South African Zionism, one of the most popular Christian movements in modern South Africa, has frequently been interpreted in narrowly indigenous terms, as a local, black appropriation of Christianity, heavily invested in orality and ritual performance. The correspondence of the twentieth-century Zionist minister Isaiah Moteka tells a different story. Moteka honed the craft of letter-writing in order to build and sustain his relationship with Zion, Illinois, the headquarters of the worldwide Zionist church. Through the exchange of letters across the Atlantic, Moteka affirmed his own and his congregants’ place within a multiracial Zion diaspora. And through their complex invocation of overlapping local and global affiliations, Moteka's writings proclaimed his standing both as a regional clergyman and as a cosmopolitan internationalist. In particular, these ambiguous missives became the platform for Moteka's engagement with apartheid-era state officials. Seeking to persuade state officials that his organization fell under ‘white’ supervision, Moteka's letters proclaimed his accreditation by Zion, Illinois, thereby casting himself as a deputy of the worldwide movement. But these documents’ citation of transatlantic loyalties also suggests Moteka's own conflicted loyalties. His letters asserted loyalty to the nation state while they simultaneously subordinated earthly power to the Kingdom of God.

Drawing on rarely analysed primary sources obtained during multi-site archival research, this article examines and proposes to reassesses the political rhetoric deployed in pre-genocide Rwanda (First and Second Republics). The article contends that the First and Second Republics' rhetoric was not as ethnocentric as often contended. It argues instead that this rhetoric, cautious and moderate, should be understood as part of regime resilience strategies. Born of questionable origins, the two regimes faced recurrent instability and only imposed their authority questionably on segments of the Rwandan population. Unlike ethnocentric rhetoric calling upon limited ethnic affinities, moderate rhetoric was meant to ‘persuade’ and ‘pre-empt’, in other words extend support for regimes that were uncertain of their grounding.

This article draws on a political ethnography of the hosting of state ceremonies to engage with erstwhile theoretical accounts of African politics as highly patrimonial and built on a social complicity between African rulers and their citizens. The article examines the patrimonial relationship between Cameroon's head of state, Paul Biya, and political elites of local ethno-regional communities who support the president within the framework of the Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) in Anglophone Cameroon. It approaches such elite politics of hosting as part of the vast cultural repertoire of patrimonial domination that emphasizes a spectacularization of proximity and intimacy between the head of state and his coterie of supporting elites as the latter seek development resources for their local and regional communities in exchange for their political support. To account for hosting as a practice of patrimonial elite politics, the article demonstrates the complex logics and pragmatics of ethnic and regional competition as well as the deployment of symbolic idioms of hierarchical relations, mutuality and interdependence in the cultural performance and legitimation of Biya's patrimonial domination of Cameroon.

In this paper, the author discusses the power of vodun leaders in present-day Benin, and more specifically anti-witchcraft cults born from the encounter with world religions. Offering an analysis inspired by Louis Marin's theory on power in its representation, the author illustrates her analysis through the portrait of a vodun leader with a view to escape from a functionalist analysis of occult power or syncretism. With the baroque mirror metaphor conceived as a device, which underscores what it is that connects heterogeneous practices, Tall describes what is shown in the rituals and practices of a vodun leader and emphasizes the centrality of the transubstantiation phenomenon in the production of a community of believers.

Much of the literature on Sierra Leonean diamonds focuses on the role that this mineral resource played in the recent civil conflict (1991–2002). However, the political-economic perspective that is common to these analyses has lost sight of the main actors in this social reality. What do miners think of diamonds? Like their Malagasy colleagues engaged in the search for sapphires, the Sierra Leonean diamond miners often maintain that they do not know what diamonds could possibly be used for. What is specific to the diamond mining areas in this West African country is that suspicions and fantasies about the uses of diamonds go hand in hand with the idea that these precious stones belong to invisible spiritual entities known locally as djinns or dεbul dεn. Although this article aims to analyse the occult imaginary of diamond miners, it takes a different stand from the occult economies approach. By combining a historical-imaginative perspective with a historical and ecological one, this article intends to highlight the indissoluble interweaving of material and imaginative processes of artisanal diamond production in the context of Sierra Leone's mines.

This article examines the event of postpartum seclusion of mother and infant in the Amhara region of north-west Ethiopia. During the period between birth and baptism, the mother–child pair remains in private repose, is subject to a variety of ritual prohibitions, and is barred from entering a church. Despite the mother's Orthodox Christian identity, both she and the child are called ‘Muslims’ during this time. Why should this be the case? What happens during the birthing event and its aftermath that would bring about this temporary shift in their religious designation? By shedding light on the distinct models of maternal care, safety, and danger that are emphasized in ‘childbed’, this study seeks an answer to these questions. In doing so, it also contributes to a broader understanding of why most Amhara mothers do not, at present, avail themselves of institutional deliveries and biomedical births but prefer to give birth at home.

Anthropological research was traditionally conducted by foreign researchers in ‘exotic’ places. However, the trend changed over the years due to various reasons such as less funding for research abroad, resistance from new independent states, and the realization that, after all, the ‘exotic’ could be found even ‘at home’. The research dynamics changed further when those who were studied earlier began to study their own. This paper is a reflection of my participatory observation in the 2009 bojale (girls’ initiation) revival ceremony of Bakgatla-baga-Kgafela in Botswana. I entered bojale with dual roles of initiate and participant observer for my research. My ethnographic research was among my own and I was expected to adhere to the ceremony's rules in the same way as the other initiates. The discussion reflects on my dual identity experiences and relationships during initiation in order to interrogate ethnography among one's own culture. I conclude that, even though being ‘at home’ has advantages such as less travelling requirements and easy rapport, it is a complex process when it involves sacred ceremonies such as bojale because of the societal obligations such as adherence to secrecy that the researcher is bound by during and after the research.