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.

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.

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.

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.

This article reassesses the accepted model of pre-colonial Tonga (Zambian) society. In a series of books and articles Elizabeth Colson has established an anthropological framework in which to analyse Tonga social and political activities. The basic parameters of that framework would appear to be: ‘Until the beginnings of the colonial period, approximately seventy years ago the largest named territorial unit among the Tonga was the small neighbourhood community.’ Ritual offices existed within the neighbourhood but political office was embryonic or non-existent until the British Government recognized headmen and chiefs and later developed a local council with an appointed civil service. (Colson, 1980b: 35). Social life is characterized as ‘anarchical’ (Colson, 1970a: 87). Politically the Tonga were said to be ‘stateless’ (Colson, 1970a: 207) and ‘amorphous’ (Colson, 1970b: 36). In a paper given in 1968 Colson analyses the concept of tribe, and states that the Tonga only recognized themselves as Tonga when young nationalist schoolboys tried to give them self-awareness. Thus, the Tonga in Colson's view are a creation of British bureaucracy and of a burgeoning nationalism. (Colson, 1968: 202; cf. also Colson, 1970b: 36). More recently the same basic position is reiterated, though the possibility of a change of viewpoint is left open; ‘Even the idea of a social unit of all Tonga is a recent creation and is still likely to be invoked principally in the national political arena, though the continued importance of the shrine of Monze may have political overtones of which I am unaware.’ (Colson, 1977: 137).

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.

A contrastive account of pre-colonial and colonial systems of land tenure in Malaŵi cannot avoid adopting thangata as its central concept. The 1921 Land Commission of Nyasaland asserted that the practice of thangata:

seems to have had a foundation in the conditions of purely [African] life under which the member of the village community worked for a certain period in the gardens of his chief, the latter assuming towards the former a responsibility which has its parallel in the relations of the best European landlords towards their native tenants today. The practice was known from the beginning by the [Cheŵa] word ‘thangata’ meaning ‘to assist’. In return for his right to occupy certain land the [African] ‘assisted’ his chief or his European landlord in the latter's work upon his own land.

There is a whole world of difference between traditional thangata and colonial thangata. The former is nothing other than a social institution which embodies a pre-colonial notion of reciprocal labour. In the colonial situation the term came to mean forced labour. In this paper I analyse the term in its colonial form. My aim is to show that thangata is a colonial institution in that it originated from processes of British colonisation of Malaŵi. This aim requires that the pre-colonial system of land tenure be characterised first before tracing the formation of the colonial system.

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.

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.

Des études historiques portant sur les Loibonok des Masai ont mis en valeur l'importance du leadership politique et rituel, en particulier pendant les guerres entre Masai du XIXe siècle. Cette étude d'un loibon Samburu montre que ses activités en période de paix sont principalement consacrées aux rites divinatoires (nkidong) et à la prescription de médecines (ntasim) visant à protéger les individus contre les actes de sorcellerie. Bien qu'il pratique occasionnellement des rites divinatoires publics et protège les communautés contre les catastrophes naturelles grâce au ntasim, de telles activités sont peu fréquentes et secondaires.

Lekati Leaduma pratiqua le ntasim et le nkidong chez les Ariaal Rendille au Nord du Kenya jusqu'à sa mort en 1987, surtout dans des communautés coupées des centres administratifs dotés de centres de soins médicaux et de services de police. Cette étude analyse le nkidong et le ntasim de Leaduma en tant que pratiques curatives rituelles et met en valeur les similarités et les différences historiques et symboliques avec les autres Loibonok des Samburu et des Masai. L'auteur avance l'idée que les Loibonok des Samburu recherchent un position de leader et une autorité morale et que leur pratique de la sorcellerie et leurs pouvoirs surnaturels leur donnent une position extérieure, isolée et dangereuse pour les normes de la société Samburu.

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.

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.

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.

Polygamy is a social system, and is intimately bound up with the subject of property, of labour, and of the difference in status between men and women. If this paper appears to trespass into other fields it is because of the complexity of the subject and because polygamy is not something that can be abstracted from the social organization generally and be examined by itself; it is both symptom and cause of widespread difference in Mende society from that of our own.

A survey of the traditional political organization of a number of chiefdoms in the Bamenda Grassfields of the Southern Cameroons was made by the writers from May to mid-September 1960. Bali-Nyonga (sixteen miles to the west of Bamenda Station) was one of the chiefdoms studied. Our inquiries were directed mainly to situations and events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within the living memory of a few aged informants and of the parents of present title-holders. A few contemporary accounts of conditions exist for Bali-Nyonga for the last decade of the nineteenth century: those of Zintgraff (who was the first European to reach Bali-Nyonga), Hutter, Esser, and scattered notices in administrative, scientific, and missionary publications. These provide a rough chronological framework for Bali-Nyonga affairs for 1889–1914. British administrative officers in the course of tax assessment, the establishment of native courts and the resolution of land cases, collected oral traditions from the Mfon (Chief) of Bali-Nyonga and his elders, and accounts of earlier judicial and executive institutions from informants who had experienced them before the establishment of the German Imperial Military Station at Bamenda in 1902. We are not directly concerned in this paper with the expansion of the German administrative, trading, labour-recruiting, and missionary frontier, but with Bali interpretations of their own constitution at the period of contact (1889) and a little before and after. We hope to show that this constitution developed in intelligible circumstances which its special characteristics reflect.

Cet article donne une nouvelle interpretation d'une forme extrêmement complexe et meurtrière de pollution (nueer) qui influence tres fortement les relations sociales contemporaines parmi les Nuer du Soudan. A travers un examen minutieux des myriades d'évènements considérés comme provoquant la condition nueer, l'auteur défie les tentatives antérieures d'interprétation de cette condition par les notions de ‘péche’ judéo-chrètiennes, entreprises par Evans-Pritchard. II argumente que nueer est mieux compris en tant que notion de pollution qui fait la distinction - par la notion ‘dangereux a manger’ - entre des flux de sang culturellement définis comme négatifs, porteurs de mort et anomaux et d'autres estimés bien dirigés, positifs et porteurs de vie. En tant que force puissante qui gouverne la circulation sociale de sang et de nourriture, le nueer aide à fonder ces distinctions plus abstraites dans les expériences corporelles plus directes, les dormant en meme temps plus de signification et d'intensite.

Cet article reconsidère les idées de John Janzen sur le consensus social et l'efficacité thérapeutique dans une structure médicale pluraliste, et réunit une approche sémantique et praxéologique à un cas prolongé d'affliction: celle d'un groupe et de ses responsables, qui étaient obliges de regarder la maladie et la mort en face, et qui réagissaient en essayant de trouver des stratégies pour regagner la santé. D'abord, on prétend qu'il faut comprendre à fond les représentations de l'étiologie, et qu'une expansion d'un point de vue sociologique et restaurateur trop borné soit absolêment nécessaire. Le groupe qui dirigerait la therapie gagnerait ainsi une connaissance plus approfondie, et multidimensionelle, des dynamiques qui produisaient le conflit ou le problème, aussi bien que de la méthode d'aider la victime. Le manque possible de consensus social parmi les membres du groupe diagnostique familial ne signiffe pas que la thérapie puisse être inefficace. II faut plutôt regarder le rituel thérapeutique comme un événement performatif ou une action de pro-cessus, un rituel qui se réalise au moyen de son développement temporel dans un procéde créateur de production signiff cative qui atteint pragmatiquement le but du rituel même.

The study of phenomena relating to identity has prompted new approaches to the subject on the part of historians as well as anthropologists. They include the study of ethnicity, a dynamic combination of socio-economic, religious, cultural and political factors. In this regard the population of Freetown is particularly interesting, for it stems from several discrete migrations from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. Some of the immigrants came direct from the African continent, ‘Liberated Africans’ disembarked on the Sierra Leone peninsula, while others, formerly slaves, came from the UK, North America or the West Indies. The result of this diversity of origin was the formation of a very rich and specific society, with a mixture of European, African and West Indian characteristics. Among the town dwellers are those called successively Sierra Leoneans, Creoles and Krio.

Since the 1950s several studies have focused on these people. After a polemical article published in 1977, new research was undertaken. Krio identity, which is at the same time a historical theme and politically contested territory, remains at the heart of the debate. In this article, emphasis is placed on terminology, to address the question of ‘ethnicity’ as applied to those known as Creoles. What were they called by administrators or historians (past and present)? What did they call themselves? How did they react to the various attempts at categorisation? How did the names, which are the visible aspect of ethnicity, evolve? What did the terms really mean and how can one move from a given name to the object it represents? These questions take into account several points of view, from within Krio/Creole society and from outside it.

In respect of its social organization and settlement pattern, Nangodi State is typical of extensive areas of northern Ghana. Three forms of authority are recognized: politico-military, kinship (or family) and spiritual. Politico-military authority is exercised through ten chiefdoms which are in turn divided into 28 sections. Kinship authority is represented by 64 agnatic lineages 57 of which are hierarchically grouped into seven major clans. Clan and lineage areas are complexly intermingled. Spiritual authority is wielded by 11 Nangodi earth priests and two outsiders over a total of 43 areas. Each of these three forms of authority in Nangodi State operates within separate and distinct geographical areas which are superposed but not co-terminous.