The distribution of raffia cloth among the Lele raises two questions. One, mainly ethnographic, is that of the various functions served in the course of its circulation from hand to hand. In answering this, the second question arises. In some aspects raffia cloth seems to perform monetary roles. Is it to be classed as a type of primitive money? In the widest sense it seems to be an imperfect type of money, performing in a restricted manner some of the main functions of money: it acts as a store and a standard of value; it is given as payment for services and sometimes used as a medium of exchange. It is not, however, the principal, or usual, means of distribution in the economy. I hope that a discussion of the short-comings of Lele raffia as a form of money may be interesting to others working in societies which are similarly on the verge of a market economy.

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).

One of the pillars of traditional Kalahari culture is the Ekine Men's Society, otherwise known as Sekiapu—‘The Dancing People’. But although many Kalahari talk of Ekine as ‘one of our highest things’, it is an institution remarkably difficult to pin down and define.

On the face of it, Ekine serves many disparate ends. At a superficial glance, it appears as a religious institution, designed to solicit the help of the water spirits1 through invocations and dramatic representations of them by masquerades. A second glance suggests that these masquerades are recreational as much as religious in their intent. Yet again, many of the masquerades seem to be important status-symbols. And finally, Ekine often appears as a significant organ of government. A day-to-day description of the society's activities in any one community would reveal these aspects as tightly woven or tangled together. In this paper, however, it will be our task not only to unravel them, but to attempt a distinction between those which are essential features of the institution, and those which are incidental.

The formal labour markets and economies of many cities in sub-Saharan Africa have been very weak for decades and this has led to significant adaptations in the nature of the livelihoods of most urban households. The lack of formal and reasonably paid jobs has also had a strong impact on population growth in cities, although this is often not recognized. This article reviews some of these trends and illustrates them with case study material from Harare, Zimbabwe. There, many urban residents have increasingly struggled to get by and their perceptions of the city and their future within it show a strong negative trend. Links to rural areas and the possibility of making livelihoods there in the future have become more important. These adaptations build on the long history of rural–urban linkages in sub-Saharan Africa but contemporary practices, including patterns of circular migration, are influenced by the harsh realities of African urban economies. The decisions and future plans of some migrants may not, therefore, fit with their aspirations – and the degree and nature of this mismatch are influenced by factors such as gender, age and position in the urban household, and links to rural areas. It is suggested that it helps to analyse the consequent migration patterns in terms of a framework in which migrants’ decisions to stay in the city or leave it are conceptualized as either willing or reluctant.

The paper examines the changing shapes of territories in the Horn of Africa and the discourses which legitimise these different shapes. It starts with the ‘Horn’ itself, the different ways to delineate it, and the interests behind these. Then Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the de facto independent Somaliland are discussed and their justifications for being examined. These justifications are found not to follow the same pattern. The criteria for inclusion or exclusion of populations or territories differ and form a rich reservoir for future conflict. On a lower level, that of regional states comprised in a major unit, the Oromo of Ethiopia, the largest ethnic group in the Horn of Africa, are discussed in some detail. Accounts about how the Oromo have come to be and who is to be regarded as an Oromo are found to be mutually conflicting. In the last part, international and transnational relations in the Horn of Africa are looked at. Major groupings cross-cutting state boundaries are formed by states forming alliances with ethnic movements, opposition forces or warlords in neighbouring states or ex-states, against other states or spheres of power. Publicity of such alliances is kept low and few efforts seem to be made to give them an ideological basis or historical justifications. The logic followed in these cases seems to be simply that the enemy of an enemy is a potential friend.

Cattle raiding is iconic of the colonial frontier in Southern African history and historiography. Incorporating settlers and Africans as aggressors and victims alike, archives and ethnohistories depict raiding as thieving, subverting authority, and inciting conflict. Despite the in-depth anthropological attention given to ‘Bushman raiding’ and frontier commandos, comparatively little work has focused on the social and cultural function of cattle raiding within chiefdoms: that is, examining cattle raiding as socially embedded rather than simply transgressing authority and property ownership. This article explores how these narratives of ‘disorder’ have been constructed, and some alternative perspectives on nineteenth-century cattle raiding as a social institution. Through vignettes drawing on archival, archaeological, ethnographic and folkloric evidence, this article offers glimpses of what narratives of the recent past could look like if views of raiding-as-disorder were revisited and revised. I draw attention to where raids were illegal versus illicit, the role of cattle as social agents, and the logic underpinning designations of raiding as resistance. Developing a view of raiding as social practice permits us to interrogate archival perceptions of raiders as outlaws and raids as analogues for warfare, thus enabling more nuanced investigations of conflict in Southern Africa's past.

This article complicates internationally circulating origin myths that alternately link hip hop to West African griot traditions or highlight the global resonance of its roots in the US inner city. I argue that such generalizing narratives potentially obscure how complex understandings of traditional cultural production inform local engagements with hip hop in Africa, and advocate instead for ethnographically generated interpretive frameworks that enable alternative, locally grounded analyses of hip hop cultures. In doing so, I examine the particularity of Senegalese invocations of origin myths to ask how local and global histories are reimagined through discourse about musical practice. Based on their understandings of tradition as something that precedes, is transformed in, and remains integral to contemporary urban life in Senegal, underground hip hoppers conflate the local popular genre mbalax with griot practice, contrasting it with hip hop as a modern music born from experiences of urban struggle that resonate with their own realities. I demonstrate that Senegalese hip hop practice is defined not only through political engagement or social action but also through and against local musical practices that performatively re-inscribe the political and social systems that limit and contain youth.

While from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century there was a lasting and elastic demand for slaves in Central Africa, the practices by which they were acquired had to be adapted to the physical and human terrain, the technologies available and the socio-cultural postures of the predator and prey societies. In this paper, I sketch the changing patterns of these variables in six slaving zones in and around the northern Mandara Mountains. Using historical sources, information from the diary of Hamman Yaji, a Fulani chief and active slaver, and data gathered in the course of ethnographic research in three of these zones by myself and colleagues, I show that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the extraction of slaves from particular sub-regions within these zones was highly variable, as is evident in the interfaces between the decentralized prey societies and the predatory states. Besides providing fresh perspectives on slaving and evidence for evaluating the constructions of historians, such studies open the way for research on the mutual accommodations to slaving affecting the societies and cultures of both prey and predators.

The subject of Igbo traditional religion has aroused a considerable amount of interest among scholars in the past few decades. The works of early ethnographers like Talbot (1926), Meek (1937) and Basden (1938) eloquently spelt out some of its principal themes. Among these are what we may refer to as the three major pillars of Igbo traditional religion, namely the Supreme Being, divinities and ancestors.

One of the problems with most of the existing studies is the tendency to generalize for the whole of Igboland on the basis of evidence which is valid for some Igbo areas only. Given the Igbo type of political system which is characterized by the existence of a very large number of autonomous communities, it is not surprising that there is a greater amount of heterogeneity in the religious system than is the case in the centralized kingdoms of pre-colonial Africa. To understand the diversity of Igbo religious beliefs and practices there is an imperative need for the study of the religious systems of specific Igbo communities.

The ethnography of Kenya and Tanganyika presents a problem of great significance to the study of culture history and social organization: why have some Bantu-speaking peoples adopted age-group organization and associated rituals from their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region have not? That this borrowing has occurred in some cases is suggested by the extant ethnographic literature. Wagner states that the age-group organization of the Vugusu of Nyanza ‘corresponds closely to the age-group organization of the Nilo-Hamitic tribes with which it is obviously historically connected’. In discussing the pairing of Vugusu circumcision groups, he says: ‘We have here a case of a formal feature borrowed from a group of neighbouring but structurally quite different tribes which has not been functionally integrated into the structure of the recipient society.’ The Kikuyu, whose age groups are of great importance in their social structure and may antedate their contact with the Nilo-Hamitic Masai, recognize a division among themselves between members of the ‘Kikuyu guild’, who practise one set of age-grade ceremonies, and members of the ‘Masai guild’, most of whom live in south-west Kikuyuland near Masailand and conduct different ceremonies. Lambert states that the Kikuyu age-regiments alternate between those of the right hand (tatane) and those of the left hand (gitienye).

This article is a reinterpretation of blood brotherhood in three East African societies based on a reading of three ethnographic accounts, Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, Roscoe on the Baganda and Beidelman on the Kaguru. It argues against a construction of blood brotherhood as a single institution with one meaning, suggesting instead that the blood pact should be seen as a mechanism by which men formed ties of filiation with other men, in part on the basis of the kinds of relationships they idealised. In this way, blood was sometimes a magical substance and sometimes a fluid of reproductive power. This article suggests that scholars should look not only at the fluid of the blood pact but also at the part of the body from which blood is taken, in order to see the kinds of relationships men sought to establish with one another. Thus when the blood of blood brotherhood was taken from near the navel, or the chest, it suggested the intimacy of uterine ties, or the closeness of infant and nursing mother. When blood was mediated by cooked meat, it suggested a dilution of the power of blood and its association with the fluids of biological relationship.

The biochemist and the anthropologist look at native food problems from very different points of view, but it seems clear that research on African diets will be of scientific value only if there is co-operation between the two. Without chemical analysis it is impossible to know the composition of any particular native diet. Without a knowledge of the customs and language of any tribal area the necessary facts cannot be collected. The present article describes an attempt at co-operation along these lines, based on a study of the diet of a Northern Rhodesian tribe.

Une comparaison de données du ‘Western Nigeria’ (la région Yoruba) de 1968/69 et de 1988 indique que les methodes et organisations de travail des petits fermiers mâles sont restées pratiquement inchangées dans la masse globale de travail ainsi qu'en ce qui concerne le travail par tâche particulière. Ce constat paraissait surprenant, étant donné qué la région étudiée se trouve dans l'arrière-pays producteur de vivres des villes Ibadan, Lagos, Abeokuta à croissance rapide. L'agriculture a changé de plusiers façons réagissant à la demande plus grande des villes et aux moyens de transport améliorés, y compris en augmentant la taille et l'envergure des fermes des fermiers mâles. D'autres formes de récoltes, une plus grande utilisation de main d'œuvre payé et une productivité légèrement accrue ne semblent etre responsable qu'en partie pour cet état de choses. Une analyse des donnees du travail en termes d'organisation du temps, plutôt qu'en termes de temps tout court, indique que les fermiers tendent à consacrer des périodes plus longues de journées consécutives à la même tâche, et ceci est lié à son tour à la réorganisation frappante de la vie cérémoniale traditionelle et à la vie politique et d'association, intensifiée pendant les weekends.

The name of Bushman has been given to a small and rapidly JL diminishing race of African natives who were, and in places still are, scattered over the central and southern parts of the continent from the Cape to near the Equator. They seem to be the survivors of very early inhabitants of this portion of the world, and were certainly here before the allied race of Hottentots or any Bantu-speaking people arrived.

Much has been said about the presence of China in Africa over the last fifteen years, with, for the most part, these discussions affirming either a ‘for’ or ‘against’ position. Working from a micro-level perspective, this ethnographic article looks at how the everyday associations of ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in Kenya are increasing, engendering expansive signifiers that proliferate as Kenya's relationship with China deepens. Although I anchor this argument in the local discursive practices that shape the proposed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)–Westlands expressway, I trace how references to China and the Chinese expand beyond construction to take up social meanings that are continuously being assembled. Although the referents may seem unrelated in their diversity, I argue that they index wider local anxieties that de-centre China and re-centre the Kenyan government in practices that place the burdens of ‘development’ on the country's already burdened citizens.

Under Idi Amin's government, institutions that served the public interest were dramatically under-resourced. An array of self-nominated, self-important, self-righteous people were empowered to take on administrative tasks that, in an earlier dispensation, had been the work of professionals. Businesses and institutions that had formerly been under the regulatory authority of credentialled experts were thrown open all at once for commoners to operate. Everywhere there were campaigns, as the new regime made obscure and technical issues into urgent problems demanding a resolution. Ugandans were called upon to defend cultures, to struggle against imperialism and racism, and to transform the architecture of the economy. That is how people came to see themselves as proprietors of public life. Their work allowed commoners to claim equity over resources and infrastructures. In their investments in the operations of public institutions, people became custodians, proprietors and petty authoritarians. Their proprietary sense of responsibility was a powerful inducement to self-sacrifice. It was also the fuel for demagoguery.

When the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district–level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision–making was being guided by profit–making rather than nation–building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the people, they argued, employing the language of socialism, nationhood and pan–African solidarity that had been utilized by the state during the construction era in the 1970s. Yet the railway services sought by these local communities had facilitated their own entry into profit–seeking behaviour as entrepreneurs in the TAZARA corridor. The transition from socialism to liberalization along the TAZARA railway was therefore a negotiated process in which the meaning of concepts such as ‘privatization’, ‘profit’ and ‘freedom’ were contested.

So far only two scholars have done significant work on the institution of àkó, a burial ceremony in Owo. Àkó, particularly the effigy used in it, is of unquestionable importance in the stylistic interpretation of some bron2e and terracotta sculptures from Ile-Ifẹ. In fact, it is essentially for this reason that Justine Cordwell and Frank Willett have studied the àkó ceremony and effigy in Owo.

This paper has two purposes: (1) to present a text in Chikaguru, a Bantu language spoken by the Kaguru of East Africa: this language has not been properly described by linguists and no extensive text in it has yet appeared; (2) to present a tale (the text) which serves as an interesting illustration of certain problems in Kaguru society.

In the first part of this paper, I present this tale in a free English translation with a few notes in explanation of certain details in the story.

In the second part I discuss the significance of this tale as a means by which one may gain insight into certain important problems in one African matrilineal society.

Two appendixes at the end of this paper present the original Kaguru text and an attempt at a literal translation, together with a list and a very brief discussion of the published material dealing with the Kaguru language.