In the mid-1990s, Côte d'Ivoire witnessed the rise of the ideology of ivoirité, a conception of citizenship based on autochthonous origins. Ivoirité was elaborated by a group of Ivorian intellectuals in the context of the political struggle opposing Henry Konan Bedié to Alassane Ouattara in the succession to the late President Houphouët-Boigny. Through the tactical use of the rhetoric of ivoirité, Ouattara was depicted by his adversaries as a ‘Burkinabé’ trying to rule the country. Going beyond this tactical aspect, the article addresses the ideological relations linking ivoirité to the ‘project of an Ivorian liberal society’ explicitly constructed by the same intellectuals. These relations contributed to the emergence, in the Ivorian public space, of a discourse establishing self-evident, hegemonic connections between notions like autochthony, modernity and nationality, on the one hand, and biopolitical concepts like population, immigration, security and resources on the other. The article uses two complementary perspectives to frame this emergent discourse. One focuses on the historical continuity of the political-economic strategies and population policies implemented by colonial governments and post-colonial elites. The other uses Giorgio Agamben's critical enquiry into citizenship and nationality to bring to light the implication of the ivoirité intellectuals in the construction of a national bios, and thus in the singling out of a paradigmatic form of bare life.

The land disputes in Cameroon that are best known are between groups of local (indigenous) populations and people originating from elsewhere (incomers). This situation is fairly common in the cosmopolitan towns of Douala and Yaoundé. The purpose of this article is not to revisit these types of conflict, but rather to explore conflicts over land between the indigenous populations and the state. This new kind of opposition demonstrates that it is not only the incoming populations who are dispossessing indigenous people of their land. In fact, in various and more effective ways, the state is playing a significant part in the expropriation of indigenous land heritage. This process may be witnessed in urban housing developments, as well as in areas set aside for public utility, or those that are too dangerous to be developed (slopes, piedmonts and marshlands). Through its policy of urbanization, the state is seemingly contributing to producing ‘landless indigenous people’ in much the same way as and probably more effectively than the incomers. This article reviews the historical processes of land expropriation from the time of the colonial state, analysing the grievances of indigenous people faced with this situation, as well as the strategies they have developed in an effort to take back control of their lost lands.

This article describes how cross-border trade in West Nile, north-western Uganda to a large extent takes place outside of the legal framework. This does not mean that this trade is unregulated. We make use of the concept of ‘practical norms’ to show the existence of regulation within this trade, which diverges both from official norms and social norms (‘moral economy’). The article describes how these practical norms emerged and how they are enforced. First, it is shown how the moral economy of cross-border trade plays an important role in their articulation. Second, we ask which practical concerns play a role in sustaining these norms and how deviations from them activate open power struggles. And third, we show how concrete events have played a role in their emergence.

The Upper West Region in northern Ghana is a major source area of migrants who travel to southern Ghana seasonally or for longer periods. This has important implications for the lives and livelihoods of the migrants themselves and their relatives at home. Almost invariably the impact of out-migration on sending areas has been studied using ‘Western’ academic parameters. Little is known about how the people hemselves value the profound changes that migration causes in their societies. In this article, findings are presented from interviews with 204 rural household heads who were asked to express their opinion about the consequences of seasonal, long-term and return migration. A quantitative approach to qualitative data was adopted to differentiate between collective perceptions and individual opinions. It was found that almost all respondents were positive about the consequences of seasonal labour migration. They applauded its contribution to food security and considered it one of the few ways of gaining access to money and goods. The respondents were much more ambivalent about the consequences of long-term migration and return migration. On the positive side, they emphasized that out-migration reduced the pressure on farmland, and that some migrants attain higher living standards, both for themselves and for their relatives at home. On the negative side, many long-term migrants are not able to improve their livelihoods or lose their interest in the home community. The lack of support of some migrants is greatly lamented, especially if they later return empty-handed and become a burden on their relatives at home. The methodology used in this study yielded a holistic view of the consequences of migration on the source area as seen through the eyes of the home community

Among the Punu of Congo-Brazzaville ikoku dancing is perceived through the concept of joy. In line with the privileging of the emotional experience, this article intends to consider the dance as an emotive institution – that is, a socially organized activity that creates culturally meaningful forms of emotion within which an understanding of self, as well as social identities and relations, are shaped. In ikoku, a succession of dance sessions, embarked on with shame-banishing pride and performed individually or as a couple, awakens a shared joy. Through the dance patterns and idiom, this joyful dancing is connected to the fecundating sexual encounter and to the activity of fishing, linking the dance world to the life-bearing water spirit world. The joining of sexual differentiation and maternal containment that in this way is enacted and deeply experienced by the participants – if the event succeeds in awakening joy – supports basic structures of Punu rural society characterized by the tension between conjugal relations based on a patri-virilocal principle and matriclanic belonging. The emphasis that our analysis places on the dance form itself, and on the shared joy in dawning fertility it evokes, also proves to be fruitful in understanding how ikoku dancing persists in changing contexts – and even in urban ones.

In January 2008 the Ghanaian Central Bank announced that it had introduced a new centralized mechanism for the settlement of transactions between the Ghanaian banks. This interbank switch, as it was called, was purchased from, and managed by, the South African company Net 1 UEPS, and it had a unique central organizing principle. The switch was indexed biometrically, using a key derived from the ten fingerprints of account holders. This new interbank switch and a smartcard encoded in the same way has equipped Ghana with the world's first biometric money supply. This article is an effort to explain the development and significance of this biometric money, which Ghanaians call the e-Zwich. It traces the way in which biometric registration in Ghana (as in other African countries) has leaked from the mundane, difficult, and mostly unrewarding, task of civil registration into the more properly remunerated domain of monetary transactions. Viewed in the light of the rich historical anthropology of money in West Africa, what is at stake in Ghana may be much more significant than any of the current participants fully realize. Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study is that the e-Zwich system might actually succeed.