In 1976, Sokoto became the capital of the newly created Sokoto State, one of nineteen comprising Federal Nigeria. This caliphal city and former colonial provincial town subsequently experienced an exponential growth of population from some 80,000 to around 200,000 by 1980. The city expanded physically into the surrounding countryside and new buildings and infrastructures absorbed large areas of farmland, and encircled several villages. This urban advance into the countryside was exacerbated by the fact that it took place within a densely populated area of annual upland cultivation, dissected by tracts of dry-season irrigated floodland. Not surprisingly, access and rights to farmland have become highly charged and sensitive issues. The peripheries and hinterlands of many Nigerian towns have become arenas of conflict and change, where state expropriation and private accumulation have dispossessed and impoverished rural people. The state has taken over land for institutional use or agricultural development projects, while urban and rural capital have accumulated land for speculative building on the edges of cities and for farming within the surrounding countryside. The increased numbers of landless and, more important, the land-poor constitute new kinds and degrees of rural poverty.

Land is widely regarded as central to the politics of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Land was, ostensibly, the core issue over which the liberation struggle was waged. On the successful redistribution of land, in Shamuyarira's (1984: 8) view, will depend ‘the future reputation and credibility of the new socio-economic and political order among the Zimbabwean masses’. Land, then, is ‘vital’ (ibid.) to both leaders and led in Zimbabwe.

This article addresses the changing nature of farm work in a peasant society in The Gambia, West Africa. The practice of farm labour has been transformed in the most palpable way by the advent of radically new technical and social relations of production associated with mechanised double-cropping of irrigated rice. Technical change, agricultural intensification and a new labour process are, however, all built upon the bedrock of household production, since peasant growers are socially integrated into the new scheme as contract farmers, specifically as contracted sharecroppers. Family labour continues to be the dominant social form in which labour power is mobilised, but under conditions directly determined and shaped by the contractors, namely project management. Irrigated double-cropping of rice production is particularly labour-demanding and makes expanded claims on customary structures of domestic labour recruitment. These new economic practices subject the culturally dominant representations of work, labour obligations and property rights—the constituents of custom and tradition— to the test of social practice. In our examination of Mandinka rice growers we suggest, following T. J. Clark, that ‘society is a battlefield of representations on which the limits and coherence of any given set are being fought for and regularly spoilt’ (Clark, 1984: 6). The introduction of a new production regime has converted rural Mandinka society into a contested social terrain; the primary struggle is a contest over gender and the conjugal contract in which property, or more accurately constellations of property rights, is at stake. By seeing economic life as, among other things, a realm of representations, we argue that the struggles over meaning and the manufacture of symbolic and material dissent in central Gambia—a proliferation of intrahousehold conflicts, juridical battles over divorce in the local courts, renegotiations of the conjugal contract—are the idioms of what Burawoy (1985) calls production politics.

The Tarok of Plateau State in Northern Nigeria, or Yergam as they are better known, may have a unique kinship system.

Their kinship institutions, and especially their kyanship, that is, the positions and roles of the mother's mother's brother (MMB) and mother's brother (MB), raise fundamental questions about the nature of filiation and descent. To indicate the problem we first briefly describe Tarok forms of kinship and marriage and then concentrate on its distinctive feature, namely, the institution of kyanship. In closing we suggest how the system probably emerged and discuss its implications.

In studies of change in indigenous political organisations under the impact of colonial administration, the precolonial situation in Africa is often depicted as essentially static. Anthropologists tend to project a relatively ‘uninfluenced’ state of affairs from the early colonial period into the past. Change seems to occur under European influence. This picture is the result less of the conviction of the authors that conditions were static than of a lack of information on precolonial development. This is especially true for ‘acephalous’ societies; centralised societies often possess detailed traditions concerning their institutional history. In the following case, of the political development of a village in the Nigerian Middle Belt, it has been possible to record precolonial changes of organisation in an acephalous society.