The Nyakyusa were the subject of a classic series of ethnographies. This article suggests that these works took insufficient account of struggles over authority in the colonial period. Consequently they overstated the formalisation of chiefly power and understated the complex relationship between generational tensions and political authority in the pre-colonial period. Following discursive and practical changes in the use of alcohol, the article identifies a shift in the nature of power among the Nyakyusa over the twentieth century and develops the idea that drinking talk, and drinking practice, are central fields for the creation and recreation of the assumptions of power which underpin authority.

It is thought that African rice (Oryza glaberrima), domesticated from the annual wild rice Oryza barthii, a plant of savanna river valleys and water holes, may have been first cultivated along the valley of the upper and middle Niger (Portères, 1970; Harlan, 1975). Cultivation under high rainfall conditions in the forest zone followed the development of ‘upland’ cultivars. Today, farmers in the drier savannas continue to depend on the seasonal rise and fall of flood water in valley bottom land for rice cultivation, and on occasion, this has developed into fully-fledged ‘irrigation’ agriculture (Linares de Sapir, 1970; Loquay, 1980), but elsewhere in the West African rice zone rain-fed ‘upland’ cultivation techniques now predominate. Where rainfall is more reliable ‘upland’ cultivation tends to be preferred because of its greater efficiency of labour use, but, as in ancient times, the occasional supplementary use of swamp to cope with bad years is not uncommon. This paper focuses attention on rice farming systems in Sierra Leone. Rice cultivation probably reached this area several thousand years ago (Atherton, 1979). Although in a few instances regular use of swamp land dates back to the later part of the nineteenth century (e.g. in the Bumban valley and the tidal swamps of the Scarcies estuary: Fyle, 1979, Carpenter, 1978) ‘upland’ cultivation still retains its former importance over large parts of the country.

The material for this paper was collected while making a general ethnographic study of the Wolof people in the Saloum districts of the Gambia and neighbouring Senegalese villages in 1950–1. The extraordinary concern of the Gambian Wolof with ‘witches’ soon became evident when discussing and observing many ‘distinct’ aspects of their way of life. The object of this paper is twofold: to describe not only emotional reactions to ‘witches’, but to give an account of the behaviour ascribed to them, and the techniques for coping with their attacks; some functions and dysfunctions of these beliefs and practices will then be discussed.

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.

A wealth of new writing has emerged around the future of labour, focusing on thinking beyond employment in imagining the futures of ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets. These new imaginaries include radically expanded forms of redistribution, such as unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income. But what are the views of the ‘surplus populations’ themselves? This article uses ethnographic research in an informal settlement in South Africa to understand why the unemployed or precariously employed poor are themselves often reluctant to delink labour and income. In particular, we focus on the discursive use of ‘laziness’ by urban unemployed young men. The varied (and often contradictory) ways in which these men employ the laziness discourse sheds light on the logics linking waged work and money in our informants’ social imaginaries. It illuminates the underlying contradictions and complexities of such logics, including those of gender, relational obligations, expectations of citizenship, and the inevitable tensions between aspirational hopes and economic realities. To begin thinking ‘beyond the proper job’, to use Ferguson and Li's phrase, we must unravel and understand such nuanced logics that continue to bind together hard work, deservingness and cash – even for those left out of labour markets.

Recent happenings in the Gold Coast, and particularly in Ashanti, have tended to focus interest upon the structure of the constitution and the struggle for political power. Ten years ago two other movements were attracting at least as much attention. In a preliminary report on the work of the Ashanti Social Survey, published in 1948, Fortes described these as first, an apparently insatiable demand for schools, and, second, an almost equally if not more powerful development of what he called ‘new witch-finding cults’. That the demand for education of all kinds continues and is gradually being met is well known; it would be interesting, and perhaps, in the light of occurrences in other parts of Africa, significant to learn what has happened to the new cults.

Valuable African archival materials are known to have been ‘rediscovered’ accidentally after having been ‘lost’ to scholarship for a time. Perhaps the foremost example of this in Lower Congo research is the eighteenth-century bibliography located by Jadin in the Vatican Library some time ago. A similar case which I shall discuss here is that of the KiKongo sources of Karl Laman's four volume ethnography The Kongo, a 775-page work detailing traditions, customs, lore, and legend from the BaKongo north of the Congo River at the turn of the century. These sources were ‘lost’ too, but in a different way. Through an obfuscating editorial policy and several translations from KiKongo to Swedish, and again from Swedish to English, their central role in the final work became completely obscured. A reconstruction of how Laman's posthumous ethnography in fact reached the stage of publication should be of help to those who find it difficult to work with as it is—although I must make clear that the work is, as it stands, already of outstanding value. An explanation of the editorial policy in terms of its premises should reveal the impact of tacit ethnological theory upon something as seemingly cut-and-dried as the posthumous works of an established scholar, already well known in his field.

La grande presse a fait assez largement écho à un article publié dans Science (Schmidt et Avery 1978) selon lequel on fondait il y a 2.000 ans de l'acier au coeur de l'Afrique. Grâce à une technique hautement sophistiquée, recourant notamment au préchauffage du vent, on obtenait un métal digne d'une aciérie moderne.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the slogans which are so prominent and ubiquitous on motor vehicles as expressions of social stratification among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. I interpret the slogans in the context of the taxi owners' and drivers' social interactions, not just as disembodied expressions of a total Yoruba world view. In studying the slogans I pay particular attention to processes of accumulation of wealth, status mobility and the way these are affected by cultural values. It is argued that the vehicle owners make different claims at different stages of their careers. Their fears and hopes at each stage must be understood in the light of the contemporary Christian and traditional mix of beliefs about destiny, the world and God.

The origin and development of cultures have long been matters of dispute. From the days of the classical school of anthropology, with its insistence on the universal inventiveness of humanity, to the kulturhistorische Schule of the present day and its doctrine of the poverty of man's ability to devise new means of meeting his environment, the pendulum has swung more and more towards a realization of the importance of cultural borrowing. There is little doubt now but that man is an imitative creature, and that human culture is essentially contagious. But how contagious it is is a problem yet to be solved. Between the extremes which have been mentioned there lies much room for difference, and differences of opinion have not been lacking.

This article examines Patrice Lumumba's afterlife among Congolese students in the 1960s. Mobilizing oral histories, it also interrogates the stakes of remembering Lumumba at different moments in Congo's postcolonial history. It shows how Lumumba's assassination became a collective and personal landmark in the biographies of a generation of student activists and clearly helped facilitate a turn towards the left in 1961 and in the years that followed. Overlooked by Cold War histories, this political process was nonetheless also a by-product of the internationalization of the Congo crisis and proved central to the historical imagination of a generation of educated Congolese. The dead Lumumba pushed young educated Congolese to revisit the meaning of decolonization. The article argues that the students’ extroverted political imagination was an important explanation for Lumumba's posthumous popularity in Congolese universities. Through their affiliation with the figure of Lumumba, young Congolese could expect to receive support and attention from real and imagined allies around the world. The international communion around Lumumba's name was sometimes the result of productive misunderstandings; nonetheless, his legacy played a crucial role in transnational mediation throughout the 1960s and made possible the circulation of new political repertoires among Congolese students.

From February to June 1995 approximately 300,000 people attended an anti-AIDS healing cult in Malawi. The name given to the cult was mchape. The article investigates the so-called ‘mchape affair’ and compares it with the anti-witchcraft movements which swept Malawi during the 1930s under the very same name. Against the background of this linguistic identity, the article reflects on the politics of healing, social memory and the public sphere as the national space in which the affair assumed its distinctive shape. Focusing on the perception of AIDS as encoding decay, it is argued that the mchape affair can be understood as a negotiation of the limits of power and the meaning of suffering nourished by the moral imagination of post-Banda society.

Traditional Somali politics was based on two dialectically related principles: kinship and contract (tol iyo xeer). Kinship was founded on the segmentary lineage system under which people traced their descent to common male ancestors. Agnates functioned as corporate political groups because they were blood relatives. But the blood relation was not sufficient to establish a political system. Agnates functioned as corporate political groups because they negotiated a social contract that defined the terms of their collective unity.

This article examines the role of women in the politics of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC), a militant ethno-nationalist movement of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria. Women's inclusion in the organizational structure and their typical roles within the OPC, the article suggests, expand the political agency of women but at the same time ensure that their contributions are contained within the OPC's overall politics. Women play important roles within the OPC, primarily by enabling and supporting the vigilante activities of male OPC members. In the provision of this support, women overwhelmingly draw on the knowledge and powers associated with typically female life experiences. As a result, women's interests are represented within the overall agenda of the OPC, but on the basis of complementary rather than egalitarian gender roles.

Devoir réagir sous la poussée démographique par migrations locales a toujours fait partie de l'histoire du Ghana du nord-est. Le colonialisme changea rigoureusement l e type de ces migrations, d'abord par force, puis par constrainte économique, en un mouvement de longues distances du nord-est du Ghana et des savannes du nord en général vers le Ghana du sud. Les migrations à leur tour eurent pour effet de déstabiliser Porganisation sociale, Pagriculture et le caractère démographique des communautés de la savanne. Bien que la politique coloniale n'ait pas toujours été uniforme, il semblerait y avoir eu une stratégie dominante avec un effet irréversible: le demembrement des communautés locales économiquement indépendantes et de la société locale afin d'encourager les migrations de main d'oeuvre, provenant en grande partie de cultures à peine auto-suffisantes, pour travailler dans l'agriculture commerciale, les mines et les travaux publics du sud. Ces secteurs étaient directement liés à l'économie européenne au profit de la Grande Bretagne. Les salaires peu élevés ainsi que les mauvaises conditions de travail encourageaient l a plupart des migrants a retourner dans leurs villages de savanne lorsqu'ils tombaient malades, se blessaient ou devenaient trop vieux pour travailler.

Lorsque le Ghana gagna son indépendance politique de la Grande Bretagne, cette nouvelle tendance des migrations était déjà fermement établie et maintenue par les changements presents dans le systéme social, système économique et celui des transports. Des observations zorses et de la région supérieure montrent qu'à n'importe quel moment donné les migrations emmenent environ 50 pourcent des homines en âge de travailler vers le sud du Ghana pour une durée d'un an ou plus. Une augmentation marquée de la proportion des dépendants en conséquence de cette migration signifie que chaque quatre adultes qui restent au pays doivent non seulement gagner leur pain mais aussi maintenir quatre dépendants au lieu des trois sans migration. Vu que les envois de fonds des migrant zorses ne comptent que pour une petite part de la valeur représentée par leur travail perdu, le résultat net de la migration sur le niveau de la consommation de nourriture de ceux qui restent au village sera determiné par l'équilibre entre l'augmentation de la productivité demandée de chacun des adultes travailleurs qui restent et le rendement diminué exigé du total des terres arables. Bien que je ne possède pas toutes les données vérifiables requises pour résoudre cette question, le témoignage des zorses non-migrants, la malnutrition chronique évidente, un décroissement à long terme de productivité des terres du à l'érosion et à l'insuffisance d'apports de matières organiques ainsi qu'à un serieux manque de main d'oeuvre durant les périodes critiques d'activités paysannes, suggèrent que le net effet des migrations est négatif pour les zorses. C'est-à-dire que ni l'augmentation en travail ou en rendement des terres ne va vraisemblablement compenser le taux plus élevé des dépendants.

Bien qu'on puisse peut-être dire que les migrants choisissent librement de partir, les chemins qui leur sont ouverts sont souvent détermines par les forces d'un système plus large en dehors de leur contrôle. Du côté positif, si un renversement des tendances établies par le colonialisme et renforcées par les développements économiques ‘modernes’ peut être éffectué, les connaissances pratiques, connaissances agricoles indigènes et les connaissances démographiques en Afrique peuvent fournir le point de départ pour un avenir viable.

Fire outbreaks are common sources of anxiety and insecurity in informal settlements, but they can also provide new opportunities for claim making and governance of urban space. This article examines how a series of four fires in Accra, Ghana – three of which took place in its largest squatter settlement – offered new opportunities to experiment with governance, or a new way for residents and leaders to imagine and construct the future. Empirically, I document how, in the process of reconstruction, residents redrew property lines and reshaped social relations. They did this through the emergent political action I call building permanence, or a physical claim to the urban space one inhabits, as well as a new existential state of being and living in environs that will last and remain unharmed. The article offers a possible way towards achieving more secure tenure beyond formalization and infrastructure upgrades, and focuses attention on how institutions change in the context of daily life after a moment of crisis.

The research that led to the writing of this paper began with a puzzle. The four volumes of K. E. Laman's Kongo ethnography (1953–68) are based on texts written by BaKongo. Who were these men and why is there no explicit reference to them in the books? The lack of any indication of who wrote what and on what authority deprives this ethnography of much of its potential value (Janzen, 1972). In search of biographical information, I turned to the bulletin Minsamu Miayenge (MM), published by the Swedish Missionary Society (SMF) from 1892 onwards. From its pages emerged a clear sense of a group of men whose position in the nascent colonial order explained both their ethnographic ambitions and their subsequent disappearance from the record.

To those outside the anthropological disciplines, the Zulu are probably the best known chiefdom of southern Africa. Zulu military prowess acted as a sharp break on the process of colonial expansion in the nineteenth century and led to a series of battles which have been immortalized on celluloid and in the more popular historical accounts of the era. Despite this, the Zulu have prompted a comparatively sparse ethnography that is based largely on the work of nineteenth-century observers and is less comprehensive than the literature on some other southern African communities.

Through a comparative analysis of two recent Tanzanian lawsuits concerning pastoralist–farmer disputes over land, this article argues that the judicial system is being employed as a vehicle for legitimizing dispossession. Wealthy elites who find their efforts to acquire vast tracts of land thwarted by protective mechanisms in the Land Act No. 4 of 1999 and Village Land Act No. 5 of 1999 are turning to the courts to get what they want. Having access to deeper pockets and being able to out-lawyer and out-manoeuvre their poorer and often less-educated opponents enables elites (including the government itself) to avail themselves of the judicial system and acquire land through illegitimate means. Yet our analysis also illustrates that Tanzanian courts at times act independently of political influence and secure property rights for at least some of the dispossessed. An unusual mix of conflicting pressures and key personalities in these two cases coalesced to produce unexpected outcomes in favour of the Maasai defendants, whose land and legitimacy were on the line. Winning, however, came at considerable cost.