In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the ‘Slave Coast’ of West Africa suffered increasingly severe problems of disorder, which seem to have been in large part a consequence of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. These disorders involved not only wars among the major states but also (in at least some cases) the weakening of political authority within states. The most obvious aspect of this dissolution of authority was the decline in the power of the kingdom of Allada, which had earlier exercised some degree of suzerainty over most if not all of the other states in the area. Among the tributaries of Allada which repudiated its authority was the kingdom of Whydah (Hueda), on the coast to the south-west, which was already effectively independent by the 1680s, and which even went to war with Allada in 1691–92 and again in 1714–17. The kingdom of Fon, or Dahomey, in the interior north of Allada, was originally also a dependency of Allada, but is recorded to have revolted and asserted its independence in 1715.

The outstanding point about British Africa to-day is the extension of the indirect system of administration. This is the more remarkable because, in the decentralized position of our territories, such extension is the result of free adoption on the part of the different governments. It is the endorsement of the system, after long experience, by practical administrators. Yet in England it has lately been subjected to a considerable amount of criticism. The object of this article is to re-state indirect rule in the light of these criticisms, in the hope of rebutting what is misinformed and incorporating what is constructive.

This article contrasts two very different timeframes in the ‘social life’ of the plant stimulant miraa – known elsewhere as khat – in Kenya and beyond. One timeframe is connected with the old miraa trees growing in the Nyambene Hills District of central Kenya: these are known as mbaine, and are greatly respected for their age and link to the past. The miraa from these trees is put to much ceremonial use by the Meru inhabitants of the Nyambenes. The other timeframe is the very different one of the harvested stems. These stems are highly perishable and so must reach the consumer quickly, leading to urgency in their trade and transportation: the ‘need for speed’. The globalization of the miraa trade has intensified this urgency further: the stems are now desired as far away as North America. Miraa trees have not escaped this ‘commercial’ timeframe, and some farmers experiment with chemical sprays to speed up the production rate. The article concludes by arguing that such attempts to speed up the timeframes of the trees are met with resistance, and have not diluted the cultural significance of ancient mbaine trees and their ancestral links.

Introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, the Nile perch has gained fame for prompting rapid regional economic growth and for driving scores of endemic fish species into extinction. This study uses oral and archival data to trace the historical development of the Nile perch fishery on Lake Victoria. Particular emphasis is placed on local responses and adaptations to (1) the Nile perch itself; (2) the abrupt integration of the Lake Victoria fishery with the global economy; and (3) the ecological changes that the Nile perch has precipitated. I also attempt to situate Lake Victoria's history in the larger debate about environment and African livelihoods. Because so much of Lake Victoria's species diversity has been lost within one generation – biologist E. O. Wilson (1992) has called this process ‘the most catastrophic extinction episode of recent history’ – the lake is an ideal case study with which to examine ‘local’ perceptions of biodiversity. The data suggest that species diversity is important and highly resolved in the worldviews of Lake Victoria's fishermen; yet, although the will for conservation is present, poverty obstructs its realization. These findings are discussed in relation to other work on indigenous environmental knowledge and ecological ethics. I argue that ‘intrinsic’ valuation of species diversity and ecological processes may be more widespread in rural societies than has traditionally been assumed by natural and social scientists, and that the preponderance of social studies highlighting oppositions between Western science and ethno-science, and between conservation concerns and local livelihoods, may have blinded us to synergies between them. More effort is needed to understand fully the nuances in these complex local ecological worldviews, perhaps via ‘social histories of extinction’ that explore the local consequences of species loss.

In the last three decades, the politics of indigeneity have led to discrimination against and marginalization of non-indigenes as well as numerous violent conflicts between indigenes and non-indigenes in Nigeria. This discrimination, which is based on a localized place of belonging, has today become bureaucratized: local governments produce ‘certificates of indigene’ to identify the origin of their holders. This article looks at the bureaucratic machinery of issuing certificates of origin in two local governments of Oyo State (in the south-west) and the everyday encounters between users and bureaucrats that cannot be reduced to practices of corruption. It looks at the complicated and ambivalent process of identifying a ‘true indigene’; this process is supposed to strengthen local citizenship but it also contributes to the daily functioning of the state and is largely accepted by the majority as part of the state's ‘insidious gentleness’. The article also seeks to understand why official discrimination against non-indigenes is poorly contested locally by assessing the role of these documents in accessing public employment, university places and basic services, and examining whether areas inhabited by non-indigenes are perceived as being neglected or abandoned by the state. Currently, discrimination policies are implemented unequally and in many instances client–patron relationships help sidestep these policies.

This description of relations between grandparents and grandchildren in a rural Ghanaian community argues that the quality of these relations varies according to age and gender. Literature on African kinship has almost entirely focused on very young grandchildren. This article draws attention to changes that occur when those children grow into adolescents and adults. Grandchildren—both young and old—speak respectfully about their grandparents, but older people regret that their grandchildren do not come to them for advice once they have grown up. Older men seem more ‘neglected’ by their grandchildren than older women. The second argument is about performance: respect, affection and relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren are demonstrated in public even when their ‘contents’ have dwindled. The article is based on anthropological fieldwork over a period of almost ten years.

In the mid-1990s, Côte d'Ivoire witnessed the rise of the ideology of ivoirité, a conception of citizenship based on autochthonous origins. Ivoirité was elaborated by a group of Ivorian intellectuals in the context of the political struggle opposing Henry Konan Bedié to Alassane Ouattara in the succession to the late President Houphouët-Boigny. Through the tactical use of the rhetoric of ivoirité, Ouattara was depicted by his adversaries as a ‘Burkinabé’ trying to rule the country. Going beyond this tactical aspect, the article addresses the ideological relations linking ivoirité to the ‘project of an Ivorian liberal society’ explicitly constructed by the same intellectuals. These relations contributed to the emergence, in the Ivorian public space, of a discourse establishing self-evident, hegemonic connections between notions like autochthony, modernity and nationality, on the one hand, and biopolitical concepts like population, immigration, security and resources on the other. The article uses two complementary perspectives to frame this emergent discourse. One focuses on the historical continuity of the political-economic strategies and population policies implemented by colonial governments and post-colonial elites. The other uses Giorgio Agamben's critical enquiry into citizenship and nationality to bring to light the implication of the ivoirité intellectuals in the construction of a national bios, and thus in the singling out of a paradigmatic form of bare life.

In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town's nouveaux riches were responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of ‘fast wealth’. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central position of pentecostal Christianity in popular interpretations of the riots. While pentecostalism itself fuelled local interpretations that ‘fast wealth’ and inequality were the product of satanic rituals, popular rumours simultaneously accused some pentecostal churches of participating in the very occult practices that created instant prosperity and tremendous inequality. The analysis explores the complex and contradictory place of pentecostalism in the Owerri crisis, looking at the problematic relationship of pentecostalism to structures of inequality rooted in patron-clientism and focusing on the ways in which disparities in wealth and power in Nigeria are interpreted and negotiated through idioms of the supernatural.

The editors invited this article, and the subsequent four response pieces, as a contribution to the debate on knowledge production in Africa and African studies, which was a critical issue in the late colonial and post-independence African universities, and which has continued to be a concern of leading African scholars in the decades since.

Thonga migrant labour has played a strategic role in the development of the Union of South Africa's economy, especially its mining industry. In 1954 there was a known total of 173,433 Moçambique labourers at work in the Union. Of these, 110,716 were employed in the mines, while 62,717 were employed in other industries and services (Anuário Estatistica, 1955, p. 131). This army of workers is drawn almost entirely from the region of Moçambique south of parallel 22° S., from among the Tonga-Shangaan peoples and the ethno-linguistically related Chope, Lenge, and Tonga of Inhambane. Although many of the motives and consequences of the Thonga emigration are shared by the migratory streams which emanate from other areas of Southern Africa and flow to the industrial heart of the Union, there are a number of circumstances connected with the movement of the Thonga which are not duplicated elsewhere.

On 29 March 1978 the Federal Military Government of Nigeria promulgated the Land Use Decree, which, with immediate effect, vested all land in the territory of each state of the Federation in the Governor of that state. The land was to be ‘held in trust and administered for the use and common benefit of all Nigerians’ in accordance with the provisions of the Decree. This paper considers the origins and effects of this policy of land nationalization.

The Copperbelt of Congo was once the bastion of industrial development and no individual embodied its modernity as fully as the salaried industrial miner. Today, with the near collapse of the state-run mining company, Gécamines, and the liberalization of the mining industry starting in 2002, the majority of miners are no longer trained and salaried industrial workers but rather children and youth eking out a precarious living as artisanal miners or creuseurs. In Congo, artisanal mining is paradoxical, for, although it indexes a future of unskilled, untrained, flexible work in rural and peri-urban enclaves, its organization of labour and rudimentary techniques of copper extraction allude to and borrow from the colonial and precolonial past. Creuseurs mobilize the past as a strategic response to the threat of dispossession of ‘their’ land by the state and foreign investors, and they do so by laying claim to an anterior ‘sovereign’ – the ancestors – whose existence predates colonialism. This paradoxical emplacement of artisanal mining, its entanglement in time, invites interrogation of some of the ways in which scholars have understood precarity not only as a politically induced condition resulting from neoliberalism but also as an outcome of the enduring nature of the colonizing structure in Africa.

Readers of Africa will be well aware of population migration as a characteristic feature of a continent where movement between one part and another is largely unrestricted as compared with the more settled parts of the world. There is much evidence of large-scale tribal migrations in the past, of the age-old seasonal wanderings of herders, and of recent labour migration to centres of mineral and industrial production, the last particularly in Central and South Africa. Information is more limited concerning the features of labour migration in West Africa at the present day. In general it is thought that migrants leave their home areas, after the harvest at the commencement of the dry season, to seek work elsewhere for a period of from three to six months and then return to take up farming with the commencement of the next rains. The major source area for these migrants is to the north of the tenth parallel where the wet season is concentrated into a period of about four months, thus severely restricting agricultural activity. Cultivation during the dry season is possible only on a very limited scale. There is thus a considerable period of the year when the primary economic activity of the people is not possible. It is logical that they should seek work elsewhere.

In September 1980 the Government of Zimbabwe embarked upon a programme of agricultural resettlement which is modest in terms of the extent of the problems which it seeks to mitigate, but ambitious in terms of the capacity of a new administration to implement it. The target rates of resettlement designed into the original programme have subsequently been multiplied some ninefold by the addition of a second, parallel programme, which makes resettlement now and in the foreseeable future the major rural development activity in Zimbabwe; indeed, it is currently the only sustained public sector programme with the potential to affect fairly immediately and significantly the economic welfare of large numbers of rural dwellers.

Debates over land tenure have been instrumental to state-building in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the local dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction in the town of Juba, this article argues that amidst the political and institutional change inaugurated by the transition from war to peace, debates over land provided a basis for the negotiation of the South Sudanese state. Actors at a variety of levels employed competing interpretations of rights to land as state-building strategies – as tools towards promoting particular visions of the state and of citizenship.

Avant l'indépendance le PDCI avait eu la considérable expérience de participer aux élections. Même avec la création d'un état de facto à un seul parti, les élections ont continuées à être un mécànisme utile dans les mains de la direction du PDCI pour renouveller la composition de l'èlite au pouvoir, particulièrement après les réformes de 1980. Une combinaison de pressions intérieures et extérieures dans les années 1990 a assuré qu'un système à partis multiples serait adopté mais Houphouet-Boigny a été capable de guider la procédure électorale de façon à s'assurer de la continuité du succés de son parti. Malgré ceci et les nombreuses imperfections de l'administration électorale il y a eu un véritable changement politique. La Côte d'Ivoire s'est embarquée dans un processus de démocratisation qui, par la suite, apportera d'autres avantages sociaux et politiques.

In the essay which follows an attempt will be made to answer and elaborate on some of the points raised by Kopytoff in his article ‘Ancestors as Elders in Africa’ (Africa, xli, 2 April 1971, pp. 129–42), an article which will, no doubt, stimulate much argument and discussion. To do this I shall utilize both published sources and material collected in Uluguru in Eastern Tanzania.

Customary land tenure is seen as a field in which social and political relationships are diverse, overlapping and competing. Property regimes are, therefore, often analysed in terms of processes of negotiation, with people's social and political identities as central elements. This article studies the negotiability of customary tenure in peri-urban Ghana where land is at the centre of intense and unequal competition and closely tied up with struggles over authority. It focuses on one village to provide a grassroots view of processes of contestation of customary rights to land. The analysis of how and to what extent local actors in this village deal with, negotiate and struggle for rights to land confirms that contestants for land never operate on a level playing field. Postulating the social inequalities of local communities, the article analyses whether it is useful to place all local land dealings under the term ‘negotiations’, or whether such a characterization stretches the boundaries of the term too far and risks undermining the significance of local stratification and ignoring the winners and losers in a contest with uncertain rules.

This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the large volume of monetary transactions and profits within the traditional sector of a farming community in West Africa. More specifically it deals with the production, distribution and pricing of local brews, points to the effect of beer making on farming, and relates this trade to contemporary developments in other spheres of social and economic life.