The comparative philology of former times mainly occupied itself with the collection of such words in different languages as showed some similarity in sound, and even this phenomenon was not thought worthy of too much attention. It was not before the beginning of the nineteenth century that the scientific importance of the problems here involved were recognized, and it was seen that they called for thorough and exact investigation. First of all, the differences in structure that exist between the various European languages were examined more closely than had been done before, and those languages that were seen to possess a number of characteristics in common were then brought together into one group, which was called the Indo-European family of languages. Next, another group was found, namely that of the Semitic languages, the relationship to each other of which had been recognized long before on account of the greater uniformity in grammar and vocabulary. Indo-European and Semitic were then both classed together by virtue of their being ‘inflecting’ languages, that is to say, they change words not by means of endings only, but also through vowel change within the stem, and have grammatical gender.

The material for this study was collected during the first two months of 1954, while camping in a Cokwe village about 50 miles north-east of Vila Luso in the administrative area of Camanongue, County and District of Moxico, Province of Bié, Angola. My chief informant was Sr. Francisco Casueka, aged 44, a Cokwe- and Portuguese-speaking African from the printing press at Boma Mission near Vila Luso. He was the ablest assistant I had among many good informants during my stay in Angola.

Full descriptions of the kinship terminology of the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria are rare. One important reason for this is that, although the basic principles of kinship organization are similar over much of the Ibo culture area, terminology reflects, on the one hand, the extreme degree of dialect variation and, on the other hand, local variation in details of the kinship organization itself. Such variations occur sometimes over a very few miles. Certainly there is no single Ibo kinship terminology; there is only in a broad sense one southern Ibo terminology; while the area which can be said to have one terminology in the narrowest sense of an absolute identity of every term is often very restricted. Although this situation may be confusing to the investigator, it is not necessarily so to the Ibo. Every Ibo is conversant with kinship terms within and often far beyond the radius in which he may seek a wife, just as he is aware of dialectal variations in any other field of terminology. Thus it is that terminology in the literature has tended sometimes to be dialectally eclectic as well as incomplete. The growing body of publications in Ibo, both in the Onitsha and the Central dialects, also illustrates this tendency when kinship relationships are mentioned. It would therefore seem to be worth while to record one specific system of terminology in detail, within the social context of its area.

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.

As part of a growing working-class movement that sought full legal status as employees in South Africa, stable urban residence and union recognition, female African factory workers became part of a dynamic new labour movement emanating from the shop floor. At the same time, this new role allowed them to challenge patriarchal structures of authority in the factory, the community and the home. This article examines the gender dimension of a bitter inter-union rivalry that beset Durban's Frame textile complex during the early 1980s. With African unions at last recognized by the apartheid state, Frame sought to bolster the strength of a compliant company union in order to thwart the organizing drive of a more confrontational independent union, an affiliate of the newly established Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). This union rivalry was fought out in the courts as well as inside the factory, in the streets of Durban's townships, and in an African workers’ hostel in nearby Clermont. The legal dispute generated affidavits by women workers attesting to the pressures they faced to join the company union and their reasons for preferring FOSATU. This evidence shows that African women successfully challenged the patriarchal authority of male managers, security personnel, indunas and male co-workers at Frame in order to join an independent union.

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.