Internationally, war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) is regarded as an instance of violent conflict driven by economic factors (attempts to control the mining of alluvial diamonds). Fieldwork (2000–01) in rural areas recovering from war suggests a very different picture. War victims and combatants from different factions stress the importance of political decay, corruption, injustice and the social exclusion of young people. Other studies confirm the picture. There is broadly based discussion in rural communities about how to address the injustices held to have been responsible for the war. It seems in line with wider debate about human rights. Are people being converted to international ideals? Applying a neo-Durkheimian perspective, the article shows that this discourse about rights is a product of local social changes brought about by the war itself. The article concludes by asking how it might be consolidated by rights-oriented reconstruction activity. Human rights in Sierra Leone are as much a local development as an imposed change. In this respect the study confirms the importance of local agency already argued by anthropologists who have studied the process of conversion to world religions.

Based on the contentions that rules cannot determine practice, and that the state is only a composite reality that needs to be analysed as a part of a wider socio-cultural totality, this article investigates how the state, as government and political practice, functions in a village in Botswana. Consequently, lay villagers' attitudes to the state and hence the issue of legitimacy become focal points in the discussion. It is argued that what is conceptualised by most villagers as the state is not co-extensive with its formal boundaries. Rather, it is associated with that which is ‘modern’ or ‘European’ and hence seen to be alien. This means not that the state is conceptualised in merely negative terms but rather that it achieves its legitimacy less on ideological grounds than from its role as a generous patron. This is due to the state's extraordinary wealth. It is argued that this form of legitimacy to some extent defines the roles it can play and makes it in some ways vulnerable but, on the other hand, enables the state to buy time to develop a political and administrative system that steers it clear of the common miseries that most other African states face.

This article restudies assumptions about the nature of nationalism in Africa on the basis of the brief moment when African nationalism emerged in the mountain area of Uluguru, in eastern Tanzania. It suggests that our understanding of the emergence of the concept of nationality was far too narrowly focused on the idea of the state and of the unity of the public existing within that state. By exploring a multiplicity of coexisting colonial and indigenous political discourses in terms of ‘creolisation’, and setting this multiplicity of public discourses against the background of the secret politics that determined their interaction, the article suggests directions for the rethinking of African politics in modernity.

Joe Slovo Park, a housing development in a white middle-class suburb of Cape Town, was designed to replace the shack settlement of Marconi Beam with an orderly working-class suburb. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of post-apartheid housing development schemes, and raises troubling questions about the failure of planners, policy makers and developers to take into account the complexities of the everyday lives they sought to transform. Had they done so they might have anticipated the ‘re-informalisation’ of the newly formalised suburb. The article explores the disjunctures between the planners' model of ‘suburban bliss’ and the reality. The messy, improvised character of low-income housing development in South Africa is contrasted with their Utopian and technocratic vision. This is not to deny that dreams embodied in blueprints may often be shared by the intended ‘beneficiaries’, only that for a variety of social, economic and cultural reasons poor communities are generally unable to realise such ideal visions of modern urban living.

This article investigates the relationship between chieftaincy and the state in modern Nigeria. It focuses on politics and the mythical history of kings in the city of Abeokuta and argues that, particularly during the 1990s, the royal politics of the town drew heavily on different versions of mythical history. The reasons are twofold. They concern, first, the traditional political discourse of Yoruba kingship, in which a king's legitimacy can be discussed in terms of the attributes of the royal persona he embodies. In this context, legitimacy and status are often discussed as the first king's mythical origin. However, the continued political relevance and even volatility of this discourse in the 1990s related to the nature of the Nigerian state, in which traditional status is closely associated with political power.

This article traces the history of Mumboism, a millennial cult of south-west Kenya, 1912–34. Mumbo, the serpent god of Lake Victoria, promised to eject whites and chiefs from the region and usher in a period of prosperity. Mumboism gained followers, it is argued, because it mixed older ideas of patron–client relations with newer ideas of omnipotent, unseen beings, introduced by Europeans as Government and God. Mumbo challenged chiefs and missionaries, struggling to create patronage networks, by attracting clients, and threatened to unmask Government and God as impotent. Chiefs and, to a lesser extent, missionaries directed state power to the repression of Mumbo, eliminating it before it could undermine the very basis of European power.

This article examines the traditional initiation of the former Senegalese Minister of Agriculture. At the age of fifty-five the Catholic Minister was initiated into the secrets of the sacred grove and thus acquired the status of adult man. The article demonstrates that Jola ethnic discourse, in which male initiation has become an important symbol, forced the Minister to enter the grove. His initiation turned him into a full member of the Jola ethnic group and qualified him as a trustworhty man capable of representing the people. In the campaign of the Socialist Party internal elections the Minister's initiation nevertheless became a major issue. The electorate did not show unswerving loyalty to ‘their’ Minister and nominated a non-initiate. The electorate suddenly changed their standards of apt political representation. The article contributes to the contemporary debate on citizenship and primary patriotism by showing that the Senegalese easily shift their position from subject to citizen, and thus empower themselves vis-à-vis elusive politicians. It also shows that politicians penetrate Jola practices of secrecy and thereby further the Jola's integration into the national public sphere.

Studies of born-again Churches in Africa generally conclude that they help members embrace modernity. Their teachings provide the ideological bases for members to embrace changing material realities. Such studies are rather silent on the demands of this ideological frame on women and men. This article looks at two Zimbabwean women's organisations, Gracious Woman and Precious Stones, affiliated to Zimbabwe Assemblies of God in Africa and Family of God respectively. Using ethnographic methods, it argues that such organisations teach women domesticity and romanticise female subordination as glorifying God. They discourage individualism by exalting motherhood, wifehood and domesticity as service to God. These demands emerge at a time when life is changing drastically in urban areas as women get educated and enter the professions. Economically a small but growing number of black families have experienced some upward mobility—something these Churches encourage through ‘the gospel of prosperity’. Although accumulation and upward mobility free families from (traditional) kin obligations which the Churches encourage, women are discouraged from resisting the patriarchal yoke even when material circumstances make it possible. The organisations repackage patriarchy as Christian faith. The article concludes that if these Churches are concerned with managing modernity, then they see modernity as female subordination.

This article examines the tensions and contradictions in the use of law as an instrument of coercion to consolidate British control in Nigeria and the legitimising rhetoric of human rights and social justice employed within the context of the operation of the law. The article explores the effects of laws introduced mainly to foster British colonial hegemony against the background of the aspiration to guarantee social justice and forge a ‘modern’ regime of rights and liberties for native subjects in the colony. It probes the circumstances that made the rhetoric of rights and liberty imperative for both the colonial regime that employed it to legitimise empire and the African elites who appropriated it to strengthen their demands for representation and self-rule. The aim is not so much to show how the colonial state fell short of its own liberal agenda as to examine the appeal ofthat agenda and the conditions that made it so central to the colonial project.

This article examines the moral ambiguities of materialism that emerged with the coffee trade in north-west Tanganyika. The White Fathers, who played a prominent (often unintended) role in the growth of coffee markets, and the Haya villagers who became coffee farmers and traders alike understood the threat that commercial activity posed to non-commercial forms of value. The Fathers' attitude to the trade was often at odds with what they perceived as their evangelical mission; equally interesting are the ways this quandary shaped the attitudes and practices of the Haya people in the twentieth century. The article describes the White Fathers' anxieties about ‘civilisation’, then turns to the concerns of Haya farmers and traders as they developed in subsequent decades. The aim is to address the projects through which the moral ambiguities of the forms of materialism the coffee trade ushered in were—and were not—resolved, so as to illuminate the complex entanglement of colonisers and colonised.

Houses frequently embody culturally specific principles of social organisation. In this article Tallensi compounds in the Upper East Region of Ghana are examined in terms of compound layout and the kinship relations of their occupants. By comparing the patrilineal descent patterns of occupants with the topological organisation of multi-courtyard compounds, it is proposed that there is a correlation between these two variables. Further multidimensional scaling analysis shows that proximity in kinship space is reflected in proximate living arrangements. For students of material culture, this investigation demonstrates that lineage solidarity and politics can be played out in architectural form on the micro-scale of the domestic scene. From the standpoint of ethnoarchaeology, the processes governing the social logic of compound design can also assist archaeologists in interpreting house features in the remains of similarly constituted settlements.

This article examines the relationship between the environment, society and the state in the Gash–Setit region of western Eritrea. Through an analysis of the environmental narrative of the local communities and the state, it explores the factors that have contributed to the environmental crisis in the region. These factors include population resettlement, the agricultural development policy of the state, war, drought and the collapse of traditional management of the environment. The combined effects have created environmental stresses which have far-reaching implications for state–society and inter-community relations. The analysis draws on historical, cultural and political dimensions in seeking to understand relations between the environment, society and the state.

This article analyses the conversion process and the experiences of the Sidāma, in being proselytised by Protestant missionaries in an attempt to integrate them into the modernising Ethiopian state. The conversion process is considered in terms of reasons for accepting or rejecting the new religion. A minority of Sidāma are shown to have changed from old beliefs and practices, partly because of the ease of moral reinterpretation and secular incentives, but primarily because of dissatisfaction with reciprocal exchange relations with indigenous spirits and a desire to transcend the finality of death. In advancing this proposition it rejects the possibility of Sidāma beliefs as constituting a closed system of cosmology. Though Islam is also present in the region, for political and economic reasons it has been less attractive to prospective converts than Christianity.

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.

This article deals with witchcraft, missionisation, domestic slavery and social life on the emerging colonial ‘frontier’ of Onitsha, Nigeria, during the last years of the nineteenth century. The analysis centres on the confession of an accused witch and former domestic slave in the Waterside area of the town. It uses the document as a springboard for a larger discussion of the intersecting lives of Africans and Europeans in this marginal location at a moment when social relations there were undergoing radical transformation. By addressing such a text, taken down verbatim at the time of the confession, the author argues, we can gain a privileged insight into women's unofficial (and even prohibited) religious practice as well as the everyday lives of persons—notably female domestic slaves—who ordinarily receive little notice in the African colonial record. From Okuwan's confession we also learn something about how the increasing flows of commodities and new forms of colonial authority along this mercantile border were changing (and possibly devaluing) African women's labour as well as their religious power.

‘It all comes down to juok’ is the recurrent answer to enquiries about suffering and misfortune among the Nilotic Jop'Adhola of eastern Uganda. Understanding what it means to ‘believe’ in juok requires a theoretical approach that recognises culture as a battleground between conflicting voices. This article explores the multiple and often contradictory ways to talk about, practise and believe in juok and how the notion of juok intersects with Christianity and biomedicine in ever changing constellations. Juok, it is suggested, can be seen as an image of intersubjective experience that allows the anthropologist insight into ways in which people in Eastern Uganda engage with each other and with the ‘other world’. Juok is one of the things people use when trying to activate events and overcome obstacles in life. As such it reflects the resilience of people confronted with suffering.

Muslim Hausa-speaking women in the city of Kano in northern Nigeria form a heterogeneous population, differentiated by many social, economic and individual characteristics. New concepts of community and identity beyond the level of kinship, descent and marriage have developed among women in specific urban neighbourhoods, as on a modern housing estate (bariki) for civil servants in the old city of Kano. Although the term matan bariki, ‘women of the barracks’, is synonymous with ‘prostitutes’ for most Hausa-speakers, the secluded wives of policemen living on this housing estate use it as a self-designation that signifies membership of an urban middle class. The article explores the ambivalent meanings of the term bariki as a symbol of modernity and ‘Westernisation’ as well as the relation between seclusion as a religiously defined institution and its significance as a mark of socio-economic status. By redefining the term matan bariki the women of the barracks use a strategy of distinction in order to differentiate themselves from other groups and milieux of women in Kano.

This article presents fragments of conversation with elderly and younger people in the rural town of Kwahu Tafo. The statements of the various speakers are often contradictory. The borders between respect and hatred, admiration and envy, affection and fear prove porous. The article is an attempt to understand the changing sentiments of the young towards the old, and vice versa. Elders pronounce both blessings and curses. Their spiritual power is sometimes appreciated as wisdom, the fruit of lifelong experience. At other times that spiritual power is denounced as witchcraft. Theologically these statements sound confusing and contradictory. From a sociological point of view, however, they make sense. They express the basic ambivalence of young people towards the old. On one hand there is respect, a cultural code which is almost ‘natural’: one regards with awe and admiration what came before. On the other, old people engender resentment because of their overbearing attitude and their refusal to ‘go’. The fact that young people die while old people remain alive is a reversal of the natural order and reeks of witchcraft.

All over sub-saharan Africa, menstruating women, pregnant women and sexual relations are seen as incompatible with productive activities (hunting, blacksmithing, cattle herding, agriculture, pottery, beer brewing, etc.). The article argues that there is a certain rationality or logic behind the prohibitions which is independent of the social contingencies found in the different societies, and which is linked with the fact that all these activities are metaphorically compared to human reproduction. The metaphors help us to understand mysterious and delicate biochemical processes, characterised by recurrent misfortune, but they also introduce a cognitive threat by creating similarity between things which are very different. The taboos then try to prevent the conjunction of the things metaphorically compared, in order to forestall the possibility of misfortune related to them.

Mediumistic divination is unique to the Nguni, as all other Bantu-speakers in southern Africa used a fairly ‘objective’ divinatory system involving a set of four incised bone tablets, or an assortment of astragals, shells and other objects (or a combination of both). Also, unlike non-Nguni, Nguni diviners were predominantly women. They were called to the profession through a life-transforming, ancestor-sent illness (thwasa) characterised by psychological and physical symptoms. The article discusses the nature, and possible correlates, of these differences. It is argued that the form of Nguni divination is connected with three related aspects of Nguni social arrangements that distinguish them from other southern African Bantu-speakers, namely the presence of strong patricians, the conceptualisation of the ancestors as a transcendent, undifferentiated collectivity, and the marked subordination of women. In addition, there is evidence of both the borrowing of certain aspects of the San trance dance, as an appropriate expression of female tensions, and, especially among Cape Nguni, of the concept of divinatory animals. This San influence is much less evident among the Zulu. The importance of appreciating the essentially selective nature of cultural borrowing is emphasised.