In considering the linguistic situation of East Africa the first outstanding impression is that of a vast multiplicity of languages which is not met with in any other part of the continent. For instance travelling inland from Tanga for about a hundred miles, the areas of the following languages are entered or crossed: Swahili, Digo, Bondei, Ruvu, Zigula, Shambala, Mbugu, Pare (also called Chasu), and also various linguistic enclaves, viz. Taita, Kamba, Kwafi, Ndorobo, and Masai. For such a small district this is a somewhat bewildering richness, even when allowance is made for the fact that most of these languages are Bantu, and some of them, as for example Ruvu and Zigula, or Shambala and Bondei, are closely related. In addition several languages, such as Jagga on the Kilimanjaro, are split up into a number of widely divergent dialects. Although the linguistic divisions are not in all parts of East Africa as marked as they are in the district between the coast and Kilimanjaro, yet there are other districts, where for the periods when on ‘safari’, almost every day a new language is encountered, as for example on the way to Lake Nyassa. In a survey like this it cannot therefore be our object to enumerate all the languages of East Africa, even in the case of those which possess the beginnings of a literature.

In this paper an attempt is made to combine contemporary field work with historical data in the study of certain early currency systems of Southern Nigeria with special reference to the Rivers Province.

My historical sources for the period up to the eighteenth century are Pacheco Pereira, Dapper, and John and James Barbot, mainly the last three; for the early nineteenth century mainly Captains Adams and Bold, together with the other sources detailed in the bibliography. For ethnographical data I have had to rely on Talbot supplemented by my own work during the period 1927 to 1946; and during a period of more recent field work in the Rivers Province and Old Calabar in 1956 I was able to make a specific study of the traditional political and economic systems of the Oil Rivers Ports.

Ironsmiths occupy an important yet ambiguous position in many African societies. They are both revered and feared, because they wield social power which arises from their access to occult knowledge, not only of metallurgy but of healing, divination, circumcision and peacemaking. In some societies smiths enjoy high status and are the wealthiest people. In others they are feared, covertly maligned, and blamed for societal misfortunes. In still others the smiths' position is often marginal except when they are needed to intercede on their society's behalf to solve natural or cultural predicaments. The forge or smithy plays a central role in the community as tool-making centre, a place of refuge from violence, of purification, and for healing. This article examines the social context of iron forging among the ironsmiths of the Kenya coast, focusing on the role of iron forging in the coastal economy, the forge, the smiths' life cycle, the institution of apprenticeship, the ritual and technical power of smiths, the role of women in the smiths' community, and the future of iron forging on the coast. It is argued that, while coastal smiths are marginal and despised, they hold important ritual and spiritual powers in coastal society. The article concludes that a detailed understanding of the traditional crafts historically practised on the coast can do much to illuminate the complex history of coastal society.

African communities are witnessing a perplexing proliferation of diverse arrangements of mutual security that draw upon old and new solidarities and inventively merge market logic with reciprocal forms of distribution and sharing. The dynamics of such voluntary arrangements and their broader social impacts emerge as increasingly important topics of study. The changing nature of global economies poses challenging questions about the novel relationships between state and market, and the potential of human agency to find alternatives to address growing inequalities. This collection focuses on local institutions of mutual security as alternative – yet also interdependent – forms of distribution that have become particularly relevant in the current era of global financialization and the changing dynamics between private and public social spheres. Various voluntary associations and informal economic networks, financial mutuals and savings/credit groups are becoming central in regulating access to resources and defining patterns of association in African communities. The articles in this themed part-issue explore these social security networks and organizations, concentrating on their ambiguous potential to empower the marginal as well as to contribute to social strife and political conflict. Ethnographic cases from diverse parts of Africa illustrate the impacts of the environments of uncertainty on the emergence of novel forms of association. The contributions suggest that contemporary mutual help arrangements should be seen as being central to the emergence of new social spaces and power configurations in such settings, revealing a broader social dynamic of globalization.

When the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district–level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision–making was being guided by profit–making rather than nation–building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the people, they argued, employing the language of socialism, nationhood and pan–African solidarity that had been utilized by the state during the construction era in the 1970s. Yet the railway services sought by these local communities had facilitated their own entry into profit–seeking behaviour as entrepreneurs in the TAZARA corridor. The transition from socialism to liberalization along the TAZARA railway was therefore a negotiated process in which the meaning of concepts such as ‘privatization’, ‘profit’ and ‘freedom’ were contested.

A generation of South Africa's new black middle class shuttles between the suburbs and the townships. This has become the focus of some South African humorous essayists, among them Ndumiso Ngcobo and Fred Khumalo, on whose works this article is based. The article argues that studying the new black middle class should extend to these literary sources and approaches. The humorous essays by these two authors consistently reference metaphors of mobility and the vexed intersection of black middle-classness, consumption, racialized residential zoning and compromised status. Through the mode of humour, the essays evince the psychological burdens borne by those with township roots but who live in the suburbs, as they negotiate status inconsistency in a post-apartheid search for human dignity. Constant visits to the township and the retreat to the suburbs constitute negotiations of spatial, financial and psychic concerns imbricated in the legacies of apartheid's racialized politics of distinction.

This paper examines the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala, Uganda. The intention is to indicate the relative standards of living of households of various composition and to decide whether the practice of soliciting money from lovers is better viewed as a preferred alternative to employment or as an essential supplementing of inadequate incomes. If lovers are necessary to the maintenance of single women and their children in African cities, analyses of extra-marital sexual behaviour which rely only on arguments about marriage rules and roles and personal values are rendered inadequate. Securing a paying lover may be indispensable to a woman who wishes to live and bring up children in town, and the practice may tell us more about her wish to educate her children, or her dislike of rural life, than it does about her sexual and marital preferences. Love affairs, in short, may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance than as an adjunct to a discussion of marriage. The data which I present here do not reduce a lover's importance to a woman to that of a charitable institution or welfare state: women who are prosperous have love affairs, and sexual pleasure is celebrated. They do indicate, however, the difficulties faced by a woman anxious to remain in town if she is not prepared to take lovers and to select them at least in part according to financial considerations. I hope, too, that the method which I use for working out standards of living available to households may prove useful as a means of establishing comparability between living standards in different cities.

One of the most interesting features of the cultural landscape of Sierra Leone is the very large number of settlements which still bear the marks of the long period of anarchy which preceded the colonial era. This is reflected both in the choice of sites and in the internal structures of settlements. Such influences are still to be found despite the impermanence of mud and wattle buildings and the sixty years which have elapsed since pacification. These settlements are interesting not only by the fact of their survival, but also for their wide distribution and their small size. There are probably more than a thousand defensive villages in the country, an average of one for every twenty-eight square miles, and reaching a maximum density of one for every four square miles in parts of Mendeland in the south. Most of them have populations of between two hundred and a thousand inhabitants. It is the aim of this paper to reconstruct the original character of these ‘war-towns’ as they were described by nineteenth- century explorers; to attempt an explanation of their wide distribution; and finally to show how social and economic changes are gradually causing a breakdown of this nucleic and defensive rural settlement pattern.

The key to understanding the experience of AIDS mortality lies in the stories that people tell each other about those they know who are suspected to have died from AIDS. We use a unique set of texts produced by rural Malawians reporting everyday conversations in their communities. These texts, drawn from the online archive of the Malawi Journals Project, consist of several thousand instances of ordinary people telling each other stories in the ordinary course of their lives. They are a form of insider ethnography, accounts of everyday life written by people immersed in the lives of their communities. Through analysis of these texts, we show that narratives of death are predicated upon the question ‘Who is to blame?’ We argue that a micropolitics of blame arises from practices of narrating death and shapes individual and collective responses to the epidemic. When we pay attention to the details of the production and exchange of these stories, we can see how the fact that narratives of death are predicated upon the question of blame both expresses and produces a desire for justice, both for the righting of wrongs through retributive punishment and for the restoration of harmonious social relations among the living. This desire for justice, we argue, is a central feature of the social impact of AIDS.

This study deals with the cultural construction of the forest by focusing on a group of farmers in Burkina Faso. It explores forest perceptions among Lyela farmers living in the vicinity of the Tiogo Forest Reserve through an analysis of cultural notions, specific historical circumstances and daily practices. Forest discourses articulate the process by which people's perceptions of forest resources are shaped both by religious and cultural notions of how to behave towards spirits, ancestors and human beings, on the one hand, and by sociopolitical and economic practices of how to make a living on the other. In search of nyo—that is, food, new farmland and a better living—people handle at least three layers of apparently contradictory conceptions of the forest. First, they follow the way of the ancestors according to which the Earth is sacred. Second, they cope with the legacy of colonial and post-colonial state administrations and particularly the Forestry Office. Third, they deal with market demands and the making of money by cotton cropping and woodcutting. The study concludes that these different layers of perception need to be understood as part of a present-day social struggle in which the Lyela farmers are engaged.

Cet article se sert d'une étude de cas pour soulever le problème du déclin de l'élevage dans les régions cultivables du Kenya. Il soutient que ce processus n'est pas à traiter comme évident en soi, en expliquant le déclin des cheptels comme le simple résultat des bénéfices relatifs de l'agriculture, de la croissance démographique et de la détérioration de l'environnement. Au contraire, ce point de vue néglige le fait qu'au Kenya l'élevage fut le premier secteur des sociétés agropastorales traditionnelles à être commercialisé et à obtenir dans le même temps un statut pénal. Les voleurs de bétail autrefois tenus pour des héros sont rapidement devenus des criminels redoutables, et c'est ce processus qui est essentiel pour comprendre le déclin éventuel du secteur de l'élevage et l'émergence de tendances inégalitaires. Cet argument se fonde sur une étude longitudinale réalisée dans le district de Kuria, dans le sud-ouest du Kenya, dans le cadre de laquelle des données ont été recueillies auprès des mêmes exploitations en 1985 et 1995. Ces deux études visaient à évaluer les conséquences de la culture du tabac sur les nouvelles tendances de stratification socio-économique. Cette méthodologie est rare et remet en cause les interprétations obtenues en se basant uniquement sur des données recueillies auprès d'un échantillon représentatif. Malgré une hausse de l'écart entre les revenus au cours de cette période de dix ans, aucune consolidation de la richesse et de la pauvreté relatives n'a été observée. On a pu constater au contraire que des tendances égalitaires significatives s'opéraient au sein de l'économie locale. Au cours de ces dix années, le cheptel a diminué de 50%. L'étude de la dynamique de cette situation change l'orientation de l'argument et l'amène vers une étude des conséquences d'une “marchandisaton” sur l'aile militaire de l'économie pastorale. L'intensification de l'agriculture a été accompagnée dans le district de Kuria par une vague de razzias de bétail et c'est ce facteur, plus que tout autre, qui a entraîné le déclin du cheptel, les éleveurs se débarrassant de leur bétail pour se prévenir des déprédations des pillards. Dans le même temps, on a observe un durcissement des comportements à l'égard des pillards eux-mêmes et constate que ce sont les families des pillards et non pas, par exemple, les families defavorisées, qui se sentent forcées de migrer et dans le même temps de vendre leurs terres, ce qui permet à d'autres membres de la communauté de consolider leur patrimoine foncier.

The note on ‘Joking relationship in East Africa’ in Africa, vol. xiii, pp. 170-3, 1940, brought to my notice a custom of which I had never heard. It led me to make inquiries about utani among the Africans on my station, whom I found without exception to be ready to discuss the matter. What follows is based on the information given me in Swahili by thirty-two men belonging to the following seventeen tribes:

Yao, Ngoni, Wemba, Ngindo, Nyakyusa, Kinga, Mbunga, Ha, Sumbwa, Nyamwezi, Zaramu, Zigua, Nyiramba, Chagga, Sambaa, Bondei, and Digo.

By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this article explores the dynamic and inconclusive negotiation of state authority in Kolfe Keraniyo, peri-urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the last few years, Ethiopia embarked on a strategy of rapid transformation driven by what its political elite defined as a ‘developmental state’, which entailed the significant rescaling of the peri-urban space. The promotion of micro and small enterprises is an important aspect of the territorialization of state power in the peri-urban space, and is actively negotiated, challenged and refashioned. The first part of the article presents three central aspects of such projects: the policy of regularization and legalization; the notion of ‘group first’ or collective participation in the country's development; and the emphasis on ‘saving first’ to create micro-dynamics of capital accumulation. The second part of the article discusses how the beneficiaries of entrepreneurship initiatives mediate the normative framework provided by the developmental state, and highlights how that framework is neither inclusive nor particularly distinct in its effects from neoliberal development strategies. The article concludes that the making and unmaking of state authority is not unidirectional from above but operates through the redefinition of spatial and temporal boundaries from below.

There is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents make sense of climate change through their own narrative frames rather than through the lens of global climate change discourses. We demonstrate how the onset of climate change in Jinja is widely attributed to perceived moral and environmental failings on the part of a present generation that is viewed as both more destructive than previous generations and unable to preserve land, trees and other resources for future generations. A focus on local ontologies of climate change highlights how the multiple, intersecting vulnerabilities of contemporary urban life in Jinja serve to obfuscate not only the conditions of possibility of an immediate future, but the longer-term horizons for future generations, as changing weather patterns exacerbate existing challenges people face in adapting to wider socio-economic changes and rising livelihood vulnerability. This form of analysis situates changing climate and environments within the context of everyday urban struggles and emphasizes the need for civic participation in developing climate change strategies that avoid the pitfalls of climate reductionism. The article draws on more than 150 qualitative interviews, generational dialogue groups, and creative methods based on research-led community theatre.

The Nharo (also known as Naron or //Aikwe) are a Khoe- (or ‘Hottentot-’) speaking people who live in the western Ghanzi district of Botswana, in the central-western Kalahari. They number about 5000 and live in small bands of eight to 40 people each. Traditionally they were hunter-gatherers, and among their closest linguistic relatives are the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe Bushmen (or San) of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, who speak dialects mutually intelligible with Nharo. The Nharo are not linguistically related to the !Kung, who live to the immediate north, but a great many aspects of their medico-religious belief system resemble those of the !Kung, and the ‘superiority’ of !Kung medicine is recognised by the Nharo and indeed by other Bushman peoples as well. The Nharo come second, with a greater spiritual and medical knowledge that the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe, or the !Kõ, who live to the south (cf. Heinz 1975: 28-9).

The limited objective in this paper is to call attention to the need to bridge an important gap in scholarly literature on the Aja, which so far has focused on the groups within the borders of the present-day Republics of Bénin (formerly Dahomey) and Togo in much the same way as Yoruba studies were once restricted to the groups within the frontiers of Nigeria, particularly the area of it now covered by the States of Ogun, Oyo and Ondo. By drawing attention to the Aja settlements and communities in Nigeria, the present writer hopes to do for this West African group what Geoffrey Parrinder (1947; 1955), Jacques Bertho (1949), Paul Mercier (1950) and Daryll Forde (1951) did in the 1940s and 1950s for the Yoruba-speaking peoples in Bénin and Togo through a series of published studies. There is no doubt that these studies have helped in widening the research horizon of scholars of Yoruba history and culture and have done much to dispel the myth of separation of the Yoruba, as of similarly partitioned groups all over Africa, created by the intercolonial (now international) boundaries, in this case the Nigeria-Bénin boundary.

The ‘great songs’ (antsa maventy) with which Sakalava praise their royalty extol them as unique and precious beings in whom all wealth in persons and things is, or eventually will be, concentrated, causing them to grow enormously and inexhaustibly fat, yet ever greedy for more. Solely because of their ancestry, their houses will be royal residences, their hats will be royal headdresses with special names. Above all, their people will be human beings owing allegiance only to monarchy, labouring only for monarchy. There may be indifferent or unwilling ones, as well as those who are eager to pay homage to the royal ancestors, but ultimately royalty will possess them all: ‘Royalty enslaves, royalty enslaves, royalty enslaves . . .’.

Les Booranas des environs de Waso au Nord-Est du Kenya se sont installés dans cet endroit dans les années 1930. Après l'établissement des frontières administratives coloniales en 1934, ils ont été isolés du reste des Booranas du Nord du Kenya et d'Ethiopie. Par la suite, les Booranas devinrent plus proche de leur voisins somaliens et, dû à ce processus de “somalisation”, ils ont remplacé leurs rituels oromo par des pratiques islamiques. Lorsque les années 1950 sont arrivées la plupart des Booranas de Waso s'étaient converti à l'islam et depuis ce temps là ont été considérés comme musulmans par le reste du Kenya. Néanmoins, des recherches récentes ont montré qu'il y a eu un renouveau des pratiques religieuses traditionnelles parmi eux.

Cet article divise l'histoire des Booranas de Waso en deux pèriodes: 1) depuis leur colonisation de Waso jusqu'aux évènements conduisant à l'indépendance du Kenya (1932–62), et 2) depuis l'indépendance du Kénya jusqu'aux années 1990 (1963–92). C'est dans cette deuxième pèriode de leur histoire que Les Booranas de Waso commencèrent un processus de diversification religieuse. Les pratiques religieuses furent renouvellées dans ces colonies et il en ressorti un manque de confiance en l'Islam. Cet article suggère qu'il y a eu une reconversion aux pratiques religieuses traditionnelles, basée sur un principe local, la division des troupeaux des Booranas de Waso.

In recent literature on the social structure of African peoples much attention has been paid to the role of the lineage in village and local organization. Among one Central African people at least–the Mwinilunga Ndembu of Northern Rhodesia–the spatial separation of adjacent genealogical generations is a structural principle of equal importance. Other anthropologists working in Angola and western and central Northern Rhodesia have obtained data which suggest that this principle is widespread in Central Africa.

Parmi les mouvements prophétiques qui donnent depuis plusieurs dizaines d'années un caractère spécifique au tableau religieux de la basse côte éburnéenne, le harrisme occupe une place de toute première importance, comptant décidément plus de fidèles que les Eglises missionnaires locales et les cultes autochtones. Déjà, en 1940, d'après les documents officiels, les Subdivisions de Grand Lahou et de Fresco (régions où ce mouvement accusait une tres grande intensité) présentaient les chiffres suivants: 7.75 5 harristes, 6.426 catholiques, 5.454 protestants, 2.202 animistes et 439 musulmans.