Most of the recent literature on democratisation in Africa has paid insufficient attention to popular understandings of democracy and the local reception of democratic practices. This article examines the articulation of the concept of democracy with existing socio-political conceptions in contemporary Buganda. The standard translation of the word ‘democracy’ into Luganda tends to assimilate it to a local political cosmology which emphasises the values of justice, civility and open communication between rulers and subjects, and involves a conception of sociopolitical hierarchy modelled on the system of clans and kingship. Key ideological features of this conception include its construction from the bottom up, the singularity of power, regulated competition and nested solidarities. Such liberal democratic practices and institutions as elections, political parties and representation are not part of the local definition of democracy. In fact, political parties are widely condemned as antithetical to democratic governance. At a more pragmatic level, however, some of the democratisation initiatives of the current Ugandan government have given rise to a new popular allegiance to democratic elections. These reforms are unusual in that they resonate significantly with local political values and conceptions. The article suggests that more attention should be devoted to the coherence of democratisation initiatives with local socio-political conceptions.

Internationally, war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) is regarded as an instance of violent conflict driven by economic factors (attempts to control the mining of alluvial diamonds). Fieldwork (2000–01) in rural areas recovering from war suggests a very different picture. War victims and combatants from different factions stress the importance of political decay, corruption, injustice and the social exclusion of young people. Other studies confirm the picture. There is broadly based discussion in rural communities about how to address the injustices held to have been responsible for the war. It seems in line with wider debate about human rights. Are people being converted to international ideals? Applying a neo-Durkheimian perspective, the article shows that this discourse about rights is a product of local social changes brought about by the war itself. The article concludes by asking how it might be consolidated by rights-oriented reconstruction activity. Human rights in Sierra Leone are as much a local development as an imposed change. In this respect the study confirms the importance of local agency already argued by anthropologists who have studied the process of conversion to world religions.

This article addresses the question of whether the aménagement/gestion de terroir approach, as it is currently being promoted by government, and. development organisations in the French-speaking countries of Sahelian West Africa, is compatible with the realties that agro-pastoralists in those countries face day-to-day. It is particularly concerned with three characteristics of life in the Sahel that have important implications for how agrarian populations manage resources, and whether the terroir approach, which, aims ostensibly to increase the effectiveness of local-level natural resource management, addresses or fails to address these characteristics. First, the Sahel is characterised by considerable agro-ecological diversity and socio-economic differentiation. Second, Sahelan populations are often very mobile as a result, of their efforts to deal with changing opportunities and constraints that affect their pursuit of a livelihood. And, third, Sahelian populations commonly use multiple strategies for risk management, including, but. certainly not limited to, those which focus on the terroir villageois.

In exploring; this question the term ‘action space’ Is used to describe the geographical and temporal distribution of the combination of more or Jess viable options that, smallholder agriculturalists and pastoralists exploit, as they pursue their livelihood. The concept of action space is more inclusive and more flexible than the concept of terroir villageois; and, as such, offers greater promise for understanding and addressing empirical realities in. the Sahel.

The development of elite associations has been a consequence of the growth of multi-partyism and the weakening of authoritarian state control in Cameroon in the 1990s. The attachment of electoral votes and rights of citizenship to belonging to ethnicised regions has encouraged the formal distinction between ‘natives’ and ‘strangers’ in the creation of a politics of belonging. The article argues that this development has also led to the replacement of political parties at the local level by ethnicised elite associations as prime movers in regional and national politics.

When conducting medical field research in a Luo village in western Kenya, my colleagues and I were occasionally suspected of being blood-thieves, locally called kachinja. The article contextualizes these blood-stealing accusations within the practices of medical research that prompted them, and within the local historical experiences which, I shall argue, they refer to. Further, it examines two social situations, in which blood-stealing accusations were raised against me and people who were in contact with me, in order to show how the kachinja idiom is used in social practice, as part of long-term social processes as well as of momentary situations, within local patterns of relatedness. These observations show how global structures and processes are articulated and moulded in a particular locality through idioms that carry memories of individual as well as collective, historical experiences, and how they are enacted by people within webs of contemporary local social relations.

The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute is attempting a comparative study of the tribes of British Central Africa and of the processes of change affecting their lives to-day. Social anthropologists have been sent to tribes selected both for the variety of forms in their indigenous social organization and for the different ways in which they have been absorbed in the modern world-system. Though we, of the Institute's staff, are spread over thousands of square miles, and have had very different trainings, we have tried to collect our data on comparable bases and to study similar problems. This short symposium, which opens what we have come to consider a crucial problem, is the first-fruits of our collaboration.

This article explores the strategies of acquiring and legitimating power in Ghana, taking the example of three ‘big men’ from the north, a paramount chief, a mine captain and a politician in the making. After offering some observations on the recent public debate on the (im)morality of power and ‘bigness’, it outlines the biographies of these three ‘big men’ and analyses how they skilfully combine different registers of power and legitimacy. It then analyses the strategies of legitimation and grounds of moral judgement which depend, at least to a certain degree, on the particular relationship of the ‘judge’ with the ‘big man’ in question. The article concludes by discussing the common ‘grammar’ that seems to regulate the debates on ‘bigness’, morality and interest.

Studies of articulations between large- and small-scale mining have overlooked the subterranean dimension of extraction and ignored how mining companies and artisanal miners cohabit in places with long histories of small-scale mining and are affected by their different capacities to access specific mineral deposits. Drawing on a study of two gold concessions in Ghana, this article focuses on three factors that influence modalities of governing access to gold in such sites: the stage of a mining operation, the local socio-political context, and the characteristics of the subterranean structure. We call the combination and interplay of these factors ‘in-depth geopolitics’. The article shows how this interplay affects the strategies used by both large- and small-scale miners to work out arrangements of cohabitation and ways of governing access, control and maintenance to gold in spatial settings where both types of gold mining occur side by side. By tracing ethnographically the variations of ‘in-depth geopolitics’, this article critically engages with ideas of subterranean sovereignty, mining enclaves, state–company–community relations, and the socio-spatial characteristics of mining concessions.

The present article is intended as the first of two contributions to the economic and social– but above all to the intellectual– history of the West African forest kingdom of Asante or Ashanti (now located in the Republic of Ghana). Both papers will attempt to pull together and to situate in a ‘mentalist’ framework a number of recent and confessedly disparate research findings concerning a cluster of concepts, ideas and beliefs that, merely for the sake of brevity at this point, I will assign simply to the embracing ‘neutral’ rubric of general transformations in the ideology (or ideologies) of wealth. The first article will be concerned with developments in Asante society up to the close of the nineteenth century (defined here interpretatively rather than in strictly chronological terms); its successor will concentrate on a highly detailed examination of a sequence of crucially telling events in the early colonial period, and upon selected developments thereafter in the twentieth century. The articles are designed and intended to be read sequentially; the first, it is hoped, will assist in making sense of the significantly denser context (and more detailed content) of the second.

This paper had its genesis in the recent thoughtful and stimulating article by Robin Horton, on African conversion; the core of his argument is summarized below. Horton's evidence is chiefly drawn from Christian African experience, though he seeks to generalize from it for both Islam and Christianity. My specific purpose here is to look more closely at the phenomenon of Muslim conversion, and to see what light this may throw on Horton's argument. In particular, he has, I think, over-estimated the survival, admittedly in considerably developed forms, of original African elements of religion; and more important, has under-estimated the willingness and ability of Africans to make even rigorous Islam and Christianity their own. My other, general, purpose is to suggest that such Muslim/Christian comparisons may considerably enlarge our perspectives upon black Africa. The comparative approach is extended further, I hope not rashly, with brief considerations of conversion in the ancient world, and of the effects of literacy.

The Republic of Benin has often been cited as a model democracy in the African context. After years of pressure from bilateral aid donors, particularly France and Germany, municipal elections were held in 2002. This article addresses three related questions. How have free presidential and parliamentary elections affected political dynamics at the local level, especially in the rural areas where most people live? What do rural people think about the change of national regime? How will decentralisation affect local government? Based on empirical research in rural Benin, it shows that démocratisation means more of the same hybrid and composite form of local government. The boundaries between the state and private organisations (including Northern NGOs), and between the national and local levels, remain blurred. Local political arenas are more fragmented than ever, and informal politics flourish. This not only dilutes power at the local level, as different veto powers block one another, it entails constant negotiation between those involved, making political processes less predictable and local political institutions less accountable. Decentralisation is only making matters worse.

In the Sherlock Holmes stories Scotland Yard famously does not deploy science or make use of all those studies of blood and ash and bone which Holmes himself had pioneered. But the Yard is never so clumsy as when the occult seems to be involved – with suspected vampires, spectral dogs, tribal fetishes. The Yard's combination of ignorance, scepticism and credulity is shown to be the very worst of all attitudes to adopt. How much things have changed in one way and how little in another. Scotland Yard is now incredibly scientific. The assumed ritual murder of ‘Adam’, the African boy whose torso was found in the Thames, has allowed a dazzling exhibition of what scientific method can now achieve. On the other hand police interpretations of the African occult still combine ignorance, scepticism and credulity.

African economies have long been a matter of concern to anthropologists, not least in the pages of Africa. These economies are situated, somewhat contradictorily, between global settings of financialized capitalism on the one hand and impoverished local arenas where cash-based economic transfers predominate on the other. The more such economies appear to be tied to wider global arenas and operations that place them beyond the reach of ordinary people, the more necessary it is to explore the logics and decisions that tie them inexorably to specific everyday settings.

All over present-day Africa witch-finders seem to appear, as it were from nowhere, flourish for a time, and then disappear. Either it is some individual of unusual personality in his community who announces a magic remedy for human sufferings, and so obtains a following, or else it is a more or less organized band of wonderworkers which crosses the border from some neighbouring territory with all the kudos attached to the foreign and the strange. Among these latter the celebrated Bamucapi, who recently swept from Nyasaland into Northern Rhodesia and later reached Southern Rhodesia and the Congo, are an interesting example. The actual origin of this movement is difficult to discover, but I watched it at its height in the Bemba country of N.E. Rhodesia in the summer of 1934, and I want in this article to describe very shortly the methods of these witch-finders, and to try to account for their success.

Cet article consiste en une série de réflections sur la sexualité en Afrique de l'Est, formulées en réponse aux théories avancées par J. C. Cadwell et ses collaborateurs. L'article soutient que leurs points de vu ne réussissent pas à saisir la manière dont les restreintes et restrictions sexuelles forment la base de l'ordre moral dans les sociétés de l'Afrique de l'Est. Leur modèle d'un système sexuel africain distinct insiste trop sur la descendance d'une facon qui méthodiquement n'attribue pas assez d'importance au mariage et réduit les cultes ancestraux à avoir pour seule préoccupation la reproduction et la continuité de la lignée. En contraste, cet article suggère, en renvoyant aux Gisus d'Ouganda, que leurs croyances ancestrâles dans leurs formes générates sont associées avec l'ensemble des régies de conduite visant à établir un mode de vie social correct, et que celles-ci ne sont pas basées sur la lignée mais sur la sexualité et son contrôle. Vu sous cet angle, la plupart des cultures de l'Afrique de l'Est peuvent être étiquetées “des cultures de respect”, par le fait qu'elles considèrent leur ordre social comme étant enraciné dans le respect, un respect qui implique de la déférence, une attention aux convenances indiquées, et avant tout de la retenue. Ces règies de conduite rendent la sexualité problématique. Cet article se tourne ensuite vers le pouvoir sacré attribué au coït même. Ceci est adressé en examinant la métaphore du mélange des sangs qui est largement utiliséé pour parler des rapports sexuels en Afrique de l'Est. La dernière section de cet article prête attention au contraste entre la consanguinité et l'alliance et l'idée que l'union entre l'homme et la femme sert de prototype pour des rapports contractuels.

Recent studies of African pastoralism have come more and more to concentrate on its political economy and to note the increasing social and economic differentiation occurring within pastoral societies. As Swift and Maliki write of West Africa: ‘Since the 1973 drought, there has been an increasing process of proletarianization in the countryside which has particularly affected herders, who are in many places being transformed from independent rural producers into cowboys herding other people's animals on land they no longer control’ (1984: 2). In Kenya this process has become increasingly apparent since independence, as pastoralism has become dominated by a town-based elite (see Dahl, 1979a; Little, 1983, 1985a and b; Ensminger, 1984). In this article I trace the origins of a new kind of pastoralism in northern Kenya, and argue that poverty and dependence is becoming a permanent way of life to many pastoralists.

A school of thought sees the African communal system of land ownership as an inherently conservative arrangement which does not adapt or adapts only slowly to economic opportunity and, therefore, acts as a constraint on development. However, this view, which partly underlies the call for radical land reform measures such as nationalisation, is, generally, not borne out by the performance of the Ghanaian system as assessed on the basis of historical evidence and the findings of a recent survey of peasant oil palm farming. In the nineteenth century, when there was a substantial increase in demand for land for the oil palm against a background of relative land abundance in Ghana, the system responded with land sales, tenancy and other temporary transfers which allowed enterprising migrant farmers, notably Krobo farmers, access to land, while sufficient parcels were retained for use by the communal owners, including the Akyem people, the major vendors of land for oil palm and cocoa farming in the forest zone. This response pattern was repeated in subsequent periods characterised by greater demand for land for the cultivation of cocoa, which supplanted the oil palm as the premier export early in the present century. Further evidence of the adaptability of the communal system is provided by its response to the renewed demand for land in respect of the remarkable post-1970 oil palm boom. A recent sample study of oil palm farming in the Kade, Twifo Praso and Pretsea - Adum Banso areas in the heart of the oil palm belt found that the communal system had been responding to the renewed demand for land associated with the crop's growing profitability, mainly by temporary transfer arrangements to the almost total exclusion of outright sale, apparently to protect the sovereign interest of the community of owners and to secure land for their own use in the wake of rapidly expanding population, urbanisation and attendant increasing land scarcity. But the communal system as traditionally organised continues to be characterised by the insecurity of the tenure granted, especially to stranger farmers, while there are signs that the number of inequitable tenancies is on the increase. These problems might be minimised and land development enhanced by greater enforcement of the new land title registration law, and byflexibletenancy and other land-holding regulatory measures within the general framework of a free market system.

The study and application of household coping have largely been confined to the problems of famine and food insecurity. Based on field insights from West Africa, this paper argues that understanding how households cope and allocate resources in times of crisis is of immense value to a broad array of development interventions. It also introduces a conceptual framework that evaluates household coping in exogenous and endogenous contexts. The application of this framework may provide a more informed approach to development intervention design, implementation and targeting that is sensitive to the differential needs and experiences of rural households and communities.

Studies of born-again Churches in Africa generally conclude that they help members embrace modernity. Their teachings provide the ideological bases for members to embrace changing material realities. Such studies are rather silent on the demands of this ideological frame on women and men. This article looks at two Zimbabwean women's organisations, Gracious Woman and Precious Stones, affiliated to Zimbabwe Assemblies of God in Africa and Family of God respectively. Using ethnographic methods, it argues that such organisations teach women domesticity and romanticise female subordination as glorifying God. They discourage individualism by exalting motherhood, wifehood and domesticity as service to God. These demands emerge at a time when life is changing drastically in urban areas as women get educated and enter the professions. Economically a small but growing number of black families have experienced some upward mobility—something these Churches encourage through ‘the gospel of prosperity’. Although accumulation and upward mobility free families from (traditional) kin obligations which the Churches encourage, women are discouraged from resisting the patriarchal yoke even when material circumstances make it possible. The organisations repackage patriarchy as Christian faith. The article concludes that if these Churches are concerned with managing modernity, then they see modernity as female subordination.

In this paper I describe the band organization of the !Kung Bushmen. The !Kung word n//a besi was translated by the interpreters as ‘people who live together’. I use the word band for n//a besi, meaning by band, in this connexion, the grouping in !Kung social organization which is above the family grouping. It is a grouping precisely of the people who live together.