Debates over land tenure have been instrumental to state-building in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the local dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction in the town of Juba, this article argues that amidst the political and institutional change inaugurated by the transition from war to peace, debates over land provided a basis for the negotiation of the South Sudanese state. Actors at a variety of levels employed competing interpretations of rights to land as state-building strategies – as tools towards promoting particular visions of the state and of citizenship.

The article describes a new mortuary in Cameroon, which has been constructed in a government hospital by the Bali-Nyonga Development and Cultural Association (BANDECA). The history and character of this hometown association is analysed and the article then argues that the mortuary has changed the temporality of death celebrations, and that this change is largely driven by the needs of national and international migrants. It claims that the association and the traditional authorities are attempting to steer recent changes within a longer historical process of ‘modernizing’ burial. The construction of the mortuary reveals some of the tensions within the community and the challenges these present to the association's leadership. In particular it illustrates the potential conflicts of interest between the hometown association and the national government that result from this form of self-help development project. Finally, the article shows that, despite the increased mobility of the Bali-Nyonga population, it is becoming more important, not less, to be buried at ‘home’, and that the mortuary and remittances are contributing to this process. Since the mortuary enables burials to take place at home, BANDECA is unwittingly reinscribing ethnic territoriality and thereby contributing to a political process of deepening the sense of ethnic belonging in Cameroon.

In the essay which follows an attempt will be made to answer and elaborate on some of the points raised by Kopytoff in his article ‘Ancestors as Elders in Africa’ (Africa, xli, 2 April 1971, pp. 129–42), an article which will, no doubt, stimulate much argument and discussion. To do this I shall utilize both published sources and material collected in Uluguru in Eastern Tanzania.

Customary land tenure is seen as a field in which social and political relationships are diverse, overlapping and competing. Property regimes are, therefore, often analysed in terms of processes of negotiation, with people's social and political identities as central elements. This article studies the negotiability of customary tenure in peri-urban Ghana where land is at the centre of intense and unequal competition and closely tied up with struggles over authority. It focuses on one village to provide a grassroots view of processes of contestation of customary rights to land. The analysis of how and to what extent local actors in this village deal with, negotiate and struggle for rights to land confirms that contestants for land never operate on a level playing field. Postulating the social inequalities of local communities, the article analyses whether it is useful to place all local land dealings under the term ‘negotiations’, or whether such a characterization stretches the boundaries of the term too far and risks undermining the significance of local stratification and ignoring the winners and losers in a contest with uncertain rules.

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the large volume of monetary transactions and profits within the traditional sector of a farming community in West Africa. More specifically it deals with the production, distribution and pricing of local brews, points to the effect of beer making on farming, and relates this trade to contemporary developments in other spheres of social and economic life.

This study examines the consequences of the rapid and unprecedented expansion of insurances for the poor in South Africa. Over the last ten years, South African insurance companies established a myriad of policies in order to incorporate the previously excluded, mostly African, poor and lower middle classes. While poverty, violence and AIDS put state institutions and social relations under pressure, insurances enable people to manage risks in hitherto unthinkable ways. The article examines the development of this new regime of risk as a Janus head, after the Roman god of opening and closing. At the heart of access to insurance were the incongruencies that were caused by the ‘translation’ of risk into the seemingly neutral concept of costs and the inability of brokers and intermediary organizations to navigate these translations successfully. Access to insurance – here not defined as having an insurance policy but as making a successful claim when confronted with the insured risk – was fraught with the contradictions of complex high-tech bureaucracies and the poor's social networks.

The outstanding point about British Africa to-day is the extension of the indirect system of administration. This is the more remarkable because, in the decentralized position of our territories, such extension is the result of free adoption on the part of the different governments. It is the endorsement of the system, after long experience, by practical administrators. Yet in England it has lately been subjected to a considerable amount of criticism. The object of this article is to re-state indirect rule in the light of these criticisms, in the hope of rebutting what is misinformed and incorporating what is constructive.

Le développement rapide des exportations de vêtements d'occasion de l'Occident vers les pays du Tiers-Monde et la hausse de la consommation de vêtements d'occasion dans les pays africains soulevent des questions pertinentes sur les effets de la mondialisation et les significations de l'Occident et du local que les consommateurs attribuent aux objets à différents points de leur parcours dans l'espace mondial. Cet article s'appuie sur des travaux de recherche approfondis sur la provenance des vêtements d'occasion en Occident ainsi que sur leur commerce en gros et au détail, leur distribution et leur consommation en Zambie. Analysant Fattitude de la population zambienne à l'égard des vêtements dont l'Occident ne veut plus, cet article suggère qu'une économie culturelle intervient dans les appropriations locales de cette marchandise particulière qui ouvre un espace au commerce local de vêtements. Les vêtements influent beaucoup sur l'imaginaire car le moi et la société s'expriment à travers le corps vêtu. En toile de fond, l'article dresse brièvement un profil des récentes tendances du commerce mondial des vêtements d'occasion qui placent les pays africains sub-sahariens en tête des régions importatrices au niveau mondial. Il s'ensuit une analyse des préoccupations de la population zambienne concernant les vêtements neufs et les vêtements d'occasion, tant sur le plan historique que sur le plan actuel. Cette analyse démontre que les significations qu'attribuent les consommateurs zambiens aux vêtements d'occasion ne sont ni uniformes ni statiques mais qu'elles varient selon la classe sociale et le sexe, et entre les zones urbaines et rurales. Surtout, elles dépendent de la politique culturelle du moment. A travers les vêtements, les Zambiens donnent un sens à la société postcoloniale, à leur place dans cette société et dans le monde en général.

A case study from western Kenya is used to explore the links between labour migration, rural economic decline and changes in key domestic relationships. Twentieth-century transformations in the regional political economy, together with processes of differentiation, have been closely bound up with changes, and continuities, in relationships within households, and in the ideologies which justify them. A central concept in the analysis is that of divisions of labour, which covers the division of tasks, divisions of spheres of responsibility and authority and contributions to the reproduction of the household. Changes in all these have shaped, and have been shaped, by the trajectory of economic decline in the region. Changing divisions of labour have been slow, piecemeal, non-uniform and non-linear. They have been the subject of intense conflicts within households which have centred on questions of access to and control over resources and in which, as well as power relations, ideas about rights and responsibilities have been crucially important.

Introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, the Nile perch has gained fame for prompting rapid regional economic growth and for driving scores of endemic fish species into extinction. This study uses oral and archival data to trace the historical development of the Nile perch fishery on Lake Victoria. Particular emphasis is placed on local responses and adaptations to (1) the Nile perch itself; (2) the abrupt integration of the Lake Victoria fishery with the global economy; and (3) the ecological changes that the Nile perch has precipitated. I also attempt to situate Lake Victoria's history in the larger debate about environment and African livelihoods. Because so much of Lake Victoria's species diversity has been lost within one generation – biologist E. O. Wilson (1992) has called this process ‘the most catastrophic extinction episode of recent history’ – the lake is an ideal case study with which to examine ‘local’ perceptions of biodiversity. The data suggest that species diversity is important and highly resolved in the worldviews of Lake Victoria's fishermen; yet, although the will for conservation is present, poverty obstructs its realization. These findings are discussed in relation to other work on indigenous environmental knowledge and ecological ethics. I argue that ‘intrinsic’ valuation of species diversity and ecological processes may be more widespread in rural societies than has traditionally been assumed by natural and social scientists, and that the preponderance of social studies highlighting oppositions between Western science and ethno-science, and between conservation concerns and local livelihoods, may have blinded us to synergies between them. More effort is needed to understand fully the nuances in these complex local ecological worldviews, perhaps via ‘social histories of extinction’ that explore the local consequences of species loss.

Certain features of Cewa witch beliefs make them well suited to sociological analysis. As this type of analysis has been somewhat neglected by students of witch beliefs, Part I of this paper will be devoted to a brief review of some of the literature (mainly on Bantu) and to an attempt to formulate a serviceable hypothesis. Part II will summarize information about the Cewa essential to an understanding of Part III, in which the hypothesis will be applied to Cewa material. Part III will appear in a subsequent number of Africa.

For many social anthropologists the problem of divine kingship was solved in 1948 when Professor Evans-Pritchard, in a well-known Frazer Lecture, put a respectably structural interpretation on the facts of the Shilluk case. Divine kingship in Africa was rather an embarrassment because the central tenet of its doctrine—that the king must be killed when he fell sick or grew senile—was usually beyond empirical verification. There was also perhaps some reluctance to accept the explanatory theories of Sir J. G. Frazer when in so many other respects his authority had long since been overthrown. In a single essay Evans-Pritchard appeared to have effectively slain both the problem and its discoverer. Such problems and such intellectual kings, however, have a way of rising from the dead. In this paper I resuscitate in part Frazer's theory of divine kingship and try to show that it illuminates important aspects of the problem which are ignored by the structuralist interpretation. With reference to a single example of divine kingship, that of the Jukun of Northern Nigeria, I utilize two familiar conceptual distinctions—person/office and political/ritual. Complementary to these, and perhaps even more analytically fruitful, is the man-god dichotomy which was one of Frazer's main preoccupations.

The democratisation process which began in the early 1990s in many sub-Saharan African countries has led to renewed interest in the role of voluntary associations in the shaping of the political and social realms. This article maintains that the most effective way to understand the role of associational politics and developments in Africa is not by postulating what they should do according to Western democratic theory, but through an historical analysis of how associations functioned before the introduction of multi-party competitive elections and putative democratic rules in recent years. In this way it will be possible to attain a richer and more complex under-standing of state–society relations under one-party and military regimes, and thus of how these links are likely to change in a more pluralistic environment. This article explores these issues in the Côte d'Ivoire.

Leach in his study of the Kachin interpreted disputes over claims to administer ritual or to recite myths as a means whereby politically opposed factions sought to assert their independence or their dominance (Leach, 1954, p. 278). He also showed that in this competition the Kachin made use of ritual and other cultural elements which they had adopted from the Shans and were using for political ends.

In 1961 Marvin Miracle attempted to demonstrate that reports of ‘seasonal hunger’ in tropical Africa were to be discounted and that in fact regular ‘hunger periods’ did not occur. He based his argument on a definition of seasonal hunger which took into account only the calories people consumed. By his definition, ‘seasonal hunger’ can exist only if people consume fewer calories than they need in certain months of each year even though their total calorie intake over the year is adequate (Miracle, 1961: 277–88). He denied that there was sufficient evidence of any such shortfall to justify the F.A.O. statement (1958) that ‘pre-harvest food shortage is still a problem in many of the drier parts (of tropical Africa)’.

In his Economic History of West Africa (1973) Hopkins points out that relatively little attention has been paid to the history of food production by contrast with export crops, even though it has been clear since early research on African food systems (e.g., Johnston 1958) that patterns of production have been changing. The determinants of shifts in land use and crop rotations are complex but two major factors have been suggested: population pressure on land resources, and the relative prices of different crops. The population pressure argument tends to assume that subsistence is maintained, so that any change in the relationship of population to food land requires shifts in farming practice to allow the maintenance of the same level of living (Boserup 1965). The price argument tends to assume that the agriculture system is penetrated by the market principle, so that farmers' decisions to maintain subsistence production patterns depend on projections about the prices of the cash crops available for sale and the food items needed to purchase (Chibnik 1978). From work on African farming systems comes a modification which suggests that the management of both these constraints depends to some extent on the broader social and economic context in which decisions are made. In particular it has been suggested that the position of women farmers in both indigenous social organisation and national economies is different from men's; they work under different constraints in their farming and have different opportunities for alternative employment (Boserup 1970; Meillassoux 1975). If the sexual division of labour is an important aspect of farming, men's and women's differential access to resources might be expected to have an independent effect on cropping patterns.

It is greatly to the credit of the editors of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa that they have made generally available ten systematic accounts of witch beliefs in East and Central African societies. All teachers of anthropology must surely be grateful to them on this account alone. Moreover the book is spiced with many insights into sociocultural problems connected with the main theme. A permissive editorial policy has stimulated a rich diversity of viewpoints and presentations. But one is left with the feeling that Monica Wilson's plea for the comparative analysis of these ‘standardized nightmares’—a plea which forms the book's motto—as one of the ‘keys to the understanding of society’ has not met here with a wholly satisfactory response.

In the last three decades, the politics of indigeneity have led to discrimination against and marginalization of non-indigenes as well as numerous violent conflicts between indigenes and non-indigenes in Nigeria. This discrimination, which is based on a localized place of belonging, has today become bureaucratized: local governments produce ‘certificates of indigene’ to identify the origin of their holders. This article looks at the bureaucratic machinery of issuing certificates of origin in two local governments of Oyo State (in the south-west) and the everyday encounters between users and bureaucrats that cannot be reduced to practices of corruption. It looks at the complicated and ambivalent process of identifying a ‘true indigene’; this process is supposed to strengthen local citizenship but it also contributes to the daily functioning of the state and is largely accepted by the majority as part of the state's ‘insidious gentleness’. The article also seeks to understand why official discrimination against non-indigenes is poorly contested locally by assessing the role of these documents in accessing public employment, university places and basic services, and examining whether areas inhabited by non-indigenes are perceived as being neglected or abandoned by the state. Currently, discrimination policies are implemented unequally and in many instances client–patron relationships help sidestep these policies.