There are no such people, any more than there were such people as the Philistines.

In ‘L'origine du nom Fulani’, I showed that the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Fulani’ come from a common root F-L which in the Indo-European languages means ‘foreigner, stranger, alien’ and, by a secondary meaning, ‘inferior’. Consequently there is no single group of people represented by the word ‘Philistine’ any more than there can be any special group represented by the word ‘Foreigner’. Such names are coined on the well-known principles of ethnocentrism, whereby one calls one's own group ‘The Men’ and all others ‘Outsiders’. Thus Meek writes that the Bachama tribe, Northern Nigeria ‘. . . call themselves the Gboare or Men, a term which is doubtless the same as Gbari (the name of a large tribe in the Niger and Zaria provinces), Bari (in Eastern Sudan) and Ka-Bwari (Tanganyika). The root gba = man is also found in the Upper Ituri regions of Central Africa under the form mu-gba or ba-gba.’

This survey of text-books on history and geography, like those previously published on hygiene and agriculture and nature study text-books, has been prepared in accordance with the decision of the Executive Council of the Institute to compile lists of text-books in actual use in Africa in order to provide material which will be helpful in the preparation of new books and will also show what additional books are most needed. We had intended to confine ourselves to notes on history text-books only, but we found that the teaching of history and geography is so closely connected in most areas that unless both subjects were dealt with the survey would be of little value. The notes have been compiled from a variety of sources. Like previous surveys this is incomplete and we hope that its publication will elicit criticism, comment, and additional information. Our sources of information have been official publications, interviews with education officers and missionaries, and discussion by a group of officials and missionaries convened in London.

Depuis 1948 la population du village côdier de Mumford a doublé, et endix anssa flotille de peche est passée du canëoe à la voile aux bateaux à moteur hors–bord suivis de bateaux de pêche même. Cet article examine quatre questions: premièrement, les changements de la technologie de la pêche; deuxièmement, une analyse des changementset des continuités des structures de production et dela possession des moyens de production. Troisièmement il fourni une discussion sur la maniere dont I'économie locale a été incorporee dans l'économie capitaliste à titre officiel du Ghana, et il considère quelques unes des réactions a cette incorporation. Finalement, il examine certainesimplications socio–economiques cles pour la societe deMumford, tels que l'endettement, l'organisation sociale, une baisse du niveau d'alphabetisation et une conscience sociale en changement.

In countries where conditions favour the preservation of manuscripts and books, the survival value of much of the literature may not be directly related to its popularity. Unpopular works may remain neglected for long periods and then regain favour; but in the conditions which have prevailed in East Africa, only those literary works receiving the continued favour of the people have had any chance of survival at all. There have been no library stacks, no dry cupboards or shelves for storing manuscripts, but only the white ant and the damp. The love of the Swahili people for a good poem has been the means of retaining much valuable work that would otherwise have been lost. Even so, much more has been lost to posterity than has been preserved.

The Ewe-speaking people live in the southern part of the Volta Region (Ghana) and Togo. They dwell in nucleated settlements (villages) of substantial sizes (varying from a few hundred to 16,000 inhabitants in Keta, their largest town). A group of such villages (from as few as one—hardly a group!—to as many as 116 in Anlo) form a larger entity dubbed ‘traditional area’ or ‘Division’ by the British colonial administrators. These Divisions were defined as ‘the groups of villages acknowledging a common fiaga or otherwise-titled Paramount Chief', and there are over one hundred of them in the whole of Eweland. The prevailing ethnographic and administrative opinion has been to equate these Divisions or ‘traditional areas’ with the precolonial Ewe sovereign political groups.

Over a period of some fifteen years I carried out ethnographic studies in north-eastern Uganda, firstly of the Kalenjin peoples on and around Mount Elgon, and subsequently of the Sor, a small mountain community of Karamoja.

The earlier study formed the basis of a thesis on the Sebei of Mount Elgon and lasted for ten years, during which time I was based near Kampala and made intermittent journeys to spend two to three weeks at a time in different parts of the Mount Elgon and western Kenya region.

Much recent research has been concerned with obtaining an acceptable definition of the terms ‘leader ’and ‘leadership’ to provide a basis for a theory of leadership. Some results have been achieved in the study of leadership in the ‘face-to-face’group. It is when large-scale social movements are involved that the techniques of the sociogram and personality tests, which have been the main tools of analysis in the ‘face-to-face’ studies, are not sufficient, and the investigator has to employ the institutional analysis, which places the individual aspect of leadership in a secondary position.

In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon’s historical and linguistic scaffolding. We take this phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of socio-economic exchange and growth, one that is distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of an unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, reflects an aesthetics in which both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The article suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as a process unfolding in ways that complicate and clog conventional economic imaginaries.

This article deals with the Belgian colonial authorities’ obsession with classification and categorization, and explores how this obsession affected medical care in the city of Coquilhatville. Whereas the authorities aspired to medical care that was strictly segregated along ‘racial’ lines, providing separate hospitals for Europeans and Africans, in reality such rigorous segregation was unsustainable. I argue that it was the authorities’ inclination to categorize patients that eventually blurred the lines. Indeed, this article shows how the administrators became thoroughly enmeshed in their taxonomic zeal when members of the African upper class, the so-called évolués, demanded different treatment from other Congolese, to reflect their status. Furthermore, these upper-class patients insisted on being differentiated among themselves too. Responding to more and more claims to be discerned from yet another ‘lower’ évolué, and in an attempt to translate social space into physical space and thus provide the applicant with a more sophisticated hospital room, the authorities gradually ran out of options. As a consequence, they – albeit unwillingly – opened the doors to évolués of a hospital that was initially reserved exclusively for Europeans.

Annual festivals in Ghana celebrate the agricultural harvest and commemorate the political authority of local chiefs. Today, multinational corporations such as Guinness, MTN and Vodafone sponsor almost all aspects of festival production. Sponsor participation has transformed festivals into sites saturated with images of commodities and corporate brands. While some chiefs support corporate participation, others deplore sponsors, who they perceive as threatening chiefs' control over the festival arena. A critical medium through which chiefs police and participate in discourses about cultural and political legitimacy is dress: chiefs clothe members of their entourages alternatively in T-shirts with corporate logos and T-shirts with images of chiefs. During festivals, chiefs orchestrate embodied practices to assert new claims to their political authority based on the nobility of their lineage or their participation in global economic networks. Through an exploration of contemporary dress practices, I argue that what is at stake in corporate-sponsored festivals is the emergence of new logics of value that challenge people to reassess the social and economic relations that underlie the production of political power in Ghana.

Violence is a murky issue to research and to theorize: this introduction suggests that it has also often been approached differently by anthropologists and historians. In the pages that follow, we reflect on the ways in which both disciplines have worked to interpret violent events in Africa, whether in the deep past, during the colonial era or in more recent periods. To better contextualize these disciplinary advances, we intersperse them with brief reviews of general theories on violence. The three articles featured in this special section, while dealing with very dissimilar case studies, provide common insights on three main themes. The first engages with the paradox of the contingency and continuity of violence, and with the unevenness of perpetrators, victims and targets. The second deals with the refractive meanings attached to violent events. The third probes, underneath the apparent turmoil of violent acts, the deep moral and cultural frameworks of action that underwrite them. We have composed this introduction around these main questions.

In this article I give an account of some features and forms of sacrifices among the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It is intended to fill a gap in a series of articles designed to cover various aspects of the religion of this people. The central act of Nuer religious ritual is sacrifice, and all their sacrifices have this in common, that they are a means of making contact with spiritual beings. Those of which I speak more particularly in this article have further in common that they are made when a misfortune has happened or threatens and with the purpose of propitiating whatever spiritual being is responsible for it, though the sense of propitiation may be more marked in some sacrifices than in others and may combine with other elements in various configurations of meaning.

After an initial discussion about the nature of Sisala society and the segmentary lineage system of shrine types, I will show that fission of domestic groups in Sisala-land takes place in three successive stages: economic, residential and, much later, ritual. This paper deals with two related problems, (a) Given a collective value of kinship amity and unity (Fortes 1969: 219ff), how are groups able to break the ritual bonds which serve to unite them into one body of ancestor-venerators? (b) How are the Sisala able to maintain the ideology of kinship and unity in the face of continual fission of family units?

In a previous article on the Shilluk I discussed the laws of homicide and the legal and ritual functions of the reth or King. An interpretation of Shilluk law and authority is not easy because, apart from early contacts with the peoples of the northern Sudan, they have been subjected to external influences and some kind of Government since the early years of the last century. These contacts began with cursory and not altogether happy encounters with the Turco-Egyptian Government which were followed by the establishment of a provincial headquarters at Kodok in 1867 under the authority of a mudir; later came the turbulent and dismal years of the Mahdia and finally the occupation by the present Government in 1898. It would be idle to suppose that the political system of the Shilluk has remained unaffected by these influences. The Shilluk are by reputation an exceptionally conservative people and certainly the effects of their relations with outsiders are, to the casual observer, hard to detect. Profound changes have taken place none the less, especially in the sphere of customary law, and these changes are undoubtedly gathering momentum.