This article examines witchcraft, shape-shifting and other supernatural beliefs among the Talensi and neighbouring Gur-speaking peoples on the frontier of the Northern Territories Protectorate of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the first half of the twentieth century. Its starting point is the succession of religious movements dedicated to the eradication of witchcraft that swept through the southern forest region of the Gold Coast in the inter-war period. Most of these movements were animated by exotic deities originating in the savanna zone, a cross-cultural passage in part propelled by the ambivalence with which the Akan peoples of the forests viewed the so-called Gurunsi of the remote north. While the ‘Gurunsi’ were generally regarded as primitive barbarians, they were also seen to have an intimate relationship with the spiritual realm and therefore to be free from the ravages of malevolent witchcraft. This intimacy with dangerous spiritual forces was most clearly manifested in the widely reported ability of ‘the grassland people’ to transmogrify into animals. Evidence suggests, however, that far from being free from witchcraft, stateless savanna societies had their own problems with malevolent occult powers. Moreover, their reputation for shape-shifting was not simply a lurid, fantastic stereotype of northern brutishness on the part of the Akan. Animal metamorphosis – and especially the ubiquity of were-hyenas – was widely reported in the northern savanna, where it was imbricated with ‘witchcraft’ and with notions of personhood and collective identities.

In this article I present an outline account of the ritual associated with the kingship of the interlacustrine Bantu kingdom of Bunyoro, in western Uganda. At the same time I attempt to analyse this material in terms of the categories both of Nyoro thought and of social anthropology. My information is drawn from the scattered accounts and references in the various writings about Bunyoro, rather than from my own field investigations, which in this department of Nyoro culture were not extensive. My assumption is that an anthropological approach based on some knowledge of Nyoro culture as a whole may make the available data more intelligible and more readily comparable with analogous material from elsewhere than it has been hitherto. This, rather than an exhaustive ethnographical account, is the aim of this article.

I. The Ngoni People. Before I made my first camp in an Ngoni village, many Europeans had said to me, ‘There are practically no Ngoni left to-day. They are all hopelessly mixed with other tribes. None of them keep to the Ngoni customs any longer. Their chiefs are no good.’ From the doorway of my hut I saw people coming all day long to the Paramount Chief, behaving towards him with profound respect, bringing him presents, working for him. His children formed a special group in the village, easily recognizable by their bearing and their manners. Old indunas came to instruct me, as they had instructed chiefs in their day, on the duties of a ruler, and the code of Ngoni laws. Old warriors in war dress came and danced by the cattle kraal and sang praise songs. Courts were held with scrupulous regard for order and justice. Other chiefs came visiting from distant parts with their retinues, and were received ceremonially. It soon became apparent that here was the centre of a political state, whose head was invested with prestige and authority over a wide area, and where behaviour to the Paramount and to every one else was strictly regulated by custom, and as strictly observed. These were Ngoni, and they and their fellow Ngoni in other areas for the next ten months introduced me to the Ngoni people. The European assertion, that they no longer existed as a people, they laughed at, and proceeded to demonstrate that the contrary was true.

In the tradition of van Gennep anthropologists have studied puberty rites mainly as rites of passage marking changes in status at the crises of life and, more recently, the role which these ceremonies play in the ordering and reordering of social relations. My purpose here is to approach Zulu puberty rites from a different angle: to examine them in the context of a system of beliefs and values underlying a whole group of ritual activities for the welfare of the community—for health, for rain, for fertility in man and beast. This context was suggested to my mind when, a few years ago, I attended a spring ceremonial in the form of hoeing a field in honour of Inkosazana or Nomkhubulwana, a maiden deity. These rites, long thought to have died out, have not only survived in outlying parts of the country, but have lately been revived in many areas, some quite close to Durban. When I heard the songs that were being sung in this ceremony it was suddenly brought home to me that this rite to secure good crops was conceived of in terms of a girl's puberty ceremony. Inkosazana, personification of nature, was symbolized as standing on the threshold of summer like a girl at her puberty ceremony, ready for marriage and procreation. These puberty songs form part also of a number of other rituals associated with Inkosazana rites to combat pests and epidemics and the herding of the cattle for a day by girls, a rite which Gluckman, mistakenly in my opinion, has interpreted as a ritual of rebellion. My main concern in this paper is to present and analyse some of the Zulu girls' puberty songs (reproduced in Appendix II), to show how they are connected with ideas of morality and to indicate briefly the relation of puberty rites to rituals associated with the deity Inkosazana.

In the course of the investigations carried out by the Missions Griaule in French West Africa during several decades, our attention has been drawn to the fact that numerous populations in the French Sudan and Upper Volta claimed to be descended from a common stock located in Mande. Mande is the traditional centre of the ancient Keita empire (called by the Arabs the Mali empire), which was founded in the thirteenth century by Soundiata Keita. The cultural centre of this area today is Kangaba, which the inhabitants call Kaba. A list of the peoples in West Africa who claim to have come from Mande has been drawn up and published.

This article explores specific oral histories and chiefship debates in the aftermath of the SPLA war in two Southern Sudanese chiefdoms. It argues that these local histories reveal much about the historical relationship between state and society – and in particular the mediation with external violence – which is central to understanding the legitimacy of local authority. Rather than being the strong arm of the state, chiefs have ideally mediated and deflected state (and rebel) violence. Unlike other African examples, they have been marginal both in landowning and patrician structures, so that chiefship has offered a more inclusive and pragmatic definition of community than have patrilineal discourses. As elsewhere in Southern Sudan, the early chiefs were often proxy mediators with marginal or outside origins and their access to government force has been balanced by the continuing authority of rain chiefs, elders, senior lineages and ‘maternal uncles’. Current governance interventions which treat chiefs as sole custodians of community land and customs may not be compatible with local understandings of the role of the chief. Oral histories of chiefship origins reflect a symbolic bargain made with government and with chiefs, whereby the latter use their ‘good speech’ to mediate violence, and if necessary sacrifice themselves to ‘bail’ people from external/government force.

A prominent feature of political liberalisation in Cameroon (as elsewhere in Africa) is the increasing resort by elites to idioms of community (regional, religious and ethnic) and neo-traditional institutions like chieftaincy as a means of mobilising political support and reasserting control of local populations. Focusing on the anglophone part of Cameroon this study examines the historical roots of the salience of these phenomena in current struggles for power. It uses the circumstances surrounding the death of a chief in the South West Province to explain the ways in which elite reliance on these phenomena facilitates the linkage of locally specific, culturally encoded political conflict with competition for power at the national level, and provokes local populations into resisting state power, often through the reinvention of traditions of their own. The study concludes that popular scepticism about whether current political struggles will lead to fundamental changes in state–society relations is rooted in the ways in which elite politics are played out in local and regional spaces.

This article investigates the nature and structure of linkages between the urban elite and local institutions in their home villages in the Nso' area of north-west Cameroon. It argues that indigenous institutions provide a frame of reference for the negotiation of identity and the provision of security in a context where state institutions seem to have lost their raison d'être. The notion of a home village has become a defining factor in the urban–rural nexus which allows the elite to acquire resources from external sources which they in turn invest in the production of social and symbolic capital. The materialisation of this capital is manifested in the acquisition of neo-traditional titles. Under conditions of dire financial and material hardship some local traditional authorities have started to ‘commodity’ what was previously earned through merit and service to the group.

Interest in African sacred kingship has for long been centred upon its ritual aspects; descriptions of highly colourful ceremonies have provided a convenient introduction to the study of a people's religious beliefs, yielding also examples of the ritual sanctions by which the ruler enforces obedience. As a result the constitutional aspects of kingship have been largely ignored.

Southern Ghana has for centuries been a region marked by continuous movement of population, both of groups and individuals; by ever-changing forms of social stratification; by urban centres of various kinds and sizes; and by trade with the outside world. Yet tradition and ‘custom’ are of great importance for the people. And despite marked economic and political development, kingship, matrilineal descent, and urbanism have remained central in most of the area in both national and local social systems.

Labour migration is an outstanding feature in most contemporary African societies. It not only touches on nearly all aspects of the lives of the peoples involved, but is often the cause as well as the result of important social and cultural changes. It therefore holds a special interest for students of such changes. Here they can observe the movements of vast numbers of people, and the concomitant problems which arise with the exposure of these people to new social, political, and economic conditions. Furthermore, working with data from migrants and their home and host communities, social scientists are able to test many theoretical assumptions which are held about the nature of socio-cultural change.

Fire outbreaks are common sources of anxiety and insecurity in informal settlements, but they can also provide new opportunities for claim making and governance of urban space. This article examines how a series of four fires in Accra, Ghana – three of which took place in its largest squatter settlement – offered new opportunities to experiment with governance, or a new way for residents and leaders to imagine and construct the future. Empirically, I document how, in the process of reconstruction, residents redrew property lines and reshaped social relations. They did this through the emergent political action I call building permanence, or a physical claim to the urban space one inhabits, as well as a new existential state of being and living in environs that will last and remain unharmed. The article offers a possible way towards achieving more secure tenure beyond formalization and infrastructure upgrades, and focuses attention on how institutions change in the context of daily life after a moment of crisis.

At the turn of the century Veblen (1899) wrote on the socio-economic base of the leisure class. He suggested that, in addition to the ‘bourgeois’ and working classes identified in the nineteenth century, there existed an upper strata which was more than a mere anachronistic remnant of the preindustrial aristocracy, but was in fact reproduced by the developed industrial society.

The main purpose of this paper is to show how recent research into the process of urbanization in Africa and into the structure of African cities and nations compels us to rethink our theories of urbanization in general.

The relationship between theory and research is a reciprocal one. New research compels the creation of new models, and new models suggest new subjects and methods of research. But both theory and research are affected by politics in the broadest sense of the term. Many African scholars consider the study of modern Africa by Westerners an extension of economic and political colonialism, especially when African cities are studied in terms of Western models. And many African governments, aware of the social problems involved in urbanization, seriously study the work of both African and non-African social scientists. The period since 1960 has been one of rapid development in the study of urbanization in Africa and the rest of the world, and the African material should throw new light on general theories of urbanization.

This article explores the ways in which efforts to expand private land tenure, coupled with the continued centrality of customary land administration in Zambia, produce a fractured system of land governance in which localized markets for land emerge but are forced to operate in a clandestine manner. Using ethnographic and archival data sources, I argue that despite the historical and contemporary relationship between land rights and economic ‘development’, the clandestine nature of land markets in rural Zambia tends to (re)produce many of the social ills that ‘development’ seeks to resolve. Using a case study of a clandestine market for land in a Tonga-speaking region of southern Zambia, this article shows how these markets undermine women's rights to land, while allowing for the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

The article brings together archival material, past ethnography, and memory on the one hand, and up-to-date eye-witness and newspaper reports on the other, to set current traumatic events in the very long view. The presentism of contemporary developmental and research approaches has precluded such perspectives. Thus the current disarmament programme being forced on the Karamojong of north-east Uganda by the Uganda People's Defence Force is no more unprecedented than the armed conflicts it is intended to resolve. The advent of colonial administration and memories of it are examined to illuminate the constraints of the present exercise. Events are not occurring solely in a local context, still less just on the national scene, but in the global context directed by world power. Thus the significance of cattle-raiding, the nature of which has not been drastically changed by firearms, has been exaggerated as part of a threat to world peace that must be tackled by international action. This has provided the rationale for repeating the brutality of the small wars of imperialism on a larger scale and with less prospect of an ensuing peace. The article proposes a rediscovery of African agency in Karamojong religious ceremonies that are not controlled by world orders.

The research upon which this article is based was carried out over a period of four months in the Northern and Luapula Provinces of Zambia. Before that, I spent two years working in the area as an agricultural officer. One of the villages described in the article is situated on the western shore of Lake Bangweulu, the other 20 km south of Kasama, the major city of Northern Province, the homeland of the Bemba (Fig. 1). The area is almost exclusively devoted to chitemene shifting cultivation, an agricultural system where crops are grown in the ash from burning the collected, stacked branches that have been lopped and chopped from an pressure, vegetation is now chopped before it is fully regenerated, and the system seems to be starting to break down. A major task during my field stay was to describe the ecological (Stromgaard, 1984a) and economic (Stromgaard, 1984b) aspects of this change, but it soon became apparent that subsistence activity and social structure deeply influenced the village's economic activities.

My recent article on the ‘Development of the Swahili Language’ was written before the publication of Pastor Roehl's article on ‘The Linguistic Situation in East Africa’. The former, therefore, though published six months after the latter, contains no reference to it. But Pastor Roehl's interesting article requires a reply. With much that he says I am in agreement, and I do not fail to appreciate his scholarship, but I must here confine myself to points of criticism.

The research that led to the writing of this paper began with a puzzle. The four volumes of K. E. Laman's Kongo ethnography (1953–68) are based on texts written by BaKongo. Who were these men and why is there no explicit reference to them in the books? The lack of any indication of who wrote what and on what authority deprives this ethnography of much of its potential value (Janzen, 1972). In search of biographical information, I turned to the bulletin Minsamu Miayenge (MM), published by the Swedish Missionary Society (SMF) from 1892 onwards. From its pages emerged a clear sense of a group of men whose position in the nascent colonial order explained both their ethnographic ambitions and their subsequent disappearance from the record.

The Upper West Region in northern Ghana is a major source area of migrants who travel to southern Ghana seasonally or for longer periods. This has important implications for the lives and livelihoods of the migrants themselves and their relatives at home. Almost invariably the impact of out-migration on sending areas has been studied using ‘Western’ academic parameters. Little is known about how the people hemselves value the profound changes that migration causes in their societies. In this article, findings are presented from interviews with 204 rural household heads who were asked to express their opinion about the consequences of seasonal, long-term and return migration. A quantitative approach to qualitative data was adopted to differentiate between collective perceptions and individual opinions. It was found that almost all respondents were positive about the consequences of seasonal labour migration. They applauded its contribution to food security and considered it one of the few ways of gaining access to money and goods. The respondents were much more ambivalent about the consequences of long-term migration and return migration. On the positive side, they emphasized that out-migration reduced the pressure on farmland, and that some migrants attain higher living standards, both for themselves and for their relatives at home. On the negative side, many long-term migrants are not able to improve their livelihoods or lose their interest in the home community. The lack of support of some migrants is greatly lamented, especially if they later return empty-handed and become a burden on their relatives at home. The methodology used in this study yielded a holistic view of the consequences of migration on the source area as seen through the eyes of the home community