Government College, Umuahia is known as the alma mater of eight important Nigerian writers: Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Gabriel Okara, Chike Momah, I. N. C. Aniebo, Chukwuemeka Ike, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Christopher Okigbo. Many illustrious Nigerian scientists, intellectuals and public leaders passed through the college in its prime, and in West Africa the name of the school evokes an astounding range of success stories. But Umuahia's legend as ‘the Eton of the East’ and the primus inter pares of Nigeria's elite colonial institutions obscures its present reality: nothing remains of its past but its extensive grounds, landmark buildings, and the glittering roll call of dignitaries who once studied within its walls. In 1979, prompted by the many signs of impending doom, a group of old boys joined hands in a historicizing venture, The Umuahian: a golden jubilee publication – the commemorative booklet compiled by the school's most famous alumnus, Chinua Achebe, to mark the college's golden jubilee. The booklet conjured up the school's founding ideals and glorious past in order to lay the ground for its rehabilitation. This introductory essay explains why The Umuahian is an indispensable source for the literary, cultural and educational history of West Africa, contextualizing its singular construction of colonial educational heritage. Sample and hitherto unpublished texts from the booklet by Achebe, his editorial to The Umuahian and its coda, ‘Continuity and change in Nigerian education: a jubilee essay’, are included with the main article. While the contributors to The Umuahian pertain to elite circles, and the volume had a world-class literary figure as its editor, the volume itself was produced for a local occasion and rarefied local audience, had a very limited distribution, and subsequently fell into obscurity. It is in the spirit of the historical and academic retrieval of such locally published and little-known materials by African thinkers and writers that this work appears in the Local Intellectuals strand.

This article concerns the effects of globalization on Islam in the Bamum kingdom, Cameroon. Since its introduction into the kingdom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islam has been closely intertwined with ethnicity and the local political system has been consensual. Politically, Bamum royalty – as the secular arm of central power – has had the unconditional support of Islam. For a long period, ‘Bamum Islam’, with its origins in the Tijaniya tariqa, withdrew in on itself, unlike other parts of Africa where sufism is dominant. But since the start of the 1990s, both political liberalization and Isalmic modernity have had their effects in Bamum through what is called in Foumban the ‘Wahhabite’ infiltration, namely, all those who have studied in Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The politico-religious foundation on which were based both the legitimacy of the royal household and the unity of the Bamum people has been undermined and disabled, provoking a crisis of identity. This crisis is evidenced, on the one hand, by the politicization of the Tijaniya on behalf of one opposition party, reforms and the destabilization of the dominant position of the Tijaniya, and, on the other hand, by a Tijaniya insurrection, open defiance and the weakening of the position of the Sultan-King of Bamum.

Memory is often considered a monopoly of adults and older children: the younger the child, the less significant the capacity for recollecting. In Côte d'Ivoire, the Beng posit a radically different theory of cognitive development: adults say that the younger the child, the keener the memory. Moreover, such recall is of a specific sort – infants allegedly hold strong memories of a previous existence before birth (wrugbe), where people reportedly live harmoniously and there is never material want. Nevertheless, remembering this space of plenitude can prove agonizing for babies, making their hold on life precarious, and a distressing array of culturally shaped diseases threaten their survival. Protecting against illness requires an elaborate bathing, jewellery and make-up routine twice daily that begins at birth and continues for the first year. All this somatic activity is meant to lure the child fully and definitively into this world, and to counteract the strong call of the afterlife that adults say is created by the infant's own memories. Why is wrugbe, as purportedly remembered by infants, envisaged as a place of plenitude? And why is it located in an historically identified past? In this essay – which is necessarily to some extent speculative given its subject of infant memory – I explore the allegorical implications of the Beng afterlife, suggesting that the attribution of heightened infant memory of an idyllic wrugbe serves as an indirect critique of French colonialism and its aftermath. I conclude by discussing the ways in which memory and forgetting are mutually constructed, with the Beng model offering substantial support for the contention that reproduction in general – and babies in particular – are crucial to this intertwined process.

Kenya's refugee camps have evoked spectacular imaginaries of terrorism and humanitarian crisis. Drawing on everyday discourses and shared knowledges among camp administrators, this article reveals that these geopolitical narratives are underwritten locally by more generalized concerns about the imagined ‘otherness’ and moral degeneracy of the displaced. Refugees are thus portrayed as criminals and crooks, sexually deviant and idle, as well as ‘mad’ and uncivilized. Together, these tropes constitute a cultural text of encampment that reproduces postcolonial imaginings of difference and engrains the notion that ‘refugeeness’ equates to a state of ‘moral disorder’. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya's Turkana county. It argues that the discursive production of refugees as immoral subjects not only has practical effects for the actions of government officials and aid workers but rekindles a binary colonial mapping of the world into ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ spaces. These social imaginaries and banal discourses illustrate that the camp has not just a political but also an imaginative geography. Kakuma camp is hereby doubly excluded: from the modernity that humanitarianism ostensibly embodies and from the imagined moral community of Kenya.

Writing about conflict in Africa is a tricky thing. Publications from non-governmental organizations and human rights campaigners often read as if they were calibrated to maximize public distress, and thus the political or financial support that would keep human rights institutions in business. Many journalistic accounts are stitched together from the rhetorical and analytical remnants of a colonial and sometimes racist common sense. Against this backdrop, fine-grained empirical studies like those typically produced by anthropologists, historians and geographers take on a particular salience. They stake out a privileged space for explaining other logics, other incentives, and different causal relations that could make sense out of wars, insurgencies and other forms of violence that appear irrational to Europeans and North Americans.

Lucy Philip Mair was born in London in 1901 and died in London on 1 April 1986. She was a social anthropologist of international reputation and known particularly for her work on Africa.

L'étude complète de ce vaste sujet demanderait un volume. Le but de cet article est plus modeste. Il ne veut donner qu'un aperçu de la situation actuelle de la polygamie; exposer les causes qui la maintiennent et d'autres qui la font évoluer, commenter la position que prend l'Administration à son sujet, et pour finir indiquer l'attitude des Missions à son égard.

A cause de l'usage général, nous employons le mot polygamie au lieu de polygynie. Il est cependant à noter, à l'encontre d'une opinion largement répandue, que la polyandrie existe au Congo Belge. Elle est coutumièrement organisée chez les Bashilele du Territoire des Basongo. De là elle s'est introduite dans quelques villages de leurs voisins, les Badinga.

Ata Kwasi was a young Ashanti, about twenty-one years old. He had gained the Primary School leaving certificate and shortly after leaving school got a job as a junior clerk. In March 1945 he complained of a persistent cough and was admitted to hospital where pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed. Pressure on the limited accommodation, the impossibility of a cure and his own dislike of a hospital regimen made him leave after a few weeks. The following are the letters and reports of his illness which he wrote in English to a friend during the last four months of his life. They are produced without alterations except for the deletion of place-names.

This article deals with metida avoidance practices as they emerge in daily and ritual practice among the agro-pastoral Datoga-speaking peoples of Tanzania. The elaboration of the avoidance practices varies starkly between and within Datoga segments, but these practices are commonly particularly elaborate in connection with death or death-like events, and with birth or birth-like events. In the study area women may spend years of their lives with severe restrictions on their conduct in terms of movement and socialization. We argue that in making sense of such avoidance phenomena the strong influence of Mary Douglas's ‘dirt’ and ‘pollution’ concepts has hindered an understanding of the fact that the metida seclusion does not only isolate substances perceived to be dangerously contaminating, but in similar ways secludes fertile and vulnerable elements in order to protect them. A Strathern-inspired transition to a focus on bodies as open and dynamic systems that mingle with other bodies in intimate flows or exchanges of bodily fluids may be fruitful in this context. We indicate, however, that incautious substitution of a ‘pollution’ concept with the concept of ‘flows’ may lead to challenges not entirely dissimilar to those that attended the employment of Douglas's concepts.

As I write, the United States and the United Kingdom have begun their invasion of Iraq. Thus, the most developed forms of violence are being brought into relationship with some of the world's most complexly layered local identitites—all on global television. The unpredictability of this situation points, I believe, to one of the more profound aspects of the post-Cold War order.

In Nakuru, a secondary city in Kenya, herbal doctors argue that African bodies are infested by ‘dirt’. Gathering at crossroads, they teach about the dangerous effects of processed foods on African bodies. During public product demonstrations, they patch together urban gossip, kemikali (chemicals in Kiswahili) and consumer goods from abroad to demonstrate their overheating effects on stomachs. In this article, I think through metabolism and digestion to demonstrate how ‘navigating’ urban toxicity in Nakuru implies a bodily praxis that hinges on debates about the porosity of the nation's borders responding to the afflictions of globalization. I show how the occult character of kemikali pivots on the collapse between insides and outsides, leading to overheating stomachs, and consequently argue that herbal interventions coating the lining of the stomach and the gut do what national borders are unable to achieve: keeping out toxic intrusions. From this point of view, herbal practices in Nakuru demonstrate agency and resistance to worlds perceived as increasingly toxic and polluted.

This article is concerned with science and sexuality, and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the former to change minds about the latter, taking as its main source of data a report released by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2015, Diversity in Human Sexuality: implications for policy in Africa. I frame the report in terms of co-production – borrowed from science and technology studies – and a theory of publics – taken from literary criticism and queer theory. I first describe how science has played a role in recent queer politics before showing how the report intervenes by appealing to a particularly African public. Thereafter, I describe how the choosing agentive subject disappears in the report’s depiction of the legitimate sexual citizen. Such a framing of citizenship raises several possible problems, some of which I address in the final section. These are described as potential confounders inhibiting the success of the report, preventing effective co-production or the summoning of a public. The article’s goal is not to discredit the report; rather, in pointing out how the report might fall short of its goal, it is directed towards a more reflexive activism.