The formalization of ‘informal’ customary land rights is at the core of current rural land policies in Africa. The dubious impacts of such policies on agricultural production, and the recomposition of land rights and governance they cause, have been studied widely. But their territorial dimensions are hardly acknowledged. Studying the implementation of a rural land rights formalization project in central Benin, this article highlights the links between territorialization and plot-level land rights formalization. It first unpacks the notion of the village and presents a conceptual framework for analysing the superimposition of and contradiction between customary and administrative territories. Using two case studies, it then examines the conflicts that arise during formalization operations and their outcomes in terms of the mapping of land rights and political and administrative change. This article shows how the political organization of the territory and the socio-spatial inequalities resulting from the history of settlement shape the results of plot-level land rights registration (which explains why large parts of village territories have not been registered), and, in turn, how these registration operations lead to new territorialization processes and increase the heterogeneity of land tenure rights within the territory.

Rural–urban migration leads to ever increasing numbers of Africans living in informal settlements. In Accra's largest informal settlement, Old Fadama, residents by definition have no statutory rights to the land and their building activities undermine formal state law and state-recognized customary landowners. Statutory institutions are unable to enforce property rights and alternative interests emerge and organize. In multiple and fragmented ways, local stakeholders create and define their own informal relations of property and land-based authority. This article examines four cases of land transfers, building and development in the settlement that involve a variety of local, national and global actors. Their actions show the contemporaneous making and unmaking of different relations of property and land-based control and authority in the densely populated urban site. Important features of urban development in Accra are thereby shown to be variations in property relations and the multitude of actors that validate land use but that circumvent statutory institutions.

The importance of female title holders, especially that of the Queen Mother, is widespread throughout the state systems of Africa. Royal monarchical power and authority is often linked to a senior woman of the royal line, sometimes a real mother, sometimes not, who is the female counterpart to the male royal person. One writer has suggested that in Africa the monarchy itself involves not simply a King but rather a royal couple—the King and his mother—so that centralized authority is in fact inherent in a mother-son ‘royal duo’ (de Heusch, 1962: 145). The Queen Mother in such a view is not simply ‘important’ but an essential ingredient in the nature of royal power and authority, and therefore of centralized government as this has developed historically on the continent.

In a previous article published in this journal analysed one East African folktale in terms of its sociological significance. In this article I present a second, similar tale which deals with the same characters and which provides additional illustration of some of the points I tried to make in my earlier work.

This folktale is in Chikaguru, the language spoken by the Kaguru, a matrilineal Bantu people living in northern Kilosa and Mpwapwa Districts. The Kaguru have cultural traditions similar to those of other matrilineal peoples in this region of Tanganyika, such as the Luguru, Ngulu, Zigua, Sagara, and others. They are organized into about ioo non-localized, exogamous matri-clans (ikungugo or lukolo), each of which is divided into many matrilineages which cannot actually trace common descent. Traditionally, political rights over land and rights to perform certain ceremonies of rainmaking, purification, and fertility descend to men through women. The traditional system has been greatly disrupted and changed by colonial rule, missionary activity, and the introduction of a market economy, but this has little relevance to the significance of the material discussed in this paper, which is concerned primarily with the traditional system.

Some apology is due for an article on this subject from the pen of one who has no claim to write with any authority. The impulse to set it forth springs from a deep-seated anxiety about African education that is evidently shared by others. To give expression to it may do a little to assist that focussing of opinion which is so vital a part of any comprehensive plan for bringing education to the African native.

This article explores indigenous notions of power and chiefly legitimacy among the Ihanzu, a relatively small Bantu-speaking community located in north central Tanzania. Particular attention is paid to local ideas and ideals of gender—that is, the cultural categories ‘male’ and ‘female’, as well as the relationship between them—in an effort to show the complex ways in which gender categories, when combined, are powerful and capable of effecting transformations of different sorts. Men and women, by combining male and female fertilising fluids, create children. Similarly, male and female chiefs, through royal incest, bring forth male and female rains. It is suggested that the strategic combination of the cultural categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ provides the underlying transformative model both for sexual reproduction and for rainmaking. And it is through the combination of gender categories that chiefs legitimise their own positions, first by producing rain and, second, by metaphorically giving birth to all Ihanzu people each season. But whether for chiefs or commoners, it is argued that power frequently comes in gendered pairs.

It has long been a cliché in the social sciences to talk about the insulation of disciplines and sub-disciplines from each other. We all know what it is like tostudy a phenomenon – poverty, crime, the family – from within one academic paradigm and then come across a quite different view of the ‘same’ phenomenon. The result is usually self-pity: ‘If only I had known what they were up to’ or ‘If only they knew what I was up to’.

When the early colonial legislators were first called upon to deal with the problem of witchcraft in Africa, the official view was the sceptical English one, but this had in practice to recognize the native's general and whole-hearted belief in the supernatural element in magical claims. The law therefore summarily dismissed the practitioner's pretentions to occult powers, but at the same time it was forced to take account of the numerous occasions on which magic furnished the powerful motive for some course of action. Certain anomalies therefore occur in the various ordinances, and some curious discrepancies are to be found in the records of cases tried under them.

It is well known that villages and small towns in the savanna and derived savanna area of West Africa have, at some time, moved down from hill sites to their present position on the plains. It has been suggested that settled conditions resulting from the penetration of colonial administration provided the stimulus in a number of cases in the Western Region of Nigeria, notably Okeiho which was moved in 1917, and Igbetti in 1905. In the Afenmai district of northern Benin, fortified hill sites were abandoned and villages were moved down to the plains after British administration entered the district in 1904, while New Idanre in Ondo Province was laid out with broad streets on a rectangular plan at the foot of the hill, leaving Old Idanre on the hill-top site. This paper outlines the reasons for the earlier choice of hill-top sites and for later movement of settlements in a small part of the derived savanna in Ibadan and Oyo Provinces, bounded by arbitrary limits to the north and east, by the Dahomey frontier to the west, and by the boundary between Ibadan and Abeokuta Provinces to the south.

One of the major, and perhaps the most embarrassing, problems still facing African populations today is hunger. It is described by Lofchie and Commins (1982: 1) as ‘the most immediate, visible, and compelling symptom of a continent-wide agricultural breakdown in tropical Africa,’ thereby making ‘sub-Sahara Africa … the only region in the world where food production per capita has declined during the past two decades.’ This condition has been blamed on many factors, the most frequently mentioned being climate, environmental degradation, outmoded and inefficient traditional agricultural methods, customary land tenure systems which inhibit innovation by individual farmers, lack of incentives to farmers to increase food outputs, bad agricultural policies, high population growth rates and agrarian dualism. A growing body of literature focusing on women's contributions in the development process has revealed another very crucial, but often ignored, reason why hunger is still prevalent in Africa: the disregard of the role of women, who are the main food producers in Africa, in efforts to promote agricultural development (Baumann, 1928; Boserup, 1970; Bryson, 1981; Guyer, 1980; Robertson, 1983). A recent book by Odero-Ogwel (1983), which discusses the food problems in Africa, pays no attention to the fact that a major contributory factor to the food crisis in Africa is the disadvantaged position of women. This exemplifies the failure, even by African intellectuals, to realise the crucial role women can play in increasing food supplies if only certain constraints are removed. Claire Robertson (1983) warns that, unless women are fully included in the development process, the food problem in Africa will deteriorate even further.

Gender distinctions in personal names are quite remarkable in African naming traditions. Such names are attractive to linguists and anthropologists alike, especially as they reflect preferences in semantic hierarchy and deeply ingrained gender biases. This article studies the gender naming in Igbo personal names that contain a key religious concept: Chi.

L'histoire de l'utilisation de la végétation et de la terre en Afrique de l'ouest inclut un modèle de changements dans l'lenvironnement qui peuvent être decrit au mieux comme étant progressifs, subtils, et difficiles à mesurer avec précision. Comparer à, par exemple, le processus d'abbatement des arbres sur une grande échelle en Amazonie, la déforestation dans ce contexte ne se prête pas à des analyses et des évaluations toutes prêtes. Des techniques locales ethnographiques, écologiques, et ethno-historiques peuvent, cependant, eêre utilisées afin de développer l'information requise pour avancer notre compréhension des precédés d'utilisation de la terre et des changements forestiers dans la région.

Dans cet article, des recherches sur l'écologie contemporaine et ethnographique d'un groupe d'agriculteurs itinérant, les Susu de Sierra Leone, sont combinées avec une reconstruction historique et une documentation ethno-historique de l'endroit, commençant avec la visite du prêtre portuguais jésuite Fr Baltazar Barreira en 1516. Des sources documentaires ultérieures inclut le journal du sergent britannique Brian O'Beirne, qui a exploré la route de Freetown au Fouta Jallon en 1821, et le compte rendu d'un voyage régional par le voyageur colonial Frederick Migeod en 1922. Ces données parmi d'autres, sont utilisées pour déterminer comment les systèmes de production actuels reflètent le passé, et pour déterminer comment les systèmes du passé ont affecté l'environnement et comment ils ont changés et évolués avec le temps.

This article explores the reasons for, and the repercussions of, a virulent and protracted crisis in the South West Province of anglophone Cameroon during the 1990s caused by the emergence of a Pentecostalism-inspired revival movement within the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called Maranatha movement and main-line Catholicism were viewed by both parties as incompatible, almost leading to a schism within the Church. The originally internal Church dispute gradually became a particularly explosive issue in the region when the politics of belonging, fuelled by the government and the regional elite during political liberalisation, became pervasive.

This article investigates practices of speech and sociability in open radio debates in Kampala to decipher imaginaries of citizenship in contemporary Uganda. In these ebimeeza (‘round tables’ in Luganda, also called ‘people's parliaments’) orators are engaged in practices of social distinction when compared to those they call the ‘common men’. These spaces of discussion reflect the importance of education in local representations of legitimacy and morality, whether in Buganda ‘neotraditional’ mobilizations or Museveni's modernist vision of politics. The ebimeeza and the government ban imposed on them in 2009 reveal the entrenchment of the vision of a ‘bifurcated’ public sphere, the separation of a sphere of ‘development’ and a sphere of ‘politics’, the latter being only accessible to educated ‘enlightened’ individuals – despite the revolutionary discourse and the institutionalization of the Movementist ‘grassroots democracy’ model in 1986.

African marketplaces have long been understood as ambivalent spaces; as sites of compliance and transgression, domination and resistance. This ambivalence comes into sharp focus in the urban marketplaces that have absorbed a large proportion of the African workforce over the past four decades. One the one hand, urban markets offer opportunities for the forging of new relationships, or ‘fictive kin’, beyond the confines of consanguinity and affinity. However, on the other hand, they are fiercely competitive places in which strangers skilfully intrude into one's life. Succeeding in the market therefore requires the striking of a skilful balance between accumulation and redistribution, disclosure and concealment. This article presents an analysis of the everyday interactions and exchanges facilitated by the movements of a waste picker in Nakasero market, the oldest marketplace in Kampala, Uganda. Amid the current emphasis on improvization and provisionality as key features of urban African life, it demonstrates the importance of long-standing cultural idioms, such as omutima (‘heart’), in providing structure and meaning to the interactions of urban African inhabitants.

During the twentieth century, Obasinjom became one of the best known and most effective cult agencies in the Cross River area of Cameroon and Nigeria. This paper aims at reconstructing the history of Obasinjom and some of its variants. Unlike many other witch-hunting cults, Obasinjom usually did not disappear after accomplishing the immediate job for which it was acquired. The owners additionally desired to possess the institution because it created wealth, influence and prestige for them as well as their village as a whole. Obasinjom and other cult agencies (as well as women's and men's societies and dance associations) spread from village to village across ethnic or language boundaries. Along with their dissemination, something of their identities and agency diffused and was incorporated into their histories over time and space. As intellectual property they were owned by the buying village and at the same time remained the property of the selling village. Obasinjom, as well as more important institutions, created decentralised networks of owners who had no definite knowledge of all the other participants. The recently formed pan-Obasinjom association, however, has changed this situation and, at least among some owners, created a feeling of identity and a greater sense of unity.

This article describes the kinship structure of some Lebanese communities in West Africa, and the resemblances they bear to the communities from which they originated in Lebanon. It also shows the extent to which kinship ties promote emigration, and the kind of trade partnership normally practised by kinsmen. Two communities are considered: the Greek Orthodox community in Ouagadougou (Upper Volta), and the Shi'ite Muslim community in Magburaka (Sierra Leone).

On his way back from his first travels to the interior of the Gambia, Mungo Park describes a ‘schoolmaster’ who entertained him in the Mandingo country while his principal host was on a slave purchasing expedition. The school of this master consisted of seventeen boys who ‘always had their lessons by the light of a large fire before daybreak and again late in the evening’ and who ‘were employed in planting corn, bringing firewood, and in other servile offices, through the day’ (Park, 1799: 313–14). Such rural institutions combining elementary Islamic education and farm production must then have existed in the coastal areas of West Africa for at least two centuries, and spread to other parts of Africa as a result of Islamic expansion. They were agents of proselytization and further Islamization. Consequently Quranic schools are often discussed primarily in their relation to Islamic history. In the present day, however, they continue in some areas as viable alternatives to western-style schools and as units of agricultural production. This paper, which stems from research I conducted in the southern part of central Upper Volta on household farms and wealth stratification, underscores the dual function of these farm schools.

The Lugbara are a Sudanic-speaking people of the Nile-Congo divide and number 242,000, of whom two-thirds live in north-western Uganda and the remainder in the adjoining area of the Belgian Congo. Their political system is a segmentary one, with no form of centralized political authority. There is a system of polysegmentary patrilineages, the largest series of which are the exogamous units. Within the territorial section associated with the agnatic core provided by such a lineage there is, or was, the obligation to settle disputes by discussion between the parties concerned so that feud was avoided, and it was only between these sections that a permanent state of hostility could exist. Each of these territorial sections consists on an average of some 4,000 people living in an area of some twenty-five square miles. They, the largest of the groups called suru by Lugbara, and which I refer to as maximal sections based on maximal lineages, are the largest political units of the system. Like the three levels of segmentation within them, they bear specific names, most of which are found in all parts of Lugbara. I call these names clan-names.

The activities of Igbo metalsmiths caught the eye of foreign observers of southeastern Nigerian cultures well over a hundred years ago, but it was not until the turn of this century that the unorthodox character of Igbo smithing achieved some recognition. G. T. Basden's typical remarks, made after a long missionary sojourn among the Igbo, highlight this striking dimension:

There are some towns which practically monopolise certain specialised professions. For example, Awka, Nkwerre and a few other places manufacture nearly all the metal work produced in the Ibo country .… These men travel widely, not only in the Ibo country, but in the regions beyond its borders as far as Calabar, Bonny, Warri and even farther afield. (Basden 1938: 318; italics mine)