It is important to understand native opinion about black magic, not only for the anthropologist but also for the colonial administrator and missionary, if they wish to show to the peoples whom they govern and teach that they understand their notions about right and wrong. The native does not so much distrust European justice and education as he despairs of the administrator and missionary ever understanding, or attempting to understand, his point of view as expressed in laws and public opinion. This despair springs largely from the handling by Europeans of such matters as sorcery, with which both missionaries and administrators frequently have to deal. The native becomes convinced finally that the European is quite incapable of seeing the difference between right and wrong, between the proper use of a cultural weapon fully sanctioned by public opinion, such as white magic, and a heinous and cold-blooded murder, such as the crime of black magic or sorcery. He eventually reaches the conclusion, through long experience, that to white men all magic is shameful and criminal, and that they will either laugh at it or penalize it.

Towards the end of every year Swazi from the Swaziland Protectorate and from beyond its borders come to the capital, the home of the Indlovukati (Queen-Mother), to take part in the dominant national ceremony, the Incwala. I will analyse this in some detail from the angle of social stratification. Cook, Schoeman, and Marwick have described the Incwala, but their accounts are very incomplete, nor can I accept their interpretations.

The Incwala can be abstracted from Swazi culture, in the same way as any other situation—a marriage, a court case, a business agreement, the building of a hut, &c., but it has a wider and more representative personnel, and Swazi recognize it as the most important of all national ceremonies, and the most essential event of the year. Personal joys and tragedies, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one affect individual men and women, but the Incwala ‘is the heavy play of all the people’.

Given that one is attempting to collect information as an academic observer among a people other than one's own, the data on many aspects of that society presented in standard ethnographic analyses must inevitably be thin and inadequate by the current standards of the social sciences. This situation tends to make for a one-sided approach. With a paucity of material at one's disposal, there is an overwhelming tendency to stress the analysis of ‘norms’ (and the more abstract ‘structures’ based upon them) since verbal statements of ‘expected behaviour’ are often more easily gathered than observations of ‘actual’ transactions. On this level, too, the limited number of one's respondents can be bolstered up by resort to linguistic parallels (‘from one informant you can analyse a language’) or by the comforting assumption, nourished by much sociological theory, that simpler societies are more ‘homogeneous’.

This paper is an attempt to establish certain contested facts about Nyoro symbolism. The need to do so results, in brief, from the following circumstances. Eight years ago I published an analysis of the significance of right and left in Nyoro symbolic classification (Needham 1967). John Beattie, who had done field research among the Nyoro, then brought out an article in which he contended that I had seriously misrepresented the nature of Nyoro representations of their own culture and history, ‘even in so far as these can be understood from readily available published sources’. His main concern in his critique, consequently, was ‘to set the Nyoro ethnographic record straight’ (Beattie 1968: 413).

Law, particularly the law of property, may indeed be an instrument of the ruling class for the reproduction of any given social and economic formation, but few anthropologists have pursued this line of argument. Instead of examining how law was actually generated within particular political and economic contexts, anthropologists concerned with property law in colonial Africa tended to take for granted its existence at a particular point in time, and either to emphasise the institutional duality of colonial and indigenous assumptions and procedures concerning property or to stress the universal elements of legal behaviour despite these institutional differences.

In this article I analyse Somali political institutions in terms of clanship (tol) and contract (heer). By the latter term I mean the explicit contracts, or treaties of government, which are the foundation of all formal political units among the northern pastoral Somali. In conclusion, I examine the significance of Somali political structure in the light of Maine's celebrated dictum that the ‘movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract’.

This article examines two closely related themes: the triangle of tradition, capital and the state; and resistance to neotraditional leadership and local activism for democracy. I investigate an uprising in the Topnaar Traditional Authority in the Erongo region of Namibia by young community activists who aimed to promote democracy in their community in a context of manifold accusations of self-enrichment and corruption against the neotraditional leadership. The article demonstrates that the corporatization of tradition is a double-edged sword: neotraditional leaders expand their local power towards their subjects in the short term, but it often produces severe conflict that may result in the delegitimization of neotraditional authority in the long run. However, the Topnaar youth uprising and quest for democracy was less about challenging neotraditional authority per se and more about replacing the incumbents as well as obtaining a fair share of political power. It resulted from the perception that the neotraditional-cum-corporate ventures no longer served the cause of a common good; this, in turn, contradicted the general ideal of equality among the Topnaar. The corporatization of tradition thus generated local grievances and stimulated demands for democratic participation. Since the uprising gained at least some of its momentum from my research on neotraditional authority, I also reflect on my role.

Despite the perception that department stores are a recent phenomenon in West Africa, modern indoor retail spaces have existed in its major cities since the mid-twentieth century. This article uses the history of Kingsway Department Store in Accra as a lens to understand emerging political, economic and social tensions in post-colonial Ghana. Drawing on United Africa Company (UAC) records, staff reports and inspection findings, as well as local newspapers, advertising and oral interviews, I demonstrate how legacies of colonial capitalism, struggles for political independence and negotiations over what constituted the ‘modern’ fuelled both local and foreign support of the project. For the UAC, investment was an opportunity to legitimize its activities in a newly independent Ghana and a means to shed its image as a colonial merchant firm. While local authorities were divided on whether large-scale retail developments should be part of an expanding post-colonial city, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah thought the store might provide a key component in constructing his vision of a new modern nation. However, the presence of white-collar working women, young managers supervising older employees, and the mixing of white expatriate and African shoppers exacerbated social conflicts – challenging local and colonial notions of authority based on race, gender and age.

Most development interventions targeting rural women's economic empowerment measure success through returns from women's on-farm or off-farm activities and the income they generate. This article suggests that special emphasis needs to be laid on income control, not just its generation, in order to take account of the more or less subtle socio-cultural obstacles and other structures of constraint hindering women in this regard. The article draws from ethnographic case studies conducted for a doctoral dissertation project in south-west Burkina Faso to show how women in cotton-farming zones strategize to circumvent customary rules and control their on-farm incomes. The context is an organic cotton-farming project targeting women. I argue that understanding these constraints and strategies provides policy makers and development practitioners with tools for a better grasp of the social landscape – and that this, in turn, enables them to reach empowerment goals.

In Nigeria there are two principal methods of contracting marriages (a) by the payment of a bride-price, and (b) by exchange.

I use the well-established term ‘bride-price’ in preference to the newfangled term ‘bride-wealth’ because the exact equivalent of the term ‘bride-price’ is used in many native Nigerian languages, and also because the term connotes a standard rate payable for a bride, whereas ‘bride-wealth’ is a vague term which seems to suggest the goods and chattels or wedding-presents of a bride.

This brief historical survey of music education in Ghana and Nigeria encompasses three periods—the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras. Its main aim is to search for explanations of an apparent dichotomy between African and Western musics in the curricula of schools in both countries. It shows that, during the pre-colonial and colonial eras, some missionaries, colonial administrators and teachers encouraged the use of indigenous musics in the formal, Western, education systems, whilst, in the post-colonial period, initiatives to include more indigenous African musics have put some pressure at lower levels of the curriculum. Consequently, it may be necessary to reassess the content, methods and resources of music education in both countries.

In June 1978, following a series of arguments in her marital home, a young Temne woman called Isatu travelled from her home in Makeni (a town which is the capital of Sierra Leone's Northern Province) to the village of Petbana Masimbo three miles away in order to consult a diviner about the cause. The diviner she consulted was Pa Koroma, a well-patronized Muslim diviner who was also her father's brother. Pa Koroma happened to be conducting a session of the dramatic and relatively expensive α η-yina Musa mediumship method of divination, which is commissioned by a wealthy client but which more minor clients such as Isatu can also participate in. He put a female medium, completely covered by a protective white cloth and gazing into a white bowl of water containing Islamic medicine (mǝ-nαsi), into a trance in which she was able to communicate with αη-yina Musa, the fearful ‘Muslim’ spirit of divination. Around Pa Koroma's central parlour, in which the divination took place, were seated members of the village, some of whom had come to ask questions, others simply to watch and, where appropriate, to interject comments on what was being said. The medium, an elderly woman called Mami Yeno, was a sister-in-law of Pa Koroma from Makaper, a village about two miles from Petbana. Each person who had come to ask about a problem addressed their question to Pa Koroma, who repeated it to Mami Yeno. Mami Yeno then silently conveyed the question to αη-yina Musa and, after a pause, returned the reply to Pa Koroma, the latter repeating and often elaborating upon her utterances to the audience.

Cet article examine la nature et le développement de l'agriculture vivrière commerciale au cours des années 90 dans la région de Sokoto, ainsi que sa dépendance vis-à-vis d'une main d'œuvre flottante, caractéristique particulière de cette ville mais qui s'inscrit dans l'essor de l'agriculture au Nigeria sur le plan national, concentrée sur les marchés urbains et régionaux. Les observations recueillies dans l'arrière-pays de Sokoto suggèrent une relance du secteur agricole et de l'investissement, la situation politique et économique actuelle incitant les élites et les classes dirigeantes à investir dans l'agriculture, les marchés privés et publics s'étant avérés moins rémuneratéurs. La culture des céréales et du fadama à grande échelle et le commerce des denrées alimentaires remontent à bien longtemps, mais ils s'intègrent désormais dans des catégories analytiques nouvelles qui indiquent un renforcement des modèles de production capitalistes, et il semblerait qu'un large éventail d'intérêts pensent qu'une accumulation du capital est possible dans l'agriculture. L'agriculture vivrière peut rapporter gros, à condition que l'exploitant dispose d'un capital suffisant pour investir et faire face aux coûts variables de la main d'œuvre. Dans les années 90, les exploitations de taille moyenne, notamment dans les plaines irriguées, représentent un glissement important vers une agriculture capitaliste, du moins à court terme. L'introduction de pompes motorisées par l'intermédiate des projets de développement agricole de la Banque Mondiale marque une innovation considérable dans l'agriculture irriguée qui elle aussi remonte à longtemps et a produit des excédents de denrées alimentaires échangés sur une zone géographique étendue. Il est clair que les exploitants qui ont le plus bénéficié d'une mécanisation partielle et de la hausse des prix des denrées alimentaires sont les petits producteurs aisés des villages, qui ont souvent des liens de filiation ou de clientèle avec les dirigeants traditionnels et/ou les politiciens, ainsi que les nouvelles classes dirigeantes urbaines.

Several attempts have been made to understand the development if not the origin of Akan culture in terms of the diffusion of (a) traits from the north which were taken south with the expansion and disintegration of the great savanna trading empires and the southward migration of Mande Dyula merchants and (b) traits which were already present prior to that migration in a large area once populated mainly by Guan in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Togo, and today populated for the most part by Akan, Adanbe, and Ewe. The mixing of these cultural traits and the point of origin for the Akan expansion appear, to have taken place along a trade route stretching from the Sahara to the Atlantic coast, close to the site of Begho near Wenchi in the Bono Techiman state (Boahen 1966; Goody 1959, 1966, 1968; Wilks 1962).

Most descriptions of social life in rural communities in Central Africa contain some references to hunters or hunting practices. Despite the decimation of some wildlife species by rinderpest at the turn of the last century, wildlife continued plentiful in many regions and hunting and trapping were part of the subsistence routines of males in rural areas during the first three decades of this century. During this period in Zambia, European administrators (Gouldsbury and Sheane 1911; Melland 1923; Hughes 1933), missionaries (Smith and Dale 1920), and itinerants (Lyell 1910; Letcher 1911) often interspersed their exploitative accounts of ‘sport hunting’ with descriptions of chants, rituals, magic and other hunting lore of their African associates. These accounts of local traditions, often colored with the latent assumptions of the time, apparently intrigued and fascinated their European readership then mentally riding the crest of colonial expansion and technological superiority. In subsequent decades, large wild mammals declined in numbers and in importance as a subsistence base in most rural areas. Yet information on hunting customs, gleaned incidentally in the pursuit of the researchers' major interests, has been a continuous feature of ethnographies written subsequently by social scientists (Richards 1939; White 1956; Turner 1957; Scudder 1962; Stefaniszyn 1964; Reynolds 1968) suggesting a widespread enthusiasm for hunting even where wildlife is no longer of consequence. These fortuitous bits of information on the subsistence hunter's world still leave many unresolved questions as to the function and frequency of these customs, the numbers and types of hunters in each community, and the nature of subsequent changes.

This note on the distribution of the Sanusiya order in north Africa and western Arabia is a supplement to the article on the history of the order which appeared recently in Africa (vol. xv, no. 2). Use has been made of earlier efforts to list its lodges. The earliest authorities were mostly relying on hearsay and later writers have sometimes copied their lists without further inquiry. On the whole, however, their records are fairly accurate and, though many of the names they give are so badly transliterated that they would be unrecognizable to anyone dependent on maps alone, they can easily be identified by anyone who knows the countries at first hand. Even when a name cannot be identified it need not be assumed that it is necessarily incorrect, because lodges are often known by more than one name, sometimes, especially in the Marmarica, by the name of their Shaikhs. I have also been able to make use of a list of 128 lodges drawn up for me by al-Sayyid Ibrahim (whose father al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif was the last head of the order), though it contains a number of inaccuracies; and of my own observations and inquiries, which cover Cyrenaica and, more superficially, Tripolitania and Egypt.

According to a partial census taken in 1960, Bamako city has about 130,000 inhabitants. Small by Western standards, it is still by far the largest city in Mali. At the time of the French conquest Bamako had only between 800 and 1,000 inhabitants; it was the capital of a Bambara chiefdom, grouping about thirty villages on the north bank of the Niger river, with a total of about 5,000 people. The ruling dynasty was that of the Niaré, who, according to their traditions, came from the Kingi eleven generations ago (between 1640 and 1700). For defence against the neighbours and armed slave-raiders fortifications were built around the town and a permanent army of so-fa (horsemen) was raised. Soon after its foundation Bamako attracted Moslem Moors from Twat who settled as marabouts and merchants under the protection of the Niaré's warriors. Among them, the Twati (later to be called Touré) and the Dravé became, alongside and sometimes in competition with the Niaré, the leading families.

The special branch of social anthropology which deals with peoples whose culture is undergoing rapid change as the result of contact with more highly developed societies is of interest from a number of different points of view. On the one hand there is the purely theoretic approach, which is concerned to discover rules governing this process—to find reasons for the assimilation of some elements of the alien culture and the rejection of others, or explanations of the fact that the dominant civilization has sometimes succeeded in imposing changes in social organization which analysis shows to be patently disadvantageous, while in other directions it may be powerless; perhaps to trace the basic human motives which come sharply into prominence when liberated by the breakdown of traditional standards of conduct and values. On the other hand this study has a severely and urgently practical importance. A recent American writer has suggested that in British colonies these problems are only considered relevant in their bearing on the maintenance of the labour supply. Such a view would appear to conflict with the fact that, as far as Africa is concerned, it is mainly in colonies governed under the system of Indirect Rule, where the economic policy is to encourage independent native production, that the study of social anthropology receives official encouragement. Actually it is being more and more clearly recognized by administrators directly concerned in moulding the development of the African peoples that this ‘sacred trust’ cannot be executed until the bases of a sound development are laid down; until it is known in each separate case how far the native social organization has been already rendered obsolete by changed conditions, how far it is capable of readjustment, what are the existing foundations on which the new institutions that the new needs require can be securely built. Experience is constantly bringing home to the man on the spot the need for some more practical criterion of policy than that inherent desirability of everything ‘civilized’, which the facts so plainly contradict.

Of the various aspects of ethnology, perhaps that of economics has been most neglected. Within the past few years a number of books and articles have appeared with the intent to remedy this situation, but the study of the economic life of primitive peoples is still in its infancy. Particularly is this true of consumer economics in primitive societies. More and more data, especially of a concrete, quantitative nature, are needed. This study is a small contribution in that direction. It presents the annual monetary incomes and expenditures of sixteen Ibo natives living in the community of Ozuitem in south-eastern Nigeria.

The Sandawe of central Tanzania speak a click language which shows no relationship with the languages of their Bantu-speaking neighbours, nor with any of the other non-Bantu languages in the neighbourhood; rather, it may be remotely related to the Khoisan languages of South Africa, in particular to Nama Hottentot. Physically the Sandawe differ to a degree from their neighbours, and their closest affinities may again be with Hottentot peoples. Sandawe material culture also differs to a degree from the cultures of their neighbours; like them, the Sandawe have an economy which largely depends on cattle-keeping and horticulture, but it is less sophisticated and their reliance on food-gathering and hunting is still considerably greater. Considering this difference in background it would be not at all surprising if their system of beliefs also showed differences. Comparisons cannot yet be profitably made, however, because little has so far been published about Sandawe religion, except a paper by van de Kimmenade and some details which can be found in the writings of Dempwolff and Bagshawe. In his ethnographic survey Huntingford draws our attention to the lack of knowledge of Sandawe religious beliefs, pointing out that these have been imperfectly recorded; yet he recognizes that the moon (láb′so or !áoso) and the sun (//′akásu) occupy a central position in Sandawe religion, which he summarizes as follows:

It appears that the sun and the moon are regarded as supreme beings, and that propitiatory sacrifices are made to the ancestral spirits who can do both good and evil to mankind.