The Rwandan refugee camps in Tanzania witnessed the marriages of very young adolescents: girls as young as 13–14 married boys of 14–15 years, boys they often did not even know. These marriages usually did not last very long; after a few months many girls were forced to leave—sent away by their husband. People of both sexes and all ages, when asked about the problems in the camp, would always mention these child marriages as one of the biggest problems. They were worried not only about the loss of respect for Rwandan culture and traditional values but also about the future of the marriages and what would become of the children. This article is not based on extensive research into child marriages, but the author was able to interview a number of young people who had got married in the camps, and to collect information and the opinions of other people on these and other cases. Rather than describing marriage customs and wedding ceremonies in Rwanda, and comparing them with what took place in the refugee camps, the article aims to show the impact of (civil) war, the consequent poverty and the destruction of social structures on a community, in order to show how in these circumstances behaviour can change radically. Refugees have to build up a new life in a camp, and the new ‘society’ is likely to be different from the one they came from, with different rules and changed values. Among various examples of deviant behaviour child marriages were the most remarkable.

The Yoruba word aladura, meaning ‘one who prays’, generally refers to a set of churches that formed a powerful religious movement among the Yoruba in western Nigeria during the first decades of this century. To date, there have been three main lines of interpretation which received general recognition: first, in form of a theological analysis (Turner, 1967); second, in a discussion of social protest (Mitchell, 1970); and finally, through the sociology of religion (Peel, 1968). In this article I propose to introduce another aspect of interpretation. Following the many passing remarks made by these authors in respect to the use of writing within the Aladura churches, I will read their accounts in terms of how people perceived and experienced the written word in the specific context of the Christian–colonial order and consider whether and how this experience has influenced people's actions and religious behaviour. In doing so, I am going to take up a theme which has become widely popular in the anthropological field under the heading ‘the consequences of literacy’.

I Mean by the Ashanti northern trade Ashanti market exchanges with Hausa, Mande, and Mossi caravan traders at the town of Bonduku (eastern Ivory Coast), Salaga (northern Ghana) before 1874, and at Kintampo (Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana) 1874-92. The main facts relating to this trade are well known to students of Ashanti. This paper attempts (i) to establish the basis of the Ashanti trading relationship with the northern peoples; (ii) to make distinctions between types of Ashanti traders, the scale and results of their operations, and to describe the production and distribution of kola from Ashanti; and (iii) finally to draw attention to those features of the nineteenth-century trade which contribute towards the understanding of what Tordoff(1965: 187) has called ‘the emergence and phenomenal growth of the cocoa industry’ in the early years of this century.

There are two ways of approaching the data on African ancestor worship. They can be dealt with as a system of beliefs viz., as a body of thought, or they may be handled as a reflection of social relations. African ancestor worship has most commonly been dealt with in the latter fashion, e.g. Fortes (1959: 30) says:

the ancestor cult is the transportation to the religious plane of the relationships of parents and children; and that is what I mean by describing it as the ritualisation of filial piety.

This paper is concerned with the limits to which exact genealogical tracing is JL carried among the Gusii, a Bantu-speaking people of western Kenya.

At the time of field-work (1946–9) the Gusii were a moderately prosperous peasant people subsisting by hoe culture and stock raising. They were isolated between non-Bantu peoples (Luo, Kipsigis, Masai) in mountain country near the Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria. They had no central authorities, except those introduced by the British colonial administration, and no central cult; they were not stratified either by rank or by marked differences of wealth. A segmentary descent system, and a common code of law regarding marriage and compensation, held them together as a common society (see P. Mayer, 1949 and 1950).

The Dyula of northern Ivory Coast consider that joking behaviour (tlon, a word that applies more generally to ‘play’, such as children's games) is an appropriate mode of social interaction between a variety of categories of persons. Such behaviour is by no means peculiar to the Dyula and to related societies. For the most part, the kinds of role relationships characterized by joking among the Dyula have long been familiar to anthropologists: ‘grandparents’ and ‘grandchildren’, cross-cousins, certain categories of affines (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 90–116). But there is indeed one form of joking which, if not entirely specific to the Dyula, is something of an ethnographic rarity, or else has gone largely unrecorded in the literature: second and subsequent generation slaves (worosso) can and frequently do joke at the expense of free men (horon) in general. The forms which this joking may take are, in certain respects, atypical of other joking relationships among the Dyula. Consequently, it may be of some interest to compare joking between slaves and free men with other types of joking relationships.

Professor Marwick's Sorcery in its Social Setting is only the third major J- work to be dedicated to this theme since Evans-Pritchard's publication of Oracles, Witchcraft, and Magic among the Azande in 1937 and Kluckhohn's Navaho Witchcraft in 1944. He has produced a comprehensive and balanced survey of sorcery beliefs and accusations among the Cewa. The study is particularly rich in ethnographic depth. The attitudes of the people to witchcraft are portrayed with a rare sensitivity and warmth.

The Institute has always placed the question of the provision of suitable text-books both in the vernacular and in the language of the European power in the different territories in the forefront of its subjects of study as being one of the most urgent needs in Africa to-day. Numerous discussions and inquiries have shown that adequate instruction in hygiene and the inculcation of simple health rules is one of the most pressing needs, and that work done in one area is often unknown in others. In consequence the Executive Council in 1929 devoted special attention to the question of what action could be taken which would assist in the solution of this problem. The general opinion was that the information at the disposal of the Institute showed the need of a survey of books in actual use. This would, it was hoped, provide material which would be useful in the preparation of model texts in which particular attention would be devoted to the method of presenting the subject to Africans. The Council decided that the survey should be divided into two parts, one of books published in English or in a vernacular used in British territories and another of books published in French or languages used in French-speaking areas, and that the information collected should form the basis of articles to be published in Africa.

There are at the present time so many societies and institutes—national and international—for the study of African questions that there would be no justification for the inauguration of yet another unless it had an object in view, different from, or at least not effectively met by, any existing organization. There are, as it seems to me, two directions in which the organizations at present in existence need to be supplemented, and the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures has been founded in the hope of meeting these two requirements.

This paper deals with certain metaphorical uses of animals in the folklore of the Kaguru, a Bantu language speaking people of east-central Tanzania, East Africa. I have published elsewhere on Kaguru social structure (Beidelman, 1971b) and discuss this here only as it bears directly on the problems at hand. I have published many Kaguru folk-tales as well as various legends, riddles, and other texts (cf. bibliographies, Beidelman, 1967a, 1969, 1974c); it is difficult to publish textual material so that much of my data is still unavailable. In this paper I use published and unpublished texts.

L'essor de la pêche artisanale au Nigeria fut l'une des rares réussites économiques des années 80. Sans assistance des agences gouvernementales, les pêcheurs en pirogues, migrants ghanéens pour une grande part, ont réagi avec succès aux opportunités offertes par le marché de Lagos. Au cours de ces dernieres années, la diminution des réserves de poissons et la concurrence des chalutiers ont forcé les pêcheurs côtiers à adapter leurs activités à cette nouvelle situation. En décrivant un certain nombre de ces réactions, l'article aborde plusieurs thèmes plus larges d'études économiques anthropologiques et africaines. Faisant ressortir le contraste entre opposition et coopération de la pêche industrielle et de la pêche artisanale, il jette une luniiere intéressante sur les débats qui ont lieu au sein du secteur informel, tandis que le rôle de la police maritime et de la marine alimente le débat sur l'état africain.

Studies of everyday policing in predominantly white areas in South Africa often focus on the spectacle of secured architecture and private policing services, concluding that the growth of the private security industry has created atomized units of residence that are alienated from the state. Such conclusions are important but incomplete: they do not look sufficiently behind closed gates to explore how private security is justified, utilized, supplemented or avoided in daily life. In this article, I explore the everyday policing of theft and robbery in a predominantly white policing sector in Durban. I demonstrate that people have not simply transferred their dependence or allegiance from public to private policing. Instead, their approach to everyday policing straddles these two spheres, perpetually disrupts any simple dichotomy between them, and illustrates how all forms of policing are entangled in the wider inequalities and insecurities of post-apartheid South Africa. In making this argument, I highlight how residents remain reliant on the bureaucratic authority of the state police, are distrustful of their employees who supposedly protect them, and appear far more willing to take matters into their own hands than many interviewees admit or imagine.

This contribution considers the current position of the Ghanaian migrant community in Botswana's capital, Gaborone, at a time of rising xenophobic sentiments and increasing ethnic tensions among the general public. The article examines anthropological understandings of such sentiments by placing them in the context of the study of nationalisms in processes of state formation in Africa and the way in which these ideologies reflect the position and recognition of minorities. In Botswana, identity politics indulge in a liberalist democratic rhetoric in which an undifferentiated citizenship is promoted by the state, concealing on the one hand inequalities between the various groups in the country, but on the other hand defending the exclusive interests of all ‘Batswana’ against foreign influence through the enactment of what has become known as a ‘localisation policy'. Like many other nationalities, Ghanaian expatriate labour has increasingly become the object of localisation policies. However in their case xenophobic sentiments have taken on unexpected dimensions. By focusing on the general public's fascination with Ghanaian fashion and styles of beautification, the numerous hair salons and clothing boutiques Ghanaians operate, in addition to the newly emerging Ghanaian-led Pentecostal churches in the city, the ambiguous but ubiquitous play of repulsion and attraction can be demonstrated in the way in which localisation is perceived and experienced by the migrant as well as by the dominant groups in society. The article concludes by placing entrepreneurialism at the nexus of where this play of attraction and repulsion creates a common ground of understanding between Ghanaians and their host society, despite the government's hardening localisation policies.

This article examines the temporalities and terrains of the home-grown hustle economy of Mathare, one of the oldest and largest informal settlements in Nairobi. It builds on my previous work mobilizing the notion of ‘hustle’ to ground the narratives of struggle, opportunity and place-making expressed by youth whose livelihood strategies have centred around neighbourhood-based informal waste labour in order to assert claims to their local environment. Drawing on three ethnographic portraits and over a decade of longitudinal ethnographic research, the article shows how hustling connects to and evolves with particular generational and gendered identities, revealing the shifting demands on ‘older’ versus ‘younger’ youth. As everyday lives are mired in constant uncertainty, youth occupy a ‘precarious present’, caught in a state of suspension but also well versed in adapting to adversity and shaping local politics of provisioning in the absence of formal structures of support. The article sheds light on local logics of wealth redistribution among youth who belong to the same neighbourhood but whose claims to particular resources shift over time. The article demonstrates how hustling in Mathare sits at the nexus of agentive economic, environmental, political and social struggles, as youth on the urban periphery manage waste in their neighbourhoods to negotiate their place but also their time in the city.

This article examines the tensions and contradictions in the use of law as an instrument of coercion to consolidate British control in Nigeria and the legitimising rhetoric of human rights and social justice employed within the context of the operation of the law. The article explores the effects of laws introduced mainly to foster British colonial hegemony against the background of the aspiration to guarantee social justice and forge a ‘modern’ regime of rights and liberties for native subjects in the colony. It probes the circumstances that made the rhetoric of rights and liberty imperative for both the colonial regime that employed it to legitimise empire and the African elites who appropriated it to strengthen their demands for representation and self-rule. The aim is not so much to show how the colonial state fell short of its own liberal agenda as to examine the appeal ofthat agenda and the conditions that made it so central to the colonial project.

At first sight this sub-title may appear somewhat paradoxical, for what could be in greater contrast than the things denoted by the words ‘primitive’ and ‘European’? On the one hand, civilization with its highly developed technical methods in everything practical and theoretical, on the other, the world of simplicity in all practical activities. There—a mighty movement of expansion, irresistibly drawing into its sphere of influence all primitive life, to transform or destroy it, and in either case to make what remains of the primitive peoples and their countries do it service; here—vain resistance against the superior strength of the European, or the doubtful attempt to conform to European ideals. In the face of successful colonization by the cultured races of Europe, the last thing to be expected was any influence on Europe by the primitive peoples. Nevertheless, such an influence certainly exists, and that in the realm of art. After the period of realistic Impressionism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a strong movement flowed through the art world of Europe, finding its most permanent expression as Futurism in Italy, Cubism in France, and Expressionism in Germany. This movement in Germany, in opposition to Realism, made it one of its principles to observe and express not the external but the interior world, while in France the desire for bold drawing of a decorative character prevailed. Both tendencies culminated in an art movement which felt for the primitive works of art a sympathy due to a sense of relationship: the Cubist appreciated their inherent architectural character, and the Expressionists the mystic emotional content.

In April 1986 British Africanists met to discuss the crisis facing African Studies in their country. The crisis was easily denned as one of lack of resources in universities where current cutbacks have particularly affected area studies; of the limited funds available to libraries specialising in African Studies; and of the severe reduction in the number of publishers willing to take on monographs relating to Africa, with the result that many scholars are ‘giving up all hope of being published'.1 Furthermore, lack of travel funds has meant that many Africanists teaching in Britain have not been to the continent of their study in seven years. So few new appointments have recently been made in the field of African Studies in British universities that, unless something drastic is done to reverse the trend, in fifteen years’ time there will be a sharp decline in the numbers actually engaged in African Studies as generations grow old and are not replaced.2 Students can see no future in pursuing African Studies at the postgraduate level and their teachers are in no position to advise even their most brilliant students that doctoral research will lead to an academic appointment. These developments have taken place in a context where those who run the government have lost or are losing interest in Africa, a continent which is seen increasingly as one of unending problems which they just wish would go away. Indeed, the whole crisis in African Studies, as described by some of the leading British Africanists that April, invited headlines in the respected weekly magazine West Africa: ‘African Studies in peril. Is the study of Africa in British universities dying?

The basis of the funeral friendship

Among the Ambo there exists a joking relationship based on the interrelations of clan objects, but to call it simply a joking relationship would hardly be appropriate, since the joking relationship is only accessory. The institution is first and foremost a real and close friendship which has for its aim assistance in the funeral of the friend, and this aim is never lost sight of, but is always alluded to even in joking. This social institution of the Ambo people may therefore aptly be termed ‘funeral friendship’ (bunungwe)

Cet article explique pourquoi les populations de Mgeta se trouvent enfermées en de longues et onéreuses querelles concernant la terre. Ces querelles ne peuvent être analysées comme des stratégies de choix rationnel: la valeur de la terre en cause n'a aucun rapport avec les frais que les personnes concernées prétendent encourir; et ces gens ont recours aux instances légates sans en attendre la moindre solution raisonnable à leurs conflits. L'explication fournie dans l'article est qu'il y a un écroulement de la définition sociale de la réalité. La recherche de justice est considérée comme une expression légate de la recherche d'une telle définition.

Les Waluguru, en ce qui conceme la terre, raisonnent en termes d'idéologie matrimoniale. Toutefois, cette idéologic ne constitue pas une identité historique qui fournit des réponses automatiques en cas de querelle, elle doit se construire continuellement au fur et à mesure que la société subit des changements sociaux. Le problème ne peut être vu comme celui d'un retard culturel, où des formes modernes de loi entreraient en conflit avec des formes plus anciennes. L'analyse des cas en cause montre par exemple que le recours à un titre individuel exige autant de construction sociale de la réalité que le secours aux systèmes des lois Luguru. Elles demontre aussi que ces formes de loi sont inextricablement emmêlées. L'échec de l'expression d'une construction sociale de la réalité, qui est ressentie comme autoritaire et contraignante, est exacerbé par une vacance de l'autorité qui a émergé dans l a société Luguru.

La force manifeste qui conduit à ces conflits apparemment irrationnels est l'envie. Dans une situation telle que celle-ci, où se manifeste une débâcle de la construction sociale de la réalité tandis qu'existe un manque d'autorité, une telle force disruptive peut se réveler sous une forme débridée.