The consciousness that Death will sooner or later expel him from the earth, despite all his efforts to make it a permanent home—and such a comfortable one for that matter—is certainly the greatest question facing man. Scared by the imminence of Death, man sometimes wishes that he had not been created at all; but having been created, he has no choice other than to accept Death as the price to be paid for living. Now it is up to him to ignore it so as to be able to enjoy the little time he has to spend on earth; he should then pay the price when it is due. Alternatively, he may want to challenge Death and try to neutralize its power. This, of course, is taking a big risk. But to succeed is to live foreever.

This article focuses on the symbolic qualities of sorghum beer and milk among the Iraqw of northern Tanzania. The author illustrates how the villagers in a southern Mbulu village handle and make use of these two products, and seeks to illuminate the manner in which they both become associated with qualities that are perceived as positive and desirable. With the spread of the market economy, and of money as a medium of exchange, the symbolic content of sorghum beer and milk has come under considerable pressure. As products in demand, they may today circulate in impersonal relations which lack the social and religious qualities that they traditionally communicated. The monetisation of sorghum beer and milk has not, however, caused a breakdown in established practices, or in the structures of meaning in which such practices are embedded. The article illuminates some of the processes which seem to be of importance in explaining this remarkable cultural continuity in the face of fairly radical social change. The examples of sorghum beer and milk seem to reflect and highlight more general dynamics of change and continuity among the Iraqw, and it is suggested that they may help to shed light on certain seemingly paradoxical ways in which the Iraqw have been conceived by outsiders and by members of neighbouring ethnic groups.

The century-old Lebanese presence in West Africa has been the subject of mixed reaction from the host societies. While many Africans, including political leaders, have defended this presence in the belief that it has been very beneficial for their countries, others have strongly criticised it, arguing that the Lebanese have blocked the way to Africans in trade, repatriated their capital and used many kinds of malpractices in their trading activities. In Senegal, which is the subject of this article, French small and medium traders opposed the presence of the Lebanese during the colonial period because the latter became their main competitors. The groundnut trade was the country's main economic activity and there was a great demand for this product in Europe. The major European companies were keen to increase exports and, in this, they relied on the Lebanese who, in the first decades of this century, acted as middlemen.

This article examines contemporary discourses on and conceptions of utumwa or ‘slavery’ on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu. It discusses how residents of this Swahili town use historical understandings of servitude as moral rather than mere physical subjugation to formulate judgements on current processes of change within the town. Central to the discussion are ideologies of uungwana (civilization) and heshima (respectability) that historically shaped social stratification in Lamu, and particularly the enduring views that an embodiment of heshima and its visible mediation within material practices facilitate a distinction between nobleman and slave. By examining how these norms are currently incorporated within everyday assessments of young people's public behaviour, I argue that the moral ideologies that shaped social structure during the era of slavery meaningfully influence ascriptions of social standing within contemporary Lamu. Specifically, the article explores how discourses about utumwa are grafted onto contemporary moral assessments of ‘beach boys’ or Lamu youth working in the local tourism industry. I suggest that the ideologies of utumwa, and the moral values that accompany it, motivate and facilitate the discursive constructions of beach boys’ work as idleness rather than gainful employment.

This article investigates ‘wisdom’ from an ethnographic perspective that pays attention to the ways in which knowledge is performed, appreciated, negotiated and questioned in everyday life in Mombasa, on the Swahili coast. It discusses the baraza setting (daily meeting points for male social peers) as a venue for intellectual practice and the appreciation of wisdom. Basic features of communicative interaction identified there can also be found to be in play when looking at case studies of individuals and their performances. The article looks at how two genres (didactic tenzi poetry and Ramadhan lectures) are used by Swahili intellectuals who are regarded as exceptional in their field. Verbal, performative and social skills are found to be crucial aspects of wisdom, which also has to do with being able to engage with common social concerns in a manner that leads to further insight and intellectual orientation for others. In this sense, social responsibilities and moral obligations in the use of knowledge play an important role. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to a general discussion of wisdom, based on insights gained on the East African coast.

This article explores the experience of one village in Ethiopia since the overthrow of the Marxist‐Leninist Derg regime in 1991. The new government introduced policies that have much in common with those dominating the international geopolitical scene in the 1990s and 2000s. These include an emphasis on democracy, grassroots participation and, to some extent, market liberalization. I report here on the manifestations of these policy shifts in Gamole village, in the district of Konso, once remote from the political centre in Addis Ababa but now expressing its identity through new federal political structures. Traditional power relations between traders and farmers in Gamole have been transformed since 1991 as the traders have exploited opportunities to extend trade links, obtain land and build regional alliances through participation in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They have appropriated the discourse of democracy to challenge their traditional position of subordination to the farmers – and this, in turn, has led to conflict. While these changes reflect the postsocialist transition, they can also be seen as part of a continuing process of change brought about by policies of reform in land tenure, the church and the state, introduced during the Derg period. These observations at a local level in Ethiopia provide insights into the experiences of other states in postsocialist transition.

Faya-Largeau, the largest oasis in northern Chad, seems to present a classic picture of Saharan labour relations and status groups. Colonial officers spoke of nomadic ‘overlords’ who used to exploit sedentary ‘serfs’ of slave descent, but indirectly favoured the latter; today, former status relations are renegotiated, at times violently so. Access to vital resources, and especially agricultural land, is the focus of much contemporary conflict. Yet, on a closer look, this picture becomes less familiar: local agriculture requires little labour, property rights are uncertain, bilateral descent, exogamy and a high degree of mobility blur boundaries, while state involvement remains limited and ambiguous, and education little valued. Status, property and labour hence emerge as contextual categories that depend on as much as they constitute a historically specific and inherently unstable mode of production.

Governments in South Sudan have long built their authority on their ability to fashion changing regimes of revenge and compensation, war and peace. Governments’ capture of these regimes has resulted in the secularization of compensation despite the ongoing spiritual consequences of lethal violence. This article explores these issues by focusing on the western Dinka of Greater Gogrial. In recent years, they have been closely linked to the highest levels of government through familial networks and comradeship. Violent revenge among the western Dinka is best understood not as revealing the absence of institutions of government, but as a consequence of the projection of government power over the details of local, normative codes and sanctions. In this age of post-state violence with automatic weapons, oil-wealthy elites and ambiguous rights, government authority and intention have often been erratic. As government authority now backs up these regimes of compensation and revenge, governments’ shifting nature has reshaped their meaning. In the last decade, the declining political space for peace and the disruption of the cattle economy has undermined the current value of compensation and its ability to appease the spiritual and moral demands for revenge. It has even distorted regimes to the extent that children become legitimate targets for revenge. The article is informed by archival sources and based on ethnographic research among the western Dinka (South Sudan) between 2010 and 2013, and further research in South Sudan until 2015.

In contrast to the tolerant and largely peaceful ‘living politics' of informal settlements, as embodied by the social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, this article considers a darker side of squatter politics: ‘xenophobic’ mobilization. I show how the historical stratification of citizenship in South Africa remains spatially embedded in longstanding informal settlements, where distinctive repertoires of collective action have been shaped by a (still unfinished) history of struggle for inclusion. Using archival research and interviews conducted in the informal settlements of Atteridgeville, Gauteng, I show how the continuing struggle for equal citizenship draws on shared experiences of mundane hardship and collective labour, giving rise to social distance between established local squatters and politically indifferent foreign newcomers. At times of protest, this polarity is concentrated by and converges with familiar practices of insurgent citizenship, creating a context for mobilization against foreigners. In this sense, ‘xenophobic’ mobilization may be seen to articulate a claim for inclusion by structurally excluded ‘citizens', rather than an exclusionary claim by those who already belong. The article provides a useful counterpoint to readings of ‘xenophobic’ violence that focus on the role of elite discourses, instrumental leaders or crude racial identities in shaping such mobilization.

This study of the Ashanti rubber trade with the Gold Coast in the closing years of the last century explores further a theme with which I have for some time now been occupied. The theme is the nineteenth-century background to Ashanti economic development in the present century. In an earlier study of Ashanti trade with Hausa, Mande, and Mossi caravans I suggested that Ashanti experience with the kola trade provided a significant foundation for the successful introduction of cocoa cultivation early in this century, and that an adequate explanation of the latter requires a knowledge of the tools and the social framework of kola production and also of the organization of kola distribution from the areas of production to the kola markets in modern north-central Ghana in the previous century (Arhin, 1970). The rubber trade was complementary to Ashanti trade in the north, and a close look at it should throw more light on the economic outlook and organizational methods developed in the previous century which account for the eagerness with which the Ashanti took to cocoa cultivation and the success they made of its distribution before the era of the lorry. Secondly, there was an interesting link between the rubber trade and the domestic slave trade with Samory which presents the Alymany in the role of a stimulant to the Ashanti economy; one tends to think of him solely in terms of his military-politico activities. Thirdly, the Government of the Gold Coast, which took a keen interest in the rubber trade, sent officials to observe its production and sale in the interior so that written reports may be compared with oral information. After a brief note on changes in the basis of, and the personnel involved in, Ashanti trade with the European establishments on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century, I shall examine the beginning, growth, and importance of the rubber trade; the categories of traders and the different modes of rubber collection; and lastly, the organization by which rubber reached the exporting agencies. The emphasis throughout will be on those features of the rubber trade which are significant for twentieth-century developments.

Tutankamen, Ur, and Glozel have all aroused so great an interest in the various branches of archaeology and prehistory that the European presses seem to find it difficult to turn out archaeological works sufficiently fast to meet the public demand; writers, too, seem to find it difficult to vary their choice of facts and their points of view. Yet in spite of all this, one type of archaeological work has never yet made its appearance,—a good, comprehensive study of archaeological method. The more one studies the subject, the more one realizes the importance of the methods necessary, both those used by the field worker in his excavations, and also those to be used by the museum worker in correlating the material before him. In time these methods begin to formulate themselves in the student's mind, and it becomes fairly clear what the original modus operandi used by men like de Mortillet must necessarily have been.

Pour les pasteurs nomades sud-sahariens, l'insuffisance ou l'irrégularité des pluies se traduit par une réduction des ressources fourragères annuelles et, par voie de conséquence, par un déficit alimentaire. Les calendriers historiques touaregs, qui privilégient pour chaque année l'événement majeur, resté vivant dans toutes les mémoires, voient périodiquement s'inscrire des années mauvaises, dénommees awetay wa n iba n allamoz, l'année de manque d'herbe—ou awetay wa n laz, l'année de la faim, ou encore, awetay wa n manna, l'année de la famine. Ces trois définitions font référence à un même phénomène, à une même catastrophe, en mettant l'accent, soit sur les troupeaux privés de pâturage, soit sur les hommes accablés par le manque de nourriture. En tamasheq, laz signifie la faim, alors que manna, associe la notion de famine à celle de sécheresse; c'est ainsi que Foucauld (1925/30: II 56) traduit dans un poème le terme de manna par la périphrase: ‘La famine provenant de la sécheresse, les tourmentait, je pense’. Si la sécheresse impose des modifications dans le régime alimentaire, il faut préciser que chaque cycle annuel apporte normalement une variation saisonnière de l'alimentation. Aussi insuffisantes en quantité qu'irrégulières dans leur répartition que soient les pluies, elles sont cependant concentrées en zone sahélienne durant la période estivale; c'est pourquoi chaque année voit se renouveler une saison bienfaisante où les pluies régénèrent les pâturages, remplissent les mares, réalimentent les nappes. Pendant deux ou trois mois, où le lait abonde, se joue pour toute l'année, le développement de la végétation et la constitution du stock de fourrage qui va permettre d'attendre le retour des prochaines pluies.

This paper examines the distribution of languages in the Nigerian Middle Belt, draws certain historical inferences from the patterns of distribution, and assesses non-linguistic evidence tending to confirm or refute these inferences. The Middle Belt is taken as an area roughly inscribed by the Hausa-speaking area to the north, and the Yoruba, Edo, and Ibo-speaking areas to the south. Geographically it is an area which has a certain climatic coherence, falling between the sahel to the north and the forest to the south (Pullan, 1962; Buchanan, 1953). It is also an area of much more strikingly broken terrain than those to the north or south, with not only the complex relief of the Jos Plateau, but also many ranges of hills, particularly along its northern frontier and in its eastern half. This terrain appears to have militated against the establishment of large coherent political systems in the past and it is only in the plains of the Niger and Benue valleys that there is a record of extensive state systems in recent history, those of the Nupe and Jukun. On the other hand, archaeological evidence indicates that the Nok culture extended over a very large area of the Middle Belt, not by any means confined to the plains (Fagg, 1959, 1969), and there is evidence of a certain measure of cultural unity today (Murdock, 1959).

This article examines the traditional initiation of the former Senegalese Minister of Agriculture. At the age of fifty-five the Catholic Minister was initiated into the secrets of the sacred grove and thus acquired the status of adult man. The article demonstrates that Jola ethnic discourse, in which male initiation has become an important symbol, forced the Minister to enter the grove. His initiation turned him into a full member of the Jola ethnic group and qualified him as a trustworhty man capable of representing the people. In the campaign of the Socialist Party internal elections the Minister's initiation nevertheless became a major issue. The electorate did not show unswerving loyalty to ‘their’ Minister and nominated a non-initiate. The electorate suddenly changed their standards of apt political representation. The article contributes to the contemporary debate on citizenship and primary patriotism by showing that the Senegalese easily shift their position from subject to citizen, and thus empower themselves vis-à-vis elusive politicians. It also shows that politicians penetrate Jola practices of secrecy and thereby further the Jola's integration into the national public sphere.

This article examines the status of land tenure in Zimbabwe following the ‘Fast Track’ land reforms of 2000–3. It finds that post-reform land tenure remains strongly dualist, with land sales and rental prohibited on the land (about two thirds of the total) classified as ‘A1’ resettlement or ‘communal areas’, while tradeable leases apply to much of the remainder, classified as ‘commercial land’. The article draws on fieldwork in Svosve Communal Area and on previous studies on land transactions in Zimbabwe to argue that land sales and rental transactions are an enduring feature of land use in Zimbabwe's ‘communal areas’. Moreover, the article argues that, despite government prohibition, there is evidence that such transactions are being fuelled by increasing demand for land arising from the collapse in the non-farm economy in Zimbabwe. The article argues that while the logic of informal (or ‘vernacular’) land sales and rental is widely recognized by land users in communal and resettlement areas, government prohibition, in favour of asserting land allocation rights of customary authorities, is driven by considerations of political control of the rural vote.

This article is about gun culture in Kumasi today. Gun use in Asante, and elsewhere in Ghana, has increased significantly in the last decade. In practice and in the public imagination this is associated with the rise of youth gangs and the criminalization of urban space. Much has been written about youths and violence elsewhere in Africa, but this article focuses on the neglected topic of guns themselves – their manufacture, sale, distribution, use and meanings. In Kumasi, which in Suame Magazine has the biggest indigenous metalwork and engineering complex in all of West Africa, skilled artisans now make copies of imported automatic assault rifles, like the Soviet AK-47, as well as shotguns and pistols. This development is explored in a number of ways, and most especially in terms of the relationship between guns and their local history, Kumasi youth, crime and shifting patterns of desire and consumption. It is the purpose of this article to add to the growing literature on ‘violent youth’ in Africa, but to do so from the viewpoint of the weapons that enable this violence.

In the new South Africa, the promise of land restitution raised millennial-style expectations amongst dispossessed and dispersed former landholders. Partly prompted by emerging policy discourses, iconic tropes of localized cultural experience such as grave sites, initiation lodges and cattle byres acquired new significance. Because they proved what the Land Claims Commission calls ‘informal rights’ to land, they became verifiable evidence of effective possession, and thus grounds on which to claim the restoration of such land. The meaning of land, the nature of ownership and the legitimacy of its restoration were all matters contested between claimants, policy makers and human rights lawyers. They were also contested by those at different levels in the hierarchical social order of the new South Africa. Members of the African nationalist political elite, in dialogue with lawyers, cherished one set of understandings, while ordinary migrant/country-dwellers tended to hold to another. Both, however, were mediated through the new discourse on informal rights. It is neither purely through the activities of cosmopolitan elites with their ‘political demand for land’ nor through the unmediated localist experience of less sophisticated country-dwellers with more practical orientations that the significance of land becomes evident, but in the interaction between the two. Based on local understandings, transformed in the course of thirty years of ‘land back’ struggles, and finally negotiated over the course of the last ten years, a new diasporic consensus on what ‘the land’ signifies has been established.

Environmental degradation in Africa is often linked to management failure and political decline. One example of this is the dominant understanding of the unfolding of Taungya farming in Southern Nigeria in recent decades. An agro-forestry method of afforestation introduced by the colonial Forest Department in the 1920s and widespread by the 1960s, it is now perceived as a means of destroying the forest. Indeed, whilst reserve land continues to be allocated for Taungya farming, today, due to the Forest Department's political and economic difficulties, no more trees are planted. But this does not necessarily constitute a political and environmental crisis. Through an ethnographic and historical study of Taungya farming in the Okomu Reserve in Edo State, this article shows not only that there were always problems with Taungya as a method of afforestation, but also that its recent transformation may be seen as quite successful, both socially and environmentally. In this way, the article challenges both the ‘crisis’ perception of Taungya farming today and conventional ideas about what constitutes proper management and mismanagement.

Passenger cars and other small vehicles have for a long time been the backbone of transport in west Africa. The cars are usually second-hand, and they are sourced on overseas car markets, mostly in western Europe. During the 1990s the port town of Cotonou, Bénin, became one of the most prominent hubs in this car trade: car markets mushroomed, attracting large numbers and a wide variety of traders – including a prominent contingent of Lebanese. This article discusses the role of these Lebanese traders in the car trade through a reconstruction of their careers. It reveals that Lebanese business, which can go through a rapid succession of different economic activities, starts as kin-based enterprise, but gradually incorporates peers and friends. Close analysis of this practice suggests that Lebanese immigrant traders are to a large extent driven by the ideal of enjoying life by adopting an expatriate lifestyle.

The existence of the Ogoni ethnic group is taken for granted in the literature that has grown out of the minority rights and environmentalist campaigns of the 1990s. This article departs from this tradition by engaging the historical development of the Ogoni ethnic group, taking as its point of departure elite politics in the context of colonial categories and post-colonial politics. With comparative data on the development of ethnic groups in Nigeria, it shows how elite politics and state structures and administrative decisions influenced the development of the Ogoni ethnic group and the identity it purveys. It also shows that differing interests in oil with unequal power bases spurred rigid positions that served to facilitate or constrain the execution of the Ogoni identity-building project.