In the past two decades NGOs helping ‘street children’ in Addis Ababa have distinguished themselves by their adherence to highly controversial assumptions about the nature of childhood and the failure of the poor to raise their children in ways that they conceive as ‘proper’. The ratification of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child by the Ethiopian government has inspired them to stop food relief in order to persuade the children in their care to seek a way out of their miserable ways of life through work on the street. In a remarkable replication of late Victorian philanthropic thinking, NGOs dispel hereby local middle-class fears that relief agencies may foster truancy and idleness and reassuringly define the code—work—that confers legitimacy on children's presence on the streets. Anticipating their escape from undeniably harsh and unjust family relations, the children of the poor are enticed into accepting this solution as the price of a ‘decent’ and morally acceptable childhood. They remain nevertheless highly critical of the rights-based approach, claiming that in the name of their rights they are denied what used to be children's normal entitlement such as protected food prices, free basic health and education. The article is based on the findings of an action research project by social workers among the children assisted by eight Addis Ababa-based NGOs in the period 1996-98.

The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement with the empirical situation and a corresponding new breadth of allusion to theory and to work from the past.

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.

This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.

This article deals with the moral panic that emerged in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that under-age Nigerian girls were being smuggled into the country to be put to ‘work’ in the sex industry. A massive police investigation not only found hundreds of cases but also uncovered the fact that certain unknown and occult rituals played a part in how traffickers, ‘madams’ and other sex bosses appeared to keep the girls locked in this exploitative system. Soon an unspecified notion of ‘voodoo’ came to dominate the entire police operation, the public image of what was happening to these girls, and the way in which the girls were treated within the Dutch judicial system and its care. The article deconstructs the moral panic and all the images of Africa and the occult which became so crucial to the way the Dutch state tried to deal with the situation. It sets this analysis in the context of an anthropology of globalisation and a cultural exploration of how issues of morality and identity are affected by what the Comaroffs have called the occult economies of late capitalist relations. It concludes that to a great extent the scale of the moral panic can be understood by pointing at the rigidity of the identity politics of the Dutch nation state in previous years. Its policies were meant to curb some of the effects of globalisation (such as illegal immigration from Africa) in order to preserve its integrity, but it now found them seriously undermined by something the policies were not designed to cope with.

The Nyakyusa were the subject of a classic series of ethnographies. This article suggests that these works took insufficient account of struggles over authority in the colonial period. Consequently they overstated the formalisation of chiefly power and understated the complex relationship between generational tensions and political authority in the pre-colonial period. Following discursive and practical changes in the use of alcohol, the article identifies a shift in the nature of power among the Nyakyusa over the twentieth century and develops the idea that drinking talk, and drinking practice, are central fields for the creation and recreation of the assumptions of power which underpin authority.

In the plantation region of the Sambirano Valley in north-west Madagascar the spirits of wandering foreign dead haunt the region's forests. They are the displaced ghosts of migratory Antandroy, drawn here in search of employment. As pastoralists from the island's distant, arid south, Antandroy as an ethnic category are juxtaposed to self-perceptions voiced by indigenous Sakalava, whose kingdom coincides with this Valley. Tandroy difference is defined in reference to local constructions of savageness and strangeness: as pastoralists they are obsessed with herds; they migrate; they willingly participate in wage labour. In life, they are tolerated ‘guests’ of the region but in death they frustrate Sakalava with their persistent presence. Unlike any other migrant group, deceased Antandroy may continue to haunt the region, begging and stealing what is not rightfully theirs: food, wives, work, and fortune. Close analysis of these perplexing spirits reveals a localised ambivalence that characterises migrant identity and the meaning of work in an urban community shaped by the forces of multiculturalism and capitalism. By virtue of their persistent presence within the social and sacred geography of the Valley, the Tandroy dead threaten the integrity of Sakalava identity in a community (and nation) where indigenousness is defined by rootedness to the land. Central to the arguments presented here is the potency of the spiritual stranger, a social category that extends the anthropological analysis of religious appropriation beyond the boundaries of possession and embodiment. Further, the decipherment of complex meanings associated with alien spirits emerges ultimately as key to more general understandings of the symbolics of difference.

Focusing on the tri-juncture of Ghana, Togo and Burkina Faso, this article examines the role of cross-border traders in the construction and redefinition of international boundaries. Through the study of the social and spatial patterning of trade surrounding three commodities–imported cloth, beans and shea butter (karite)—it explores the multiple ways the border is endowed with or deprived of significance. When the border is viewed as a socio-geographic region the importance of popular practice to the on-going constitution of state power and presence becomes evident.

Nzema has been used historically as a multiple term to describe different but interrelated social, political and territorial realities. Failure to understand the historical context fully has led to persistent ambiguity in writings about the area, especially in anthropological studies. The tendency is to isolate ‘ethnic groups’ as precise categories in a broad context which in reality is covered by a pervasive network of continua. This article deals with the historical ‘mapping’ of ‘what it is to be Nzema’ and therefore puts forward a framework for analysing the question of identity in its actual formulation or, in other words, in relation to local ideological and political processes. Finally, it attempts to identify some of the registers which inform the question and some of the criteria for the use of each specific register by individuals and communities.

In the academic debate on labour migration and urbanisation in Southern Africa the persistence of links between urban workers and people in rural areas has proved a pertinent issue. As is implied by the term labour migration, economic forces have always been regarded as a major determinant of migratory behaviour. State-centred perspectives have dominated studies of rural–urban migration in Zimbabwe, where a restrictive legal framework regulated migration to urban centres during the colonial era in an attempt to prevent large numbers of Africans becoming permanent town dwellers. This ethnographic study of labour migrants in Harare originating from the Buhera district, however, shifts away from perspectives that reduce migratory behaviour to an effect of state intervention and/or economic forces. Such external forces are mediated by migrants’ networks that encompass both rural and urban localities. Rather than being only economically motivated, individual migrants’ participation in these networks has to be understood as an expression of a socio-cultural pattern in which rural identification and kinship ideology are of major importance. Viewing migration practices in this way—i.e. as observable outcomes of migrants’ socio-cultural dispositions—not only helps us to understand better the preferences that motivate economic behaviour but also challenges conventional perspectives in which the rural and urban are often viewed as distinct social worlds and the urbanisation process as part of a wider evolutionary development or transition towards a modern class society.

Competition, success and secrecy are fundamental characteristics of the local food economy of Ibadan, Nigeria. With the growth of the processed cassava, or gari, trade throughout this area, these characteristics are revealed in a number of contexts in the food trade. Traders and shopkeepers circulate their wealth and plough profits back into a range of trading items to obscure their exact economic status from other traders and their families. Success in this context entails secrecy in a number of respects. In relation to buyers in the gari trade, secrecy entails the obfuscation of whether the trader deals retail or wholesale, what she is worth in terms of food stocks and her personal wealth. Successful traders also invest their earnings in social celebrations, in their children's education and in personal homes that all work to foster and enhance their social status and validate their wealth.

In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town's nouveaux riches were responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of ‘fast wealth’. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central position of pentecostal Christianity in popular interpretations of the riots. While pentecostalism itself fuelled local interpretations that ‘fast wealth’ and inequality were the product of satanic rituals, popular rumours simultaneously accused some pentecostal churches of participating in the very occult practices that created instant prosperity and tremendous inequality. The analysis explores the complex and contradictory place of pentecostalism in the Owerri crisis, looking at the problematic relationship of pentecostalism to structures of inequality rooted in patron-clientism and focusing on the ways in which disparities in wealth and power in Nigeria are interpreted and negotiated through idioms of the supernatural.

The article analyses the distinctiveness of magico-religious practices in the north-western sector of the vast Kongo cultural complex, namely among the peoples who refer to themselves as Vili and Yombe. On the basis of fieldwork and a critical examination of the sources, the article points out that such widely distributed terms of proto-Bantu origin as nkisi cannot be covered by a single or even a multi-stranded definition; the variants, ranging from spirit to object, express local and time-specific beliefs. An approach that seeks a single Kongo universe is an ethnographic, historical and linguistic misreading that obscures existing regional concepts while possibly overlooking the importance of other notions. The article focuses on sorting out the basic ethnographic data relating to the beliefs current in the region and reveals not only long-standing aspects, some of them common to the wider Kongo world, but also those that have developed more recently in this particular coastal zone where different peoples trade and interact.

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.

This article examines how diverse and contradictory representations of the sisal industry under the British Mandate and independent socialist Tanzania are shaping the process of privatisation. By setting present-day socio-economic realities in the long-term historical context of transformation it dispels some of the assumptions that underlie celebration of market forces and the private sector.

In the second half of the twentieth century the population of Kampala grew substantially and the long-remarked surplus of men over women began to level out. These general trends are equally evident in other African cities, but important differences show up when the balance of age cohorts within the male and female populations is considered. Thus in Kampala, along with population growth and a declining overall sex ratio, censuses show a growing excess of girls/young women over boys/young men. The article reviews these population data and two levels of (unenumerated) explanation for them. The first is extrapolated from Uganda's recent history; the second from observation and narrative in one densely populated parish. The argument is that changes in the age–sex ratio follow from change in the map of work options in Kampala. The disappearance of young males stems from the collapse of the formal economy, once the employer of men, and the developments in the informal economy which favour young women. This conclusion is supported by census data from Nairobi, where the formal employment structure remains relatively buoyant, and the comparable age–sex ratios are less extreme. The health policy relevance of the Kampala trend is underlined by official calculations of increasing HIV/AIDS incidence among teenage women. As long as sex work remains dominant among their options in the informal economy, one effect of their economic advantage is extra vulnerability to fatal disease.

The Mkomazi Game Reserve is contested by people who wish to use its resources and by conservationists who have argued that the reserve should be set aside for wildlife. Underpinning the conservationist case is the argument that people are harmful to the reserve's environment. Former residents of the reserve, notably pastoralists, argue that human use of the reserve did not cause its degradation. The debate is characterised by a lack of data extraordinary in view of the assertions made. An earlier paper set out the contrasting views and defined the data that would be needed to test them. This paper assesses what data there are, and whether it is possible to evaluate the extent to which people caused environmental change at Mkomazi. Using physical data and comments about the environment made by observers it is argued that no firm conclusions can be drawn about small-scale change but that there are indications of large-scale resilience. As a result of this uncertainty the article goes on to consider the extent to which there can ever be clarity about environmental change at Mkomazi as a philosophical contention or as a researchable issue.

Historical writing on agrarian differentiation in rural Zimbabwe has moved away from conceptualising the peasantry as a homogeneous class, and has therefore enhanced our understanding of the process of rural differentiation. While such writing recognises patterns of differential land holding, however, it has not shown clearly how the differences developed over time. There has been a tendency to argue that land distribution in the ‘communal’ areas is less skewed than other variables and therefore acts as a brake on the process of accumulation and differentiation among the peasantry. The article challenges this basic assumption, arguing that ‘communal’ tenure actually facilitated the development of significant disparities in landholding and accumulation by rural households.

This article explores local understandings of and experience with democracy in an Iraqw community in northern Tanzania. At independence, President Julius Nyerere in his development of a one-party state, argued that democracy in this new nation state would be modelled on that which is found in indigenous, pre-colonial political systems. In the Iraqw homeland, pre-colonial ‘democracy’ was expressed in elders’ councils in which male elders made decisions on behalf of the rest of the community. Differences of opinion were voiced but eventually the group would come to one opinion to achieve the state of being of ‘one heart’ before decisions could be put into effect. While Nyerere claimed that this practice of democracy and achieving consensus would provide the model for the post-colonial state, in actuality the state drew more on colonial models characterised by top-down decision-making and autocratic governance. Overlaying both the pre-colonial and post-colonial political systems is an ideological emphasis on ‘unity'. This article explores how the central notion of unity is expressed and perceived among the Iraqw in Tanzania and how it forms the screen through which people view démocratisation.

Focusing on south-eastern Tanzania, this article explores the colonial state's spatial strategies for economic and political control of its citizenry and their concurrence with strategies to control and conserve nature. Analysing British colonial archival documents, it demonstrates that Africa's most famous wilderness, the Selous Game Reserve, is a product of colonisers' economic and political control schemes, not a vestigial pre-modern landscape. The analysis reveals that the control of nature was inseparable from the state's efforts to control African subjects (mostly Ngindo peasants) and ultimately to create a new kind of person: ‘civilised’, productive and surveillable. Control schemes had significant ecological consequences, specifically increasing elephant (Loxondata africana) populations and the creation of vast tracts of tsetse fly-infested bush. The result, sometimes unintended, but more often orchestrated, was the displacement of African land use and settlement and a new geography of society and nature. The article concludes that colonial efforts to reorder south-eastern Tanzania were fundamental to the process of modern nation-state building, a process that was propelled by a particular way of thinking about social order in visual terms.