In 1976, Sokoto became the capital of the newly created Sokoto State, one of nineteen comprising Federal Nigeria. This caliphal city and former colonial provincial town subsequently experienced an exponential growth of population from some 80,000 to around 200,000 by 1980. The city expanded physically into the surrounding countryside and new buildings and infrastructures absorbed large areas of farmland, and encircled several villages. This urban advance into the countryside was exacerbated by the fact that it took place within a densely populated area of annual upland cultivation, dissected by tracts of dry-season irrigated floodland. Not surprisingly, access and rights to farmland have become highly charged and sensitive issues. The peripheries and hinterlands of many Nigerian towns have become arenas of conflict and change, where state expropriation and private accumulation have dispossessed and impoverished rural people. The state has taken over land for institutional use or agricultural development projects, while urban and rural capital have accumulated land for speculative building on the edges of cities and for farming within the surrounding countryside. The increased numbers of landless and, more important, the land-poor constitute new kinds and degrees of rural poverty.

In this paper I isolate for study a particular set of ancestors, the maternal ancestors in patrilineal societies and paternal ancestors in matrilineal societies. I call these the ‘extra-descent group ancestors’, for they are the ancestors of the parent who is residual with reference to the descent group of Ego. Thus among the Tallensi of northern Ghana, since membership of the descent group is traced patrilineally, the mother is the residual parent, and consequently the maternal ancestors are extradescent group ancestors, while the patrilineal ancestors are descent ancestors. Conversely, among the Plateau Tonga of Zambia, where there is a matrilineal system of descent, the father is the residual parent, and therefore the extra-descent group ancestors are the paternal ancestors, while the descent ancestors are matrilineal. It is with the character and actions of the extra-descent group ancestors that I shall be mainly concerned.

Le troisième volume des notes de K. Laman édité par S. Lagercrantz en 1962 étudie la vie religieuse chez les Kongo. Une grande partie des 258 pages traite des nkisi, ces forces non humaines capturées par les hommes qui les incorporent à un support matériel pour les mettre à leur service. Souvent aussi, prenant l'initiative du contact, les nkisi offrent leurs pouvoirs à certaines personnes de leur choix. A partir des 119 nkisi mentionnés ou décrits par K. Laman est-il possible de construire un système explicatif dans lequel ils obéissent à une certaine logique, sont actifs dans un domaine particulier, sont justifiés par des correspondances avec certaines catégories du monde, bref, sont reliés à un système de pensée cohérent et capable de légitimer leur action? Laman lui-même nous y invite puisqu'il déclare ‘minkisi belong to three classes: land, water and sky minkisi, according as their nkisi-fotraing medicines derive from these respective spheres’ (p. 71).

Studies of African religions almost invariably include detailed discussions of various categories of spirits. Rarely, however, is spirit considered in the abstract; spirits are described, but not the spiritual. This paper will explore the concept of sunsum, ‘spirit’, as it is employed throughout Akwapim Akan philosophy. Sunsum will be shown to be the central, unifying theme which integrates the various domains of Akwapim Akan thought. The distinction between the exclusively spiritual (ye sunsum) and the inspirited (wo sunsum) figures prominently in the ontology, epistemology and theory of causality and constitutes a major premise of the philosophy. The paper will conclude with the assertion that the universe in traditional Akwapim Akan thought is not divided into separate spiritual and material worlds but is most accurately regarded as one inspirited universe.

The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement with the empirical situation and a corresponding new breadth of allusion to theory and to work from the past.

This article analyses the reasons why, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1992, the Upper West Region (UWR) has become one of the strongholds of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in northern Ghana. In all five general elections to date, the NDC has won more than half of the presidential vote and over 70 per cent of the parliamentary seats. The article explores the factors that explain the NDC's electoral dominance in the UWR. At the regional level the accepted argument has been that the NDC's predecessor extended developments to the area. However, if voting preferences are based on development considerations, why didn't loyalty shift to the NPP? I argue that political loyalty is generational and that the popularity of the NDC in the UWR can be understood through an appreciation of the recent history of the region. On 14 January 1983, PNDC Law 41 decreed the creation of the Upper West Region, carved out of what was then the Upper Region. I conclude that the political and socio-economic opportunities that came along with decentralization are historical memories of high value, which the NDC capitalizes on in its electioneering campaigns.

The influx of Chinese-made African ethnic dress has been central to debates about the consequences of the growing Chinese presence in Africa. Exploring the reception of the Chinese-produced capulana in Mozambique and net'ela in Ethiopia, we demonstrate that Mozambican and Ethiopian manufacturers and traders, from the grass roots up to cultural elites, engage with Chinese imports with creativity and verve. While welcoming Chinese materials for their affordability, bold and bright colours and suitability for dressmaking, they fashion them in ways that fit their own tastes and the local fashion trends. We distinguish three practices by which people do this: first, by incorporating Chinese materials or design elements into their own products; second, by co-creating new designs and dress with their Chinese counterparts; and third, by altering the imported fabrics. Apart from fashioning imports, some manufacturers use strategies to distinguish their own products from Chinese counterparts. These strategies include naming practices linked to the stories of their origin and alterations to the material.

The land disputes in Cameroon that are best known are between groups of local (indigenous) populations and people originating from elsewhere (incomers). This situation is fairly common in the cosmopolitan towns of Douala and Yaoundé. The purpose of this article is not to revisit these types of conflict, but rather to explore conflicts over land between the indigenous populations and the state. This new kind of opposition demonstrates that it is not only the incoming populations who are dispossessing indigenous people of their land. In fact, in various and more effective ways, the state is playing a significant part in the expropriation of indigenous land heritage. This process may be witnessed in urban housing developments, as well as in areas set aside for public utility, or those that are too dangerous to be developed (slopes, piedmonts and marshlands). Through its policy of urbanization, the state is seemingly contributing to producing ‘landless indigenous people’ in much the same way as and probably more effectively than the incomers. This article reviews the historical processes of land expropriation from the time of the colonial state, analysing the grievances of indigenous people faced with this situation, as well as the strategies they have developed in an effort to take back control of their lost lands.

Although the educational value of African oral traditions, particularly folktales, has been discussed widely in social studies of children, education and folklore, riddling is not commonly investigated as a part of children's everyday social practice. In this article, I present riddling as a part of children's expressive culture, through which they play together and learn about their local environment. I generated the data through ten months of ethnographic fieldwork among Guji people in southern Ethiopia. Based on analyses of the times and locations of this activity, as well as the social interaction involved, I argue that children perform riddling in order to entertain themselves and to learn from their immediate social and natural environment through discrete peer networks.

North-east Nigeria is an area of great ethno-linguistic diversity and religious pluralism, with Islam and Christianity both having a strong presence. The majority of the population is Muslim but there is also a substantial indigenous Christian minority, who form a majority in some local government areas. This paper draws on fieldwork by the authors in two north-eastern states, Bauchi and Gombe, to explore why, despite comparable religious demographics, there are marked differences in the levels of collective violence experienced in the two states. Although ethno-religious violence has increased across northern Nigeria since the 1980s, some areas have been more affected than others. To understand why this is, it is necessary to place ethnic and religious differences in their local historical and political contexts. This paper compares Gombe and Bauchi and argues that, although there are complaints of marginalization among different groups in both cases, Gombe State has developed a more inclusive system of government and local conflict management than Bauchi State. We explore what accounts for this difference in the articulation and management of belonging and whether the contrast is significant enough to explain differential levels of violence. In doing so, we consider how inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations have been shaped historically in the two cases and compare current forms of collective mobilization, considering different social and political spaces within each state. The paper also briefly outlines the impacts of the radical insurgent group Jama'at ahl al-sunna li'l-da'wa wa'l-jihad, nicknamed Boko Haram, in Bauchi and Gombe states.

The causes of migration are a major theoretical issue in migration studies. Some writers, such as Udo, see migration as involving a permanent or semi-permanent change of residence. It is usually considered to be a rational, that is an economic, man's reaction to economic differentials between regions (Udo, 1978: 124). Hill adds that in rural West Africa the propensity to migrate does not necessarily correlate at all closely with population density as demographers and economists so often assume; it may be the result of lack of lucrative non-farming occupations, because farming is not regarded as ‘work’ by some West Africans (Hill, 1978: 25–6).

This article explores the ways in which the Ivoirian Land Code of 1998 has played into political debates around national citizenship that have divided Ivoirian society since the 1990s. The attempts to reinterpret public policies on land and immigration have played a crucial role in exacerbating the political crisis of nationalism. When land was linked to nationality and indigeneity, the land question became significant in determining the boundaries of nationality, since to gain security in property rights Ivoirian nationality had to be proved. The article traces how land policy has been transformed from an inclusive framework that encouraged the rapid expansion of the cocoa and coffee frontiers in the 1970s to an exclusionary policy rooted in concepts of nationalism and autochthony, as land became increasingly scarce in the south-west. The Land Code of 1998 endorsed this nationalism, preventing foreigners and their descendants from owning land. Through an example of a conflict in Tabou in which Burkinabé migrants were ejected from the land, the article shows how customary land values have been recreated to take on nationalistic, xenophobic values, according to which ethnic identities become conflated with distinctions between ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’, and land relations are defined as between ethnic groups rather than being contractual relations between individuals belonging to different groups: thus social identities become more exclusive.

Les écrits consacrés à Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I (1888-1931) portent majoritairement sur sa carrière de roi des Asante dans le contexte de la colonisation britannique. Cet article tente de nous éclairer quelque peu sur la vie personnelle de Prempeh et sur son attachment au christianisme et à la modernité. Il définit les notions de modernité et de conversion dans le contexte Asante, et examine l'initiative novatrice de Prempeh de fusionner la tradition Asante et la modernité. Les conséquences de cette initiative ont été très importantes pour Prempeh et les Asante. L'article est une microétude de l'action des forces culturelles mondiales dans un contexte non occidental.

In the rural Adja region of south-west Bénin there is a labour problem. People who want to expand their businesses need cheap and reliable labour, but such labour is difficult to find and to manage. The sort of ‘big men’ known as alo-su amè dji—those mainly interested in investing in and dominating people—would like to keep up the appearance of being a ‘big man’ with many people under their control, but they cannot avoid the modern temptation of aspiring to personal wealth. Their style of management is to use mainly domestic labour, yet they face problems as the young begin to distrust the intentions of their household heads: the latter are suspected of looking after their own interests, while their followers doubt whether they will get a fair share of the assets when there are so many of them in a large family. Furthermore, sons and dependants find a long, very low-paid ‘apprenticeship’ increasingly unacceptable.

There is growing awareness of the difficulties of working with domestic labour and of the splintering effect of redistributing assets between a great many people. A small but growing number want accumulation for themselves and a limited number of descendants. This new style is associated with the sort of accumulators called eho wu amè, people who try to maximise financial gain. They work with much less family than hired labour (and prefer a much lower rate of polygyny). But hired labour at economic rates is not easy to find and there are organisational problems.

The Ibo of Owerri Province form a compact mass living in what are perhaps best termed village-areas, straggling ‘garden cities’ covering a large area of ground, and where huts either stand in little unprotected bunches or in walled compounds with farmlands and forest between. The few towns, in the European sense of the word, that exist are semi-artificial and date from after the British occupation. Schools and churches are multiplying quickly, but the bulk of the dense population is still pagan and illiterate. It is composed almost exclusively of farmers who, in certain districts, are also oil-nut gatherers. These Ibo are intensely democratic, recognizing no central tribal authority and though coming apparently from the same stock and speaking the same language (although with strong dialectical differences) are curiously individualistic. Their compatriots, living in another village-area only a few miles away but unrelated by ties of kinship, are considered as ‘foreigners’', all bearers of the worst possible characters and capable of the darkest crimes. Daily habits, methods of farming, methods of building, taboos, religious conceptions, vary bewilderingly so that the investigator finds, after months of work, that he has still nothing but bits and pieces that form no coherent whole. All he can do is to pick out a few of the pieces which seem to him significant and describe them to the best of his admittedly limited knowledge in the hope that others may find the links between them.

Studies on the Bantu of south-east Africa by American anthropologists are rare. For this reason visits such as that of Dr. Marvin Harris of Columbia University to Moçambique should be welcomed.

However, on reading his paper on the political and cultural factors of the migratory labour of the Thonga his data seem incomplete and the inferences therefrom not altogether correct. He chose a social process of extreme complexity, and for it to be completely understood it is necessary to undertake more research on its correlations and implications, and to observe it in a broader perspective, taking into account geographical, historical, ecological, cultural, political, and economic peculiarities of this whole region of Africa. In the following comments I shall try not to become involved in moral or political issues but to observe the migratory process as objectively as possible.

The has been considerable concern in recent years with the large number of young people in various developing countries who receive a few years of primary education and then prove a drain on the economy because they cannot or will not find employment. The usual complaint has been that they all want clerical jobs for which they are marginally, if at all, qualified, and the usual remedy suggested has been a return to the farm.

This paper describes the political organisation of transporting in Agege, a Nigerian town located on the northern boundary of Lagos. Its aim is to provide an anthropological interpretation of this important domain of modern entrepreneurship, for, while social anthropologists have increasingly studied African urban economies, the analysis of transportation remains the preserve of economists and geographers. When anthropologists do make mention of those who own vehicles geared to the movement of produce and passengers, their social and political significance is confirmed. Wealthy Hausa transporters emerge as key figures in Cohen's (1969) careful dissection of the Sabon Gari of Ibadan, while Peel (1983) details how those traders who were also transporting magnates exercised continuous influence in the political transformation of Ijesha throughout much of the present century. Despite such occasional commentaries, the organisation of transporting per se remains a field unexplored by anthropologists. Accordingly, it is the micropolitics of relationships between bus owners, drivers and conductors that constitute my major concern, although the analysis also leads to examining relationships between prominent transporters and those who exercise authority in the contemporary Nigerian state.

The economic condition of workers in the fast-growing urban centres of African countries is of concern to scholars and policymakers interested in developing programmes to alleviate the persistent poverty. However, there is a dearth of micro-level research on the economic activities of the numerous occupations to be found in these settings. This information would provide a more realistic basis for policies and the assessment of competing theoretical models of social change (Moser, 1980). The aim of the present paper therefore is to provide baseline data on the economic situation of one group of workers within the urban economy—vendors of street foods. Street foods are defined as edibles which have been prepared outside the consuming household and are ready for consumption at point of purchase; however, the buyer may take them elsewhere. The study does not include those ready-to-eat foods prepared within the confines of modern establishments with four walls. Modern restaurants and the cafeteria sections of hospitals, prisons, colleges and universities were therefore excluded. The small-scale businesses under study are part of what is known as the informal sector. The study was conducted in Ile-Ife, a university town in Oyo State (Yorubaland). Among the Yoruba, women became active in small-scale trade following changes in the patterns of international trade and in farming since the fifteenth century. This process was also facilitated by colonial penetration into the socioeconomic fabric of the society (Afonja, 1981). Within the trading business the marketing of street foods was dominated by women (Bascom, 1951; Marshall, 1964; Fadipe, 1970). Central to the concerns of this paper therefore are the levels of income generated by these women, the problems associated with the enterprise and possible recommendations on how to improve the situation of food vendors in the urban economy.

In his book on the Arusha, the agricultural Masai of Mount Meru, Professor Gulliver concludes with a general theoretical statement in which he suggests a way of classifying processes of dispute settlement. Gulliver says that there are ‘two polar types of process—judicial and political—between which there is a graduated scale where, ideally, particular systems could be placed according as to whether they were more judicial or more political in their nature’ (Gulliver, 1963, p. 297).