As the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe worsened between 2000 and 2003, the state embarked on an intense propaganda campaign. Facing an increasingly popular opposition, the state adopted a two-pronged strategy of marketing its programmes while subjecting the opposition to violence and negative publicity. Using various media, the propagandists sought to portray the ruling party (ZANU-PF) as a sacred movement fulfilling prophetic oracles that the black majority would reclaim the lost land. State functionaries systematically appropriated religious ideas, with concepts from Christianity and African traditional religions being used to buttress political statements. The controversial land reform programme was couched in religious terms and notions like sovereignty attained mythical proportions. This article examines the appropriation of religious themes in political propaganda in Zimbabwe. It analyses the communication environment in the country and how it facilitated the interface between religious and political discourses.

This article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. ‘Youth’, as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist politics, and in the 1950s formed the Tanganyika African Nationalist Party (TANU), which instituted its own category of ‘youth’ with the creation of the TANU Youth League (TYL). Consisting mainly of young, under-employed men who failed to obtain sufficient educational qualifications, the Youth League challenged the late colonial state's theoretical monopoly over violence through voluntary and aggressive policing activities. After the work of independence was complete, there was practical way to demobilize this enormous, semi-autonomous police and intelligence-gathering force. The repeated reassertion of party control over its Youth League took many forms in the decade after independence – through the creation of a National Service and the militarization of development; frequent nationalist events and rituals where Youth League members controlled public space; and a war on urban morality led by Youth League shock troops. Control over youth also offered a potentially autonomous patrimony for ambitious TANU party members. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of the general failure of both state and party to generate sufficient resources to serve as a patron to patron-seeking youth, which has effectively decentralized youth violence and vigilantism ever since. A political history of ‘youth’, both as a social category and political institution, can shed further light on contemporary dilemmas of youth violence, meanings of citizenship, and hidden motors of party politics.

Extreme flexibility in the residential and financial arrangements attached to marriage and matrilineal kinship have remained a consistent characteristic of Asante throughout this century. The constant renegotiation processes that constitute and renew family relations have kept them remarkably strong through a series of radical changes in the enacted content and boundaries of those relations, linked with dramatic fluctuations in the economic and political environment of Ghana. The degree of personal agency sustaining this Asante social framework has challenged and stretched a succession of theoretical models, since this negotiability extends to the principles and limits of negotiation itself. The continuing vitality of Asante matriliny actually requires a high degree of individual autonomy, including the economic autonomy that anchors the negotiating position of each social adult. Recent life history work among Kumasi women traders shows that the elastic framework of family relations can absorb considerable change in the expectations and the balance of power between spouses or between parents and children as long as the pace remains slow enough and individual self-reliance stable enough to preserve the continuity of the renegotiation process. The economic crisis of the final decade of the century has threatened the basis of social reproduction by reducing the opportunities for financial independence. Without basic autonomous subsistence young men and women can no longer function effectively as Asante adults.

This article is a contribution to reflection on the question of land markets in Africa. Based on a case study of Abure society (Côte d'Ivoire), the article emphasizes, first, the relation between the intra-family dimension of land rights and the functioning of the land lease market. Particular attention is paid to intra-family land tensions induced by the land lease market, and their repercussions in the form of inter-community conflict reflecting the ethnic-national basis of the land lease market (with autochthonous Abure lessors and Burkinabe tenants). Second, emphasis is placed on the socio-political dimension of land tenancy relationships. The article is based on a deciphering of the land rights and land tenure practices within Abure family groups, and of a 2001 conflict which set Abure young men against Burkinabe pineapple growers. Beyond the inter-community conflict surrounding land, the article reveals an intergenerational conflict within Abure society itself between social juniors and the elders who manage family land, regarding the delegation of rights to lease out family land and the distribution of land lease (rental) income.

In recent years scholars have shown considerable interest in the early use of photography by non-Western peoples. Research on nineteenth-century Indian, Japanese and Chinese photography has revealed a rich synthesis of European and Asian imagery. These early photographs show how non-Western peoples created new forms of artistic expression by adapting European technology and visual idioms for their own purposes. Because of the long history of contact between Sierra Leoneans and Europeans, Freetown seemed a logical starting point for similar photographic research in West Africa. The information presented here is based on ten years of searching for nineteenth-century photographs made by Sierra Leonean photographers. To locate these pictures, I have visited Freetonians and viewed their family portraits and photograph albums, interviewed contemporary photographers throughout Sierra Leone, and researched in the various colonial archives in England to locate photographs preserved from the period of colonial rule. I have discovered that a community of African photographers has worked in the city of Freetown since the very invention of photography. The article reviews the first phase of this unique photographic tradition, 1850–1918, and focuses on several of the African photographers who worked in Freetown during this period.

This article presents two themes: how young professionals personally experience sexuality and issues of cultural belonging or identification; and how these issues are interrelated in their lives. I identify ways in which ‘young professionals’ as a social group are in the vanguard in respect of societal reconfigurations of gender, sexuality and culture. I argue that this group embodies post-colonial transformations concerning reconfigurations in gender, sexuality and culture. I work out the complexities of sexuality and culture by focusing on public debates about African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality, on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-definitions on the other. Finally, I explore how sexuality has become central to self-expression and how cultural self-identification is an ambiguous concern for young professionals.

Among the Kofyar of Northern Nigeria the organization and composition of the household is ecologically adapted to certain features of the subsistence technology and the physical environment. While reductionist arguments of environmental determinism or diffuse functional interconnexion are not adequate, it is possible to demonstrate specific reciprocal influence. This paper considers the kinds of evidence available for empirically determining the connexion between a particular social pattern and the productive activities of a society, providing an example of the analysis Steward called ‘cultural ecology’ (1953: 30).

C'est dans la zone urbaine la plus importante de Malawi, Blantyre, ville de 400,000 habitants, que trente à quarante jeunes prêcheurs environ dirigent une quinzaine d'organisations constituant le mouvement ‘Regénération’ (‘Born Again’). Les organisations comprennent aussi bien les ‘saints ministères’ et les ‘confréries’ que les ‘églises’. Le mouvement a commencé vers 1974. Il est significatif que tous les dirigeants étaient à l'époque des adolescents; encore aujourd'hui, la deuxième ‘génération’ de prêcheurs comprend des adolescents ou des jeunes d'une vingtaine d'années. Leur message est dominé par un même thème: ils mènent une opposition véhémente contre les actions mêlées à des pratiques d'un caractère pour le moins mystérieux ou même malveillant, particulièrement la sorcellerie et la politique. Les jeunes prêcheurs présument que ces forces sont à la base du pouvoir exercé par les plus anciens dans les villages ou les communes urbaines. Pourtant, à Blantyre, où la surveillance politique sur la vie quotidienne est très forte, il leur faut rester très prudents en défiant la puissante génération precédente, s'ils veulent conserver ‘l'espace intellectuel’ qu'ils trouvent dans la religion. Enfin, dans sa conclusion, l'article soutient que les théories utilisées pour expliquer l'installation d'Eglises Sionistes en zones urbaines dans d'autres régions du sud de l'Afrique ne s'appliquent pas à l'analyse du mouvement ‘Regénération’, un mouvement dirigé avec succès par de jeunes citadins.

Most people are vaguely aware that the characteristic feature of African music is its rhythms. Some would say with the late Professor Hornbostel of Berlin that ‘it is syncopated past comprehension’; others would claim that any competent Western musician could reproduce African rhythms. Does the truth lie with either of these views or does it lie somewhere between them ? It is time we knew what Africans really do: and it is the purpose of this paper to give some account of the bases of their musical practice.

In the 1990s the feared witch among Tonga-speakers of Gwembe Valley, Zambia, is often the father, whose adult children accuse him of using witchcraft to gain power over the child's life force to use in his enterprises. Suspicions of the father arise from changing family dynamics associated with restricted economic opportunities and a changing agricultural system involving cash cropping where family labour is of vital importance. Witchcraft fears, as elsewhere in Zambia, have become more salient as worsening economic conditions have led to general malaise and the loosening of restraints on public accusation. Feeling victimised and vulnerable in a world where transport minimises distance has led to witches being endowed with the power to operate without regard to distance. Nevertheless witchfinding deflects hostility from national political figures to elders in the neighbourhood, especially fathers, who are continuous sources of immediate frustration and are also vulnerable to local action.

While doing field-work among the Fipa of south-west Tanzania between December 1962 and June 1964 I collected evidence about an anti-sorcery cult or movement called Kamcape which was then active in the area. The present article describes this evidence and seeks to assess its sociological significance.

Keen to show the fluidity of border areas, and the limits of state control, much anthropological scholarship on borders highlights arrangements, activities and opportunities that pass beneath the official radar. But while such a clandestine focus casts border dwellers as preoccupied with resisting state regulation, this article shows how Zimbabwean–South African border dwellers make the most of their location by being visible to state officials, as waged farm workers. They seek agricultural jobs as a foothold in building lucrative businesses. Moreover, waged farm workforces are hubs of border trade, as workers remit goods for resale as a response to the crisis at home in Zimbabwe. The article therefore questions the wider theoretical opposition between the creative entrepreneurship of the informal economy and the drudgery of formal employment. Formal and informal modes of livelihood constitute one another, intersect and are interdependent. This article unpacks the spatial and temporal articulations between waged work and other means of making ends meet. In so doing, it suggests fixating less on the border itself as a distinctive feature, replete with smugglers and murky goings-on, and appreciating the various meanings of work in borderland economies.

In the face of restrictive migration policies, migration brokers in emigration countries sell services that are meant to facilitate departure projects. Not all aspiring migrants who give money to migration brokers are able to travel. This article asks how aspiring migrants in Anglophone Cameroon understand and deal with the potential for deceit by migration brokers. The analysis is based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2013, predominantly in the town of Buea. By studying the social effects of European migration management through the lens of norms and values in a place of departure, the article argues that migration brokers cannot be understood exclusively as actors who are instrumental for the realization of migration trajectories. In a context where European migration management frustrates aspirations for global citizenship, migration brokers are also dealers in hopes for global belonging. Relations of trust between brokers and aspiring migrants are articulated through local terms such as ‘dokimen’, ‘feymen’ and ‘big men’. The article's two case studies examine relations between migration brokers and aspiring migrants within a broad social framework that includes family dynamics, as well as with a temporal perspective that stretches beyond the initial moment of failed departure.

Among the different tribes of the Kuba group, three forms of initiation rites are practised: the eastern tribes (Ngende, Ngongo, and the Shoowa) follow a common form, the Kete of the Luebo region have their own, and the Bushong of the south have yet another form.

I was initiated according to the Bushong rites at the village of Mapey in the south from 23 October to 9 November 1953. Initiation rites at the capital have fallen into disuse and, apart from the capital, may only be performed in villages which pay a special tribute to the king and are known as ‘royal villages’. The people of Mapey allowed me to be initiated because the king himself vouched for me, and because they hoped that I would refute the allegations of immorality brought by the missionaries.

I describe a people who, in aspiring to Swahili Islamic values and life style, marginalise themselves economically and politically.

The title of the article both indicates the dilemma of their identity and, for scholars who study Swahili-speaking peoples, is deliberately provocative. How can people whom we call or who call themselves Swahili possibly also be referred to as Mijikenda? After all, these two peoples have in other descriptions been shown to be sharply distinct, either as enemies, as traders in separate goods, or as employers and labourers respectively. Yet, though this is a reasonable characterisation of a difference of great historical significance for the creation of Kenyan coast culture and hegemony, it forgets the areas of overlap between the two peoples, where, in effect, it becomes sometimes impossible to posit consistent differences. The sharp delineation conventionally recorded by writers between the Swahili and the Mijikenda (and the various names by which they have been known before the use of this term in 1945) is as much a result of the conditions under which such writings were produced: they unconsciously reproduce the very distinctions by which pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial authorities administered and ruled the area and its peoples.

Although the Nuer are generally described as ‘naked’, the ethnographic literature and photographs suggest that they hold certain notions about ‘nakedness’ and ‘nudity’ which prescribe wearing or not wearing certain garments or ornaments in certain social situations. Some of these notions seem closely related to important Nuer conceptual categories of their social groups and their world, especially those related to sexuality, marriage, and affinity, and the process of changing from one social status or moral state to another. Some of these are considered in this paper.

The structure of the Yoruba cosmos is broadly evident in their creation myth and can be discerned as presupposed behind many other myths, praise songs of the gods, and other symbolic utterances. These formulations help us, too, to construct a more detailed model of this cosmos than is available in any single mythical form. A model worked out from these sources is preferable methodologically to one derived from interrogating informants to get at their personal ideas and formulations, because these myths and liturgical expressions are relatively permanent features of Yoruba culture and are the materials for informants' constructs. Furthermore, it is not on intellectual grounds that myths survive and one must therefore beware of jockeying informants into making untypical intellectual abstractions from them and then using these abstractions as one's main primary source material. However interesting in themselves their own attempts at a generalized statement of the cosmos may be, informants can better be used to clarify over-condensed or allusive passages in myths and to check one's own interpretations, and again, to supply evidence for the details of the analysis through, for instance, their assertions about the locations of the various gods, spirits, and the ancestors.

The objective of this paper is to examine the nature of the interface between two systems of land tenure in an area of smallholdings, Murang'a District, Central Province, Kenya. The first, the ng'undu system, evolved in the fertile, dissected plateau area east of the Nyandarua Range since the Kikuyu migrated there in the early seventeenth century (Muriuki, 1974: 62–82; Government of Kenya, 1929: 6); the second, a freehold system of individual land tenure, was introduced by the colonial state in the mid-1950s as a political instrument to counter the force of Mau Mau (Lamb, 1974; Leys, 1975). The latter system, it was intended, would replace the former, thereby laying the basis for an intensification of African agriculture which was also, under the Swynnerton Plan, to include production for the urban and export markets (Heyer, 1981; House and Killick, 1983). Commitment to this same principle continues to inform present agricultural policy (Government of Kenya, 1984a, Kenya Development Plan 1984–1988, p. 187; 1986,: 88).

La mosaïque végétale de la forêt et de la savane que l'on trouve le long de la lisière au nord de la zone forestière humide de l'Afrique de l'Ouest a généralement été décrite par les cercles politiques comme étant un paysage forestier dégradé et dégradant, à la suite de la ‘savanisation’ par les populations agricoles. Des écologues ont suggeré que la mosaïque végétale pourrait cependant être plus stable, déterminée par des différences au niveau du sol, et d'autres suggèrent que la forêt pourrait être en train d'empiéter sur la savane à la suite de la ‘réhumidification’ climatique à long terme.

Cet article présente une évidence historique à travers l'exemple de Kissidougou qui montre que contrairement à l'orthodoxie scientifique et politique quʼil y a, les endroits forestiers ont récemment augmenté aux dépens de la savane. Cet article fait un bref compte-rendu des pratiques agro-écologiques locales qui ont enrichi le paysage, et examine comment le cours du changement dans la végétation qui a été observé durant ce siècle peut être expliqué dans l'articulation de ces pratiques avec les changements économiques, politiques, démographiques et climatiques. Une nouvelle théorisation de l'écologie dans la mosaïque de la forêt et de la savane est proposée ici. Celle-ci en faisant appel aux dynamiques de non-équilibre, offre une meilleure structure pour comprendre l'impact que les gens ont sur l'écologie de la forêt et de la savane.

Une des caractéristiques fondamentales de la vaste remise en cause que connaissent les valeurs de la culture occidentale est sans contredit le fait qu'elle a dépassé une réflexion sur elle-même et qu'elle va puiser ses éléments de renouvellement dans les autres cultures. C'est dans ce cadre que la médecine occidentale, confrontée à d'autres traditions médicales, s'interroge sur ses postulats fondamentaux et sur leur valeur universelle. Cette interrogation est particulièrement aigüe dans le domaine de la psychiatrie: contestée violemment par ceux-là même qui la pratiquent, elle est à la recherche de nouvelles coordonnées et de nouveaux modes de thérapie qui lui donnent prise sur un objet qu'elle a de plus en plus de peine à définir. Au sein de ces tâtonnements naissent une série de tentatives nouvelles de traitement dont certains pensent trouver un correspondant dans d'autres formes de psychiatrie, déjà enracinées dans toute une tradition. Ainsi, différents cliniciens sentent actuellement la nécessité de se laisser interpeler par la façon dont les sociétés africaines appréhendent et organisent le domaine des maladies mentales et de leur traitement.