The Zimbabwe culture of present day Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique, of which the main occupation at the nuclear site of Great Zimbabwe dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, is best known for its external trade in gold, ivory, and copper and for its monumental stone ruins. But while important in terms of prestige exchanges at the diplomatic level, mining and trade seem to have been seasonal occupations fitted in round the annual cycle of subsistence cultivation dependent upon the rains (Barreto 1667: 489–92; Mudenge 1974; Phimister 1974). Patron–client relations between Shona-speaking groups were expressed by limited, symbolic tribute in agricultural labor, military service, gold, ivory, livestock, wives, slaves, local produce, and other prestige items (Barros 1552:271; Conçeicão 1696: 66; Andrade 1955: 306, 310–11), but until recent times basic control over social and political groupings was probably exercised through belief in various levels of spirit cult, ranging from the grass-roots system of individual guardian spirits (mudzimu, sing.) in the ancestral cult controlled by village elders in the extended family and descent group, through a hierarchy of ritually senior, loosely territorial land spirits (mhondoro) holding sway over the progressively larger land shrine realms (nyika) of neighborhood leaders, petty chieftains, chiefs, and paramounts. Leaders at each level influenced a following of both spirits and living people who were interconnected, and the fluctuating network of alliances that existed between leaders was symbolized and kept going by an intermittent traffic in tribute, diplomatic missions, and religious congregations coming to the shrines and leaders located at the various headquarters (zimbabwes) of the confederacy. When the confederacy was large and free from civil wars and secession, the system sometimes culminated in a unifying central cult devoted to a supreme spirit (such as Mwari Nyadenga, Leza or Mulungu) supporting a Mambo, whom the Portuguese called King or Emperor (Santos 1609: esp. 196–9; Abraham 1966; Bullock 1928; Garbett 1966, 1969; Holleman 1953).

The way in which the class structure is reproduced, and the implications and significance of these various rules for the two classes, can be seen in their marital strategies.

Although the tawsatin (descent groups) of both classes exhibit a high rate of endogamy, there is no prescriptive rule of endogamy as such. The rules are defined in terms of incest categories, beyond which the pattern and effect of endogamy is merely the result of the various marital strategies adopted. This ‘incest’ category is very small: the only people a man is forbidden from marrying are his mother, his father's and mother's uterine sisters, and other classificatory mothers (which includes those kinswomen of ascending generations), his uterine sister, his daughter, the daughters of his uterine brothers and sisters, and his mother-in-law, sister-in-law and daughter-in-law. In other words, there is no prohibition on marriage with any type of cousin.

The Kuranko term for sacrifice is sarake (from the Arabic sadaqa). Any gift, offering or material object over which invocations to spirits are made is a sacrifice. Sarake thus includes offerings made to the three major categories of spirit: (1) Ala or Altala (God), (2) Bəmbanu or Fɔl' mɔryonu (‘Ancestors’ and ‘First/original people’ respectively), (3) Njεnnenu (Spirits of the wild or djinn). Sacrifice also includes material objects (medicines and fetishes) which are prayed over.

This is a study of Teso District, eastern Uganda, during a period of colonial administration from 1896 to 1927. A group of appointed chiefs was brought into being and maintained within a local political environment in which neither traditional rulers nor a principle of hereditary succession to political office were recognised. The growth of the bureaucratic and authoritarian aspects of client chiefship is traced, along with changes in the relations of the chiefs with the colonial regime and with the people they ruled. In time, their increasing powers of coercion and their accumulative control of patronage led to the emergence of a class interest among them. This became crystallised in the mid-1920s when, as a body, they maintained a conservative stance within a colonial administration geared to change.

Comorian marriage must strike anyone with even the most passing knowledge of the Islands as surprising. All men strive for the lavish, expensive and lengthy marriage form known as ndola nkuu (great marriage) or harusi ya ada (customary marriage) even though a perfectly respectable simple form, mna daho (little house), is all that moslem customary law requires. Mna daho marriages cost almost nothing: ada marriages may cost as much as £5000. Why invest such a large sum in this way? What, in plain anthropological language, are the functions of ada marriage?

The town of Ningi is located on the western edge of the North East State of Nigeria, about 25 km from the south-eastern corner of Kano State. Old Ningi town (about 50 km from the town's present site) was founded by a Kano Qur'anic teacher-scholar, Malam Hamza, and his followers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Malam Hamza is said to have fled Kano because of political and religious disputes with the Emir of Kano which resulted in a purge of the Malam class. Moving away from the centre of Kano power to the comparative safety of the Kabara hills and the non-Hausa people who lived in them, Malam Hamza was able to establish the separatism he and his followers desired. During this period the Kabara hills were the scene of slave-raiding and warfare, constantly threatened by the Hausa-Fulani emirates which surrounded them. Fighting from the hills, the people of Old Ningi, loosely allied with their neighbours, the Butawa, Warjawa, and others, were able to maintain their independence from Bauchi, Zaria, and Kano.

The Tuareg are Berber-speaking ‘semi-nomadic pastoralists’. The Northern Tuareg, comprising the Kel Ahaggar and Kel Ajjer, inhabit the Central Saharan massifs of Ahaggar and Ajjer in Southern Algeria. The Southern Tuareg, namely the Kel Adrar, Kel Ayr, Kel Gress, Kel Tadamakat, Iwllemmeden, etc., are found throughout much of Mali and Niger. Each of these groups constitutes a separate, independent federation. This paper is concerned with the Kel Ahaggar who number about 5000–6000.

The word egungun, masquerades, is often used to describe all masked figures found among the Yoruba of Nigeria. It is, strictly speaking, applicable only to those found among the Oyo Yoruba, hence Egungun Oyo, Oyo masquerades (cf. Adedeji 1969: 6; Beier 1958: 5). This type has diffused to other sub-groups where it occurs with local types such as Gelede in Egbado, Agemo in Ijebu, and Epa in northern Ekiti. Its ubiquity may be due to the movement southwards of Oyo Yoruba elements, the extent of Oyo and later Ibadan Empires, peaceful migration and cultural contacts with neighbouring sub-groups (see Fig. 1 inset).

The importance of female title holders, especially that of the Queen Mother, is widespread throughout the state systems of Africa. Royal monarchical power and authority is often linked to a senior woman of the royal line, sometimes a real mother, sometimes not, who is the female counterpart to the male royal person. One writer has suggested that in Africa the monarchy itself involves not simply a King but rather a royal couple—the King and his mother—so that centralized authority is in fact inherent in a mother-son ‘royal duo’ (de Heusch, 1962: 145). The Queen Mother in such a view is not simply ‘important’ but an essential ingredient in the nature of royal power and authority, and therefore of centralized government as this has developed historically on the continent.

Notre propos, dans cet article, n'est pas de tenter une analyse détaillée de la manière dont la monnaie moderne est actuellement maniée par les agriculteurs haoussas. Nous allons, plus modestement, nous contenter de souligner les mécanismes généraux auxquels obéit la circulation du numéraire au sein de la communauté rurale et, surtout, d'en faire ressortir les effets socio-économiques. Nous espérons pouvoir montrer ainsi comment l'argent constitue un des instruments privilégiés par lesquels se transmettent jusqu'au coeur du monde rural africain des influences déterminantes, issues de sphères économiques beaucoup plus vastes.

Christian missions in Africa have produced mountains of publications which, despite their collective mass often escape notice in the wider landscape of African studies. Some of the reasons for scholarly neglect are readily apparent. A secular age is inclined to under-rate the impact of religious forces born in another era; an anti-imperialist generation of scholars is repulsed by the generally unabashed cultural imperialism of nineteenth-century evangelists; the devolution of political power from white to black hands has produced an understandable preference for the study of purely African agents of change in the recent past. Myopia, embarrassment, and the looming presence of contemporary African nationalism all encourage a tendency to leave the study of missions to antiquarians and the professionally pious.

Fetishism, a word much in vogue in late nineteenth century anthropology, no longer appears in serious scholarly use, except among art historians, psychoanalysts, and Marxist economists. Tylor, the most influential voice in the definition of fetishism, regarded it as a development of animism; fetishism was ‘the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be taken as including the worship of ‘stocks and stones’ and thence it passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry’ (Tylor 1874:II:144). Tylor went on to speculate that primitive man originally imagined the soul of a deceased person to inhabit some relic such as a bone; this idea once established, it evolved into a propensity to associate any unusual object with a spirit. If the spirit, with its capacity for action, were embodied in an object specially made to represent its character, the ethnographer would recognise an Idol.

There is a general belief among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo that when a person dies the soul of the deceased goes to live in a nether world which is beyond a river, a common belief along the Guinea Coast of West Africa. This spirit-world, known as Tsiefe to the Ewe, is believed to be divided into two units, one for those who have led exemplary lives and the other for ‘criminals’ such as witches, sorcerers and murderers. Some Ewe believe that even the ‘bad part’ of the underworld will not accept the spirit of a criminal unless a special type of ritual has been performed following death. In this case the spirit of the deceased criminal lingers on in this world, plaguing and punishing members of his family or lineage until the appropriate ceremony is performed.

A contrastive account of pre-colonial and colonial systems of land tenure in Malaŵi cannot avoid adopting thangata as its central concept. The 1921 Land Commission of Nyasaland asserted that the practice of thangata:

seems to have had a foundation in the conditions of purely [African] life under which the member of the village community worked for a certain period in the gardens of his chief, the latter assuming towards the former a responsibility which has its parallel in the relations of the best European landlords towards their native tenants today. The practice was known from the beginning by the [Cheŵa] word ‘thangata’ meaning ‘to assist’. In return for his right to occupy certain land the [African] ‘assisted’ his chief or his European landlord in the latter's work upon his own land.

There is a whole world of difference between traditional thangata and colonial thangata. The former is nothing other than a social institution which embodies a pre-colonial notion of reciprocal labour. In the colonial situation the term came to mean forced labour. In this paper I analyse the term in its colonial form. My aim is to show that thangata is a colonial institution in that it originated from processes of British colonisation of Malaŵi. This aim requires that the pre-colonial system of land tenure be characterised first before tracing the formation of the colonial system.

This paper concerns the historical and sociological significance of the traditions of certain lineage-groups residing on the eastern fringes of Lake Victoria in Kenya. These traditions have implications about the nature of pre-colonial social structure in the region, and allow the use of anthropological findings in the reconstruction of social forms through the medium of oral history.

The groups in question are to be found on the islands and adjoining southern mainland at the mouth of the Gulf of Kavirondo (see map 1). These lineages, together with others, are collectively known as the Basuba, and they inhabit in whole or in part a number of South Nyanza administrative locations and extend across the Kenyan border into Tanzania; the lineages of immediate interest here are to be found on Rusinga and Mfangano Islands, and in the mainland locations of Gembe, Kaksingiri, and Gwasi. The discussion which follows is largely based on information gathered from selected knowledgeable men on the islands, and supplementary researches conducted by the same means in the mainland areas mentioned above; five months of fieldwork were conducted in two periods in 1969 and 1973 and, unless otherwise indicated, all information below pertaining to South Nyanza is derived from that.

In October 1974 I returned to the Kahama District of Tanzania for a further period of research in northern Unyamwezi where I had previously worked between late 1957 and early 1960. The present paper arises from a consideration of the implications of two facts which impressed me strongly on this second visit. The first of these was that a substantial number of the homestead heads who had been my neighbours in the village of Butumwa for the larger part of my first fieldwork were still alive though some of them had moved to other parts of the District and beyond. The second was that those who had remained, along with many others from surrounding villages, had been moved as part of the Tanzanian Government's national resettlement programme into a new large nucleated village shortly before my return there. These two facts have led me to pay further attention to the nature and functions of pre-1974 settlement patterns and to examine the relation between these and the form of the new scheme. One of the main points which will emerge from my discussion is the need, in trying to understand these settlement patterns, to take careful account of how villages change and develop over time as part of a complex combination of social and ecological processes. This processual aspect of village organization in the area has, I may add, not previously received sufficient attention in my own and other accounts of the situation there.

In anthropological studies of African societies a recurring problem of analysis centres on the relationship between descent groupings and territorial units. A categorical distinction, such as Maine advanced (1861), between kinds of societies or groups based on either descent or locality is empirically spurious (Gluckman 1971: 85). Fortes has emphasised that the problem is one ‘of assigning an order of relative weight to the various factors involved in culture and in social organization, or alternatively of devising methods for describing and analyzing a configuration of factors so as to show precisely how they interact with one another’ (1953:25). Other writers have favoured this same move from reductionist either-or typologies to relativistic functional propositions, notably in analysing the modalities of descent (Lewis 1968; Goody 1969), of descent and affinity (Schneider 1968; Leach 1971), of kinship – and neighbourship (Gulliver 1971). But despite these developments, comparative analysis is still often based on crude correlations derived from an arbitrary and piecemeal codification of data (Hallpike 1971). My approach in this essay is guided by three structuralist propositions: descent and locality are (1) complementary principles, the significance of one being relative to the significance of the other, (2) mental —representations and tactical signs, rather than institutions sui generis, (3) variables within a transformational system, the system being susceptible to analysis at the level. of both organization and conceptualization.