L'exercise du pouvoir dans les états africains depuis l'lndépendance—généralisée ici sous le terme de “post-colonisation”—a été marqué par un penchant pour les cérémonies et par un esprit d'apparat plus surprenant quand Ton considère le caractère et combien illusoire sont des grands travaux réalisés par ces états. De plus, le pouvoir est appliqué a un degré de violence et de pure exploitation dont l'on trouve les antécedents dans les précédents résgimes coloniaux. Le peuple réagit par la voie de l'indécence qui s'exprime dans des festivités obscènes. La question générate est de comprendre la raison pour laquelle ce pouvoir, en dépit de ses limites évidentes, a semble-t-il autant de portée. Et plus précisement, pourquoi la population joue-t-elle apparemment le jeu de son gouvernement? Comment peut-elle à la fois se moquer des simagrées de ses gouvernants et toutefois prendre part à leur célébration? L'argumentation soutenue ici, d'après les faits tirés principalement du Cameroon et du Togo, explique que, si l'on centre l'analyse sur les precédés détaillés et les rituels de cette concertation, il devient clair qu'il se produit une intimité, un lien presque familial, dans la relation entre gouvernants et gouvernés, ce qui désarme emcacement les deux camps et met le jeu du pouvoir en représentation.

From the time when I first became entangled with the Third World, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I have been fascinated by those contemporary ways of life and thought which keep growing out of the interplay between imported and indigenous cultures. They are the cultures on display in market places, shanty towns, beer halls, night clubs, missionary book stores, railway waiting rooms, boarding schools, newspapers and television stations. Nigeria, the country I have been most closely in touch with in an on-and-off way for some time, because of its large size, perhaps, offers particular scope for such cultural development, with several very large cities and hundreds if not thousands of small and middle-size towns. It has a lively if rather erratic press, a popular music scene dominated at different times by such genres as highlife, juju and Afro-beat, about as many universities as breweries (approximately one to every state in the federal republic), dozens of authors published at home and abroad, schoolhouses in just about every village, and an enormous fleet of interurban taxicabs which with great speed can convey you practically from anywhere to anywhere, at some risk to your life.

The first part of this paper seeks to develop an approach to traditional African thought already sketched in several previous contributions to this journal. My approach to this topic is strongly influenced by the feeling that social anthropologists have often failed to understand traditional religious thought for two main reasons. First, many of them have been unfamiliar with the theoretical thinking of their own culture. This has deprived them of a vital key to understanding. For certain aspects of such thinking are the counterparts of those very features of traditional thought which they have tended to find most puzzling. Secondly, even those familiar with theoretical thinking in their own culture have failed to recognise its African equivalents, simply because they have been bunded by a difference of idiom. Like Consul Hutchinson wandering among the Bubis of Fernando Po, they have taken a language very remote from their own to be no language at all.

Cet article discute l'importance qu'ont les films indiens en révélant un aspect relativement ignoré dans le courant de culture transnational. La circulation de films indiens au sein du Tiers-Monde offre aux spectateurs Hausa une facon de s'engager imaginativement avec des formes de tradition différentes dès leurs tout en percevant une modernité qui vient sans la signification politique et idéologique de celle de l'ouest. Après avoir discussé les raisons pour la popularité des films indiens dans un context Hausa, cet article explique cet investissement imaginatif des spectateurs en examinant les histoires comme forme d'enquête sociale. Les jeunes hausa explorent les limites des attitudes acceptées des hausa envers l'amour et la sexualité à travers les histoires dans les films indiens et les histoires d'amour hausa (soyayya). Cet exploration a occasioné un débat public profond, comme les auteurs de soyayya ont été accusés de corrupter les jeunes hausa en empruntant des formes d'amour et relations sexuelles étrangères. Cet article maintient que cette controverse révèle une inquiétude plus générale à propos de la forme et de la direction de la culture nigérienne contemporaine. L'analyse des livres soyayya et des films indiens éclaircit le processus de remise en marche et d'indigénisation au niveau local du courant des média transnationaux qui a lieu dans les pays du Tiers-Monde et entre les pays du Tiers-Monde, perturbant les dichotomies entre l'ouest et le non-ouest, le coloniseur et le colonisé, la modernité et la tradition afin de voir comment les média crée des modernités paralléles. A travers le spectacle et la fantaisie, la romance et la sexualité, les films indiens procurent des avenues pour considérer ce qu'être moderne signifie et ce qui pourrait être la place de la société hausa au sein de la modernité. Pour les nigériens du nord, qui répondent à l'état nigérien, religieusement au Moyen Orient et à l'Afrique du Nord, économiquement à l'ouest, ou culturellement à la domination cinématographique de l'Inde, les films indiens sont juste une partie de l'hétérogénéité de la vie de tous les jours. Ils procurent une modernité parallèle, une façon de s'engager imaginativement avec la base sociale de la vie contemporaine qui est une alternative à l'influence de l'ouest séculaire qui se fait sentir un peu partout.

The publication of Mr. F. J. Pedler's note on what are called ‘joking relationships’, following on two other papers on the same subject by Professor Henri Labouret and Mademoiselle Denise Paulme, suggests that some general theoretical discussion of the nature of these relationships may be of interest to readers of Africa.

For over a decade African economies have been plagued by recurrent food shortages, economic decline and growing disparities between the living standards of rich and poor. To a large extent food shortages and rural impoverishment may be attributed to external shocks—world recession, oil price shocks, deteriorating terms of trade and mounting debt service obligations—compounded in the 1970s and early 1980s by drought and war. In addition government policies have exacerbated the effects of adverse environmental and world market trends, aggravating rather than alleviating food shortages and depressing rural output and incomes.

For nearly fifty years the Aladura or ‘prayer’ churches have been a prominent feature of the Nigerian scene. Their drumming and singing can nowadays be heard at almost any time of day or night in most of the larger southern Nigerian towns. Their prophets and pastors exert a guiding influence on the lives of an everlarger proportion of the population. And recently they have even been credited with an important part in bringing rebel resistance to an end in the Nigerian civil war. Similar churches, usually labelled ‘Zionist’, have been described and analysed by sociologists, social anthropologists, and comparative religionists working in many African countries. Hitherto, however, no full-length sociological monograph on the subject has appeared from Nigeria. So John Peel's Aladura, a full-length study of two of these churches in Yorubaland, meets a long-standing need.

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.

Colonial relations of political administration are being reproduced in the current era of participation and decentralisation. In natural resource management, participation and decentralisation are promoted on the basis that they can increase equity, yield greater efficiency, benefit the environment and contribute to rural development. Reaping these benefits is predicated on (1) the devolution of some real powers over natural resources to local populations, and (2) the existence of locally accountable authorities to whom those powers can be devolved. However, a limited set of highly circumscribed powers are being devolved to locally accountable authorities, and most local authorities to whom powers are being devolved are systematically structured to be upwardly accountable to the central state, rather than downwardly accountable to local populations. Many of the new laws being passed in the name of participation and decentralisation administer rather than enfranchise. The article examines the historical legal underpinnings of the powers and accountability of state-backed rural authorities (chiefs and rural councils), the authorities through which current natural resource management projects in Burkina Faso and in Mali represent local populations, and the decisions being devolved to local bodies in new natural resource management efforts. Without reform local interventions risk reproducing the inequities of their centralised political-administrative context. Rather than pitting the state against society by depicting the state as a negative force and society and non-state institutions as positive—as is done in many decentralisation and participatory efforts—this article suggests that representation through local government can be the basis of general and enduring participation by society in public affairs.

Young people are the major participants in most wars. In the African civil wars of the last twenty years combatants have become increasingly youthful. Some forces are made up largely of young teenagers; combatants may sometimes be as young as 8 or 10, and girl fighters are increasingly common. The trend to more youthful combatants also reflects the discovery that children—their social support disrupted by war—make brave and loyal fighters; the company of comrades in arms becomes a family substitute. There are two main adult reactions. The first is to stigmatise youth combatants as evil (‘bandits’, ‘vermin’). The other (regularly espoused by agencies working with children) is to see young fighters as victims, as tools of undemocratic military regimes or brutally unscrupulous ‘warlords’. But many under-age combatants choose with their eyes open to fight, and defend their choice, sometimes proudly. Set against a background of destroyed families and failed educational systems, militia activity offers young people a chance to make their way in the world. The purpose of this article is to let young combatants explain themselves. The reader is left to decide whether they are the dupes and demons sometimes supposed.

The idea that gods are made by men, not men by gods, is a sociological truism. It belongs very obviously to a detached and critical tradition of thought incompatible with faith in those gods. But Yoruba traditional religion contains built into it a very similar notion, and here, far from indicating scepticism or decline of belief, it seems to be a central impulse to devotion. The òrìṣà (‘gods’) are, according to Yoruba traditional thought, maintained and kept in existence by the attention of humans. Without the collaboration of their devotees, the òrìṣà would be betrayed, exposed and reduced to nothing. This notion seems to have been intrinsic to the religion since the earliest times. How can such an awareness be part of a devotee's ‘belief’? Rather than speculate abstractly, as Rodney Needham does (Needham 1972), about whether people of other cultures can be said to ‘believe’ at all, it seems more interesting to take a concrete case like the Yorba one where there is an unexpected–even apparently paradoxical–configuration of ideas, and to ask how these ideas are constituted. Only by looking at them as part of a particular kind of society, with particular kinds of social relationships, can one see why such a configuration is so persuasive. The notion that men make gods is by no means unique to Yoruba thought. It is present to some degree in a number of traditional West African religions, and in some, such as the Kalahari one, it can be seen in an even more explicit form than in the Yoruba one. A comparison may help to show how it is the constitution of social relationships which makes such a notion not just acceptable but central to the religious thought of the society.

Since the 1960s researchers have emphasised the continuing importance of rural–urban connections as a special aspect of urbanisation in Africa. It is clear that since then, in many parts of Africa, the involvement of urbanites with their ‘home’ village has increased rather than decreased. Four of the articles in this issue were originally papers presented at two ASA panels (Toronto, 1994) which set out to explore these rural–urban connections. The content of the exchanges and the moral involvement of city people and villagers in such relations vary greatly. The variations have important implications for regional differences in, for instance, the development of new modes of accumulation or the cementing of ethnic networks. The other article (by Dickson Eyoh) addresses the effects of recent political changes in this context—a theme also raised by the other articles. In many parts of Africa democratisation seems to evoke an obsession with ‘autochthony’, origin and belonging. The increasing role of elite associations, as an alternative to multi-party politics, makes the rural connection of vital importance to urban politicians. Hence ‘the village’, and more generally the region of origin, acquire new importance as a power base in national politics.

Il est vraisemblable quʼil y ait des spectateurs à condition quʼil y ait des spectacles. La perception que cʼest l'orientation de l'auditoire vers l'orateur qui crée les spectateurs est le point de départ pour un développement plus approfondi dans les études des média et de spectacles qui met l'accent sur l'activité et la créativité du public. Si le public a un rô1e actif dans la création du spectacle, les historiens culturels qui cherchent à découvrir les histoires de conscience dans les genres populaires africain ne peuvent pas se permettre de l'ignorer. Mais les publics ne sont pas tous les mêmes. Ils sont un produit historique tout autant que le sont les spectacles. Il y a des manières différentes d'interpréter et de faire l'expérience du spectacle, soit collectivement ou en dispersion, qui sont profondement liées à la nature de la vie sociale, l'âge, et l'endroit. La façon dont les gens se retrouvent ensemble; la façon dont ils établissent un rapport entre eux et avec le spectacle ou le discours auquel ils assistent; de quoi ils se considèrent eux-mêmes faire partie en établissant ce rapport; la façon dont le spectacle/discours leur est adressé—tout ceci est spécifiquement culturel et nécessite des recherches empiriques. Certain publics africains particuliers ont des manières et des styles conventionnels de trouver du sens, tout autant que les artistes/orateurs. On doit se demander comment les publics font leur travail d'interprétation.

In Part I of this paper, I pushed as far as it would go the thesis that important continuities link the religious thinking of traditional Africa and the theoretical thinking of the modern West. I showed how this view helps us to make sense of many otherwise puzzling features of traditional religious thinking. I also showed how it helps us to avoid certain rather troublesome red herrings which lie across the path towards understanding the crucial differences between the traditional and the scientific outlook.

Ancestor cults and ancestor worship loom large in the anthropological image of sub-Saharan Africa and few would disagree with Fortes that ‘comparatively viewed, African ancestor worship has a remarkably uniform structural framework’ (Fortes, 1965: 122). The general pattern may be quickly summarized. Ancestors are vested with mystical powers and authority. They retain a functional role in the world of the living, specifically in the life of their living kinsmen; indeed, African kin-groups are often described as communities of both the living and the dead. The relation of the ancestors to their living kinsmen has been described as ambivalent, as both punitive and benevolent and sometimes even as capricious, In general, ancestral benevolence is assured through propitiation and sacrifice; neglect is believed to bring about punishment. Ancestors are intimately involved with the welfare of their kin-group but they are not linked in the same way to every member of that group. The linkage is structured through the elders of the kin-group, and the elders' authority is related to their close link to the ancestors. In some sense the elders are the representatives of the ancestors and the mediators between them and the kin-group.

In his witty and thought-provoking Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘Et maintenant, Lord Lugard?’ (Africa, xxxiii. 4, 1963), Gouverneur Deschamps has provided us with an excellent general appraisal of the relative achievements and failures of French and British ‘native’ administration in Africa. But he does not do full justice to the fundamental differences between the two systems. Though he hints at these differences on several occasions in his lecture, he contends that, far from what is generally supposed, the two were in practice very similar, since they both reposed on indigenous chiefs. He insists that ‘la seule différence est que nous n'avons pas tenté, comme vous, Lord Lugard, de moderniser ces états anciens, ni de créer des embryons d'états là où il n'en existait point’; or‘…[our administrative practice] ne différait de la vôtre (au moins en Afrique noire) que par une allure plus familière et des buts moins définis’. This seems seriously to underestimate the nature of the differences between the two systems, which were rather those of kind than of degree.

One effect of specialization in the field of African Studies has been to prevent or hinder the study of subjects which, by their very nature, demand interdisciplinary interests and competences. Emerging popular culture is such a field. Division of labor among various social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities—late-comers to Anglo-American concerns with Africa—have long worked like a conjuring trick: making vast and vigorous expressions of African experience de facto invisible, especially to expatriate researchers. African scholars have been slow to denounce this state of affairs, perhaps out of an elitist need to set themselves apart from the loud and colorful bursts of creativity in music, oral lore, and the visual arts emerging from the masses.