La tribu des Sénoufos habite principalement le nord de la Côte d'lvoire, tandis que quelques groupements moins importants resident dans les districts méridionaux du Soudan français, entre Jes fleuves Baoulé et Volta Noire. Son territoire s'étend entre le 8e et le 11e degré de latitude nord. Comme les Sénoufos y vivent à côte d'autres tribus sur ce territoire, il est difficile de déterminer leur nombre exact, les recensements officiels du gouvernement colonial ne faisant généralement aucune distinction entre les tribus différentes. Néanmoins on peut approximativement évaluer les Sénoufos à 800,000 individus, y compris les anciens esclaves, prisonniers de guerres et leurs descendants qui ont accepté les coutumes et les mœurs de leurs maîtres. Cette tribu se subdivise en clans à idiome propre, avec certaines variantes dans les coutumes secondaires. Les clans principaux sont: les Naffaras, les Kiémbaras, les Niarafolos, les Pallakas, les Diébalas, les Tagouanas, les Niellés.

Africans and Melanesians have been put into a similar position by the Europeans who invaded and occupied their country, and extended a colonial tutelage over them. There are, of course, many kinds of ‘colonies’ and ‘native’ peoples in each of these regions: within the African continent (as far as it is inhabited by black races) various areas can be distinguished in east, west, and south. The Papuo-Melanesians exhibit regional varieties in a somewhat similar way.

Many different examples of African art were made available to me while I was collecting material for a book on the subject, but my main interest was to observe systematically the way Africans work as creative artists. In order to do this, I decided to play the role of instigator and teacher while, at the same time, introducing them to a technique and art form unknown to them. I thought it would be interesting to teach them the art of etching and to see them at work as etchers.

The Abyssinian farming communities of the three highland provinces of Eritrea (Ḥamasên, 'Akele Gûzay, and Serawê) may be said always to have had two agencies of government: on one hand, the institutions of village society, and, on the other hand, the central government of Ethiopia, known in Eritrea as the mengiśti and comprising the military organization of the Solomonid monarch—the Nigûśe Negeśt—and the quasi-feudal establishments of his provincial governors and of the Coptic Church. To the latter of these agencies, in constitutional theory, there succeeded the Italian monarchy when the Eritrean Colony was proclaimed on 1 January 1890. Even before that date the scope of the mengiśti in Eritrean affairs had never been well defined, but had been modified or intensified as political conditions changed in the Empire generally. Thus when highland Eritrea was governed by a Bahre Negȧśê, before the Somali and Turkish invasions of the sixteenth century, the Nigûś and his nomadic Court were probably an appreciable factor in village government. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scarcely any functions of imperial government can be traced in Eritrea, and the villages, in the words of the contemporary Abyssinologue Job Ludolf, ‘Regi Habessinorum quidem parent, sed sibimet Rectores præficiunt, ac suis legibus in modum alicuius parvæ Reipublicæ utuntur.’ During the nineteenth century political authority—which may be summarized as power to exact tribute (the strict etymological implication of mengiśti), to requisition and re-allocate land, and to beat the war-drum (kitet)–passed into the hands of mesafinti, chiefs of local peasant origin who claimed a dubious imperial sanction for the authority they had won by their arms. This phase culminated in the unsuccessful attempts of John IV (1870-89), himself a mesfin from the Tigray, partially to reorganize Eritrean village society on a feudal basis that would enable him to reassert the lapsing imperial authority. The only code of laws known in Ethiopia was the Fitha Negeśt, or Canons of the Kings, culled from Scripture, from ancient canons of the Church, and from early Byzantine statutes by a Syrian compilator of the fifth century and translated into Ethiopic in the fifteenth. The Fitha Negeśt stood until the twentieth century as the basic law of the Empire beside the Law of Moses, and was no less inept in village affairs for being highly revered by the Abyssinians.

The Report of the De La Warr Commission on Education in East Africa, the recent Colonial Office pamphlet on Education and Village Communities, and repeated statements and proposals by Directors of Education in British African dependencies are again drawing attention to the pressing need for new advances in the development of educational facilities in Africa. From these studies, proposals and reports it becomes clear that there are three main directions along which the need for advance seems urgent, namely: the development of higher education of a University standing (and the establishment of centres for research at the projected University schools), the increasing of facilities for secondary education which shall, inter alia, open for a greater number of Africans the doors to University studies, and, lastly, an increase in the numbers of some kind of rudimentary schools for the peoples as a whole, which will help to spread the basic tools of modern living—reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is this last line of development which is the subject of the present article.

Bien que la description suivante soit basée sur un cas précis, observé en 1952 dans un campement des immigrés guerzé installés depuis des années dans le pays kono, aux environs du village de Bakoré (canton de Lola), son schéma correspond en grandes lignes au mécanisme coutumier local général.

This article analyses an episode of public anxiety when, in late 2013, word spread throughout Kenya’s rural Lunga Lunga constituency that politically connected gangs called mumiani were abducting and killing children for their eyes, tongues and genitals. The rapid spread of these rumours coincided with a regional drought, parliamentary election campaigns, and the apparent discovery of ‘devil worship paraphernalia’ inside a shipping container at the nearby port of Mombasa. I analyse the 2013 mumiani scare in relation to histories of famine survival strategies, predatory patronage and occult speculation to argue that the 2013 mumiani panic condensed and expressed these histories in figural rather than temporal form. As ‘constellations’ of coastal Kenyan historical consciousness, mumiani are (and have long been) a key feature of, and at the same time iconic of, a broader critical discourse about the dark side of political largesse – ‘politics by night’.

This article examines the works of one of the earliest Yoruba poets, Denrele Adetimikan Ọbasa (1879–1945), a member of the local intelligentsia in colonial Nigeria. In my assessment of the poet as a culture activist and local intellectual, I draw on biographical information, extensive archival research and relevant textual illustration. The central argument of the article is that Ọbasa exploits Yoruba communal oral resources for ideas, themes and other linguistic influences in his poetry. Therefore, the essay explores the creative ability of Ọbasa to preserve different forms of oral literary material in his poetic composition and how he uses the folkloric materials as instruments for raising the social consciousness of his readers. At this level, the article argues, Ọbasa transforms oral traditions into metaphorical and symbolic language that best articulates his political or philosophical positions. Thus, orality is not static, but dynamic, flexible and adaptable to change. The main article offers translations of excerpts from Ọbasa's poetry, while the online supplementary material offers more complete samples of Ọbasa's poems.

Much attention has been given to the causes accounting for the rise of religious movements: inequality (Linton, 1943), racism (Lea, 1926; Sundkler, 1948), relative deprivation (Barber, 1941; Aberle, 1972), oppression (Lanternari, 1963), the colonial situation (Balandier, 1970), and white power (Ifeka-Moller, 1976) are among the factors which have been given prominence. These and other similarly ‘macro-social’ factors are very visible, especially from a distance. They can be, and often are, imagined to operate with general uniformity across entire social groups. This then invites the use of similarly general demographic measures to prove both the reality of the independent variable and its efficacy in accounting for the dependent variable – the rise of new churches and/or conversion to them.