Since its inception in March 2000, the South African National Lottery has been treated as both a developmental boon and a dangerously exploitative new consumer product. In both discourses the poor feature prominently: as recipients of Lotto largesse and as its most frequent victims. Both academics and the National Responsible Gambling Programme have traced the poor's participation in the Lottery to their financial illiteracy and to their extraordinary millennial hopes. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town's townships in 2008–10, this article puts paid to such interpretations by looking at the economic realities and lottery participation of ‘the poor’. I contend that poor people in these areas have adapted enormously flexible ways of dealing with the multiple contingencies that mark their lives. This flexibility often translates into very modest investments in the Lottery, both financially and in terms of hope. As such, playing the Lottery is just one of a range of ways in which people ‘make a plan’ and ‘tata ma chance’ (take a chance).

This article examines popular understandings of diabetes, and conflicts and ambiguities in the management of diabetes care, in two areas of Cameroon. Conducted over a two-year period, comparative ethnography in Yaoundé and Bafut started in four diabetes clinics (two in each place). From there it extended outwards, first to the homes of patients with diabetes, and then on to a number of indigenous healers consulted by patients or their families. We explore here the tension between clinic-based demands for patients' ‘compliance’ with treatment guidelines, including repeated strictures against resorting to ‘traditional’ medicine, and patients' own willingness to alternate between biomedicine and indigenous practitioners, a process in which they subject the claims of both to a kind of pragmatic evaluation. The continuing importance of indigenous healing practices, and explanations for diabetes in terms of ancestral intervention or witchcraft, are considered in the light of recent anthropological debate about the ‘modernity of witchcraft’ in Africa.

This paper had its genesis in an attempt to understand certain aspects of the ancestor cult of the Mpondomise, a Cape Nguni people of the Transkei, South Africa. Like all Southern Bantu, the Mpondomise have only a vague idea of a supreme being and effective ritual behaviour is directed towards the shades of deceased agnatic forebears, the izinyanya. It was immediately obvious that any understanding, particularly of the structural aspects of the cult, depended on a clear picture of the lineage, of what is, in effect, its ‘congregation’ (in the Durkheimian sense). It is an anthropological truism that ancestor cults exhibit to a high degree that congruence between ritual behaviour and social structure emphasized by Durkheim. In strong contrast to the universalistic world religions, recruitment to the cult group is in terms of a kinship idiom, either through birth, marriage, or adoption, the beings to whom worship is directed are highly differentiated and structurally defined, and their sphere of influence is similarly bounded. There is evidence that the ancestor cult is inversely correlated with a highly developed cult of a supreme being and that sacrifice to the manes tends to symbolize commensalism (as one would expect with erstwhile kinsmen) rather than the explicit identification of the worshipper with the offering found, for example, both among the Nuer, with their conceptualization of an omnipotent High God, and, in some of its symbolism at least, in the Christian Eucharist. Be this as it may, ancestor cults have been particularly congenial to the structural interests of modern social anthropologists and the growing number of detailed studies has greatly increased our knowledge of this religious form. It was thus essential, as a preliminary exercise, to define the congregation of the cult, the locus of ritual authority within it, and the relationship of the living members of the group to the dead.

Holding people to account for their actions is a feature of all societies. This article examines two different mechanisms of accountability, both of which are used in the Arumeru District of Tanzania. The first is a form of ritual cursing called ‘breaking a pot'; the second is the local government financial audit. By placing both practices in the same frame the article aims to unsettle the conceptual divide between the rational and the irrational, the modern and traditional, the scientific and the occult. It also asks whether imported forms of local government, such as are represented by Arumeru District Council, might be made responsible via indigenous and indexical mechanisms of accountability, or whether imported institutions are best rendered accountable by ‘universal’ means.

On the strength of research in 1992–95 and 1998 this article discusses the way Muslim women dress in Bouaké, Côte D'Ivoire, and what it tells us about the trajectory of their lives and view of the world. Arguing that fashion is emblematic of processes of identification, it seeks to explain how young women come to be situated and position themselves in these processes. To do so, it examines the processes through a life course analysis that takes into account local versionings of tradition and aesthetics, Muslim cosmology and ideals of Western modernity. The article shows that as young women gain social maturity and assume the socially defined status of adult they dress and act increasingly in a manner that emphasises Muslim identity. The various ways in which they use dress reflect the stance they adopt towards competing versionings of Islam.

This article explores conflicts over local administrative boundaries in South Sudan and what these reveal about relationships between pastoralist communities and the state. Drawing on research in the Gogrial region of South Sudan, it argues that conflicts over local boundaries are rooted in the existence of different border paradigms and in subsequent attempts to resolve, sometimes violently, competing moral claims on the landscape. It draws a contrast between a Dinka concept of the border as a point that is owned and the state's concept of the border as a neutral dividing line. These concepts are based on different cultural logics, but there has been a century of interpenetration as well as conflict between them. The state has tried to lay its lines over Dinka points and local people have sought to tap the power of the state by claiming authority at administrative boundaries. These complex processes of interpenetration show how rural populations negotiate with violent state power: both in the past and in the process of forming the new state of South Sudan. They also reveal how some pastoralist populations have played an active role in shaping the geography of the state.

This article offers a new perspective on contemporary ‘whiteness’ in Africa by looking at the ambiguous ways in which it affects everyday life in and around the labour compounds of a multinational timber firm in the Congolese rainforest. As a foreign investment enclave, the logging concession is home to a small isolated community of European expatriate men whose ‘white’ faces evoke a set of ambivalent memories of colonial exploitation in the area. Through a carefully contextualized understanding of how these contemporary expats are perceived in the labour compounds and how they construct their own racialized male selves, this article pushes the discussion on whiteness in Africa beyond the conventional analysis of (post-)settler identities and whites of African nationalities. It argues that, as a permanent fixture in the present neoliberal moment but also as an uncanny repetition of a colonial past, the European loggers construct and embody very specific ‘expat’ masculinities whose internalized dynamics of self-exoticization make them ‘African’ in their own right. Mobilizing the problematic trope of ‘darkness’, both in expat self-making practices and in popular narratives about their presence, this article illustrates how whiteness in Africa comes in many shades.

As one goes through the numerous publications concerning East Africa, it becomes apparent that certain subjects have rarely been approached, having been neglected or even totally ignored. Such is the case concerning the problems linked with the Hadrami diaspora, the extended study of which—apart from a few notable exceptions—has not yet aroused the interest of historians or the curiosity of anthropologists.

This article aims at contributing to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary West Africa by adopting a bi-focal analysis that looks both at power struggles within the urban elite and at the grassroots multi-ethnic setting in southern Guinea-Bissau. I pay close attention to the social dynamics of rural peoples' perspectives, coping strategies and inter-ethnic conflicts. Local conflicts are elucidated as an ongoing process that traverses times of war and peace. Although they are subject to manipulation by urban actors, local conflicts are also a matter of continuous negotiation and partial consensus at the grassroots. In stark contrast to this, the struggles in the ruling group are characterized by an escalating spiral of factionalism, diminishing compromises and elimination of rivals. By analysing the relationship between urban and rural actors and the role of cosmology, the article also aims to shed new light on the multiple shapes patron–client relations can assume in Africa.

This article presents the case of the creation and expansion of Namaqua National Park in Namaqualand, South Africa, to highlight the contradictions between global interests in biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods. Despite the policy shift in the conservation literature from ‘fortress’ to community-based conservation, we argue that in practice conservation still tends to dominate when there is a trade-off between Western-style conservation and support to the livelihoods of marginalized communities. This can again be explained by the hegemony of a conservation discourse that is shared by a network of actors. The article highlights the role played by powerful environmental organizations and wealthy individuals supporting conservation at the expense of land redistribution in Namaqualand. The combination of scientific research and finances provided by this actor-network aided the creation and expansion of the Park. Local people, however, see the expansion of the Park as direct and unfair competition for land that they wish to acquire through the land redistribution programme, as well as an indirect challenge to their local livelihoods. Whatever the merits of their case, it seems clear that communities aspiring to more land, together with advocates of human rights and poverty alleviation, remain on the margins in terms of policy influence, especially when they pursue goals that are perceived by the conservation advocates to be in conflict with those of biodiversity conservation.

This article explores the role of ethnic identity in the framework of the livestock trade in West and East Africa. It argues that ethnic identity was used as an instrument to build trust relationships that were vital to the development of pre-colonial livestock trade networks. With the onset of colonial rule, alternative marketing channels developed, none of which proved to be capable of providing reliable and low transaction cost services to both livestock producer and consumer. Nevertheless, the ethnic trade monopolies were threatened by the advent of formal colonial marketing institutions and the progressive ‘opening up’ of the market. This situation remained basically unchanged during the post-colonial era and with recent livestock and meat trade liberalisations. The evidence from Benin and Kenya demonstrates, however, that ethnic identity continues to determine the organisation of the livestock trade, albeit in a different way. The transfer of trust remains crucial to minimise transaction costs in a market that is characterised by a mobile commodity, long distances, and delayed payment in the absence of adequate financial institutions. In addition, it is argued that the specificity of the market environment equally facilitates the use of ethnicity for commercial purposes such as the delimitation of market niches.

This article explores the hunting aesthetics of initiated Jula hunters of Côte d'Ivoire who call themselves dozos. It explains how their hunting aesthetic structures their relationship to Islam and the Ivoirian state. Although many Africans approach Islam in the context of tensions between local ritual traditions and modernizing Muslim reform, dozos approach Islam the way they approach the forests where they hunt, assimilating to both in order to tame them. They organize their hunting activities around an aesthetic centred on notions of sweetness and fullness; their contraries, difficulty and emptiness; and the process of mimetic transformation (shape-shifting) that mediates between these extremes. With these categories dozos assimilate themselves to and appropriate power from the forest to kill game. They also link themselves to pre-Qur'anic Muslim figures to legitimize themselves as Muslims. More recently, they tried to assimilate to the Ivoirian state to become a parallel police force. Stories of their tutelary spirit, Manimory, and the texts of their hunting songs, incantations, and epics encode diverse ways for dozos to relate to Islam, leaving room for dozos to eschew it as well. Their texts reveal a dynamic sense of history that defies classification in terms of tradition, modernity or postmodernity.

This article explores migrant existences in the border zones around Europe. Drawing on ethnographic research in Morocco undertaken in 2012, 2013 and 2015 and in continued engagements with migrants using social media, the article analyses three extended migrant stories, detailing their experiences of uncertainty, waiting and hoping. By elucidating the objectives informing migrants’ pathways and the material and moral considerations underpinning the ways in which they navigate migrant life in Rabat, the stories unveil how different temporalities and spatialities intersect and influence their decisions and ability to endure hardship and waiting. The article argues that uncertainties and risks inherent in migration, and in irregular migration in particular, have transformed collective expectations of the migratory project as a means of upward social mobility and economic security into hope and into a mode of hoping that individualizes success and failure. Meanwhile, the rising costs of migration and structural marginalization render the opportunity to travel elsewhere contingent on assistance from transnational social networks or international institutions. Individuals’ success or failure thus comes to depend on how understandings of hardship, waiting, opportunity and moral obligation are configured and reconfigured by lived experiences in different places.

The Islamic brotherhoods common in North Africa take a variety of forms south of the Sahara, but even at the very fringes of Muslim, penetration the great orders such as the Qaddiriyya have a part to play in the lives of the believers. One function they have is to bring adherents back to what members of the order see as the essential tenets of the faith, to purge practice of the inevitable compromises made with local ‘pagan’ cults, and to increase the solidarity of the congregation of the faithful.

Colonial rule brought about significant changes in the regional economies of West Africa, which had already been influenced by Europeans through the slave trade and the succeeding period of legitimate trade. Colonial administration extended the cultivation of export crops, introduced new systems of taxation and currencies, reorientated trading networks, and introduced policies aimed at ending domestic slavery. Levels of population mobility also increased, especially in the agricultural sector, as the seasonal redistribution of labour became an integral part of the production of export crops. This paper looks at the origins and development of dry season labour migration from Sokoto in north-western Nigeria, a migratory system which is generally accepted as being a product of colonialism. The argument takes the opening years of colonial rule in Sokoto and tries to uncover the nature and type of migration which obtained at this time. It is suggested that early migration was influenced by the economy of the central Sudan of the late nineteenth century, and there was an overlap, rather than a sharp break, between pre-colonial and colonial economies. The likely influence of pre-colonial structures is especially pertinent in an area which was the centre of the Sokoto caliphate, the largest and most populous state in nineteenth-century West Africa. But, in the early 1930s, dry season migration changed as the volume of migrants increased and their destination altered; it is the identification of this point of change which distinguishes the early period of migration and the changing impact of colonial policies.

This article examines the way young men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, make sense of and engage in the transnational cocaine trade, which has established itself on the Upper Guinea coast. It describes Guinea-Bissau's emergence as a regional centre for the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, and shows how the illegality and volatility of the commerce are socially assessed and valued. The drug connection impacts on the lives of the young men in the city in a variety of ways. While it is seen to have brought with it a range of political and societal insecurities and uncertainties, it is also perceived to offer potential livelihoods and prospects. On the one hand, cocaine is positioned as an ethically dubious commodity; on the other, its revenue and concomitant social effects are seen as morally reasonable and required. The article therefore centres on the ethical dimensions of the trade, as seen from the perspective of the youth in question, and argues that it needs to be understood in terms of situational obligations rather than abstract ideals. It approaches ethics from a relational point of view and shows how the moral evaluation and ascription of the cocaine trade are defined inter-subjectively and understood in relation to social responsibility, care and accountability.

It is widely recognised that seasonal labour bottlenecks present major obstacles to peasant farmers seeking to expand agricultural output in sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence from Nigeria and Sierra Leone, for example, reveals that labour shortages and limited income to hire off-farm labour have historically constrained rural producers from intensifying and enlarging their agricultural operations (Norman et al., 1979: 42–7; Watts, 1983: 202–3; Richards, 1985: 96). Many attempts by colonial and contemporary African States to promote food crop and export crop production failed, in part, because of peasant resistance to the threat of subsistence insecurity associated with labour conflicts in the agricultural calendar. Richards's (1986) study of the failure of a series of labour-intensive wet rice cultivation projects in central Sierra Leone illustrates the degree to which peasant agricultural practices represent adjustments to labour-supply problems. Given the pervasiveness and importance of seasonal labour constraints in African agricultural systems, it is surprising that ‘few studies have provided insights into the adjustment in labor use resulting from the introduction of cash crops and new technologies’ (Eicher and Baker, 1982: 99).

This essay examines anthropology and the work of anthropologists in Nigeria during the colonial period, which, for the sake of convenience, can be taken from 1884 and the establishment of the Colony of Lagos and of the Oil Rivers Protectorate to the end of the Second World War and the introduction of Regional self-government in the 1950s. During the latter part of this period I was a colonial administrator in this colony, and therefore absorbed the administrative bias in regard to anthropology and anthropologists. After the colonial period I became a professional anthropologist and acquired some of the bias of the professional anthropologist towards the colonial bureaucracy and its Nigerian successor. In what follows I am attempting to recapture my original attitudes.

Les malentendus que provoque fatalement dans les colonies la rencontre d'une civilisation supérieure avec des civilisations inférieures, dégénèrent de temps en temps en troubles violents. Ces mouvements de révolte se produisent plus fréquemment aux époques de crise économique. Si nous recherchons les causes profondes de ces mouvements, et de ces troubles, nous finissons presque toujours par y découvrir l'action de quelque panacée mystérieuse, détenue par une société secrète, ou mise à la disposition de la collectivité tout entière.

Cet article examine des examples de continuité et de changement dans les phénomènes de possession par les esprits parmi les Sidamo de l'Ethiopie du Sud. Les rituels traditionnels de possession semblent perdre leur importance culturelle par suite de la popularité croissante des manifestations de possession et de guerisons par exorcisme pratiquées dans le contexte rituel de mouvements religieux indépendants. De tels mouvements ont émergé dans la région, en réponse à un phénomene étendu de conversion au christianisme et à l'islam dans les années 1950 et 60. Des exemples de guerison de possession dans les nouveaux cultes sont examinés à la lumière de la définition holistique qui prévaut en matière de santé et du rôle attribué à des agents surnaturels dans la maladie et son étiologie. En même temps qu'il souligne les points de convergence et de divergence dans la recodification des rituels, l'article met en relief leurs objectifs thérapeutiques et la focalisation sur la guériso n de ces cultes nouvellement émergés. Certains avancent que le modéle à la fois politique et fondé sur l'antagonisme des sexes qui est proposé par les “théories de la dépossession” est inadéquat à expliquer le changement des modalités de la possession par les esprits et sa persistance sur la scene africaine. Les mouvements indépendants de guérison doivent être reconnus comme un facteur important de guéŕison, là où les Africains des villes et des campagnes recherchent un soulagement à un gamine étendue de maladies organiques et mentales, de déboires personnels, et de conditions de vie stressantes.