Cet article se base sur une enquête de six mois sur les guérisseurs et les sources de la médecine populaire à Kampala et dans ses alentours en Ouganda durant 1992. Quatre études de cas sur les guérisseurs et leurs vies montrent le choix de guérisons qui est à la disposition des gens malades ou angoissés. L'accent est mis sur le retour ‘aux choses de chez nous’, retour aux techniques et croyances de la culture traditionelle Bougandaise, face à la pauvreté des gens ordinaires et la pénurie, et le coût et l'échec de la bio-médecine. Mais ce ‘fondamentalisme culturel’ est combiné avec un syncrétisme pratique puisque les guérisseurs demeurent Mulsumans ou Chrétiens et recommandent un traitement hospitalier chaque fois que celui-ci semble être plus approprié.

One of the most important differences in technology between Africa south of the Sahara during the pre-colonial period and many other areas of the world, it is frequently suggested, was the almost complete absence in the former of any form of wheeled transport. The transport of goods overland in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa was normally done by pack animals, where these were available, or more generally by human porterage. This lack of wheeled transport, it might be argued, had crucial implications for the history of sub-Saharan Africa, since the high cost of transport by pack animals and human porterage has often been presented as one of the principal constraints upon the expansion of trade, and hence of economic growth generally, in pre-colonial times. The lack of wheels in sub-Saharan Africa, it is clear, cannot have been due simply to ignorance, since many areas of the continent had been in contact with wheel-using civilizations outside Africa for several centuries before the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as this article will show, there is abundant evidence that, in West Africa at least, the technology of wheeled transport was quite widely known, though put to only very limited use, in the pre-colonial period. The reasons why this technology, although readily available, was nevertheless not generally adopted are, however, very far from being clear.

African postcolonial rulers have made of the public sphere a space where through the production of violence and coercion they attempt to bring their subjects' bodies under an endless process of tight discipline, subordination and servitude.Moreover, they havemanaged to set up a politically structured sphere that not only restricts citizens' freedom of movement, speech and assembly, but also rationalizes their way of standing, speaking and walking. But the governmental claim to exercise full control over the public sphere is incessantly challenged by popular practices of insubordination and impoliteness. This paper which focuses on the carrefour de la joie (‘space for pleasure’) in Cameroon demonstrates how through ‘immoral’ and ‘indecent’ behaviour such as drunkenness, debauchery and indiscipline, Cameroonian subjects have been striving not only to evade the suffocating restrictions that the ferocious Cameroon People's Democractic Movement (CPDM) regime imposes on their rights, but also to formulate a sharp critique of this postcolonial power.

The importance of oral traditions in the reconstruction of the history of non-literate peoples has virtually ceased to be a matter for debate and is now generally acknowledged. Indeed, within the last few years, historical research, based on such traditions has made possible histories of many societies in Africa. But in spite of this general acceptance, the diversity of oral traditions has not been so fully recognized as to make possible the analysis of each type as historical data. In this regard, the history of the Yoruba provides a good example. Their culture has accumulated around it a rich variety of oral traditions whose study has made significant contributions towards the understanding of their past. For the earlier period of their history, their historians have had to rely mainly on oral traditions; even for the latter period, in spite of the existence of written documents, oral traditions have still proved very useful in giving a balanced view of events. The tendency, however, has been for the historians of the Yoruba people to regard oral traditions as no more than personal recollections and generalized historical knowledge. In the main, they have failed to give cognizance to oral literature; experience elsewhere, however, has shown that a meaningful utilization of oral traditions in historical reconstruction cannot afford to neglect this third category, which is for historians of non-literate societies what literature is for the cultural and social historians of literate societies. Moreover, the Yoruba themselves treat some forms of oral literature as quasi-historical records.

This article deals with the system of beliefs of an Independent African Church, the Apostles, founded in 1932 in the eastern province of Rhodesia by John Maranke. It seeks to define the Apostles' concept of ‘the Holy Spirit’, around which their whole religion centres. An analysis of this concept will make it clear that it has arisen out of a synthesis of elements from two older religions, namely traditional Karanga religion and Christianity as it has been presented to Rhodesian Africans by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

In 1930 the Land Apportionment Act created freehold areas exclusively for blacks, known as the ‘native purchase areas’. Forty-seven years later these sixty-six separate areas lost their legal identity when the Land Tenure Amendment Act consolidated them, and the formerly ‘European’ commercial farms, into the ‘general area’ distinct from the communally held ‘Tribal Trust Land’. Today, although the new Government has not yet touched Zimbabwe's land law, it has popularized new terms to describe these three categories: ‘rural farmers’ describes the peasantry in the communal lands; ‘small-scale commercial farmers’ locates freeholders in the former African purchase lands; and ‘large-scale commercial farmers’ are those whites– and handful of blacks – who work land in what used to be the ‘European area’. The small-scale commercial farmers, however, remain exclusively black. Thus we can talk of the African purchase lands as if they had not been affected by the Land Tenure Amendment Act of 1977.

This paper is an attempt to analyse briefly the literature on the Nandi-speaking peoples of Kenya with the object of noting structural similarities and differences between them. In particular the inquiry is directed to discovering whether their political structures conform to the same general type.

In a previous essay (Austen, 1986a) I attempted to trace a particular type of deviant hero in African history and culture: a ‘social bandit’ or criminal figure identified in the popular imagination with resistance against alien or indigenous oppressive elites. The search proved frustrating within its original terms of reference but it did suggest an alternative paradigm for identifying the entire relationship between cultural norms and criminal behaviour in Africa. The present article attempts to develop this paradigm through the analysis of six African narratives dealing with heroic and/or anti-heroic figures in a variety of contexts.

The arrival of Europeans, and the introduction of guns, first in the coastal areas JL and then into the interior of West Africa, altered the nature of warfare. Already in the seventeenth century, the Akan-Fanti, Akim, Akwamu, and other peoples on the Gold Coast no longer relied entirely on bows and arrows, spears, and javelins which were the traditional weapons but used guns and even a few cannon. Besides the change in weapons, wars were undertaken on a larger scale than ever before—a situation which was aggravated by participation in the slave trade. Among the peoples of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, none excelled the Ashanti in either the scale or intensity of their fighting. From the turn of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, they fought major wars of conquest and minor ones of consolidation throughout the area of present-day Ghana, and after 1820 they were involved in four major clashes with the British until the latter dissolved their kingdom in 1900.

Anthropology is an aggressive science. It has infected the study of contemporary social conditions with its outlook and methods. Witness the work done in Middletown, on the Irish countryman, and at Newburyport; the gradual pervasion of European folk-lore research with the methods of exotic field-work; and such a movement as Mass-Observation in England. Anthropology is now turning to the full sociological study of the great oriental cultures in China, India, and Japan. Nor is the reason for its effective aggressiveness difficult to find. The anthropologist among all other students of humanism was forced to obtain his material at first-hand through the direct observation of primitive races. For in his subjectmatter, there is no relying on written documents. Thus the strongest asset and the most inspiring force of the anthropological point of view is its thorough-going empiricism. Ethnography is the laboratory of social science.

The fact that most of the studies recently carried out on the Ibo have been initiated in response to an urgent political situation, has resulted in an emphasis on those aspects of the culture of most immediate interest to administrators; and although a considerable body of data on religion has been included in the results, this sphere of activity has perhaps received rather less attention than others.

In this article an attempt is made to sketch some salient features of religious belief in a single Ibo village-group, which, it is hoped, may illuminate some facets of the problem not emphasized in previous work. My investigations were carried out in the Northern Ibo Nike group which lies to the immediate north-east of Enugu, capital of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. Rich land and low population density (48 per sq. mile) have here mitigated the usual economic pressures towards education for a life of migrant labour, commerce or clerkship in the towns, with the result that, despite their proximity to a very highly developed urban area, the Nike people tend to take little interest in mission activity. Ibagwa, the senior village of the group, contains some 260 adult males, of whom only a bare half-dozen practise a loose form of Roman Catholicism, so that mission influence is not at all developed. This of course is a distinct advantage for the present study.

Those who populate the productive frontiers of capitalism are often targets of violence by groups and institutions aiming to poach, control and regulate their economic practices. This article draws on years of ethnographic research conducted with informal transport operators in Nairobi who drive, conduct and own the minibus taxis called matatu. In order to navigate the city, this workforce engages in a coordinated but tense economic dance along the dangerous and shifting lines between illegality, work and reciprocity. The article aims to situate the more dangerous and morally ambiguous aspects of the ‘hustle economy’ ethnographically, within the generative and ultimately mobile location of urban transportation infrastructures of the matatu sector. Building on the conceptualizations of social infrastructure of AbdouMaliq Simone and Janet Roitman's study of fiscal disobedience, whereby the legitimacy of regulatory authority is questioned and undermined, matatu workers as infrastructure challenge multiple levels of state and non-state regulation through a variety of practices that blend danger, violence and control with solidarity, reciprocity and redistribution. This article evaluates and analyses distinctive features of ‘hustling’ in Nairobi through the ethnographic lens of matatu transportation operators as they navigate dangerous negotiations with the state, the police and vigilante gangs.

Among various processes of recognition and development of local know-how related to biodiversity, the protection systems based on Geographical Indications seem to open up interesting perspectives for the countries of the South. Ethiopia is on the way to equipping itself with such a tool.

In this article we argue that Ethiopia offers an exceptionally good terrain for setting up such a mechanism. It has many products derived from the exploitation of biodiversity by a variety of cultural groups. Many of these products already have reputations linked to their cultural geographical origin. The existence of competitive national and international markets requires labels and protection systems.

Nevertheless adoption of a Geographical Indications system is not without its problems. The specific circumstances of the Ethiopian context – social and institutional as well as environmental – raise questions as to the limitations and possible risks of such a system, including the unequal development of certain components of biodiversity, standardization and loss of know-how, modification of current territorial subdivisions and the corresponding social and administrative organizational structures.

There is widespread apprehension about the resilience of the ‘traditional African’ model of the extended family in maintaining norms and practices of inter-group cooperation and care in conditions of demographic, social and economic change. In Nyanza Province, Kenya, where one of every five children is currently orphaned, and HIV/AIDS and wide-scale poverty continue to render lives and livelihoods insecure, many people are not able to take their families' care for granted. Ideas and practices of kinship have been challenged profoundly by questions regarding who is responsible for the care of orphaned children. This article looks at two complementary practices among Luo families in western Kenya that address such dilemmas: the communal initiative of ‘sitting’ as a family to discuss and resolve issues in a cooperative and consensual manner; and the individualistic initiative of ‘standing’ to represent the interests of another individual. I suggest that while the immediate purposes of sitting and standing are pragmatic in assigning caring responsibilities for specific children, their eventfulness also actualizes something greater: trust, reciprocity and solidarity among extended families.

In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and they share a present that in many countries is being radically affected by historical transformations such as urbanisation, impoverishment and the scourge of AIDS.

L'histoire des élections compétitives ininterrompues au Botswana depuis 1965, et la littérature abondante que ces rivalries ont engendrées sont réexaminées afin de, premièrement, éclairer les vues qui se répandent au sujet du Botswana concernant les objectifs et le sens de ces évenements, deuxièmement, examiner l'évolution des procédures électorates dans cet état, et troisièmement, élucider les effets que les élections ont eut sur l'institutionnalisation d'une politique stable. Une des découvertes principales qui a été faite est que, de plus en plus, les élections sont largement acceptées par le corps électoral, et que les résultats des élections sont a perçus comme étant matériellement important pour une population qui apparemment juge désormais les candidats et les partis d'une maniere très instrumentale sur la base des exploits politiques que ces derniers ont accomplis. La concurrence électorale à son tour est devenue un facteur de plus en plus important pour former certains éléments central dans les procédures politiques de Botswana, peut-être en particulier depuis que la compétition électorale entre le gouvernement et I'opposition a principalement émergée comme un combat entre le BDP au pouvoir et le candidat BNF. Dans l'ensemble, les vastes données qui ont été générées par des études antérieures faites sur les élections, notamment les résultats des récents sondages d'opinion publique, permettent le développement d'une perspective sur la politique du Botswana qui concède aux élections un rôle plus central que traditionnel contrairement à ce qui en a été jusqu'à présent.

This article is about ideas and practices concerning the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food among the Muslim Argobba of Ethiopia. Food among the Muslim Argobba of Ethiopia is an essential idiom, both for drawing a hierarchy of in-group/out-group distinctions and for expressing relationships within groups. The in-group/out-group relations are typically expressed in terms of what foods are consumed by the Muslim Argobba and their non-Muslim Amhara neighbours, by the Muslim Argobba and their Muslim Oromo and Adal neighbours and indeed by some wealthy trader Argobba families and poor Argobba peasant households. Food preparation and distribution, on the other hand, express relations internal to the group, either in terms of gender within the household, as in who serves what to whom, where and in what quantities, or in informal exchanges, as in establishing social links among men and women. Nowadays fewer and fewer Argobba are producing the food they consume, and many are drawn away from their rural homelands either as merchants or as wage labourers. The article examines how Argobba consumers have become accustomed to foreign foods and new modes of preparation and distribution and how such changes have also altered the ways in which food has expressed social relations in terms of class, ethnic and gender identity. It investigates the relative importance of the social and symbolic function of Muslim meals, and discusses the material life of cooking and cuisine in changing socio-economic environments.

Among the traditional patrilineal Zulu of South Africa, women are more often associated with mystical experiences than men. While on the one hand, as daughters or sisters, women may be associated with the positive mystical forces as diviners, on the other hand, as mothers or wives, women are often related to the negative polluting mystical forces. It is the logic behind these notions that I want to examine in this article.

In 1991 in the Republic of Congo, a sovereign national conference in Brazzaville inaugurated a peaceful transition from socialist one‐party government to multi‐party democracy. The pluralization of public voices in the newly liberalized country – in religious movements, political parties and independent presses – expressed new conditions of understanding about the nation and its affairs. At the same time, local networks and categories of perception inflected geopolitical pressures from foreign powers into quasi‐ethnic divisions in competition for power through government representation. Subsequent conflict over contested elections sparked devastating civil war in 1997 and resulted in the return to power of the former socialist leadership.

Given the uncertainties – indeed, the crises of institutions and of knowledge – during these times, how did Congolese diagnose the troubles through which the country passed? This article examines how national and socialist ideals and practices were evoked and reinterpreted to this end in public discourse through idioms of family, affliction, spiritual power and the living body. These modes of speech and action give evidence of longer‐term continuities in the region's political imaginations, as these incorporated changes brought by ongoing involvement in larger modern worlds.