The concept of ‘middle class’ in African societies has been recognized recently but at the same time it resists clear-cut definition. Rather than seeking clearer classification, I propose to embrace its contested nature as productive, seeing ‘middle class’ not as a category that we can find ‘out there’ and measure, but as a classification-in-the-making. Middle-class status, or a particular idea of the good life, is a position people strive towards, but what this entails depends on context and place. The study of the pursuit of social mobility in Ghana during colonialism, independence and the post-Cold War period – of those who have successfully improved their livelihoods – provides knowledge about the middle class in the making in different eras and under different conditions. I propose a three-pronged approach to study this processual nature: Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structures of feeling’ helps unravel the shifting affective qualities of the changing political economy, while Sara Ahmed's focus on the ‘feelings of structure’ zooms in on agency as an important tool to analyse how middle-class trajectories unfold over time. Lastly, the availability of advantageous conditions is not enough to stimulate change; one needs the savoir faire to enact them.

Among historians, social scientists and scholars of religion there has been increased recognition of the importance of studying Islam and Christianity in Africa not separately but rather together as lived religions in dynamic interaction over time. In this article, I trace how scholars have arrived at such a point and consider some of the challenges of conducting research on religious encounters, and particularly those associated with studying Islam and Christianity, Muslims and Christians together. I frame this discussion in terms of some of the theoretical and methodological issues at stake in advancing the study of religious encounters in Africa and draw from my own research and the work of others on the topic, particularly in West Africa, to reflect upon how this important field of inquiry has developed and what it has accomplished.

This article analyses the conversion process and the experiences of the Sidāma, in being proselytised by Protestant missionaries in an attempt to integrate them into the modernising Ethiopian state. The conversion process is considered in terms of reasons for accepting or rejecting the new religion. A minority of Sidāma are shown to have changed from old beliefs and practices, partly because of the ease of moral reinterpretation and secular incentives, but primarily because of dissatisfaction with reciprocal exchange relations with indigenous spirits and a desire to transcend the finality of death. In advancing this proposition it rejects the possibility of Sidāma beliefs as constituting a closed system of cosmology. Though Islam is also present in the region, for political and economic reasons it has been less attractive to prospective converts than Christianity.

Northern Uganda is in transition after the conflict that ended in 2006. While its cities are thriving and economic opportunities abound, the social institutions governing land access are contested, the land administration system is changing, and the mechanisms available to address conflicts over resources have themselves become a venue for authority claims. This article examines the intergenerational nature of land conflicts in northern Uganda, focusing on the interplay of customary law, return migration and the development of a market in land. There are three contributions to existing literature: (1) a discussion of children's property rights under customary and statute law in Uganda; (2) the identification of the dual nature of children during complex emergencies as both victims and agents; and (3) an addition to knowledge on post-conflict return and community reconstruction. Evidence comes from several sources, the most important of which are a set of interviews conducted in Gulu and Kampala in May and June 2015. Secondary sources augment the field research, particularly survey research conducted in northern Uganda after the conflict.

Un énorme travail a été réalisé sur les populations Pygmées du Zaïre. Dans ce domaine, l'ethnologie, l'anthropologie, la théologie africaine doivent beaucoup à J.-P. Hallet, à P. Schebesta, à C. M. Turnbull et á bien d'autres. Bon nombre de ces études ont diffusé et privilgié l'image prédominante du Pygmée nomadisant á travers la forêt, son milieu naturel. Cependant, elles ont occulté la connaissance et empêché l'investigation sur de nombreux autres groupes de Pygmées vivant loin de la forêt. En effet, pour Schebesta, qui fait de l'anthropométrie un critère privilégié, les seuls vrais Pygmées sont les Bambuti de la forêt de l'Ituri (1933: 63). Tous les autres ne seraient que des ‘Pygmoformes’ ou des ‘Pygmoïdes’, des ‘peuples métissés dont un croisement aura abâtardi les caractères de race et de culture’ (1940: 20). De nos jours, les critéres ont changé. Certains chercheurs se fondent sur le caractère polyphonique de la musique comme élément primordial dans la définition du Pygmée.

Evaluations of colonial education policy tend to treat it as a tool for applying imperial ideology, which—among other things—denied the Africans their past. This study of the debate about history education in southern Nigeria in the 1930s suggests the need to re-evaluate this assessment. While some imperial pronouncements did deny African history, colonial administration also required historical knowledge. Further, many colonial educators thought it proper to provide African students with a sense of their past appropriate to colonial subjects. A few went much further, to actively promote pride in African history. In this ambivalent context African schoolteachers and graduates got on with the task of describing their past, often using colonial educational media, constrained but not silenced by their colonial situation. Recognising the fertile ambivalence of this aspect of imperial culture opens new and more fruitful approaches to colonial intellectual history in general.

The AmaMpondo are a Bantu tribe of the south-eastern group, living in a native reserve on the southern border of Zululand, and speaking a dialect of Xosa. They depend for their subsistence upon cattle farming and hoe culture. They have a typical Bantu ‘cattle complex’, cattle not only being of economic importance, but being a centre of men's interests and emotions and playing a large part in religion and marriage. They live in patrilineal kinship groups imizi (sing, umzi) which are scattered about the country at distances varying from some hundreds of yards to two or three miles. The average umzi now contains four to five adults, but formerly, when danger from man and beast made concentration necessary for defence, it is said that it was common for twenty married men, together with their wives and children, to live together in one umzi. Both chiefs and commoners practise polygyny, and a union is legalized by the passage of cattle from the groom's group to the bride's (ukulobola). Administration was organized on a territorial basis. There was a powerful paramount chief with district chiefs and sub-chiefs under him. Each sub-chief had a court, from which there was the right of appeal to his immediate superior and finally to the paramount. Cutting across the territorial groupings (amabandla) are patrilineal clans, iziduko (sing, isiduko). Iziduko are strictly exogamous, and the sense of difference between them, and oneness within them, is marked by the taboo on drinking milk, or eating sacrificial meat, of a strange isiduko, but the acceptance of either from a member of the same isiduko. Great emphasis is laid on the respect for elders, living and dead. Deceased ancestors, amatongo, are believed to have the power of blessing, or of sending sickness and poverty, and sacrifices of meat and beer are made to them. Besides being sent by ancestral spirits, sickness is thought to be caused by sorcerers, abatakati. Murder by sorcery is regarded as the worst possible crime, and was punished with torture and death. The fear of sorcery is ever present in the minds of AmaMpondo. The most powerful specialists in the society are the diviners, amagqira, who discover sorcery and who also treat sick persons.

Ruination has recently received much attention as a defining aspect of the materiality of modernity. Less attention is given to the processes of regeneration that occur within sites of ruination. In this article, we examine how processes of ruination and regeneration are folded into each other, by looking at the materiality of a single site, a small village in the vicinity of Dakar, Senegal. By building the University of the African Future at Sébikotane, the Senegalese president has sought to rekindle the spirit of excellence that inspired education at the École normale William Ponty in a Pan-African spirit. As part of a larger plan for urban expansion, the site of Sébikotane has inspired hope for development. Examining how the different temporalities of utopian modernism and Afro-nostalgia intersect in the ruined site, this article reflects on the ruination of African futures on a site of ever renascent utopian infrastructures.

En dépit du nouveau discours sur le développement, qui met l'accent sur la durabilité, la preservation de la biodiversité, la gestion des ressources naturelles, la création de revenus, l'association des partenaires a la recherche, le nouveau projet de la Banque Mondiale pour le développement de la pêche au Malawi représente la continuation des pratiques du passé. L'article examine, à la lumière d'enquêtes effectuées au sein des communautés de pêcheurs du Malawi, le cadre conceptuel à la base du projet et ses implications, La Banque, y dit-on, se trompe en soutenant l'important secteur commercial de la pêche plutot qu'en essayant de donner forme à des initiatives plus innovantes, faisant appel à la coopération des petits pêcheurs, des petits transformateurs et du petit commerce, qui constituent la vaste majorité des usagers du lac.

This is a preliminary report on the social and political significance of the rainshrines as an integrating force in Tonga society. In a sense it is a misnomer to refer to them as rain-shrines, for they are also appealed to on any occasion of general community disaster, such as epidemics or cattle plagues, but to the Tonga themselves the dominant aspect of the shrines is their efficacy in ensuring the proper rainfall.

This paper is based on personal research among the Igbo, and more especially among the Umundri group. It describes the coronation-ceremony of two divine kings who are the spiritual heads of the Umundri. The two divine kings occupy different towns which are in the Awka District, Onitsha Province. This Province is in Southern Nigeria and lies on the left bank of the Niger. Originally there was only Aguku and only one divine king. Dissensions arose and a part of Aguku seceded, to found the town of Oreri with its own divine king.

Belief in witchcraft was a characteristic of the Middle Ages and earlier in Europe, and a witch was executed there as late as 1782. Belief in witchcraft does not therefore place the African automatically in a special category of mankind; it is the result of being born and brought up in a society in which it is inherent. Broadly speaking a belief in witchcraft is a belief in a theory of cause and effect. It is a species of logic to explain why certain events have occurred. More particularly it is a theory of the causes of misfortunes which the believer finds to have their origins in the enmity of people possessed of evil powers. Since the belief is conditioned largely by the society in which the African is born and lives in a tribal state there is danger in the often-uttered statement that every African without exception believes implicitly in witchcraft. That is a superficial observation which is certainly not true. The African brought up outside tribal society to a greater or lesser degree will have his faith in witchcraft modified accordingly since that faith is a social and not a mental condition. An African born and brought up, for example, in England would only know of witchcraft objectively as a belief of other people. In Africa to-day, although tribal society predominates, it is not static; on the contrary in many respects it is in a state of constant change and modification, some would even say of a disintegration. In the light of this it is not surprising to find some Africans whose belief in witchcraft is being modified too.

Avec le discours du Président F. W. De Klerk du 2 février 1990 et les changements dramatiques par la suite évidents dans la politique sud-africaine, beaucoup d'érudits ont été enclin à tourner les yeux vers l'état. Si une transition envers une certaine forme de régie majoritaire est sous la main, comme la plupart des observateurs le croit, les questions sont: dans quelle condition se trouve l'état qui doit etre hérité par les nouveaux gouverneurs, et comment est-ce que celui-ci s'est trouvé dans une telle condition?

Un des processus les plus frappants a été la soi-disante afrikanérisation de l'état, qui a eu lieu pendant la plus grande partie du vingtième siecle et particulièrement après la victoire du Parti National (Purifié) de 1948. Done cet article identifie, premiérement, les creances et coutumes que les membres Afrikaner de l'elite bureaucratique ont acquis pendant leur ascendance au “trône Afrikaner” et, deuxièmement, analyse les tentatives visant à institutionaliser ces créances et coutumes au sein de l'état. Ainsi, cet article est à propos des actes d'une élite bureaucratique Afrikaner cachée derrière des positions d'autorité daris tous les secteurs de l'état depuis au moins quarante ans.

Two contrasted viewpoints are adopted by scholars towards indigenous credit institutions in underdeveloped societies. The first holds that such institutions cannot play any significant role in capital formation in those societies. Thus Firth (1964: 15–34) doubts ‘if such credit associations can contribute substantially to capital formation to promote economic growth significantly’. The second viewpoint is held by those who accept the important contributions of these institutions in the process of development but understate their functions and value in the process of development. Geertz (1962: 241–63) belongs to this group. After analysing indigenous credit institutions in Asia and Africa, he asserts that they can serve as a kind of ‘middle rung’ in economic development. He sees them as an ‘educational mechanism in terms of which peasants learn to be traders not merely in the narrow occupational sense, but in the broad cultural sense’. These conclusions seem to have influenced other scholars studying credit institutions in Africa. For instance, in his study of credit associations among the Afikpo Igbo, S. Ottenberg (1968: 237–52) adopts much of Geertz's stance.

The Nharo are a Khoe- (‘Hottentot-’) speaking hunting and gathering people of the central-western Kalahari. Linguistically they are closely related to the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and to several other, lesser-known, central Kalahari and Okavango Bushman peoples of Botswana. They are more distantly related to the extinct Khoekhoe (‘Hottentot’) herding peoples of the Cape Province of South Africa, and more distantly still, to the Nama Khoekhoe of Namibia. Lexicostatistical, cultural and genetic evidence suggests that the Khoe hunter-gatherers in general have lived independently from their herding relatives for some 2000 years, and that the Nharo in particular have lived in close contact with the !Kung and possibly also the !Kõ (both non-Khoe-speaking Bushman peoples) for a considerable part of that time. The primary purpose of this article is to present a description of selected Nharo institutions and customs, with reference to sex differentiation; but first a brief look at the Nharo settlement pattern is necessary.

The Azande are a Central African ethnic complex to which some fifty different peoples, speaking Sudanic, Bantu, Nilotic, and Nilo-Hamitic languages, have contributed. This was brought about by the migrations and conquests of the Ambomu people, under their Vongara ruling family, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the course of them the Mbomu clans, including the Avongara, were scattered far and wide, and everywhere they imposed on the subjugated peoples their language and political institutions, so that these peoples, some more quickly, and some more completely, than others, became, or are in the process of becoming, absorbed in the Zande amalgam. Little by little their languages are forgotten and their distinctive customs fall into desuetude. But, as might be supposed, in the process of assimilation to the dominant Ambomu, the foreign peoples, both the subjugated and those bordering Zandeland, contributed much to Zande culture. This paper is designed to give some indication of the extent to which the Ambomu have taken over foreign usages and of the complexity of the cultural amalgam which these borrowings have brought about.

In every continent in which it has taken root, the co-operative movement has assumed new forms and adopted fresh methods. In Europe, its original home, the consumers' stores of England and the credit and agricultural societies of Germany grew up almost independently of one another. When transplanted to America and Australia, it acquired peculiar strength in the field of large-scale marketing. In Asia the principal development has been that of credit for the peasantry, though with less emphasis on economic and more on moral elements than in Europe. In each of these continents the people, especially the poorer classes, have derived great benefits from their societies, the European in his domestic purchases, the American in the orderly disposal of his produce, the Asiatic in relief from the yoke of usury and in training of character by self-control and mutual control. The majority of Asiatic countries learned the lesson from India, whence the co-operative idea spread first to Ceylon, British Malaya, and Siam, then to the Philippine Islands and China. Japan is an exception, her national leaders after travel and observation having imitated in many respects the German system; Palestine and the Dutch East Indies, the latest recruits, also draw inspiration from both European and Asiatic sources. The general position now is that, save in a few regions where government is still unsteady, Co-operation is universal outside Africa.

Recent literature on Third World households suggests that the household is a critical unit of analysis in decision-making and economic organisation for development (Smith, Wallerstein and Evers, 1984; Netting, Wilk and Arnould, 1984). Increasingly, this literature is addressing intra-household behaviour, the ways in which households relate to other institutions and the degree to which they are autonomous or embedded in more comprehensive social structures (Guyer and Peters, 1984; Folbre, 1985; Moock, 1986). Indeed, the household focus requires not only close examination of the household's internal dynamics, but also its external context. That context includes the physical setting, international as well as national political and economic structures, and the local political economic and social systems.

The themes of knowledge and ignorance are explored in this article, as is their dialectic, in the light of the continuing failure of development efforts based on top-down procedures. My specific aim is to deliver a statement about the intricate relationship between knowledge, ignorance and power in the context of a Rwandan development project. I will demonstrate how ignorance is generated through agricultural extension and will argue that agronomic services rely on power structures reminiscent of the ‘old’ premise of social inequality (Maquet, 1961; for a summary of the debate on social inequality in Rwanda, see Reyntjens, 1985: 21–30). My concern will be to assess whether the project-induced creation of ignorance—such as the distorted portrayal of practices outside the project area—leads to the displacement of local knowledge and the adoption of new methods.

Les Bamiléké ont élaboré des institutions profondément originales dans des domaines en apparence nettement distincts, lignage et parenté, chefferie, sociétés coutumières, organisation des quartiers. L'organisation sociale qui en résulte est fort complexe et présente des variations notables d'un groupement à l'autre, surtout dans le domaine du fonctionnement de la chefferie. L'édifice apparaît surchargé d'éléments secondaires, au point que ses grandes lignes finissent par se trouver masquées.