Les principes qui ont réglé et règlent encore l'enseignement que nous délivrons aux indigènes de nos colonies, ont été parfaitement définis par M. Charton, Inspecteur Général de l'Enseignement en Afrique Occidentale Française, dans plusieurs études. Je ne les reproduis donc pas si ce n'est à l'occasion de leur application. Préférant faire œuvre plus originale, je vais essayer de vous esquisser comment est distribué cet enseignement. En prenant l'exemple d'une de nos colonies, en comparant ce qui s'y fait avec ce qui se fait en d'autres territoires, puis en exposant pourquoi et en vertu de quels principes, vous aurez une vue d'ensemble de la question. Nous choisirons donc l'Afrique Équatoriale Française, dont je peux vous parler plus particulièrement puisque je viens d'y passer treize ans – et puisque M. Charton dans ses études traite de l'Afrique Occidentale Française.

Quelques mots d'abord sur la structure administrative et territoriale de l'Afrique Équatoriale Française, puisque l'organisation scolaire a dû nécessairement en tenir compte. L'Afrique Équatoriale Française se compose de quatre territoires: le Gabon, chef-lieu Libreville, le Moyen Congo, chef-lieu Brazzaville, l'Oubangui-Chari, cheflieu Bangui, et le Tchad, chef-lieu Fort-Lamy.

Pour bien comprendre le problème du mariage chrétien en AOF, il est nécessaire de bien situer la place de l'individu et de la femme, d'une part dans la société païenne, et d'autre part dans la société chrétienne.

La société païenne a comme élément fondamental et comme cadre, tout à la fois, la collectivité familiale patriarcale (ou matriarcale). Cette collectivité familiale n'a pas constitué son organisation en vue du bien direct et immédiat de l'individu, c'est au contraire toute l'activité de l'individu qui se trouve ordonnée en vue du bien supérieur de cette collectivité. L'individu adulte ne fonde pas une famille nouvelle qui aura sa vie propre et son indépendance, car la famille patriarcale qui l'englobe, la seule famille qui compte, existait bien avant l'individu. Elle prend son origine dans un passé lointain, plus ou moins mythologique, et son avenir est sans limite. C'est cette collectivité patriarcale qui possède seule une personnalité complète, au point d'absorber largement celle des individus, aussi peut-on dire que les individus ne sont plus que les organes ou les instruments de cette personnalité complexe. Les intérêts de la collectivité dominent les intérêts de l'individu et en cas de conflit, ce sont toujours-les intérêts de ce dernier qui sont écartés.

This article is about two generations of women in south-western Chad – the baou déné and the mosso. It addresses the puzzle of how these groups of women are present in the everyday life of the region known as ‘useful’ Chad, while women as economic agents are absent from stories about the region and about successive schemes to make it profitable. The baou déné are wealthy farmers, but the last generation of these ‘women who have a lot of things’ is disappearing. Younger women are referred to as mosso, meaning ‘to fall down’. They are more likely to make a living from small trade than from farming and their lives are defined by precarity. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how the erasure of women happened in different ways over time. In the colonial era, administrators and travel writers were unable to imagine that women transformed forests into cotton fields. In this century, the idea that women farm just like men was disseminated by oil companies, facilitating land expropriation while drowning out stories of women's marginalization. The baou déné and the mosso are the products of specific historical processes and profit-making schemes, and the silences about women's places in them helped make profits, empire and ‘useful’ Chad possible.

While mobility-assistive devices ease movement and independence of persons with disabilities, their use may depend on their social and symbolic meaning. This article departs from our observation that elderly people in Wakiso in Uganda own a variety of assistive technologies yet do not utilize them all equally. Our findings are based on data collected through conversations, interviews and observations of thirty elderly people visited in their homes between July 2016 and January 2017. We found that elderly people with mobility disabilities valued devices for the greater autonomy they afforded, although dependence was also valued in some situations. The source or provenance of a device imbued it with meaning. Holding onto it regardless of how much one used it was in a way like holding onto the social relationship that the artefact represented, and the same can be said of abandoning it. Devices were also valued according to the manner in which they portrayed the user to the rest of the world – either positively as cosmopolitan and cared for, or negatively as sickly.

Colonial Onitsha provided the stage for John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939), a Manchester trader and poet, to perform the role of an educated gentleman. In his autobiographical writing, Stuart-Young created a host of famous metropolitan friends and constructed for himself a past through which he invited African readers to remember him. The extent to which Onitsha citizens accepted his version of his life is explored in this article, for during the period of Stuart-Young's residence in town, from approximately 1909 until his death in 1939, different sectors of Igbo society observed him closely, read his publications, worked with him and witnessed his patronage of young men. Local people, including the children, studied his behaviour over time and produced a range of African names and watchwords by which they remembered his life.

This article departs from general anthropological debates about the nature of gender to focus more narrowly on the impact of political economy and religion on gender relations. It explores the dialectic between commodification, Islamic conversion and gender relations in the Hausa hamlet of Marmara, in northern Nigeria. Despite changes in political economy and in religion, there has been great continuity in gender relations. The article ends with a structural comparison between the Hausa of Marmara and the Giriama of Kaloleni (in Kenya). In this comparison, it appears that political economy can be privileged over religion in the understanding of gender. Over the long term, however, a deeper continuity in local moral concepts structures people's very understanding of political economy, religion and gender.

On 16 July 2013, Simone Schlindwein, a German journalist, used her mobile phone to photograph a conflict-related image in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that later contributed to local riots and to her hasty exit across the border. From the ‘front’, she uploaded the photograph to her Twitter account and caused a melee of virtual and on-the-ground controversy that at record speed came to involve the United Nations, members of the Congolese diaspora, the Congolese army, the M23 rebel army propaganda office, and the residents of the region. This article starts from her image to ethnographically examine the resulting events and responses, both online and in the city of Goma. In so doing, it engages the heated regional debate as to whether the image was objectively captured or if the violence depicted was simply ‘playing for the camera’. Addressing the simultaneous online movement of the image through social media and news sites, the article argues that the combination of the socio-political climate, conflict and the uncontrollable narrative of the image created a perfect storm in which the entangled regional politics suddenly became visible.