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.

The aim of this study was to examine people's beliefs about the causes of marital instability in a rural population cohort in south-west Uganda. Results from a baseline survey of HFV-1 infection in the cohort of over 4,000 adults (over 12 years old) showed a twofold increase in risk of infection in divorced or separated persons when compared with those who are married. A purposive sample of 134 respondents (seventy-two males, sixty-two females) selected to represent different ages, religions and marital status were asked in semi-structured interviews to comment on the reasons for continuing marital instability in their community. The most common reasons suggested for marital instability were sexual dissatisfaction, infertility, alcoholism and mobility. Interviewees stated that men and women would be more likely to stay with someone who satisfied them sexually. It was reported that infertility, particularly of the woman, would lead a couple to separate. Alcoholism was said to lead to neglect of family responsibilities and decreased sexual inhibitions, while occupational mobility was a common cause of infidelity. HIV infection was not mentioned as a direct cause of separation, but a small independent study revealed that seven out often couples separated on learning of a positive HIV test result of one or both partners. Marital instability is not uncommon in this population; there is evidence that HFV infection is making the situation worse.

Les églises sionistes, en particulier celles qui mettent l'accent sur la guérison se montrent d'une disposition envers la politique d'état sud africaine d'un consentement frappant. Cet article examine à la fois l'évidence et les explications présentées par les sciences humaines et par les théologiens. Mais avant tout, cet article se concentre sur l‘organisation du service de la santé en tant qu‘appareil de contrôole social, une considération qui a tendu à être négligée dans ce contexte.

Eminent Indologists have stated that it is inappropriate to use the word ‘caste’ in non-Hindu contexts. Despite such warnings numerous Africanists have used the term, with varying degrees of imprecision. In this paper I first outline different emphases which have appeared in the literature concerning caste in India; then discuss several examples of hierarchical systems in Africa which have been described as ‘caste’. Finally, I focus upon my own fieldwork data concerning the Dime of South-West Ethiopia, amongst whom there operates a system which can, I believe, be unequivocally labelled caste.

The new British ambassador to Maputo, Richard Edis, recently travelled to the Renamo base at Maringue to meet its leader Alfonso Dhlakama. He carried with him a letter from Overseas Development Minister Baroness Lynda Chalker, two footballs and a pile of books on ‘democracy’ for Dhlakama's library.’

Warning: We don't want it

The people of Yardaji Have No Regard For Any Political Party Whatsoever: We Are Tired of Hearing Idle Talk. Whoever Ignores This Advice Will Regret It. Listen Well: Don't Come Here. This is Not a Matter Of One Person Alone. We Don't Want It.

If a thriving capitalist economy relies on the innumerable small deposits of savings that local people place in banks, then ‘unbanking’ represents a threat to just such an economy. And yet, across the globe, billions remain outside the formal banking sector, thereby reducing the ability of formal banks to set these savings in motion. This unbanking has been the subject of many reports and studies by economists, corporations and non-profit organizations, but unbanking never seems to diminish. Indeed, by all accounts, it continues to thrive. In order to offer an alternative explanation for this phenomenon, the author revives an important, age-old distinction between hoarding and saving, while also providing an anthropological survey of alternative modes of saving in Africa. In so doing, the author argues that the critics of unbanking may be ignoring the ways in which banking and unbanking are tied up with subject formation.

The term ‘Dorobo’ denotes an ethnic category embracing small hunting-and-gathering groups residing on the fringes of various agricultural and pastoral peoples in East Africa. The essence of the Dorobo's position is that they engage in economically symbiotic activities with regard to local farmers and herders, while retaining their social marginality as people of the bush. Much is known of them through the constructs of their neighbours, who assign them attributes commensurate with their marginal social position; the Dorobo are amalgamated with wild amoral creatures, and their ancestors are thought to have been in attendance at the birth of the present world-order. Their marginality therefore has economic, spatial, and temporal dimensions.

History is often presented as a unilineal process whereby events follow on from each other in a causal sequence: A gives rise to B which in turn leads to C. While this structural form is extremely compelling as explanation, it has limitations when applied to the colonial encounter. The differences between the beliefs and practices of the people involved in this encounter, and the consequent variety in perceived significances of individual events, make it almost impossible to construct a unified history. The diversity of perceptions in historical events has been recognised and is most clearly seen in those historical accounts of the colonial encounter written from the perspective of the ‘other’ (Sahlins, 1981; 1985). However, these analyses, by focusing on events, still maintain the structural framework of conventional history.

Like many key terms in history and the social sciences, ‘middle class’ is at once a category ‘of social and political analysis’ and a category ‘of social and political practice’, in Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper's terms – two aspects that were, and continue to be, entangled in complex ways. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the term ‘middle class’, or the ‘middling sorts’, has been a catchword in political discourse, and it became one long before scholars defined it in any systematic fashion. Once it became a more or less well-established conceptual tool of research, however, it began to take on an academic life of its own, with scholars also using it to describe people who did not invoke this category for their own self-description. But scholarly terms could – and indeed did – also feed back into folk understandings of social stratification. In particular, the recent global popularity of the term ‘middle class’ seems to be at least in part a result of the appropriation of academic categories by policymakers. This article contributes to the discussion on African middle classes by tracing the genealogy of theoretical perspectives on class and by outlining some findings from studies of the history of European and American middle classes as well as recent research on middle classes in the global South. I discuss both the history of scholarly debates on the middle classes and what empirical studies tell us about people's contested self-categorizations, and how their understandings and practices of being middle-class have changed over time. The article argues that future research on the dynamics of African social stratification has much to gain from a regional and historical comparative perspective.

The emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.

The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

Credit is a vital economic institution without which trade becomes very limited. In the industrial Western societies, where it is highly developed, it operates through formal, standardized arrangements and procedures by which the solvency of the debtor is closely assessed, securities against possible default are provided, and the conditions of the agreement are documented and endorsed by the parties concerned. Ultimately, these arrangements and procedures are upheld by legislated rules and sanctions administered by central, bureaucratized, fairly impartial, efficient, and effective courts and police. In West Africa, on the other hand, where long-distance trade has been fostered by varying ecological circumstances, such organization has not yet evolved, particularly for long-distance trade. Nevertheless extensive systems of credit have been developed.

The chiefdoms of Sierra Leone are institutions of colonial origin but nevertheless continue to serve as local government units in the post-colonial state. The prevailing view among scholars is that these institutions have little basis in indigenous political culture, and have furthermore become breeding grounds of political corruption. This view has tended to elide anthropological analysis of internal chiefdom politics. However, it is argued in this article that such conclusions are premature. With reference to the Biriwa Limba chiefdom of northern Sierra Leone, it is shown that historical precedent, in many cases relating to prominent political figures of the late nineteenth century, continues to serve as a primary means of ordering local rights in land, settlement and political representation. This phenomenon is not a product of innate conservatism but emerges rather as a pragmatic response to the persistent failure of successive Sierra Leone administrations to extend modern measures of citizenship to the bulk of the rural populace. Rights and properties have become progressively localised in villages originally registered for tax collection in the early colonial era. Here one finds one of the most telling legacies of the British policy of indirect rule in post-colonial Sierra Leone.

Africa is notable for the extent to which women participate in cultivation. An examination of the contribution of men and women by means of ‘The Ethnographic Atlas (Ethnology, 1967) shows that women play the major part in cultivation in 45 per cent of societies in Africa as a whole, and in 53 per cent of sub-Saharan societies. We are concerned here with the contribution women make to cultivation (in pastoral as well as purely farming economies) and not to its over-all control, which is largely in the hands of men.

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.

This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.

This article investigates the fraught relationship between violence and healing in Central African history. Looking at the case study of one of the largest uprisings in the colonial history of Congo – the Lobutu–Masisi Kitawalist uprising of 1944 – the article asks how the theories of power that animated the uprising might help better illuminate the nature and role of violence not only in the uprising itself but in the broader history of the region. Drawing attention to the centrality of discourses that relate to the moral and immoral use of disembodied spiritual power (puissance/nguvu/force) in the uprising, the article evokes critical questions about the deeper history of such discourses and the imaginaries and choreographies of violence that accompanied them. Thinking about violence in this way not only breaks down imagined lines between productive and destructive/legitimate and illegitimate violence by highlighting that such distinctions are always contentious and negotiated, but also demonstrates that the theories of power animating such negotiations must be understood not as tangential to the larger anti-colonial political struggle of Bushiri and his followers, but as central to that struggle. Moreover, it paves the way towards thinking about how these same theories of power might animate negotiations of legitimacy in more recent violent contexts in Eastern Congo.

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 recent years, it has become common for academic writers to use ‘the occult’ as an analytical category to which are assigned various types of mystical belief and activity that are quite widespread in Africa, including those often described as ‘magic’ and ‘witchcraft’. It is notable that all these concepts generally go undefined. The present article argues that much of the current academic vocabulary used to describe and analyse the invisible world that many Africans believe to exist is tainted by an intellectual history associated with colonialism. Instead, we propose that much African thought and action related to the invisible world should be considered in terms of religion, with the latter being defined contextually as a belief in the existence of an invisible world, distinct but not separate from the visible one, that is home to spiritual beings with effective powers over the material world.

The nature of ethnic interaction has been at the heart of a longstanding debate on the characteristics of Rwanda's precolonial political system. Until recently, the historical referents for such discussion, and in particular the origins of the Rwandan state and its social institutions have been seen as far too remote to base conclusions on empirical data. Consequently the debate has tended to be formulated in terms of logical constructs, rather than in terms of empirical reconstruction of the historical processes involved.

This essay describes (1) how mortuaries changed the Akan funeral culture of Ghana and (2) how that converged with the interests of relatives and hospital managers. Such a development would not have been possible, however, (3) without the money provided by well-to-do relatives staying abroad. Mortuaries enable relatives to stretch the liminal period between death and funeral as long as they want to while they prepare everything for a grand funeral. For hospitals, this new fashion means an attractive extra source of income, as the mortuary is more lucrative than its medical services. My observations derive from anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu, Ghana.