Au regard des Kasena, la vie trouve dans la mort sa mesure et sa source de revitalisation. En effet, le défunt survit dans ses descendants et dans l'univers ancestral. Les pratiques funéraires sont trés élaborées. Elles ne sont pas uniquement un reflet des valeurs et des préoccupations d'ordre social, culturel, religieux et psychologique partagées par le groupe, mais bien davantage une modalité d'élaboration revigorante de celles-ci: la vie sociale et culturelle se regénère au travers la mort et les funérailles d'un membre qui, lui-même, accède à un état de vie fondatrice de celle de ses descendants. A base d'une recherche dans le milieu d'origine de l'auteur, on se concentre en particulier sur les funérailles premières pour adultes. La description détaillée est suivie d'une analyse des congruences surprenantes entre rites de naissance et rites funéraires. L'examen porte ensuite sur «la maison» ou «la chambre» créée dans le sol—soit dans la chambre maternelle même, soit dans un champ voisin vers l'est—pour accueillir le mort comme dans une extension fondatrice, voire dans «les entrailles» de la demeure des survivants.

De récentes trouvailles en archéologie et en biologie en population humaine indiquent deux périodes démographiques dans la colonisation de la forêt du sud du Ghana: la période préhistorique et le début de la periode historique. La premiere pèriode commença au début de l'ère commune. Le problème materiel le plus important qui a confronté les premières populations de la forêt en Afrique de l'oust a été le besoin de contrebalancer des taux de mortalité infantile et de maladie adulte extraordinairement elevés. Cette perte démographique était le résultat de nouvelles maladies écologiques—le rapport entre les pathogènes, notemment la malaria, leurs hoes et leurs environnements mutuels—qui ont confronté les peuples de la forêt aux temps préhistoriques et au début de la période historique. Le fait que ces nouvelles communautés de la forêt aient du payer chèrement de leurs vies et productivité les a conduit à apprécier la reproductivité des femmes étrangères (esclaves). La deuxième pèriode d'ajustement démographique vint entre le quinzième et le dix-septième siècle, lorsque les africains de l'ouest ont répondu à l'esclavage, les guerres et le viral Eurasien, les maladies bactérielles et [spirochètales] comme la tuberculose et la syphillis, en se regroupant dans leurs colonies de façon à dévélopper un système de defense. C'était pendant cette période, lorsque les réfugiés avaient été incorporé dans les communautés des forêts en grand nombre, y compris des femmes esclaves qui avaient été amenees pour reproduire, que la tradition des étrangers falsifiant les généalogies akan s'est répandue, aidant ainsi à assurer la reproduction sociale des lignages akan.

The present paper is an attempt to interpret the structural principles of the Nilo-Hamitic age-system and to establish its significance in the wider structure of the Nilo-Hamitic societies. The discussion is based on an analysis of the available anthropological literature. But this literature is extremely uneven and not seldom confusing, so that some aspects of my argument necessarily have but a preliminary value. It will not be possible to produce here all the details of the analysis, which I hope to deal with more extensively in some other place.

The idea of founding the Institute crystallized at a meeting of missionaries, and others, which was held at High Leigh in September 1924. Dissatisfaction with the prevailing order of things occupied the minds of all who were faced with the burning problems in Africa at that time. They were not content to allow a negative policy of drift to continue. They realized that they were confronted with one of the major problems of our age. They saw the need for an application of scientific method to a solution of the questions arising generally from the contact of Western civilization with African culture and particularly from the attempt to educate Africans on modern lines. The rapid opening of Africa to all the influences of Europeanism, they were convinced, called for an advance in the education of the peoples of Africa through the medium of their own forms of thought. The linguistic question was seen to lie at the root of the problem. The more systematic study of African languages, of their relative importance and uses, of their orthography, was deemed to be urgently necessary if the progress of education was not to be retarded, or rendered impossible, through the prevailing confusion and lack of co-operation between governments, missionary societies, and scientific experts. Such were the ideas in the minds of those who took part in that meeting nine years ago and embodied in a memorandum which they drew up. These problems had already been raised in New York after the return of Dr. Jesse Jones and Dr. Aggrey from West Africa before the departure of the Phelps Stokes Education Commission to East Africa. It seemed to us at High Leigh that the time was ripe for the setting up of an organization to carry out these ideas. We thought then modestly of ‘A Bureau of African Languages and Literature’. Probably not one of us had a prevision of whereunto the thing would grow.

The three books reviewed in this article seek to provide interpretations of dependence, unfreedom and slavery in African societies. But they reach different conclusions; bring different methodological frameworks to bear on the circumstances they examine; and – when they are concerned with policy questions – propose different remedies. A comparison of these books is useful not only for understanding African dependence and unfreedom, but also for rethinking critically the approaches of some of the main contemporary strands of research on these phenomena.

La recente résurgence de l'intérèt porte à l'impact de la deuxième Guerre Mondiale sur les peuples d'Afrique a délaissé à ce jour le sujet de l'énergie de la forêt (le bois à brûler et le charbon de bois) quant à sa production, sa consommation et ses échanges commerciaux. Cela doit être rectifié, pour un certain nombre de raisons: (1) le combustible de bois a représenté la part du lion de la production forestière pendant la guerre, en volume et en valeur, déclenchant (2), à un degré sans précédent, des séries intenses d' interventions d'urgence de l'état dans les marchés du bois à brûler qui ont contenu (3) d'importantes implications de capitaux—ce qui n'a pas ete mentionné en majeure partie—avec le risque que les tentatives actuelles et futures pour diriger les ressources en bois (en cas d'urgence) ne tiennent peut-être pas compte des lessons de cette expérience. Cet article traite ainsi des dynamiques et des conséquences des démarches adoptées face à la crise dans le domaine de la sylviculture coloniale. II tente de cerner les politiques sur l'énergie de la forêt et leurs applications, au temps de la guerre, en Afrique britannique de l'Ouest, en faisant spécialement référence à leurs conséquences sociales ‘inapercues’. Après une présentation, au niveau regional, du contexte politique, économique et surtout militaire de l'activité de l'énergie de la forêt, des études de cas détaillées évaluent l'impact de ce dernier sur les travailleurs dans la péninsule de la colonie Sierra Leone et dans les mines d'étain du Plateau Jos dans le nord du Nigeria. Le but principal de ces études est de montrer comment les demandes pour raison de guerre, en produits de subsistence, tels que le bois à brûler et le charbon de bois ont pesé démesurément sur les pauvres, même ceux qui appartenaient à des secteurs de la société qui bénéficiaient de situations priviligiées quant à la répartition des rares provisions en produits alimentaires. Un intérêt récent pour les implications financiéres des politiques et des pratiques actuelles et proposées (au temps de paix) sur l'énergie intérieure en Afrique, suggère que les questions sur les parts de justice soulevées dans cette étude sont largement plus au fait que le contexte historique spécifique à l'intérieur duquel ils ont été traités.

Muslim radicalism in Tanzania has tended to be perceived as a political problem, and as part of a trans-regional wave of Islamist movements. The present article instead seeks to demonstrate the connections between current debates among Tanzanian Muslims and long-standing ritual and social concerns, by highlighting debates on funerary practice. While these debates focus on the correct ritual process of burial (with reformists decrying elements of traditional practice as inappropriate innovation), their underlying concern is with the ability of the living to safeguard the well-being of the deceased. This concern, in turn, can be connected both to long-term social change and to the interaction between Muslim and indigenous religious notions. As propitiation of God supplants that of ancestors, the fate of the dead is increasingly construed as depending on the supplication of the living. Ultimately this religious debate is as concerned with society as with doctrine or ritual, and the opposing sides share some common ground. They do not, however, construe this as ‘Africanizing’ Islam, but as part of a necessary intellectual debate.

This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.

Le terme Minyanka est aujourd'hui officiellement consacré mais il n'est probablement qu'une déformation, due aux premiers auteurs européens, de Myanka, d'ailleurs rarement utilisé par les intéressés. Ceux que tout le monde appellent aujourd'hui les Minyanka se donnent eux-mêmes le nom de Bamana, dont la signification populaire est ‘ceux qui refusent le maître’. Par maître, il faut entendre aussi bien Allah, le dieu suprême des musulmans que le maître politique. Bamana désigne le fond de population non islamisée et demeurée fidèle à ses traditions religieuses. L'expression bamana djomo s'applique à la langue minyanka, par opposition au bambara, appelé blo djomo, la ‘langue des esclaves’, parce qu'elle était apprise par tous ceux qui étaient emmenés en captivité par les armées du royaume bambara de Ségou.

Age has represented in various ways a significant principle of social organization for the Mbeere of Kenya, one of the peoples of the North-eastern Bantu cluster, just as it has among numerous other peoples of East Africa. Traditionally a formal age organization comprised two groups: age-sets universally recruited from circumcised youth, and generation classes with constituent generation-sets. Informants' explanations of the age organization together with census and genealogical data clearly suggest that the recruitment principles and social processes within age-sets were independent of the recruitment principles and social processes characterizing generation classes and their generation-sets. The distinction between these two subsystems of the age organization is therefore more than an heuristic device.

When the bi-sexual deity of the cosmos Nyame Amowia, visible as the moon, gave birth to the Sun god, she gave him her kra, her eternal soul or life-giving power; hence his name, the Only Great Nyame (Nyame; ko- only; pɔn- great) generally drawn together as Nyankopɔn. The kra is also envisaged as bi-sexual; its female aspect is believed to be the substance or body of the moon and sun, i.e. fire, while its male aspect is the spirit, the essence, the spiritual, or that which is truly divine.

Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send to children in their country of origin. This article illuminates another permutation of these processes: family members in Senegal who establish relations with and through children in France through gifts and money. Focusing on relationships between children in Paris and their family members in Dakar, it provides an insight into the everyday exchanges through which transnational families attempt to assure the material reproduction of households in Africa. I trace the ways in which children use Facebook to maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal and examine how adults shape these relations. Focusing specifically on innovative forms of ‘cross-cousin’ relationships in the Senegalese diaspora, this article illustrates how adults create cultural scaffolding around children who may be unaware of the kinship terms for the relationships in which they are implicated. I demonstrate how practices that have permitted Africans to weather economic volatility for centuries are now carried out, in part, through social media. Approaching material circulation and the transmission of cultural values as mutually imbricated processes, I demonstrate how Senegalese selectively reinforce links with certain family members, in an attempt to favourably position themselves in socio-economic networks of transnational kin.

The young men of Nima, a popular neighbourhood in Accra, organize themselves in small age groups that meet almost daily in a specific spot, to chat, play and ‘wait’, while dreaming together of a better future in a distant elsewhere. The friendships that find root in these so-called bases, which often have names such as ‘Chicago’ or ‘Brooklyn’, lead to hope and specific modes of action through which these young people engage with the city, the wider world and their own aspirations. Taking these bases as an ethnographic vantage point, this article looks into relations of proximity, friendship and trust and the agency of the young men. The article's focus then turns to the virtual world of the same young men – and their girlfriends – in order to analyse the new modes of friendship that are shaped by their internet browsing. It shows how the modalities and intricacies of online, often deceitful, friendship and love rely on vital localized friendship bonds, defined by trust, of browsers in the zongo. Browsing opens up new possibilities but also challenges, and erodes existing moral socialities between friends.

It is one of the disadvantages of the division of West Africa between various colonial powers that, in many instances, tribal and language groups are cut across or artificially limited. It is not always realized that the Yoruba-speaking peoples, so numerous in Nigeria, extend beyond the frontiers of that colony. Right across the centre of what is now the French colony of Dahomey is a band of Yoruba-speaking peoples, and even in Togoland this wave continues. These are not isolated groups of traders, such as may be found in many large coastal towns, but continuous towns and villages of people who, whatever their origins, speak dialects of the Yoruba language. These peoples are often denominated ‘Nago’ on French ethnographical maps, and the use of this term has been an additional factor in obscuring their kinship in language, and also probably in race, with their Yoruba neighbours in the adjoining British colony of Nigeria. The word Nago has entered maps and official documents; frenchified as Nagot, it sometimes even takes on the ugly feminine form of Nagote.

Students of Europe's contact with Africa have long regarded the Christian missions in the ancient kingdom of Kongo as a peculiarly potent symbol. For some the conversion and subsequent reign of Afonso I in the first half of the sixteenth century were a momentary aberration, a false dawn quickly to be obscured by the realities of the exploitation associated with mercantile capitalism and the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. For others, the story of these missions has merely served to illustrate the continuing inviolability of indigenous traditions. Kongo society, it is argued, accepted only a thin veneer of Christianity, while its basic cosmology, practices and beliefs remained unchanged.

Ongata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rarely seen in Kenya. Locally described as ‘being cosmo’, this distinct political rhetoric and emerging subjectivity has its roots in the mixed ethnic origins of its leaders, the history of land acquisition, and xenophobic persecution and displacements elsewhere in the country. More specifically, the evolution of this conviviality in the shadow of conflict has been driven by the interests of ‘half-caste’ political elites and increasingly established Kikuyu landowners. Together they draw on and reinforce a foundation myth of fair land transfers to promote peace and their own economic and electoral ambitions. The result is a vernacular and spatialized cosmopolitanism that fosters localized ethnic blindness. Its success depends on demonizing discourses of indigeneity while embracing ideas of ethnic homelands beyond the city. By acting as a foil to a growing literature on the ethnicization of land and space in Africa, this article demonstrates the need to understand spatially constructed subjectivities as responses to supra-local social and political practice.

The 1996 cerebrospinal meningitis epidemic in Nigeria exemplified a medical situation that was linked with political concerns at the local, national, and international levels. It is argued that these political aspects must be understood, as they have implications for the treatment of future outbreaks. This article examines local attempts to stem the epidemic, on the basis of participant observation and epidemiological data collected from the north of Kaduna State. The epidemic is then considered in the national context: general deterioration of the health care system associated with economic decline, a national structural adjustment programme and crisis of political leadership. The local and national contexts of the 1996 epidemic are related to the view, held by many Nigerians, that reports of the epidemic's severity and the subsequent Saudi ban on Nigerians making the pilgrimage to Mecca reflected international politics, particularly the uneasy relations between the Nigerian, Saudi Arabian, and US governments, as well as health concerns. The article concludes with some recommendations for a national policy and for community health initiatives that take the politics and economics of cerebrospinal meningitis immunisation and treatment into account.

For a group of Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Their migration to the city and entry into the urban economy had occurred along ethnic and kinship lines. But, as they perceived the socially heterogeneous environment of the city that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds, they experienced their continuing dependency on their relatives as a form of confinement. Against the backdrop of the city, the Wayao perceived their social relations as being burdened with an inescapable sameness that made it impossible to trust one another. Mistrust, contempt and mutual suspicion were the flip side of close social relations and culminated in accusations of uchawi (Swahili: witchcraft). However, these accusations did not have a disintegrative effect; paradoxically, their impact on social relations among the vendors was integrative. On the one hand, uchawi allegations expressed the claustrophobic feeling of stifling relations; on the other, they compelled the accused to adhere to a shared morality of egalitarian relations and exposed the feeling that the accused individual was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were of particular importance to others.

Le but de cet essai est d'étudier le culte Tumbura de la possession de l'esprit au Soudan en tant que phénomène directement associé avec les changements sociaux et politiques des cent dernières annèes. On peut trouver le Tumbura dans les voisinages pauvres et les bidonvilles qui entourent les larges centres urbains du Nord du Soudan. Le majorité des fidèles du culte sont des descendants d'esclaves africains du sud et de l'ouest du Soudan qui avaient été amené comme esclaves au nord par les arabes mulsumans du nord. Malgré leur conversion à l'islam, les esclaves et leurs descendants ont toujours été regardé par les arabes du Nord comme étant soushumains, sans religion, sans descendance ou histoire. Ces revendications sont contestées par le Tumbura. L'initiation au culte permet aux fidèles de construire un sens d'identité positive et de faire valoir quʼeux aussi sont mulsumans, descendants d'Adam et Eve, et quʼils sont une catégorie sociale avec un sens d'histoire spécifique, en d'autres termes, quʼils sont des êtres humains. Pendant la période coloniale et post-coloniale, la situation des descendants des esclaves au sein de la formation sociale a changé considérablement quand de nouveaux groupes de gens sont apparu. Ceux-ci étaient les réfugiés du sud qui avait fuit la famine et la guerre civile et qui aujourd'hui peuplent les bidonvilles entourant la capitale, Khartoum, et les autres villes du nord. Les réfugiés ont permit aux descendants des esclaves de s'éloigner des marges de la société et d'être plus près de leurs maîtres arabes tout puissant. La transformation de l'identité qui a suivit a été reflétée dans la rapide diminution de la popularité du Tumbura. En même temps, les groupes qui reste au Tumbura sont en train de connaître un processus structurel de réorganisation qui suit celui de Zar Bore, un autre culte féminin, plus populaire, qui est surtout pratiqué par les gens de descendance arabique.

This article is about the marital sexual relationships (MSR) and the timing of the next child among the Ekiti and Ikale sub-groups of the Yoruba. Contrasts in post-partum sexual practices between the two groups allow us to demonstrate the importance of parents' perception of their child's growth and their observance of prohibitions on sexual intercourse during the wife's lactation as factors shaping their decision to have another child. It is argued that the similarity in birth spacing among the two groups, derived from contrasting attitudes to post-partum abstinence, is evidence of an explicit decision on the timing of the next child. Such a decision takes account of the role of the child's growth and social development as it affects adults in the performance of their daily social and economic routines and goes beyond an unquestioned response to quasi-religious taboos. The implications of the findings for fertility prospects are also discussed.