A case study from western Kenya is used to explore the links between labour migration, rural economic decline and changes in key domestic relationships. Twentieth-century transformations in the regional political economy, together with processes of differentiation, have been closely bound up with changes, and continuities, in relationships within households, and in the ideologies which justify them. A central concept in the analysis is that of divisions of labour, which covers the division of tasks, divisions of spheres of responsibility and authority and contributions to the reproduction of the household. Changes in all these have shaped, and have been shaped, by the trajectory of economic decline in the region. Changing divisions of labour have been slow, piecemeal, non-uniform and non-linear. They have been the subject of intense conflicts within households which have centred on questions of access to and control over resources and in which, as well as power relations, ideas about rights and responsibilities have been crucially important.

There are few, if any, African societies which do not believe in witchcraft of one type or another. These types can be classified and their areas of distribution marked out. Thus we have the ‘evil eye’ type, the likundu type, and the kindoki type, and doubtless other variations could be distinguished. But though some notion which we can describe as a belief in witchcraft is found in maybe every African society it is far from playing a uniform part in each. In many communities, including the one from which the information used in this paper was gathered, witchcraft is a function of a wide range of social behaviour, while in others it has little ideological importance. In this paper my conclusions about the social relations of the witchcraft concept are drawn from twenty months experience of the Azande nation of the Nile-Uelle divide, where witchcraft is a ubiquitous notion. Whether what is true of this people is true of many other African communities I cannot say.

Comme C. L. R. James a démontré dans Beyond a Boundary, les sports d'équipes organisés ont incarné les efforts coloniaux pour inculquer la hiérarchie, la stabilité et la discipline dans les esprits des colonisés. Ces valeurs n'ont pas cependant été intériorisées passivement. Vue comme microcosme de l'experience coloniale, cet étude du football au Zanzibar illustre les limites de l'abilité des européens pour façonner les expériences sociales des africains. Le sport au Zanzibar, comme ailleurs dans l'empire, a souvent été empreint de conflits sous-jacents et a parfois été ouvertement politique. Cependant le football a représenté beaucoup plus qu'un champ de bataille politique pour les joueurs et les spectateurs. Pour les homines au Zanzibar colonial jouer et regarder le football avait été souvent une expérience sociale importante. Cet article explore la diversité des significations attribuées au football entre 1900 et 1950.

Certain features of Cewa witch beliefs make them well suited to sociological analysis. As this type of analysis has been somewhat neglected by students of witch beliefs, Part I of this paper will be devoted to a brief review of some of the literature (mainly on Bantu) and to an attempt to formulate a serviceable hypothesis. Part II will summarize information about the Cewa essential to an understanding of Part III, in which the hypothesis will be applied to Cewa material. Part III will appear in a subsequent number of Africa.

This article examines innovations in livestock marketing that livestock traders in northern Kenya use to overcome a host of trading obstacles. Livestock trading in northern Kenya is one of the toughest and most risk-prone jobs in the region, yet livestock traders have been able not only to transform the ways in which trading is conducted through ‘home-made’ innovations, but also to mitigate trading risks. The article demonstrates how livestock traders have become resilient to risks and have been able to succeed in a trade that in the past many have had to abandon. Trust embedded in social networks and relations reinforces the adoption of risk-minimizing strategies. The article focuses on the broad field of pastoral risk management to illustrate how an innovative risk management strategy can be used to create a successful business entrepreneurship in a risk-prone environment. I draw on fieldwork conducted during 2001–2 among cattle traders in Moyale District of northern Kenya and Nairobi, and on recent work among Somali livestock traders-cum-ranchers in Garissa District of North Eastern and Coast provinces.

In his Economic History of West Africa (1973) Hopkins points out that relatively little attention has been paid to the history of food production by contrast with export crops, even though it has been clear since early research on African food systems (e.g., Johnston 1958) that patterns of production have been changing. The determinants of shifts in land use and crop rotations are complex but two major factors have been suggested: population pressure on land resources, and the relative prices of different crops. The population pressure argument tends to assume that subsistence is maintained, so that any change in the relationship of population to food land requires shifts in farming practice to allow the maintenance of the same level of living (Boserup 1965). The price argument tends to assume that the agriculture system is penetrated by the market principle, so that farmers' decisions to maintain subsistence production patterns depend on projections about the prices of the cash crops available for sale and the food items needed to purchase (Chibnik 1978). From work on African farming systems comes a modification which suggests that the management of both these constraints depends to some extent on the broader social and economic context in which decisions are made. In particular it has been suggested that the position of women farmers in both indigenous social organisation and national economies is different from men's; they work under different constraints in their farming and have different opportunities for alternative employment (Boserup 1970; Meillassoux 1975). If the sexual division of labour is an important aspect of farming, men's and women's differential access to resources might be expected to have an independent effect on cropping patterns.

It is greatly to the credit of the editors of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa that they have made generally available ten systematic accounts of witch beliefs in East and Central African societies. All teachers of anthropology must surely be grateful to them on this account alone. Moreover the book is spiced with many insights into sociocultural problems connected with the main theme. A permissive editorial policy has stimulated a rich diversity of viewpoints and presentations. But one is left with the feeling that Monica Wilson's plea for the comparative analysis of these ‘standardized nightmares’—a plea which forms the book's motto—as one of the ‘keys to the understanding of society’ has not met here with a wholly satisfactory response.

For many social anthropologists the problem of divine kingship was solved in 1948 when Professor Evans-Pritchard, in a well-known Frazer Lecture, put a respectably structural interpretation on the facts of the Shilluk case. Divine kingship in Africa was rather an embarrassment because the central tenet of its doctrine—that the king must be killed when he fell sick or grew senile—was usually beyond empirical verification. There was also perhaps some reluctance to accept the explanatory theories of Sir J. G. Frazer when in so many other respects his authority had long since been overthrown. In a single essay Evans-Pritchard appeared to have effectively slain both the problem and its discoverer. Such problems and such intellectual kings, however, have a way of rising from the dead. In this paper I resuscitate in part Frazer's theory of divine kingship and try to show that it illuminates important aspects of the problem which are ignored by the structuralist interpretation. With reference to a single example of divine kingship, that of the Jukun of Northern Nigeria, I utilize two familiar conceptual distinctions—person/office and political/ritual. Complementary to these, and perhaps even more analytically fruitful, is the man-god dichotomy which was one of Frazer's main preoccupations.

In 1961 Marvin Miracle attempted to demonstrate that reports of ‘seasonal hunger’ in tropical Africa were to be discounted and that in fact regular ‘hunger periods’ did not occur. He based his argument on a definition of seasonal hunger which took into account only the calories people consumed. By his definition, ‘seasonal hunger’ can exist only if people consume fewer calories than they need in certain months of each year even though their total calorie intake over the year is adequate (Miracle, 1961: 277–88). He denied that there was sufficient evidence of any such shortfall to justify the F.A.O. statement (1958) that ‘pre-harvest food shortage is still a problem in many of the drier parts (of tropical Africa)’.

Leach in his study of the Kachin interpreted disputes over claims to administer ritual or to recite myths as a means whereby politically opposed factions sought to assert their independence or their dominance (Leach, 1954, p. 278). He also showed that in this competition the Kachin made use of ritual and other cultural elements which they had adopted from the Shans and were using for political ends.

This article examines the resurgence of hunter associations (donzo ton) in Côte d'Ivoire during the 1990s in the context of game depletion, rising crime rates, and a dysfunctional state. Initiated hunters (donzow) are widely respected by the general public for their mystical powers and potent amulets which protect them from malevolent forces in the natural and social worlds. The donzow's success in reducing crime in northern rural areas led to an expansion of the dozon ton to the national level, as donzow were increasingly employed as private security guards in the country's major cities. The government and political parties also employed donzow to complement the police and gendarmes in maintaining order during the 1995 presidential elections. The attempt by politicians to manipulate the donzo ton during re-election campaigns was frustrated by the decentralised structure of the hunters' organisation and the diversity of its membership. Fearing that the donzo ton would become a politically destabilising force, successive governments have attempted to restrict its activities to the northern savanna region. The policy of containing the donzo ton to its so-called ‘original cultural hearth’ is discussed in the framework of the national cultural identity ideology of ivoirité and its xenophobic political manifestations around the 2000 presidential elections.

Children's rights activists contend that corporal punishment in schools is a form of child abuse which hinders children's learning. Yet most parents and teachers in Maasailand, Kenya consider corporal punishment, if properly employed, to be one of the most effective ways to instil the discipline necessary for children to learn and grow well. Responding to calls for a more empirical anthropology of rights, this article provides an ethnographic analysis of the practice of corporal punishment in domestic and primary school settings, exploring its pedagogical, developmental and social significance, and illuminating its role in the production and negotiation of identities and personhood.

The democratisation process which began in the early 1990s in many sub-Saharan African countries has led to renewed interest in the role of voluntary associations in the shaping of the political and social realms. This article maintains that the most effective way to understand the role of associational politics and developments in Africa is not by postulating what they should do according to Western democratic theory, but through an historical analysis of how associations functioned before the introduction of multi-party competitive elections and putative democratic rules in recent years. In this way it will be possible to attain a richer and more complex under-standing of state–society relations under one-party and military regimes, and thus of how these links are likely to change in a more pluralistic environment. This article explores these issues in the Côte d'Ivoire.

Refugees are generally viewed as a transitory problem. In many African countries, however, protracted refugee situations have turned the temporary refugee state into a more or less permanent phenomenon. In this article, I draw on the concept of uncertainty, and on claims that suspicion structures humanitarianism, to examine how long-term residents in Dagahaley refugee camp in Kenya attempted to make themselves worthy of being considered for resettlement. I demonstrate how the incompatibility between the UNHCR's resettlement criteria and Somali refugees’ lived realities provided both sets of actors with a resource: they used understandings of vulnerability as a means for making or denying resettlement claims. Refugeeness is a process of becoming, premised on how earlier arrivals deployed long-term suffering as a justification for being prioritized for resettlement. These dynamics resulted in the emergence of ‘new’ and ‘old’ refugee distinctions through which the meanings of vulnerability were redefined.

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.

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.

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.