Land is widely regarded as central to the politics of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Land was, ostensibly, the core issue over which the liberation struggle was waged. On the successful redistribution of land, in Shamuyarira's (1984: 8) view, will depend ‘the future reputation and credibility of the new socio-economic and political order among the Zimbabwean masses’. Land, then, is ‘vital’ (ibid.) to both leaders and led in Zimbabwe.

It is often considered probable that the recent rise of vigilante groups in Nigeria means an erosion of the state monopoly of legitimate violence as well as a marked decline in state sovereignty over the national territory. However, this conclusion does not take into consideration the fact that in Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a term initially proposed by the police in the mid-1980s as a substitute for an older practice known in the western part of the country since the colonial period as the ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ system. Hence, instead of looking at vigilante groups as a response to a supposed increase in crime or a supposed decline of the police force, we should consider them – initially at least – as a first attempt to introduce forms of community policing in order to improve the appalling image of the police. As such, in south-western Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a new name for an old practice of policing that should be considered in an extended timeframe (from the 1930s onward), a period in which violent crime has been perceived as a potential danger. Finally, within the ongoing debate on the ‘privatization of the state’ in Africa, non-state policing in Nigeria testifies to a continuum existing since the colonial period rather than to the appearance of new phenomena in the 1980s or the 1990s.

One of the most interesting problems of pre-colonial history is the relation of so-called secret societies to indigenous government. In West Africa they are concerned mainly with the ownership and use of supposedly supernatural medicines and the propagation of certain cults.

These are the functions also of other associations, but what principally distinguishes secret societies from the ordinary medicine society or cult is the esoteric basis of their activities. Not only do the secret societies employ particular rituals, signs, symbols, and forms of knowledge which are withheld from non-initiates, but these things are regarded as a special source of power through being kept private. Associations of this kind are prevalent in southern Nigeria, and are particularly numerous in the coastal area of rain-forest in general, including the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and parts of Ghana and Portuguese Guinea. They are not secret in any other respect. On the contrary, not only is the existence and general purpose of these societies known to every grown-up person, but in many places the wide range of their activities makes them the dominant social force. They are frequently responsible for tribal education, regulate sexual conduct, supervise political and economic affairs, and operate various social services, including entertainment and recreation as well as medical treatment.

Cet article explore la base culturelle de la légitimité politique en Afrique sous-Saharienne. II se poursuit en se concentrant sur le langage, les figures de rhétorique, et les métaphores que les africains utilisent pour communiquer leurs perceptions de la politique en général. Après avoir examiner la nature du pouvoir et refléter sur l'importance du langage politique, l'article présente quatre prémisses pour un modèle intitulé la matrice morale de la légitimite gouvernementale, prenant note de leurs relations avec la légitimité politique. En conclusion, il établit le rapport entre Fanalyse du pouvoir et de la légitimité et l'agitation politique actuelle à travers une grande partie de l'Afrique, se concentrant spécifiquement sur la question de la ‘démocratisation’.

The purport of this article is to provide an answer to the following questions:

1. What is African music like as compared to our own?

2. How can it be made use of in Church and School?

The answer might be as brief as the questions:

1. African and (modern) European music are constructed on entirely different principles, and therefore

2. they cannot be fused into one, but only the one or the other can be used without compromise.

The attention of most of my readers will only be engaged by the second of these points as being one of practical interest, while the first is of a more theoretical nature. But my second answer being only a conclusion drawn from my first one, I shall have to support it by entering on some theoretical detail; it will not, therefore, be possible to keep altogether clear of musical technicalities. Readers who feel alarmed at the idea of having to find their way through analyses of this kind, or to read music, may safely confine their attention to the last section; as for the preceding ones, they will, it is hoped, be indulgent towards the author, granting him that it would be difficult to state a thing without speaking of it.

My purpose in this paper is to describe some of the religious beliefs held currently by the !Kung Bushmen of the interior bands of the Nyae Nyae region of South West Africa. I shall limit the paper to a description of their concepts of the gods, the problem of evil, supplication, the spirits of the dead, and the ceremonial curing dance, but leave for another paper a more detailed account of medicine men, how they become medicine men, and more about their practices and beliefs. We gathered the information which I present principally on our expeditions of 1952–3 and 1955.

This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signalling the intensified globalization of images of desire and opportunity, on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution, on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, language, sex, possession, loss, self-construction and self-corruption mutually shape each other. The paper seeks to represent the textures and intricacies that arise as the interdependencies among status, pleasure, appropriation, seduction and livelihood are worked out. It examines how these operations themselves elaborate a landscape of possibilities always on the verge of overflowing established sense and sentiments, yet somehow reined in, held, albeit in a highly tenuous relationship, to what is known and valued. The city makes itself urban, despite the nearly impossible economic and political conditions it faces, through a capacity to narrate these tales of fishing (as well as fishy stories), but also always trying to chase, to catch up with its capacity to proliferate words. Written against the background of the threat posed by HIV/AIDS in Africa, the paper also draws attention to the need for further scholarly research on the lethal cocktail of the twin globalization of consumerism and poverty in marginal sites of accumulation pregnant with contradictions and uncertainties such as Africa.

Ecrit du point de vue de la recherche pour la prévention du HIV/SIDA au Zambie, cet article soutient que les africains ruraux se trouvent maintenant être la cible de trois discours concurrents et contradictoires au sujet de la responsabilité, chacun d'entre eux prétendant leur dire comment mener leur vie à l'abri du SIDA. Le premier de ces discours, qui est représenté par le paradigme bio-médical, professe avoir des connaissances certaines en ce qui concerne l'étiologie et l'épidémie du HIV/SIDA mais est incapable de le guérir; le deuxième, le discours missionaire, prêche l'abstinence et encourage le retour aux croyances traditionnelles et aux règies de moralité comme étant le seule façon de faire face et de survivre au SIDA; tandis que le troisième est le discours traditionnel—représenté par les guérisseurs traditionnels et les trouveurs de sorcières—qui professe avoir des connaissances certaines et l'abilité d'éradiquer le mal.

Mon argument est que la conjonction de ces discours a pour résultat de créer une confusion qui a mené à l'influence de ce qui est appelé ici le discours africain traditionnel, charactérisé par la réapparition d'accusations de sorcellerie et de chasses aux sorcières; done ce discours fournit des modèles explanatoires à travers lesquels les africains ruraux peuvent saisir la signification de leurs vies dans des situations òu les certitudes modernes semblent avoir échouées. Le discours africain traditionnel offre une explication en ce qui concerne les taux croissants de mortalité—probablement du SIDA—et par d'autres disastres contingents que l'on croit avoir été causé par des sorcières. Ces points se font voir dans une étude de cas étendue des activités d'un trouveur de sorcières invité par une communauté rurale pour les aider à ‘desamorcer’ les sorcieres locales.

Le trouveur de sorcières n'a pas seulement réussi à usurper les autorités officielles, mais a aussi réussi à tuer horriblement seize personnes locales en les poisonnant avant que son exposition au media national ait conduit à son arrestation par les autorités. Cet article veut aussi mettre en lumière l'importance des notions de maladie basées sur l'envie et la manière dont ces notions se rapportent aux efforts pour changer les attitudes parmi ceux qui travaillent pour la prévention du SIDA et les mécanismes qui peuvent conduire à l'effondrement des autorités officielles en Afrique rurale aujourd'hui.

This article examines the Holy Spirit movement of Alice Lakwena, which emerged i n Uganda between 1987 and 1989. The popular account of Alice, as told in the Western media especially, ignored die social and historical contexts which are essential to understanding die forces which gave rise to her and her following. The spirit possession revealed by Alice Lakwena took forms which were familiar t o the people of this part of Uganda, aldiough die political and social dislocations of the late 1980s were significant in shaping her actions and in determining the full range of issues with which her spiritualism came to be associated. This can be seen by examining die actions of Alice herself, but also by recognising diat odier spirit mediums were active in the region at die same time. Spirit mediums helped to establish a degree of social accountability in a world where die state had largely lost its credibility and collapsed and where witchcraft and sorcery were widely believed to be die most common causes of mortality. These spirit mediums were influenced by Christian conceptions of morality: it was partly because spirit divination had become closely associated widi die Catholic Church diat Alice and odier mediums were able to marshal such large followings and to appeal to such a broad spectrum of society. The case of Alice Lakwena is fascinating and informative not because of its novelty but because of its mixture of old and new forms, its continuities with die past and widi wider social processes, and its responses to new social traumas.

Etant donné la crise actuelle du véritable pouvoir de l'Etat dans le Cameroun (comme ailleurs en Afrique), les chefs sont parfois envisagés comme une possible alternative d'exercice de l'autorité. Toutefois la chefferie est un phénomène très variable, dépendant du contexte, même si son origine remonte seulement à la période coloniale. L'article illustre ce point en examinant les fortunes diverses de l a fonction de Chef au sein de deux sociétés camerounaises, les Maka (qui furent sous administration française) et les Bakweri (qui furent sous administration britannique). Dans aucun des deux cas, (mais pour des raisons différentes), la chefferie n'apparaît comme étant l'instance alternative, de moyen pouvoir, dont l'on aurait besoin.

This article examines the origins and evolution of the terroir approach as an organizing idea in development planning in West Africa. We consider the evolving meaning of the terroir concept in three distinct periods: as a research approach crafted in a French geographical school; as a site for research-development programmes, and, most recently, as a tool for conservation planning, territorial restructuring, and land privatization. An important shift in the meaning of the terroir concept is apparent in its evolving uses. For the terroir school, the terroir came to represent the socio-natural heritage of a group in which its social organization and pattern of resource use became inscribed in the landscape. The concept took on new meaning in the late-1980s as an appropriate location for on-farm research by agricultural development planners. The terroir became both an alternative research site and a setting for mobilizing rural populations to adopt new land management and farming techniques. The meaning of the concept shifted again in the 1990s with the advent of the gestion des terroirs approach. In the hands of conservation and development planners, the terroir was conceived of as a scale of intervention for a host of government, aid donor, and NGO programmes. In summary, a significant change in the meaning of the concept has taken place from one in which the notion of local heritage was dominant to one that emphasizes territory and boundary clarification.

Since 1980, with considerable regularity during the dry season which propels the rural poor into the urban centres of northern Nigeria, religious riots have erupted in or adjacent to five cities: Kano (1980), Kaduna (1982), Bulum-Ketu near Maiduguri (1982), Jimeta near Yola (1984) and Gombe (1985). In each instance the conflict was remarkably similar. When confronted by the state authorities, an Islamic sect, the 'Yan Tatsine, unleashed an armed insurrection against the Nigerian security forces and those outside the sect, resulting in widespread destruction, in thousands of deaths and in millions of naira of property losses. Indeed, if one were to search for a historical equivalent in Nigerian history, only the communal riots of 1966 surpass the destruction wrought by the 'Yan Tatsine insurrections of the eighties. The account appearing in West Africa, describing the Gombe outbreak, provides a typical press analysis of the insurrection:

Fighting began early on Friday, April 29 when a detachment of police moved in to arrest suspected members of a maitatsine type religious sect in the Pantami ward of Gombe. The suspected leader of the religious group is a man named Yusufu Adamu. That was when all hell broke loose. Within hours, some streets had been littered with corpses many of them caught in the cross fire between fanatics and the law enforcement agents. [West Africa, 6 May 1985: 876]

For the following analysis it is noteworthy that the correspondent describes the sect as a ‘maitatsine type’, that the insurrection erupted only when the police attempted to arrest an alleged leader and that the members of the dissident sect are labelled ‘fanatics’ without any supporting evidence.

The shea tree (Vitellaria paradoxa) is indigenous to Africa's Sudano-Sahelian region and crucial to savanna ecosystems and peoples. African women have long collected, marketed and transformed shea nuts into a multipurpose butter. The growing global trade in shea butter destined for the Western food and cosmetics industries thus represents an opportunity to bolster impoverished female incomes. However, such international sales are also prompting changes in the west African shea landscape. This article examines the role of shea as a female heritage in Burkina Faso, West Africa's largest shea exporter. It focuses on the knowledge systems informing the management, conservation and processing of shea. It also considers the effects of global shea commercialization on the maintenance of traditional agroforestry practices, tenure rights, and butter-making techniques. In so doing, the article illuminates the cultural and botanical heritage of shea as well as the significance of this species in biodiversity protection, African natural heritages and female knowledge systems.

What has become known as ‘the African agrarian crisis’ is an extremely complex phenomenon. This much is clear from the fact that, despite the very considerable amount of literature which has been accumulated on the subject (Berry, 1984), there is still very little agreement as to its precise nature and dimensions and even less certainty on how to resolve it in the context of national level policies, plans and programmes. What this must mean, inter alia, is that explanations cannot be sought simply in pithy epigrams drawn from grand theories and hastily assembled micro-level data bases.

Some years ago one of the very few structuralist anthropologists to contribute to Southern African studies complained that ‘Aucune étude n'a encore été consacrée à l'organisation spatiale et aux relations qu'elle implique chez les Bantu du Sud-Est’ (Roumeguère- Eberhardt 1963: 77). This was not strictly accurate. For example, Holleman (1940) had provided an important analysis of the Zulu homestead, borrowing something of the methods and concerns of the Leiden school's studies in Indonesia; and one cannot ignore Walton's (1956) wide-ranging if unsystematic treatment of the Southern African village. Yet the topic has been largely neglected despite the highly-ordered nature of the Southern Bantu homestead and the legal and symbolic significance of the traditional homestead plan.

This article explores how people in Botswana approach and navigate their own feelings of disgust and morbid curiosity towards the aesthetically impaired bodies of their fellow citizens, and the problems and opportunities these feelings present in a context where a particular humanistic ethos of respect and manners, botho, is stressed in the public discourse of nationalism. The agenda of contemporary disability and patients' rights movements is based on the assertion that moral sentiment is neither determined nor subverted by particular bodily states or configurations. While such activism acknowledges and affirms experiences of debility and physical suffering, the political agenda largely centres on enabling persons to participate equally in rational-critical discourse in the public sphere regardless of the vagaries of any individual's particular bodily state. Within this framework, physicality should have no power to structure relationships among citizens. And yet, in Botswana, as in other places, the messiness of the human body – manifested in diarrhoea, drool, disfigurement, and disgust – threatens to subvert humanistic efforts, and challenges the smooth enactment of rights-based politics and other liberal projects. In what follows I explore the sometimes troubling physicality of humanistic and affective life in Botswana to better grasp the messy bodily dimensions of sociality that are so often swept under the rug in discussions of citizenship, rights and community. Aesthetic efforts at bathing, bandaging and otherwise reworking the bodies in question reveal dimensions of sociality and aspects of sensory and affective interaction that are critical to the enactment of moral sentiment.

The article offers an empirical perspective regarding customary land sales in Côte d'Ivoire, focusing on their socio-political embeddedness as well as on the implications of such processes for the content of the rights and duties transferred. Two interlinked aspects of land transfers, which usually come together in African contexts, are to be taken into account: rights and obligations regarding land access and control (‘the land resource dimension’), and rights and obligations regarding group membership, and more generally the socio-political dimensions that condition the social recognition and effectiveness of the transfer of land rights (‘the socio-political dimension’). These two dimensions are empirically explored, together with the processes of their connection and possible disconnection/reconnection. We show that the diverging interpretations of land transfers, from emic as well as from etic viewpoints, do not necessarily correspond to mutually exclusive explanatory models, or to a simple transition phase from customary to ‘pure’ market land transfers. Access to land may become commoditized without extinguishing the socio-political dimension of land transactions. Another point is that the articulation of these two dimensions of land transfers is a specific and always contextualized issue. This has direct consequences on the legitimacy of land transfers as well as on the security of the stranger right holder within the local community and more generally on the politicization of land issue.

This article uses a key principle of the Tanzanian ujamaa project – self-reliance – as an analytical lever to open up the historical landscape of development politics in that national context during the 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout this period Tanzanians understood and experienced self-reliance in a variety of ways: as a mandated developmental strategy or a collective developmental aspiration, a condition of dignity or privation, a hallmark of national citizenship or a reflection of local survivalism, a matter of luxury or necessity. I trace these multiple meanings through three distinct but overlapping fields of inquiry: first, by cataloguing the plural ideological registers indexed by self-reliance within official development discourse vis-à-vis domestic and international politics; second, by illuminating a diverse range of rural elders' accounts of ujamaa villagization and self-reliance policy in the south-eastern region of Mtwara; and third, by examining the ambivalent position of self-reliance within public debates about regional development in relation to the national scale. In doing so, I expose the dialectical friction between competing constructions of citizenship and development at the heart of ujamaa, and suggest new avenues forward for conceptualizing the afterlives of ‘self-reliance’ and the changing meaning of development in contemporary Tanzania and beyond.

Focusing on south-eastern Tanzania, this article explores the colonial state's spatial strategies for economic and political control of its citizenry and their concurrence with strategies to control and conserve nature. Analysing British colonial archival documents, it demonstrates that Africa's most famous wilderness, the Selous Game Reserve, is a product of colonisers' economic and political control schemes, not a vestigial pre-modern landscape. The analysis reveals that the control of nature was inseparable from the state's efforts to control African subjects (mostly Ngindo peasants) and ultimately to create a new kind of person: ‘civilised’, productive and surveillable. Control schemes had significant ecological consequences, specifically increasing elephant (Loxondata africana) populations and the creation of vast tracts of tsetse fly-infested bush. The result, sometimes unintended, but more often orchestrated, was the displacement of African land use and settlement and a new geography of society and nature. The article concludes that colonial efforts to reorder south-eastern Tanzania were fundamental to the process of modern nation-state building, a process that was propelled by a particular way of thinking about social order in visual terms.

The hinterland of the Gold Coast north of the 10th parallel N. Latitude is a land of sparse forestation lying within the Sudanese Zone. The continuous plains, the monotony of which is, in the dry season, broken only by scattered trees, occasional patches of low bush or a low range of hills, have been described as belonging to an ‘Orchard bush’ type of country. The Tale settlements occupy an area of some 200 square miles, immediately north of the White Volta river, and have a population density of over 170 to the square mile in the settled parts. Agriculture is the basic industry of the Tallensi and their neighbours, but their farms yield only a bare living to the majority of the populace. Unduly late rains or a visitation of locusts spells food deficiency bordering on famine for thousands.