Wherever belief in witchcraft permeated an African society, fear prevailed and people demanded protection and control. Even though the degree of African concern about witchcraft was not always appreciated by outsiders, it was possible, at least in centralized societies, for such outsiders to discern the processes that were involved in its control. A king or a priest who failed to control the spread of witchcraft and to alleviate the fear was unlikely to maintain his authority for long. In non-centralized societies, the problem of witchcraft and the means of control were less clear-cut. Solutions were rarely obvious and easy.

In the northern part of the Central Province of Tanganyika Territory, near the swamp or lake marked on maps as Lake Eyasi, dwells a tribe of hunters speaking a clicking language which is related to the Bushman and Hottentot tongues. These people call themselves Hadzapi (singular Hadza); neighbouring tribes call them by various names, of which the Isanzu term Watindega (singular Mutindega) is probably the best known. Mr. J. F. Bagshawe has contributed some papers to the Journal of the African Society on ‘The Peoples of the Happy Valley’ in which he includes this tribe, calling them the Kangeju, probably the name given to them by their neighbours to the east. The Masai are said to call them the Ashi.

This article focuses on relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren in an urban society in East Cameroon. It argues that despite fluid generational demarcations between grandmothers and mothers, women perform their grandmotherhood differently from their motherhood. As a result of the claims grandmothers often make on their children's children, grandmothers easily replace mothers but they do not rear children in the same way. The sharing of home, food, and bed is central in the performance of grandmotherhood and differs from relationships of sharing in the mother-child bond. The article also argues that grandmotherhood in East Cameroon is not a clearly bounded, unambiguous life stage but that it contains multiple trajectories that do not occur in the same time or in the same order. Multiple trajectories, characterised by both agency and constraint, are explained in terms of differences within and between grandmothers’ life courses. The article shows that grandmothers play vital roles in complex practices of marriage and descent and, in contrast to previous studies in the area, that matrilineages are closely linked to patrilineages.

Dans la tribu agro-pastorale des Kuria située dans les plaines du district de Tarime, dans le nord de la Tanzanie, de nombreux hommes jeunes s'adonnent au vol de bétail, qui constitue une source principale de revenu. Une étude menée sur soixantequatre voleurs de bétail de cette tribu révèle que les trois quarts d'entre eux sont issus de families dont le nombre de garçons est supérieur à celui des filles, suggérant ainsi fortement que la nécessité, pour les fils, d'acquérir leur propre bétail dotal autrement que par le mariage de leurs sœurs constitue le critère majeur permettant de prédire quels hommes jeunes choisiront de devenir des voleurs de bétail.

Il est devenu banal pour les érudits de parler des villes, particulièrement des villes coloniales, en tant que textes dans lesquels les rapports de pouvoir sont incrusté. Cet article présente les données de six années de recherches, y compris des recherches d'archive, des entrevues, et des enquêues de terrain sur la planification et le developpement à Zanzibar. Je me concentre sur le bâtiment des maisons et les environnements domestiques dans les quartiers africains historiques de la ville, connus comme Ngʼambo ou ‘l'autre côté’. La lutte pour l'hégémonie culturelle est évidente dans les conflits concernant le milieu bâti à Zanzibar pendant le vingtième siècle. Le centre d'interêt est sur la façon dont le langage officiel qui définit les types de maison et établit les codes de construction, qui avaient été développés sous le colonialisme, étaient devenu un instrument tactique de la part de ceux qui sont puissant pour imposer la domination de l'espace. Cependant, la mise en vigueur des codes de construction a souvent démontré la limitation des efforts de l'élite coloniale et locale quant à avoir l'hégémonie, surtout à la fin de la période coloniale. A travers le siècle, les mots pour l'habitat traditionnel africain et les types d'habitats dans les quartiers de Zanzibar ont laissé voir le dédain avec lequel ceux qui sont puissant les avaient traité. Il y a cependant un ordre et un plan de la ‘ville non-planifiée’ qui domine toujours la ville.

In this article, I explore how digital technologies in Kenya emerged as a site through which questions of citizenship were posed – if not resolved – at a moment of national crisis. I draw attention, specifically, to the ways in which developers, bloggers and state actors mobilized techno-utopian narratives about Kenya's ‘Silicon Savannah’ to advocate for what I call ‘digital citizenship’, an ethical blueprint for how best to belong to the nation. While social scientists writing about ICT in Africa have focused primarily on Africans’ novel uses of objects such as mobile phones, I contribute to this conversation by interrogating how digital technologies have been mobilized as an idiom to both challenge and perpetuate social cleavages of ethnicity and class. ‘Digital citizenship’, I suggest, compels us to revisit debates about (post)colonial history, ideologies that undergird digitality, and the formation of local, national and transnational scales of belonging.

Popular talk and silence about AIDS in Botswana have been shaped by survivors' efforts to manage the ways in which they remember relationships arising from procreation. The emotional force of death induces the immediately bereaved and wider communities of survivors to recollect who has shared blood with whom through sexual intercourse. Such acts of remembering may have decisive repercussions on relations of kinship, marriage and mutual support. For Batswana, ‘remembering’ is a form of acting as well as feeling, possessing a capacity to shape moral conduct for the long term. In the context of death, local debates about what and how to remember reflect contested endeavours to make relations based on blood persist beyond a person's passing. Focusing on a particular set of local perspectives on the morality of remembering, the article shows that members of an Apostolic church in Gaborone encourage one another to remember in a manner reflecting distinctive methods of maintaining relations of kinship and care.

In studies concerning Islam and gender in West Africa, the expertise of women in Islamic esoteric practices is often overlooked. These practices, that include divination, dream interpretation and prayer sessions, are central in politics, economics and the daily life of most West Africans. Furthermore, their products (such as amulets) and their practitioners (marabouts) travel to Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Despite the importance of Islamic esoteric practices in West Africa and the rest of the world, they are understudied. In this article, I focus upon the life and work of two marabout women living in Dakar: Ndeye Meissa Ndiaye and Coumba Keita. Their position is exceptional: Islamic esoteric knowledge is a particularly male-dominated field. This article describes how two women's Islamic esoteric expertise is negotiated, legitimated and publicly recognized in Dakar.

In the one hundred and forty years that the Nuer have been known to small audiences outside the Sudan they have almost invariably been presented as truculent and aggressive warriors. They appeared in the nineteenth century exploration literature as archetypical ‘savages’: naked, stubborn and warlike men who were compared to monkeys, to the monkeys' advantage (Baker 1867:60). In the early twentieth century they were thought to be an intractable problem that impeded the peaceful establishment and efficient running of a new colonial administration. In Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard's monographs Nuer feuds and raiding are described as central to the structural relations between Nuer sections and between the Nuer and their neighbours.

African men, like men everywhere, have dominated the public sphere, holding the vast majority of official positions of power and authority. In pre-colonial African societies women were formally subordinate to male authority and male dominance was buttressed by an ideology of male superiority and a status system where women showed deference to men. But formal systems, ideologies and codes of etiquette are not realities. In some societies women wielded considerable influence and authority, so much in fact that these systems have been characterised as dual-sex political systems with each sex managing its own affairs (Okonjo, 1976). Women were not so much involved in hierarchical orders of relationships as in complementary, mutually dependent relationships.

Cet article explore à la fois le sens du “odwira”, le rituel royal qui purifie annuellement la communauté de sa pollution, et la manière par laquelle le rite est utilisé pour négocier les configurations changeantes du pouvoir à Akuropon et dans le royaume d'Akuapem. Dans une petite société où les consensus sont requis en public et les conflits sont régiès en prive, où les rois avaient jadis le pouvoir de faire de leurs adversaires des esclaves et encore aujourd'hui peuvent leur dénier emploi et maison, l'opposition doit être discrète. Les rituels et les symboles sont bons pour faire une déclaration politique car une ambiguité ancrée leur permet d'être un terrain sûr pour une agression politique. Pour cette raison, bien que le rituel de purification du “odwira” soit considéré comme inaltérable dans sa représentation et sa structure symbolique, en pratique la politique explosive de la communauté est aussi reflétée dans les modifications occasionnelles qui sont faites au long precédéxs cérémonial chaque année.

Lorsque le Conseil Exécutif de l'Institut International Africain m'a fait l'honneur de me confier cette ‘Lugard Memorial Lecture’, le nom prestigieux de Lugard me frappa comme un éclair et chassa de mon imagination toute possibilité d'autre sujet. Je ne sais si notre Président, lorsqu'il prononça, en 1952, dans cette même ville, son remarquable discours à la mémoire du grand Lord, son prédécesseur, avait été victime d'une crise de possession aussi caractérisée. Quant à moi je découvris brusquement que j'avais depuis longtemps quelque chose à dire à Lord Lugard et que je n'aurais jamais de meilleure occasion. Souffrez done que je lui parle en votre présence.

Since 1982 the Mouvement des forces démocratique casamançais has been fighting for the independence of the Casamance region of Senegal. In 1989, when the Mouvement initiated a sustained military campaign, Senegal's official and independent press began to provide intensive coverage of its activities and objectives. This article documents the arguments for and against Casamançais independence as documented by Senegal's press in the year following the resurgence of this conflict. The Mouvement's leadership has consistently maintained that its efforts to win independence for the Casamance are legitimate because France created the Casamance. The French, it argues, never intended the Casamance to be administratively incorporated into Senegal. Conversely, those opposed to the Mouvement have attempted to delegitimise its activities by claiming that it represents the interests of the Jola, just one of the Casamance's many ethnic groups. It is argued that the Senegalese government and other opponents of the Mouvement have attempted to label the independence movement an ethnic movement because of a distinction in African political ideology between nationalism and ethnicity. According to this ideology, nationalism, and other legitimate forms of political mobilisation, should represent a plural constituency. Those that represent the narrow interests of a single ethnic group are not considered legitimate.

This article outlines the history of a people known as ‘Nubi’ or ‘Nubians’, northern Ugandan Muslims who were closely associated with Idi Amin's rule, and a group to which he himself belonged. They were supposed to be the descendants of former slave soldiers from southern Sudan, who in the late 1880s at the time of the Mahdi's Islamic uprising came into what is now Uganda under the command of a German officer named Emin Pasha. In reality, the identity became an elective one, open to Muslim males from the northern Uganda/southern Sudan borderlands, as well as descendants of the original soldiers. These soldiers, taken on by Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, formed the core of the forces used to carve out much of Britain's East African Empire. From the days of Emin Pasha to those of Idi Amin, some Nubi men were identified by a marking of three vertical lines on the face – the ‘One-Elevens’. Although since Amin's overthrow many Muslims from the north of the country prefer to identify themselves as members of local Ugandan ethnic groups rather than as ‘Nubis’, aspects of Nubi identity live on among Ugandan rebel groups, as well as in cyberspace.

This article is about the unseen world of war—the unrecorded consequences for children of large-scale horror. There are two parts to it. The first is on the need for healing: it is an account of children's suffering during Zimbabwe's War of Liberation and their part in the fight for freedom. The second describes the means for healing: it examines how traditional healers (n'anga) provided opportunities through ritual for reconciliation and the soothing of individual trauma.

This article explores the austere labour regime of Safaricom – Kenya's largest telecommunications firm and financial services provider – from the perspective of the women and men who work as ‘human ATMs’ for Safaricom's breakout service, M-Pesa. Far from women and men simply acting as ATMs, I argue that the affective and social labour of these people working at sites across the country constitutes a form of maintenance work that, while essentially free in Safaricom's accounts, critically underwrites the success of M-Pesa and Safaricom. In making this argument, I draw on the insights of feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser, who has pushed Marx's key insight that behind the sphere of exchange lies the ‘hidden abode’ of production. In contrast, Fraser argues that behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production lie domains more hidden still that constitute the ‘backstory’ of contemporary forms of accumulation. I argue that the work of ‘human ATMs’ constitutes both the ‘front story’ and the ‘backstory’ of contemporary modes of accumulation unfolding in Kenya. Their labour is formally exploited while broader forms of work required to build and maintain the social and material networks on which Safaricom depends are expropriated, forming the basis of new frontiers of accumulation. This process is mirrored in Safaricom's contemporary business strategy, which is premised on enclosing people's everyday habits and social networks in their digital forms as sites of innovation and market-making.

The Jola of Lower Casamance in southern Senegal are involved in ‘turnaround’ (or circular), rural to urban migration. Using data from three Jola communities located in different geographical and cultural sub-regions, this article compares the dynamics of migration among the villages and explores variations along gender and generational lines. Special emphasis is placed on the number of young unmarried girls and boys who return to the village during the rainy season to help their parents with agricultural work. It has been argued that the movement of people from the countryside to the city has had a negative effect on local food production. ‘Turnaround migration’ mitigates to some extent the impact of the rural exodus on rural communities. It has important implications of its own for the future of agriculture in the various Jola sub-regions.

This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural–urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollections of marriage during the war. The intense identification of migrant Igbos with place of origin and the importance of ‘home’ and ‘home people’ are situated in the context of the legacy of Biafra. The importance of kinship relationships for access to patron–client networks is linked to the Igbo perception of marginalization in the wake of Biafra. Igbo ideas about the significance of reproduction and the vital importance of ‘having people’ are reinforced through collective memories of Biafra. Igbo people's conceptions of Nigerian politics, their understandings of the social and economic importance of kinship and community in contemporary Nigeria, and even their reproductive decisions can be better explained by taking into account the legacies of Biafra.

Cet article traite de l'idée que se font les Akans de la sorcellerie à travers deux lieux sacrés de l'anti-sorcellerie. Il suggere que les craintes contemporaries à l'égard de la sorcellerie symbolisent des incertitudes morales concernant l'identité, la sociabilité et le matérialisme. Ces idées sont exprimées au moyen d'une critique fortement autoréflexive des concepts d'admiration sociale et de consommation transculturelle.

New field material should give an opportunity for reappraising old research. Thus Father de Sousberghe's latest report on the Pende (1963) stimulates a radical revision of assumptions about Central African ethnography. Is there a recognizable type of kinship organization which we can call ‘Central African’? The question was first raised by Gluckman in his introduction to The Lamba Village before any intensive field-work had been reported. At that stage his answer was that the typical Central African social system was characterized by lack of corporate lineages such as are found among the southern Bantu. These were the early days of post-war anthropology, and since he was using a negative criterion, he denned the sense in which he used ‘lineage’ as a genealogical structure whose members shared corporate rights and responsibilities. Before the ink was dry, however, Clyde Mitchell was sending in the first reports on the Yao, who are culturally much akin to the Maravi peoples, Nyanja and Cewa, among whom they live. According to Mitchell, the Yao were organized in distinct corporate matrilineal lineages. Gluckman did not tear up his introduction and write a new one. In an addendum he hoped that the unexpected discovery of corporate descent groups among the Yao would stimulate further inquiry.