This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural–urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollections of marriage during the war. The intense identification of migrant Igbos with place of origin and the importance of ‘home’ and ‘home people’ are situated in the context of the legacy of Biafra. The importance of kinship relationships for access to patron–client networks is linked to the Igbo perception of marginalization in the wake of Biafra. Igbo ideas about the significance of reproduction and the vital importance of ‘having people’ are reinforced through collective memories of Biafra. Igbo people's conceptions of Nigerian politics, their understandings of the social and economic importance of kinship and community in contemporary Nigeria, and even their reproductive decisions can be better explained by taking into account the legacies of Biafra.

This article explores the politics of decentralization and state–peasant encounters in rural Oromiya, Ethiopia. Breaking with a centralized past, the incumbent government of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) committed itself to a decentralization policy in the early 1990s and has since then created a number of new sites for state–citizen interactions. In the context of electoral authoritarianism, however, decentralization has been interpreted as a means for the expansion of the party-state at the grass-roots level. Against this backdrop, this article attempts a more nuanced understanding of the complex entanglements between the closure of political space and faith in progress in local arenas. Hence, it follows sub-kebele institutions at the community level in a rural district and analyses their significance for state-led development and peasant mobilization between the 2005 and 2010 elections. Based on ethnographic field research, the empirical case presented discloses that decentralization and state-led development serve the expansion of state power into rural areas, but that state authority is simultaneously constituted and undermined in the course of this process. On that basis, this article aims to contribute to an inherently political understanding of decentralization, development and their entanglement in local and national politics in rural African societies.

Dans le royaume pré-colonial de Mamprusi les sorcières etaient, soit exécutées après le prononcement de la sentence à la cour du roi, ou bien isolées dans une section spéciale d'une grande ville marchande où elles recevaient des médicaments pour neutraliser leur sorcèllerie. Ce traitement des sorcieres est une manifestation du processus de centralisation à l'oeuvre dans le royaume, et exemplifie aussi la division du travail rituel qui est typique du système politique. Des changements récents dans la composition du village des sorcières qui ont été accompagnés par de nouvelles conceptions Mamprusi au sujet de la sorcellerie, tirant sur une croyance de longue date dans le pouvoir des femmes quant à subvertir l'ordre social. Des changements radicaux dans la politique nationale et les conditions économiques, ainsi que des changements au niveau local en ce qui concerne la division du travail menacent les normes idéalisées des relations de genre au Mamprusi. La chasse aux sorcières au Mamprusi émerge en tant que tentative pour controller les femmes, qui sont percues comme étant une des sources de ces désordres en général.

Within the Nilo-Hamitic group of tribes in East Africa is a sub-group, the tribes of which speak closely related dialects. So close are these dialects that a native speaker of any one can understand a speaker of any other. In the normal intercourse between the peoples this does in fact happen constantly. Linguistically this group of dialects might be called the Teso Dialect Cluster, after the tribe of that name.

Most developing countries are said to have far too few skilled workers. They are certainly limited in the number and size of technical schools they can afford to support. However, technical trainees may be too ‘high-powered’ to be useful in small-scale, indigenous businesses and most holders of technical certificates drift into work quite different from that for which they were trained (Foster, 1965, pp. 294-5; Pfefferman, 1968, p. 113). Alternative and much cheaper sources of skilled workmen are provided by training within industry and apprenticeship to an individual craftsman.

This paper explores the nature of ethnic identity in the small town of Guider in northern Cameroon. It focuses on the process of ethnic identity change, specifically upon the incorporation into the Fulbe (sing. Pullo) ethnic group of individuals who originate outside it. Ethnic group change of this kind is not unknown in Africa (see Little, 1951; Richards, 1954; Banton, 1957; Wallerstein, 1960; Burnham, 1972; Salamone, 1975; Nicolas, 1975; Vaughan, 1981). The data in this study contribute to a growing body of literature concerned with ethnic boundary crossing, but, I shall argue, they suggest that we re-examine certain widely held assumptions about ethnicity and the process of ethnic assimilation.

Cet article explore les dynamiques en transition dans l'éducation des enfants à Asante (au Ghana) à travers le concept problématique de ntamoba. Dans les records historiques et dans la mémoire populaire, ntamoba a survécu sous un certain nombre de formes—en tant que paiement de mariage, en tant que rite lié à la naissance et à l'appellation de l'enfant et en tant qu'indemnité payée au père par la lignée maternelle afin de signifier la termination des droits qu'a le père sur cet enfant. Cet article cherche à dormer une perspective historique et à expliquer la manière dont les droits du père de se servir de ses enfants avait été transformé en des droits de propriété. Cet article met au premier plan le temps et la place sociale/le statut en tant que des variables clés dans cette enquête, démontrant comment la disparition de ntamoba était liée à la résurgence des catégories sociales subalternes en Asante au vingtième siècle.

Many people living in Mwanza, Tanzania, provision themselves through urban agriculture—the planting of crops and raising of animals in urban and peri-urban areas, as well as in the countryside. This article compares Mwanza's urban farmers with those in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana. Like Zimbabwe's urban agriculturalists, more and more of Mwanza's are not among the poorest of the poor. Much like Ghana's urban farmers, those in Mwanza are often middle and upper-class males with access to scarce land and inputs. Urban cultivators in Mwanza differ from those in Kenya and Zambia with regard to gender, socio-economic class and the factors motivating their farming activities. These findings suggest that even though socio-economic differentiation is on the increase in Tanzania it has not reached the levels of divergence found in Kenya and Zambia. Many of Mwanza's wealthier males continue to face enough job/income insecurity to choose to plant crops to support themselves and their household in lean times. They may also engage in urban agriculture because they are unable or unwilling to take advantage of more profitable investment opportunities outside the food market, or because they desire to spread risk across a number of different investments.

In modern social thinking, norms are generally thought of in opposition to a space of freedom that is more or less curtailed by and through processes of normalization. ‘Transgression’ thereby becomes an implicit or explicit act of resistance against the norm. This is particularly clear in Western Queer Theory, where a political and analytical investment in anti-normativity has – paradoxically – become a field-defining norm. Yet such strong anti-normativity can become a liability when trying to do justice to actually existing queer dynamics in past and present African realities. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork among sexually dissident young men who call themselves ‘fioto’ in urban Democratic Republic of Congo, this article shifts the always already oppositional relationship between queerness and normativity – not by arguing that queer is normal too or by showing that queer lives produce their own norms alongside heteronormativity, but by suggesting that queerness is a potential of normativity, rather than an opposition to it. It specifically thinks with two groups of fioto friends in Kisangani to show how and why norms generated their own queerness – as something that was already there as an inherent dimension of their own dynamism and multiplicity.

Modern anthropological research has shown that at every level of civilization there exists a moral code which is expressed in the ideal behaviour of individuals in the community, that is a behaviour which is ‘correct’ according to the people's ideas and praised by them in speech and story. Part of this moral code consists of regulations determining the mutual behaviour of the sexes, that is, of rules attempting to direct and control the physiological and emotional sexual impulses in individuals in the interest of the social well-being of the community or state. These physiological and emotional forces of sex are part of the biological equipment of human beings and hence common to all peoples. The anthropologist among so-called primitive people can approach the study of the moral code and its application from two angles: that of the individual, and that of the community. In all forms of society there is a supposition that individuals find control in sexual matters irksome, and only submit to restraint as a result of effective training allied to effective external pressure. A further universal supposition is that the community finds it necessary to demand a certain type of behaviour from individuals for the sake of its cohesion and stability. Both these suppositions are borne out by anthropological studies in primitive sociology. As soon, however, as we descend from general principles to a particular tribe, we begin to ask whether there is any connexion between the nature of the community and its demands on individuals as represented by the moral code and especially by the sexual regulations. Is there, for example, less need for stringent sexual regulations in a small isolated community than in a warlike tribe dependent for its existence on the strength of its arms? And if there is any such connexion what are the reasons for it?

Cet article examine la logique économique du marché national des boissons et sa place dans les stratégies de subsistance des hommes et des femmes du district rural d'Ulanga, dans le sud de la Tanzanie, où les activités brassicoles des femmes coexistent avec la monopolisation du marché des alcools de sue par les hommes. La disponibilité saisonnière des alcools de sue, combinée avec l'intégration du district dans les marchés céréaliers nationaux, crée une brève opportunité pour certaines femmes d'augmenter les revenus qu'elles tirent de la production et de la vente de bière de maïs, une opportunité rendue possible par l'interdépendance économique inégale des hommes et des femmes ainsi que de différentes régions de la Tanzanie. L'essor saisonnier du marché de la bière de maïs survient lorsque le prix du maïs est élevé et les stocks de céréales domestiques sont faibles. Les brasseurs doivent faire un choix entre satisfaire leurs besoins de consommation immédiats et investir leurs modestes réserves de capitaux ou de céréales dans la production de biére dans l'espoir de générer des profits à plus long terme. Comme dans d'autres régions de la Tanzanie, ce choix s'exprime de façon idiomatique à travers le contraste entre “manger” (kulia) et “générer” (zalisha) à travers lequel les céréales, et l'argent auquel elles sont explicitement comparées, peuvent être amenées à se reproduire grâce à un investissement prudent.

In the mid-1990s the village vigilantism known as sungusungu emerged, for the first time, in Tarime District, in northern Tanzania, in response to high levels of cattle theft and related violence—not in the form of independently organised but co-operating village vigilante groups, as it had first manifested itself a decade and a half earlier, in west central Tanzania, among the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples, but under state sponsorship. This article describes the organisation and operation of this form of state-sponsored vigilantism as it unfolded in a village of the agro-pastoral Kuria people, and argues that, while it offers a number of significant benefits both to the state and to local people, it nonetheless suffers from some of the same weaknesses that plague the official law enforcement system.

The material for this paper was collected while making a general ethnographic study of the Wolof people in the Saloum districts of the Gambia and neighbouring Senegalese villages in 1950–1. The extraordinary concern of the Gambian Wolof with ‘witches’ soon became evident when discussing and observing many ‘distinct’ aspects of their way of life. The object of this paper is twofold: to describe not only emotional reactions to ‘witches’, but to give an account of the behaviour ascribed to them, and the techniques for coping with their attacks; some functions and dysfunctions of these beliefs and practices will then be discussed.

The Nyakyusa were the subject of a classic series of ethnographies. This article suggests that these works took insufficient account of struggles over authority in the colonial period. Consequently they overstated the formalisation of chiefly power and understated the complex relationship between generational tensions and political authority in the pre-colonial period. Following discursive and practical changes in the use of alcohol, the article identifies a shift in the nature of power among the Nyakyusa over the twentieth century and develops the idea that drinking talk, and drinking practice, are central fields for the creation and recreation of the assumptions of power which underpin authority.

Recent happenings in the Gold Coast, and particularly in Ashanti, have tended to focus interest upon the structure of the constitution and the struggle for political power. Ten years ago two other movements were attracting at least as much attention. In a preliminary report on the work of the Ashanti Social Survey, published in 1948, Fortes described these as first, an apparently insatiable demand for schools, and, second, an almost equally if not more powerful development of what he called ‘new witch-finding cults’. That the demand for education of all kinds continues and is gradually being met is well known; it would be interesting, and perhaps, in the light of occurrences in other parts of Africa, significant to learn what has happened to the new cults.

La grande presse a fait assez largement écho à un article publié dans Science (Schmidt et Avery 1978) selon lequel on fondait il y a 2.000 ans de l'acier au coeur de l'Afrique. Grâce à une technique hautement sophistiquée, recourant notamment au préchauffage du vent, on obtenait un métal digne d'une aciérie moderne.

N!ow is a belief concerning rain and cold which is held by the !Kung Bushmen in the region around Nyae Nyae in South West Africa.

About ten inches of rain falls in an average year in this part of the Kalahari Desert and sinks into the deep sands. There is no run-off in streams and there are few water holes. The rain is sufficient to support a covering vegetation of grass, shrubs, and scrubby trees. The vegetation includes numerous edible roots, tubers, leaves, fruits, and nuts, for which the Afrikaans language provides the convenient word veldkos.

A wealth of new writing has emerged around the future of labour, focusing on thinking beyond employment in imagining the futures of ‘surplus populations’ no longer needed by labour markets. These new imaginaries include radically expanded forms of redistribution, such as unconditional cash transfers or universal basic income. But what are the views of the ‘surplus populations’ themselves? This article uses ethnographic research in an informal settlement in South Africa to understand why the unemployed or precariously employed poor are themselves often reluctant to delink labour and income. In particular, we focus on the discursive use of ‘laziness’ by urban unemployed young men. The varied (and often contradictory) ways in which these men employ the laziness discourse sheds light on the logics linking waged work and money in our informants’ social imaginaries. It illuminates the underlying contradictions and complexities of such logics, including those of gender, relational obligations, expectations of citizenship, and the inevitable tensions between aspirational hopes and economic realities. To begin thinking ‘beyond the proper job’, to use Ferguson and Li's phrase, we must unravel and understand such nuanced logics that continue to bind together hard work, deservingness and cash – even for those left out of labour markets.

In contemporary Ghana, adult children are considered responsible for the care of aged parents. Within this idealized framework, two aspects of eldercare are overlooked. Firstly, such a narrative obscures the role of non-kin and extended kin in providing eldercare in southern Ghana historically and in the present. Secondly, it hides the negotiations over obligations and commitments between those who manage eldercare and those who help with an ageing person's daily activities. It is in this latter role that non-kin and extended kin are significant in eldercare, while closer kin maintain their kin roles through the management, financial support and recruitment of others. This article examines recruitment to eldercare and the role of kin and non-kin in eldercare in three historical periods: the 1860s, the 1990s and the 2000s, centred on Akuapem, in southern Ghana. In particular, I show that helping an aged person relies on previous and expected entrustments, in which more vulnerable, dependent and indebted persons are most likely to be recruited to provide care.