This study addresses the problem of sexuality and ideology in relation to (pan)-Africanist doctrines that have been instrumental in the effort of post-colonial African elites to constitute an exclusive African sexual selfhood. The focus is on their efforts to ‘Africanize’ the sexuality of the masses in a global context that dramatizes the uncontrolled flow of sexual desires, and favours the emergence of new forms of sexual expressions and practices that destabilize the post-colonial sexual order. The leading question informing this study is how a hegemonic heterosexual identity has come to be internalized in post-colonial Africa, and how both men and women have come to believe that to be ‘good’ citizens or ‘real’ Africans they have to become repressed subjects who not only limit their sexuality solely to heterosexual desires, but also have a natural aversion to other forms of sexuality such as same-sex relations. My main argument is that in most African countries, and specifically in Cameroon, both the edification of a phallocratico-patriarchal society and the political invention of the sublimated Muntu, the so-called libidinal African straight, went along with the suppression, annihilation or negation of gays and lesbians, generally misrepresented as deracinated Africans and dangerous ‘witch-others’.

The settlements of Bantu-speaking people in Southern Africa vary widely in size and distribution, ranging from the dispersed homesteads of the Nguni to the large towns of the Tswana. These two extremes have interested Africanists since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Europeans first encountered the Thlaping at Dithakong near present-day Kuruman. Today the contrast between Tswana and Nguni settlements are most often attributed to differences in social stratification, cultural preference or environmental conditions.

These conventional explanations provide a focus for considering the meaning of settlement patterns among the southern Bantu. I first develop a model of political and settlement hierarchies to isolate the essential differences between Nguni and Tswana communities, and then I present archaeological evidence that calls into question the conventional explanations.

L'article décrit quelques uns des évènements politiques principaux qui ont eu lieu au Togo dans la deuxième moitié de 1991, à l'époque où le pouvoir du Président Gnassingbé Eyadéma faisait face à une opposition plus sérieuse qu'à aucun moment depuis sa prétention à la présidence vingt-quatre années plus töt, et examine comment ces évènements ont été représentés lors d'une discussion populaire à Lomé. En analysant certains aspects de la lutte au pouvoir pendant cette période et les perceptions populaires à ce sujet, l'article à pour but d'éclaircir les mécanismes culturels par lesquels Eyadéma a pu se maintaindre au pouvoir et par lesquels son pouvoir pourrait être contesté.

In Part I of this article (McCaskie, 1983a) I discussed the relationship between accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante to the close of the nineteenth century. In this concluding part I analyse these and cognate themes in the twentieth century. I remain wedded to the approach outlined in detail in Part I; an attempt to locate action and motive within a cognitive or ‘intellectualist’ framework. But this article is more episodic and less directly narrative than its predecessor. There are reasons for this change of stylistic gear.

I Do Not intend to say to-night all over again what has been said many times before in admirable addresses to learned societies. I propose only to bring to your notice some features of the subject which have often been overlooked or disregarded and yet seem to me to be important.

May I in the first place mention the confusion which frequently arises when someone asks whether social anthropology can, or should be, an applied science. It is evident that it cannot be applied in the same sense as, for instance, medicine or engineering are said to be applied sciences since it cannot state its findings as laws in the light of which it can predict events. Perhaps it will never be able to formulate laws as these are understood in the exact sciences. Nevertheless social anthropology is a body of knowledge about human societies and, like all knowledge of the kind, can be used in a common-sense way to solve social problems; and there is surely no one who holds that it should not be so used.

RENAMO is a shadowy movement and ill-understood, save for its well-established genesis as a military artefact of the Rhodesians, then its transition in 1980 to South African patronage. Lacking all the features we have come to associate with successful insurgencies in Africa, such as a charismatic leadership or easily identifiable ideology, it has failed to develop a political identity commensurate with its military strength. It has no clearly defined regional base, relies on widespread forced recruitment, and behaves with notorious brutality towards the civilian population. Yet it operates throughout the length and breadth of Mozambique, and holds the state in virtual paralysis. Since it lacks rear bases and therefore depends upon local provisioning, it must be able to obtain compliance over large areas of rural Mozambique. That also implies effective organisation.

Scholars have recently begun to describe a speech form emerging in post-colonial cities which reflects the creative melding or ‘creolisation’ of elements from indigenous and former colonial cultures. These ‘urban varieties’ are not, strictly speaking, Creoles but rather indigenous languages whose structures and lexicons have been adapted to the complexities of urban life. A primary characteristic of such varieties is their ‘devernacularisation’. No longer tied to the cultural values represented by the languages in their more traditional forms, they reflect instead the new values and way of life found in the urban centres where they are spoken. This article, based on fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 1986 and 1989, describes the formation and role of one such urban linguistic variety, Urban Wolof. In particular, it focuses on Dakarois’ conflicting tendencies to accept Urban Wolof in Dakar as the most pragmatic form of urban communication while rejecting it as evidence of an undesirable creolisation between indigenous and French culture.

In the aftermath of social conflicts and urban violence between autochthons and migrants in Italy in recent years, the question of how to control the growing number of illegal immigrants is increasingly discussed in the language of zero-tolerance anti-crime campaigns. Traffic in women has been a ‘structural’ social reality in the Italian migration landscape over the last 15 years, and is a prominent aspect of illegal female migration. These women are qualified as ‘victims of human trafficking’ when they denounce their pimps. Most of their suffering – involving psychological or psychiatric symptoms and requiring psychosocial support – is expressed through an emic vocabulary that talks about fetishes, spirit possession, witchcraft, sacrifice, debts, and spiritual and moral deliverance. This study – based on extensive field research in Turin into an Ethno-Psychiatric Service (provided by the Frantz Fanon Centre) in which 50 Nigerian women participated – addresses the following anthropological issues: the relationship between emic vocabulary (so called ‘voodoo’ or ‘juju’), migration, and moral economies of violence; and the intersection between symbolic violence and coercion, as experienced through sexual abuse and/or ritual violence (occurring both in Nigeria and Italy, and also during the migration itself in different countries such as Benin, Mali and Libya). In the conclusion of this article, I underline the limits of psychiatric and psychological therapeutical methods vis-à-vis the symptoms and traumatic experiences that ‘mark’ these female bodies; and I discuss in particular the emergence of new forms of post-colonial disorders affecting subjects who are at the mercy of compromised desires.

Arising out of debates over ‘children at risk’ and the ‘rights of the child’, the article compares two contrasting childhoods within a single large society—the Hausa‐speaking peoples of northern Nigeria. One segment of this society—the non‐Muslim Maguzawa—refuse to allow their children to be beaten; the other segment, the Muslim Hausa, tolerate corporal punishment both at home and especially in Qur'anic schools. Why the difference? Economic as well as political reasons are offered as reasons for the rejection of corporal punishment while it is argued that, in the eyes of Muslim society in the cities, the threat of punishment is essential for both educating and ‘civilising’ the young by imposing the necessary degree of discipline and self‐control that are considered the hallmark of a good Muslim. In short, ‘cultures of punishment’ arise out of specific historical conditions, with wide variations in the degree and frequency with which children actually suffer punishment, and at whose hands. Finally the question is raised whether the violence experienced in schooling has sanctioned in the community at large a greater tolerance of violence‐as‐‘punishment’.

The marriage of a woman to a woman, found in many African societies, has not been given the attention it warrants, and is still imperfectly understood. Herskovits imputed to it sexual overtones that are foreign to the institution when, after stating quite definitely that such marriage did not imply a homosexual relationship, he went on to add ‘although it is not to be doubted that occasionally homosexual women who have inherited wealth…utilize this relationship to the women they marry to satisfy themselves’ (Herskovits, 1938, 1: 319–20). He made no attempt to substantiate his statement. And Lucy Mair, for all the clarity and grasp displayed in her excellent book on marriage, seems to have failed to appreciate the nature of the institution when she says, ‘According to Evans-Pritchard's account of the Nuer it is usually barren women who make such marriages, and indeed it is hard to imagine a woman who had her own children doing so’ (my italics; Mair, 1971: 60). In actual fact it is usually married women with children of their own who contract such marriages, except, it would appear, among the Nuer. By woman-marriage we mean the institution by which it is possible for a woman to give bridewealth for, and marry, a woman, over whom and whose offspring she has full control, delegating to a male genitor the duties of procreation.

Social memory, cultural memory, culture as memory, and memory as culture, landscape and memory, places of memory, regimes of memory—all these have been prominent topics in cultural studies, also in anthropology; in this work, attention is usually paid to remembering. Based on several prior inquiries into popular historiography and local regimes of memory, this paper is an attempt to include forgetting in a model of ‘memory work'. What this entails is shown with ethnographic evidence, the recording of a conversation made in Lubumbashi in 1986 with one of the African pioneers of the town. The text in French and Swahili, accompanied by an English translation, is accessible at www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca.

In his recent writings on the subject of marriage and kinship, Malinowski has repeatedly emphasized what he terms the ‘principle legitimacy’. By this he means the rule, found in all human societies, that a woman has to be married before she is allowed legitimately to conceive. ‘Roughly speaking, an unmarried mother is under a ban, a fatherless child is a bastard. This is by no means only a European or Christian prejudice; it is the attitude found amongst most barbarous and savage peoples as well.’ Where prenuptial intercourse is regarded as illicit and immoral, marriage is obviously the essential prelude to the birth of legitimate children, i.e. children having full social status in the community. But even where prenuptial intercourse is tolerated, this tolerance does not extend to liberty of conception. The unmarried boys and girls may indulge freely in sex, but there must be no issue. An unmarried mother will be subjected to punishment and become the object of scorn, her child possibly killed or aborted, while often the putative father is also penalized unless he marries the girl. Almost universally, a child born out of wedlock has a different status from the legitimate offspring, usually very much to his disadvantage. Facts such as these show that the group of mother and child is considered incomplete in the eyes of the community, and that the sociological position of husband and father is everywhere felt to be indispensable.

The unexpected death of a citizen in 1977 triggered a series of events in one small Ghanaian kingdom, pointing to confusion in the locally accepted criteria for Christian conversion and to contradictions in the avenues to status and power. Since the deceased was a millionaire businessman, something of a huckster, and a person who was at the centre of an unusually complex constellation of social ties, his death forced the people of his local community to re-examine the relationships between traditional religion and Christianity, and between wealth, religious adherence and the display of status and prestige. There was long and bitter hostility between the two towns to which this man was affiliated by descent. Each town competed for the glory of ; claiming him as a member, and while once he too would have desired that, logically it could not be. There was also perennial conflict between the factions within the kingdom's capital. This enhanced the drama and helped explain the urgency of the respective townspeople's attempts to resolve the underlying structural contradictions which became manifest in the events following the death to their own advantage. At the same time this is the story of a self-made man, unusual largely because of his extreme wealth, who understood conflict and ambiguity, and who manipulated the social structure in which he found himself to his own advantage. The funeral of this one man, who simultaneously entertained contradictory belief systems and juggled opposing attributes of leadership, mobilised the attention of the entire population of both towns. It did so precisely because the ritual of his funeral was used to ‘describe in advance a desired but uncertain state of affairs. It [ritual] is about power and is itself more or less political’ (MacGaffey, 1986: 11, emphasis added).

The development of commercial cocoa growing in Ghana is always assumed to be something of a miracle. It evokes the stereotype of the plodding subsistence farmer, eking out a living by a system of shifting cultivation in the forest. This peasant is correctly presumed to have been unfamiliar with the cash economy centred on palm produce for export and deriving mainly from areas south-east of the forest zone, but he is somehow supposed to have desired and contrived to fit a new permanent orchard crop into his ‘traditional system of food farming’, thus creating cocoa farms of from 1 to 3 acres from which were exported 80 lb. of cocoa in 1891, 536 tons in 1900, and 40,000 tons in 1911—since when Ghana has always been the world's largest cocoa producer.

In his admirable study of the Mugwe, a religious dignitary among the Meru of Kenya, Bernardi reports a singular fact which raises a problem of comparative and theoretical interest: viz. that the left hand of the Mugwe possesses and symbolizes his ritual power. The issue is best seen, to begin with, in the following passage:

Among the Imenti [a sub-tribe] an unusual aspect of the people's conception of the Mugwe concerns his left hand. It is this hand…that should always hold the kiragu [insignia] and be used only to bless. It is a most sacred member of the Mugwe's body and no one is allowed to see it. During the day, the Mugwe spends his time playing kiothi, the Meru draughts, but even while he plays, he must always keep his left hand covered and no one must see it. Sudden death would overtake anyone who dared to look at the left hand of the Mugwe.

Biodiversity means, in its broadest sense, the variety of life. More specifically it can refer to the number of species, genetic diversity or the variety of environments in which species or genes are to be found. The concept is in some ways an odd one, since biodiversity is quantitative without necessarily being quantifiable. As an object of study biodiversity is a bit like an iceberg—most of it is hidden from view, and (like the underwater portion of an iceberg) indefinite in shape and extent. The notion of global species biodiversity is often expressed in the form (estimates vary): 1·5 million species known to science, 5 million (or 30 million) yet remaining to be discovered (Primack, 1993). The rider to this surprising formulation is that most of the unknown species are probably insects in the tropical rain forest.

After the end of the colonial period, international commodity flows into Africa at first continued to reproduce patterns of colonial domination. In the last ten years, however, important shifts have become visible. New commodity chains bypassing the old colonial powers have developed and are changing the way Africa is integrated into the global economy. This article looks at four trade networks that converge in Oshikango, a small trade boom town in northern Namibia. It describes how trade in Scotch whisky, Brazilian furniture, Japanese used cars and Chinese sneakers into Oshikango is organized. Whisky trade follows old colonial patterns; furniture trade relies on new South-South business contacts backed by political lobbying; in the used car trade, goods from the North are traded by networks of Southern migrant entrepreneurs; Chinese consumer goods are brought into Africa by Chinese migrants who bridge the cultural gap between the markets. Trade in Oshikango highlights the importance of new trade routes for Africa. Migrant entrepreneurs play an important role in these trade routes. A closer look at them shows, however, that their importance is largely due to opportunities arising from their place in the international system, not to a group's inherent cultural or social characteristics.

This article reconsiders the relationship between ancestors and colonial power through a comparative analysis of the mortuary rituals of two Malagasy peoples, the Betsimisaraka of the east coast and the Karembola of the deep south. In contrast to analyses which emphasise an opposition between ancestors and colonial power, it argues that mortuary rituals construct striking analogies between the two. These analogies rest on similar conceptualisations of power as both enabling and enslaving, and are enacted in contemporary mortuary ritual through the incorporation of colonial goods and labour practices. By playing on similarities and differences between ancestral and colonial power, Betsimisaraka and Karembola mortuary rituals parody and critique mimetically appropriate colonial power, even as their appropriation of colonial symbols endows ritual practices around ancestors with the power to pull against the centralising power of the national sphere. Bakhtin's conception of heteroglossic language provides a useful way of conceptualising the multiple dimensions of ritual practices around ancestors.

In the concluding paragraphs of Part I of this article it was pointed out that in addition to its judicial functions the Poro society possessed some important powers of administration. On the other hand, there was also evidence to suggest that the society carried on this wide range of activities, amounting almost to government of the country, as an instrument of the chiefs.

Based on field research carried out in 2004, this article focuses on how Ituribased Congolese relief workers negotiate humanitarian access with roadblock militias. Experiences and testimonies highlight the importance of sociocultural and political awareness during relief work induced by conflict. It is demonstrated that relief workers in conflict zones do not (and cannot) shed their ethnic identities; that instead they accept that a perceived ethnic identity brings strategic advantages as well as disadvantages. Further, a relief worker's bargaining power is shown to be influenced by militia perceptions of how his/her organization is positioned in the conflict. The overall argument responds to the renewed policy interest in debating the political context of humanitarian intervention.