In my two books on the Nuer I gave some account of the importance of cattle in their economy and social life. I scarcely mentioned their role in religion as I did not wish to stray too far from the topics I was then discussing. I summarize very briefly what was said there before discussing their religious significance.

The proliferation and overlapping of spiritual beings is a feature of many religions. Saints in popular Catholicism and Vishnu's avatāras in Hinduism represent, in different ways, the possibility of spiritual beings that are simultaneously one and many, clusters or series of manifestations whose inner relationships are often not fully explained. Yoruba òrìṣà are in good company. However, the way in which multiple aspects of gods are made and maintained clearly varies from one religious repertoire to another. I suggest that it is important to look at the means or medium by which fractions of gods are established, in order to understand how the relationships between them are conceived. Yoruba òrìṣà can scarcely be apprehended without taking into account the specific textuality of the oral genres through which they are created, maintained and communicated with.

Cet article passe en revue les politiques agricoles de l'Ethiopie post-révolutionnaire et commente l'évolution des relations entre la paysannerie et l'Etat militaire dans les années 1975-1990. Grosso modo, la politique de l'Etat est rapidement passé d'un populisme simple, empreint de nationalisme, de la fin des années '70 à un stalinisme pur et dur. Rapidement l'article recense les différentes politiques rurales qui se succéderènt, telles que la collectivisation, la ‘villagisation’ et la relocalisation des populations, ainsi que l'effet de ces mesures sur la paysannerie. II met l'accent sur le fait que ces politiques empêchèrent l'institutionalisation de la réforme agraire populiste, politisèrent la programmation agricole au détriment de la production, et aggravèrent les relations entre l'Etat et le monde paysan. L'article s'intéresse également a la structure du pouvoir dans le milieu rural éthiopien au moment où il commençait à émerger des réformes radicales de la periode considérée. L'on voit que la nouvelle élite rurale qui se constitue, les paysans qui s'impliquent dans les organisations agricoles de masse, sont tous étroitment liés à l'appareil de l'Etat. Le durcissement de la politique gouvemementale d'une part et le mécontentement des paysans d'autre part conduisirent promptement à une sorte d'alliance maudite entre les forces gouvernementales au niveau local et l'élite rurale, engendrant une corruption à grand échelle. Et l'on voit que Pescalade rapide de l'insurrection paysanne, alors même qu'elle ne vise directement personne, est une conséquence de la détérioration des relations entre les paysans et l'Etat. La reforme du stalinisme agraire lancée en hâte en 1990, assez longuement étudiée dans la dernière partie de l'article, est arrivée beaucoup trop tard pour rallier la paysannerie.

We are fortunate in possessing enough good ethnographic material on Dahomey to attempt a reassessment in the light of later theoretical developments of the very interesting types of marriage reported there.

Analysis shows that three criteria are involved in the thirteen ‘types’ of marriage as given by Herskovits's Dahomean informants: (i) the method of arranging the marriage, including courtship and payment of the bride-wealth; (2) the status of the children; and (3) the relationship between man and wife—a constant which is, however, influenced by the distribution of rights and duties in regard to the children. The nature of the social groups concerned in the configuration of rights and duties connected with marriage is a point of great importance which does not appear in connexion with Herskovits's analysis of marriage; he divides these ‘types’ into a matrilineal and a patrilineal class on the basis of the status of the children. The starting-point of the following analysis is the transfer or non-transfer of puissance, or jural authority, through marriage—a criterion emphasized by Le Hérissé.

Tree cultivation and management are a common form of land use in high-potential areas of Kenya. While some of these practices are related to economic considerations, such as markets and prices for specific tree products, others were derived from or developed in parallel with customary practices. This article traces the origins of contemporary demarcation practices in Kikuyu areas of Kenya, involving the planting of trees in hedges and windrows, from their customary antecedents. Customary law prescribed clear mechanisms for demarcating land to which rights of use had been acquired. These mechanisms, characterised principally by the planting of particular trees on the boundaries of land holdings, were given limited recognition by the colonial administration, and were subsequently incorporated (without any clear awareness of their customary role) in the contemporary body of land law which emerged as a result of the land reforms of the early 1960s. Land reforms tended to obscure customary distinctions between rights of control to trees and rights of use and access, by equating rights of control with rights of ownership. The result has been that rights of use and access, which had been guaranteed to the landless under customary law, were, for the most part, eliminated.

In their accounts of the war in Angola, refugees from south-eastern Angola who now live in Rundu (Namibia) draw a distinction between warfare in the past and the events that happened in their region of origin after Angolan independence in 1975. Although they process their experiences through recounting history, these refugees maintain that the incidence of torture, mutilation and massive killing after 1975 has no precedent in the area's history and forms an entirely new development. This article investigates the reasons for this posited modernity of killing, torture and mutilation. The placement of the recent events outside local history is shown to represent an expression of outrage, anger and indignation at the army's treatment of the civilian population during the recent phase of the war. The outrage not only concerns the scale of the killing, torture and mutilation but is also linked with the issue of agency. The informants accuse UNITA army leaders in particular of wanton disregard for the lives and livelihood of their followers. They furthermore maintain that UNITA ordered ordinary soldiers to take part in killings which released powers the soldiers were unable to handle.

This article is about Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa (c. 1830s–1921) ofEdweso (Ejisu) in Asante, locally famous in tradition for her supposed leadership role in the last Anglo–Asante conflict (1900–1), and now internationally celebrated as an epitome of African womanhood and resistance to European colonialism. The article is in three parts. The first part examines the historical record concerning Yaa Asantewaa and sets this within the conflicted context of Edweso–Kumase relations before, during and after her lifetime. It also considers her role in the 1900–1 war and the nationalist constructions placed on that role by later Asante and other Ghanaian commentators. The second part examines the politics of the celebrations held in Asante in 2000 to mark the centenary of the last Anglo–Asante war and to honour Yaa Asantewaa for her part in it. Discussion here is concerned with the struggle between the ruling Asante elite and the Rawlings government in Accra to take possession of Yaa Asantewaa's reputation and to define and reinterpret it for contemporary political purposes. This was also a significant and revealing episode in the run–up to the Ghanaian national elections of 2000, in which J. A. Kufuor's Asante–based NPP finally ousted Rawlings's NDC which, in various incarnations, had ruled Ghana for twenty years. The third part examines the recent and ever–growing afterlife of Yaa Asantewaa in the age of globalization and the Internet. Attention is paid in particular to the constructions placed on her by Americans of African descent and to cultural expressions of her present status as, perhaps, the most famous of all pre–colonial African women. Finally, Asante reactions to the internationalization of Yaa Asantewaa are considered. In general, and using the case of Yaa Asantewaa, this article sets out to show that in Asante – as elsewhere in Africa – history is a continuous and vivid presence, constantly fought over, reworked and reconfigured to make the past serve new needs and aspirations.

The Cwezi-kubandwa cult was the most prominent form of religious belief in the interlacustrine region of East Africa during the pre-colonial period. It has long been regarded as providing ideological support to monarchical regimes across the region. Recently, though, scholars have contrasted the hegemonic ambitions of the state with evidence that Cwezi-kubandwa also provided opponents of pre-colonial authority structures with both ideological and organizational resources. In particular historians of the cult have hypothesized that Cwezi-kubandwa offered women a refuge from patriarchal political and domestic institutions, and that Cwezi-kubandwa was dominated by women in terms of its leadership, membership and idioms. This article challenges the new orthodoxy by suggesting that both traditional religion's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic roles may have been over-estimated. A re-examination of the Nyoro sources indicates instead that Cwezi-kubandwa was far from homogeneous and dominant, that kubandwa was not obviously oppositional to other, supposedly male-dominated, religious beliefs, and that Cwezi-kubandwa brought female exploitation as well as empowerment. These findings require either a re-evaluation of the nature of Cwezi-kubandwa across the region, or recognition that the cult was much more geographically diverse than has hitherto been believed.

Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. The dash was pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of the dash led to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.

Recent literature on the agrarian crisis in Africa questions the adequacy of a technocratic approach to explaining and alleviating the crisis. Bringing about sustained growth in African agricultural output and rural incomes will require more than a technological breakthrough. Farmers' capacity to employ improved technology and to increase output and investment depends on their access to productive resources—broadly defined to include not only human, financial and material inputs, but also the knowledge and institutional means to use them effectively. To advance knowledge of the causes of the agrarian crisis and strengthen capacity to develop meaningful measures to alleviate it, it is necessary to understand the conditions under which African farmers gain access to productive resources and the ways in which conditions of access affect resource use and agricultural performance.

The village-group of Nike occupies an area of some 200 square miles to the immediate north-east of Enugu, capital of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. It comprises 24 villages with a total population of 9,600, a figure which gives the average density of the group as 48 per square mile—one of the lowest in Ibo country.

Traditions in neighbouring groups, as well as in Nike itself, affirm that before the advent of the British Administration the people of Nike were the principal slave-traders in northern Ibo-land. The first mention of the group in the history of colonial Nigeria appears in an account submitted by the Assistant District Officer, Obubra, of some exploratory journeys undertaken amongst the northern Ibo in the year 1905. Remarking, with the true empire-builder's sang-froid, that ‘the whole area seems relatively quiet and well-disposed…cannibalism and human sacrifice are more or less general’, the officer encloses an interesting sketch-map of the north-eastern section of Ibo-land which shows the Nike group to have been the main trading cross-roads of the whole of this area.

This article examines the historical development of a particular cultural institution, the Yoruba cult of twins, with a view to providing an added perspective into the working of the institution as it exists today. After a brief reference to some of the evidence supporting the view that the cult represents a reversal of the former practice of twin infanticide I shall consider the possible origins of the cult and attempt to outline the process of reversal leading to its later development.

Cet article examine deux périodes dans l'historiographie et l'ethnograhie des LoDagaa du nord du Ghana et analyse les similarités entre ces deux périodes. A la fin des années 20, l'institution de chef de clan a été écrit dans l'histoire des LoDagaa par les administrateurs coloniaux, seulement deux décennies après qu'ils aient euxmêmes créé cette institution dans une société qu'ils avaient une fois considérée comme étant déprivée d'autorité politique. Au début des années 30, les administrateurs coloniaux ont créé une fiction historique, à savoir que les chefs avaient toujours existé parmi les LoDagaa, malgré l'opinion des premiers officiers, qui étaient de l'avis qu'il n'y avait pas eu de chefs avant l'arrivée des Britanniques. Les administrateurs avaient besoin de finasser avec le passé non pas afin de convaincre les LoDagaa de la légitimité des chefs, mais afin de continuer à gouverner par l'intermédiaire des chefs une fois que le pouvoir indirect avait été introduit. Les manoeuvres politiques coloniales avaient été rendues indigoènes afin de survivre sous les termes du pouvoir indirect. Le finassement du passé a légué des ambiguités et contradictions qui sont évidentes dans les attitudes contemporaines envers la position des chefs parmi les LoDagaa.

Parallèlement, dans les années 70 et 80 le clergé indigoène parmi les LoDagaa, qui avait remplacé les missonaires qui lui avait précédé dans les années 60, commença à réexaminer la nature de Dieu dans la pensée religieuse indigène afin de rétrécir la distance entre la culture des LoDagaa et le catholisme. L'idée d'acculturation qui s'était développée après le deuxième Conseil du Vatican fut à la base de cette démarche. Les prêtres LoDagaa ont réexaminé la religion indigoène et découvert l'existence d'une croyance en une divinité unique et de sa vénération, qui avait été négligée par les premiers missionaires et ethnographes. Ces derniers avaient soutenu qu'il n'y avait qu'une notion diffuse et inutile d'un Dieu absolu dans la culture et pensées des LoDagaa.

Le Dieu qui avait été auparavant inutile fut répatrié, comme s'il avait été exilé par des premiers observateurs d'une manière et dans des circonstances similaires à l'invention des chefs en tant que réalité pré-coloniale. Tandis que des revisions politiques ultérieures étaient faites par des officiers coloniaux, avec le consentement de leurs chefs coloniaux, inclinés à changer la culture et l'histoire des LoDagaa par souci de commodité administrative, les révisionistes d'après étaient apparemment plus incliné à défendre et préserver la culture indigoène plutôt que de la changer. Cependant, la notion du culte de Dieu comme ayant existé avant les missionaires est autant une fiction historique que l'idée de l'existence des chefs dans la période précoloniale.

Les études de cas ont été effectuées par les auteurs de cet article en pays malinke, guro, gbã (ou gagu) et bete à l'ouest du Bandama, baule à l'est. Ces études ne sont pas toujours exhaustives et homogènes eu égard au sujet du présent article, et, de plus, elles concernent essentiellement les parties forestière et préforestière de la vallée du Bandama.

There is a long history of migration among low-income families in sub-Saharan Africa, in which (usually young, often male) members leave home to seek their fortune in what are perceived to be more favourable locations. While the physical and virtual mobility practices of such stretched families are often complex and contingent, maintaining contact with distantly located close kin is frequently of crucial importance for the maintenance of emotional (and possibly material) well-being, both for those who have left home and for those who remain. This article explores the ways in which these connections are being reshaped by increasing access to mobile phones in three sub-Saharan countries – Ghana, Malawi and South Africa – drawing on interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research from twenty-four sites, ranging from poor urban neighbourhoods to remote rural hamlets. Stories collected from both ends of stretched families present a world in which the connectivities now offered by the mobile phone bring a different kind of closeness and knowing, as instant sociality introduces a potential substitute for letters, cassettes and face-to-face visits, while the rapid resource mobilization opportunities identified by those still at home impose increasing pressures on migrant kin.

The practice of pawning children, whose labour served as interest paid on loans, was common in precolonial and early colonial Ekiti Yoruba society. Known as , these children would work for the lender until their kinsmen had repaid the debts they had incurred. British colonial officials came to view this practice as a form of slavery and eventually outlawed it. This paper considers the life history of one older man who worked as an in a small Ekiti Yoruba town, focusing on his memories of child-pawning and how this practice has been interpreted by his children. The paper then examines the process whereby people's changed thinking about the moral bases of pawning parallels contemporary reassessments of the practice of child-fostering by young parents, some of whom claim that it is ‘like slavery’. How subsequent generations of townspeople remember slavery, child-pawning and, more recently, child-fostering, have implications for reproduction, since what it means to have the number of children who can be ‘raised well’ may contribute to social and economic pressures to limit family size. This study of memories of pawning and child-fostering, which support reduced fertility, underscores the ways that distinctive historical experiences have had different consequences for how reproduction is perceived and practised.

The indigenous crafts of West Africa are so primitive in comparison with the mechanized industries of Europe that they may easily be omitted from schemes for future progress. Plans have been suggested for the extensive development of backward areas such as Nigeria as part of the post-war aim of the expansion of world trade. Large measures of social reconstruction, together with the starting of new industries and the improvement of old have been advocated in order that poverty may be lessened and the equipment of public services increased. Of many of these schemes there is no doubt that, if they were possible of achievement, industrial organizations would be set up that would have no relationship to African life as it is now. Experts in materials and industrial processes are not usually interested in sociological questions, nor are they accustomed to take them into account. They are concerned with efficiency, and have only to satisfy themselves that there is a sufficient supply of labour which is capable of manipulating machinery. Experts in the science of economics, for their part, have to decide whether there will be a market for the products of new or improved industries and therefore must necessarily examine some aspects of the life of the people in the area which they are studying. But the predominating factors of advertisement and price enable them to disregard deeper questions of cultural disintegration. Yet thorny questions would eventually arise upon which Africans would have decided opinions: such as the use of land for the exploitation of minerals, and the ownership and control of industries. The supply of labour might at first appear to Africans an innocuous, even a beneficial function, but later it might be discovered that the movement of workers into industrial towns was undermining the whole basis of their society

Observation of the way in which local groups develop in a given society must ideally take place over a longer period than most researchers remain active in the field, particularly if changes over time are to be charted adequately. But longer-term studies remain relatively scarce and there are obvious difficulties in the way of them: younger anthropologists are often reluctant to look again at a society that has already been carefully studied, especially if the scholar who carried out the earlier field-work still survives; and changing theoretical perspectives and field-work techniques make it hard to match data from different periods. Bearing in mind the need to overcome these difficulties, we combine in this paper field data collected in the course of expeditions spanning more than forty years in an effort to trace the development of an important Kgatla grouping, the ward.

African religious history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been dominated by the rapid growth of Islam and Christianity. This has been especially true of the Senegambia region of West Africa, which has witnessed the adoption of Islam by approximately 80 per cent of the region's populace and the development of a small, but influential Christian minority. Among the Diola of the Casamance region of Senegal, Islam and Christianity have both enjoyed rapid growth. The approximately half million Diola, however, include the largest number of adherents of their traditional religion within the Senegambian region. They are sedentary rice farmers and are usually described as acephalous peoples. While Muslims and Christians have been in contact with the Diola since the fifteenth century there were few conversions during the pre-colonial era (Baum, 1986). During the colonial era Islam became the dominant religion among the Diola on the north shore of the Casamance river, and Christianity also attracted a considerable following (Mark, 1985). Among the south shore communities neither Islam nor Christianity became important until after the Second World War. Seeing the increased momentum of recent years, many observers are confident that the south shore Diola will follow the northern example and convert to Islam or Christianity. Louis Vincent Thomas, the doyen of Diola ethnographers, described Diola traditional religion as ‘a false remedy to a very real crisis; fetishism will become a temporary response that will be quickly swept away by another attempt, even larger and undoubtedly more profound: Islam and perhaps we could add, Christianity’ (Thomas, 1967: 225; translations are my own, unless otherwise stated).

In dryland West Africa, policy makers have come to acknowledge livestock mobility as a sound adaptation strategy for variable dryland climate regimes. In Mali, the national government is taking measures to support mobility in the form of grazing zones, conflict management mechanisms and, most notably, livestock passage corridors. These corridors are part of a long and contentious history of territorialization in agrarian West Africa. This paper demonstrates through a comparative case study that livestock corridors can accomplish the agro-ecological objective of improving herd mobility but they also have unforeseen political impacts that depend on socio-spatial relations between farmers and herders. By historicizing corridors and contextualizing them within the host–stranger relationship that is found throughout the region, this paper reveals the different meanings that boundary-making processes take on for autochthonous farmers and mobile herders. In an area where ethnic Fulani herders have settled independently from farming communities, the latter have rejected a proposed corridor. In contrast, farmers in areas where herders are seasonal guests have supported the same measure. These divergent outcomes do not depend simply on different levels of resource competition, but, instead, on the ways in which corridors and their boundaries become inscribed in perceived land claims and power relations between competing groups. These findings have broader implications concerning the interactive changes occurring between autochthonous rights and decentralized democratic institutions in sub-Saharan West Africa.