No one who has visited East Africa has come away without seeing the wood-carvings made and sold by the Kamba. Sets of salad-servers crowned by Masai or Nandi heads, figurines of warriors bearing spear and shield, and models of elephants and leopards—these are their stock-in-trade which they carry to every part of East and Central Africa, to the Rhodesias and the Sudan, the Congo, and, exceptionally, to England. Their carvings are spread on the pavement outside hotels and at the most frequented corners of the main streets or they are hawked in baskets from door to I door. Like the jewellery sold at Port Said, their carvings have an exotic but suspiciously uniform look about them and at the back of everyone's mind there lurks the suspicion that really they are all mass-produced by machines—in Birmingham, or ‘by the Indians’ or at some remote Mission station.‘We have been unable so far to come into contact with the managing body of this organized and doubtlessly machinery-using industry’, wrote an American firm anxious to buy their carvings direct from the manufacturer. The truth is that there is no managing body and no machinery. The carvings are made by hand with tools that were in common use before this century and they are sold in the first instance either by the men who carved them or, more commonly, by Kamba ‘dealers’, who may have started as carvers but who eventually have found trade more profitable than manufacture. Some of the dealers have built up a trade which yields them incomes earned by few other Africans in Kenya, and in general there has come into being, almost entirely as a consequence of Kamba enterprise, a thriving industry which provides men from one of the most barren parts of Kenya with incomes comparable to those earned in the most prosperous agricultural regions.

The jubilee of the World Missionary Conference, which was held at Edinburgh in June 1910, should be noticed by students of Africa, since it brought into prominence for the first time, as one of its two secretaries, a man who was to have considerable influence on African affairs and was the first Administrative Director of the International African Institute. This was J. H. Oldham who had been briefly a missionary in India and then secretary of the Missionary Study Council of the United Free Church of Scotland. ‘The conspicuous ability’ he showed in the organization and running of the great conference led to his subsequent appointment as full-time secretary of the Continuation Committee, which was set up to maintain the work of the conference and which became in 1921 the International Missionary Council. In this post, and as the first editor of the International Review of Missions, Oldham was in constant and daily touch with mission affairs from the whole world. He was, in fact, beginning a long career as a missionary statesman, with, from the First World War, his headquarters at Edinburgh House in London. In negotiating then with the Government over German missionaries and their property in India and the British African territories, Oldham began to build up a fund of goodwill in the official world.

On 15 November 193 5 a riot took place in Wiawso, the capital town of Sefwi Wiawso district in the then Western Province of the Gold Coast. It followed weeks of struggle to bring destoolment charges against the omanhene, Nana Kwame Tano II. Four people died of gun-shot wounds, forty were injured and the omanhene was assaulted. On 2 December the State Council completed its hearing of fifteen charges against the omanhene and brought in a majority verdict in favour of destoolment, which in due course was confirmed by the Governor.

Studies of the deposition of chiefs in the Gold Coast have tended to focus on the changing reasons for and, particularly, the increased frequency of destoolment (Busia 1968: passim; Owusu 1970: 63ff.). Arhin especially has looked at the effect of the cash economy upon the relationships between chiefs and their subjects (Arhin 1976). Others have described the increasing complexity of the politico-jural structures surrounding the office and functions of chieftaincy as revealed in destoolment cases (Dunn and Robertson, 1973; Robertson 1976).

Die übliche Einteilung der afrikanischen Sprachen unterscheidet Buschmann-, Sudan-, Bantu-, hamitische und semitische Sprachen. Statt Buschmannsprachen sagt man besser Khoisan-Sprachen, um die Zusammengehörigkeit des Hottentottischen mit den Buschmann sprachen zum Ausdruck zu bringen; denn obgleich das Hottentottische hamitische Züge hat und eine Sprache eigenen Charakters ist, sind doch seine nächsten Verwandten die Sprachen der Buschleute. Verwandt sind wahrscheinlich auch die hamitischen und semitischen Sprachen, und man spricht deshalb von einer hamito-semitischen Sprachfamilie. Eine eigenartige Stellung nimmt die unter dem Namen nilotische Sprachen bekannte Gruppe ein. Sie bildet in ihren Lauten, der Wortform, dem grammatischen Aufbau und auch im Wort bestand eine Einheit, die sich von ihrer Umgebung deutlich abhebt Die südliche Gruppe (Bari, Masai, Nandi, Tatoga, etc.) zeigt gewisse von manchen Sprachforschern als hamitisch angesehene Merkmale wie z. B. die Unterscheidung des grammatischen Genus am Pronomen, sie pflegt deshalb als niloto-hamitische der nördlichen niloto-sudanischen (Schilluk, Dinka, Nuer, etc.) gegenübergestellt zu werden. Es ist aber sachlich richtiger, die unleugbar vorhandenen Gemeinsamkeiten zu betonen als die Einheit zu zerreissen und die beiden Gruppen je einer anderen Sprachfamilie zuzuteilen. Dies umsomehr als es zum mindesten zweifelhaft ist, ob die bisherige niloto-hamitische Gruppe wirklich den Hamitensprachen zugerechnet werden darf, und weil der Zusammenhang der niloto-sudanischen Gruppe mit den Sudan-sprachen weniger eng ist als z. B. die Verwandtschaft der west-sudanischen Klassensprachen mit den Bantusprachen.

Broadly speaking it is true to say that the Colonial Empire woke up all of a sudden, some eight years ago, to the fact that it was faced with nutritional problems of considerable magnitude. In 1936, as part of the outcome of a debate on world nutrition at Geneva in the previous September, the British Colonial Secretary asked for a report from each colony on the state of nutrition within its borders. The chorus of woe evoked by this was startling in its unanimity and showed that the little heeded scientific voices of the preceding years had after all been saying something of the greatest importance.

Most independent nations in Africa believe that the state is ‘the indispensable agency’ for creating the necessary conditions for rapid socio-economic transformation which will bring about a more equitable distribution of the benefits of development, especially in rural areas. But few countries are agreed on the institutional and organizational structures for bringing this about.

Governmental intervention in the sphere of marketing has become a feature of increasing frequency in the post-war economic policy of many countries, particularly during and since the economic depression of 1930 to 1932. In general, raw materials and foodstuffs have been made the object of regulations by authorities and statutory bodies more than manufactured articles, since the producers of the latter are usually able to come to voluntary agreements in relation to prices, limitation of production, &c., without the help of the Government. The general factors and ideologies which have brought about this considerable public intervention into a sphere which was left predominantly to private enterprise in pre-war days, are more or less common to all countries, but the particular difficulties and problems which have prompted statutory measures differ from country to country.

Historical writing on agrarian differentiation in rural Zimbabwe has moved away from conceptualising the peasantry as a homogeneous class, and has therefore enhanced our understanding of the process of rural differentiation. While such writing recognises patterns of differential land holding, however, it has not shown clearly how the differences developed over time. There has been a tendency to argue that land distribution in the ‘communal’ areas is less skewed than other variables and therefore acts as a brake on the process of accumulation and differentiation among the peasantry. The article challenges this basic assumption, arguing that ‘communal’ tenure actually facilitated the development of significant disparities in landholding and accumulation by rural households.

The foundation and the broad policies of our Institute emerged from what proved a fortunate conjunction of diverse interests and opportunities that developed after the First World War. The initial phase of modern economic advance in tropical Africa, following the introduction of the telegraph, railways, all-weather roads, was by the twenties making apparent a wide range of needs and opportunities for further progress in Africa—progress in which both the interests of, and contribution by, its peoples would be closely concerned. Within African territories the demand for literacy and training in new skills both more extensive and at higher levels was becoming more and more obvious and pressing. The significance of the increasing and inevitable association of Africans and their communities with a world economy was beginning to be more widely appreciated. With this growing recognition of the need for a more positive and constructive response many questions arose concerning not only the means of fostering such developments, but also their effects on the attitudes, beliefs, and institutions that had hitherto sustained the cultures and the social life of largely autonomous tribes and chiefdoms.

Côte d'Ivoire has travelled full circle from economic success (from 1960 to about 1979) to failure (from the 1980s onwards) in little more than a generation. In the early 1990s, Zouglou, today Côte d'Ivoire's internationally best-known music, emerged at the university residences of the University of Abidjan in the Yopougon quarter. The young people who were to become the ‘Zouglou generation’ were precisely the generation that bore the brunt of this economic deterioration. Zouglou was born at a time when, as a result of an unprecedented economic crisis and the attendant structural adjustment measures, university students experienced a general downgrading not only as students but also as future graduates hoping to find employment. In addition, the number of students and school pupils who were unable to complete their education grew considerably during this time. As this article demonstrates, these phenomena had a profound influence on the development of the philosophy associated with Zouglou music. Accordingly, Zouglou singers have called themselves the ‘sacrificed generation’. Indeed, the many songs about orphans in Zouglou music can be read as a symbolic statement about this experience: the sense that Ivoirian youth have been abandoned by their elders, their families and the political authorities is unmistakable in the words of Zouglou songs consoling such (metaphorical) orphans. Zouglou music has become an important platform through which this generation has been able to express itself, as well as a site for oral street poetry and collective catharsis. The article discusses the content of these songs, as well as interviews with Zouglou singers on this matter, to investigate how Zouglou, as a cultural phenomenon, grew out of the experience of a generation.

This article explores local understandings of and experience with democracy in an Iraqw community in northern Tanzania. At independence, President Julius Nyerere in his development of a one-party state, argued that democracy in this new nation state would be modelled on that which is found in indigenous, pre-colonial political systems. In the Iraqw homeland, pre-colonial ‘democracy’ was expressed in elders’ councils in which male elders made decisions on behalf of the rest of the community. Differences of opinion were voiced but eventually the group would come to one opinion to achieve the state of being of ‘one heart’ before decisions could be put into effect. While Nyerere claimed that this practice of democracy and achieving consensus would provide the model for the post-colonial state, in actuality the state drew more on colonial models characterised by top-down decision-making and autocratic governance. Overlaying both the pre-colonial and post-colonial political systems is an ideological emphasis on ‘unity'. This article explores how the central notion of unity is expressed and perceived among the Iraqw in Tanzania and how it forms the screen through which people view démocratisation.

In the last twenty years the number of smiths and the range of their activity have greatly increased in Tamale, the principal city of northern Ghana. The evolution of the national economy and the particular situation of Tamale in the geography of Ghana explain this development and the contribution that the city's smiths make to the economy, national as well as local.

The pamphlet Kenya: Twendapi? (Kenya: Where are we heading?) is a text often referred to but rarely read or analysed. Abdilatif Abdalla wrote it as a twenty-two-year-old political activist of the KPU opposition as a critique of the dictatorial tendencies of Jomo Kenyatta and his KANU government in 1968, and consequently suffered three years of isolation in prison. Many (at least on the East African political and literary scene) know about Kenya: Twendapi? but few seem to have read it – indeed, it seems almost unavailable to read. This contribution to Africa's Local Intellectuals series provides a summary reconstruction of its main points and arguments, and a contextual discussion of the text. This is combined with the first published English translation (overseen by Abdalla himself) and a reprint of the original Swahili text, an important but almost inaccessible document. The article proceeds with a perspective first on the political context in Kenya at the time – an early turning point in postcolonial politics – and second on the work and life of its author, Abdilatif Abdalla who had been trained as a Swahili poet by elder family members who were poets. As most students of Swahili literature know, Abdalla's collection of poetry Sauti ya Dhiki (1973) originated in the prison cell but they know little about the pamphlet Kenya: Twendapi?, nor the circumstances of its authorship. Part of my wider point for discussion is that Abdalla, as an engaged poet and political activist, can be usefully understood as a local intellectual who transcended the local from early on – topically and through global references and comparisons, but also through his experience in prison and exile. Concerns about Kenyan politics and Swahili literature have remained central to his life. This reflects Abdalla's continued and overarching connectedness to the Swahili-speaking region. Abdalla wrote in Swahili and was deeply familar with local Swahili genres and discursive conventions, language and verbal specifications (of critique, of emotions, of reflections) that use the whole range and depth of Kimvita, the Mombasan dialect of Kiswahili, as a reservoir of expression.

This article considers the reconstruction of Rwanda's post-genocide music industry through the national music competition, Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It explores local ideas about ‘playback’ and ‘live’ music, and argues that these two performative categories can be understood as wider metaphors for the relationship between the Rwandan state and its citizens, particularly Rwandan youth. On the one hand, Guma Guma aims to create the ideal post-genocide celebrity subject who will ‘play back’ a unified, de-ethnicized Rwandan identity with body and words. On the other, during the first two seasons of the competition, audiences demanded ‘live’ performance and Guma Guma prompted heated debate about ‘taboo’ topics, revealing enduring differences along socio-economic, ethnic and regional lines. Rather than affirm an inclusive Rwandan identity, Guma Guma hinted at its fragility and underscored the multiple and conflicting ways in which young people identify themselves and evaluate ‘truth’ in the post-genocide era. The article contributes not only to literature on popular culture in Africa, but also to studies that focus on mediation and changes in recording technology. Although scholars have quite rightly attempted to dissolve the boundary between the live and the mediated, I suggest that the boundary continues to do cultural and political work, particularly in developmental states.

To the Yoruba, divination is of great concern, as the means by which they discover and hope to influence the changes in their relationships with the gods and ancestors and other spirits in their complex cosmos, and so to gain their aid in their pursuit of health and good fortune. They employ a number of divinatory techniques. The one that yields the fullest information is the system of geomancy known as Ifa, for which there are three procedures of varying complexity, the two most complex being used by professional diviners (babalawo). The Ifa oracle is animated by a deity named Orunmila, but also often called Ifa.

Since the turn of the century contemporary dance has been gaining momentum as a pan-African artistic movement in which a new generation of performers is engaging. In contrast to more popular forms of ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ performance genres, this new movement has evolved within the cosmopolitan urban elite and is driven by processes of professionalization that lead to the creation of new, border-crossing artistic spaces. These spaces are characterized by new boundaries and inequalities, related to various modes of distinction reflecting the shifting grounds of social status – gendered, generational, knowledge-based and economic. Taking an artistic ‘capacity-building’ project targeting female dancers in West Africa as an entry point, the article analyses how the practice of contemporary dance in Ouagadougou leads to the emergence of a translocal social space embedded in a dense network of transnational relations and connected to global art worlds. It is argued that the unequal power relations characterizing the professional art world of contemporary dance reflect the tensions and contradictions of local urban societies in the making and at the same time contribute to a reconfiguration of urban spaces where new forms of rooted cosmopolitanism can be invented.

Based on a study of the International Women's Day (8 March), a truly popular event in Cameroon, this article attempts to understand the dynamics of state mobilization in this long-lasting regime. By observing the production and use of one of its symbolic objects, the pagne du 8 mars (a dedicated wax print), it sheds significant light on the social fabric of loyalty and the articulation of loyalist and disruptive popular mobilizations and allows us to move beyond ready-made, state-centred explanations. As an object of exchange and social distinction, the pagne provides women with a variety of ways of interacting (or not interacting) with the state and with men. Although, on the face of it, the act of dressing in the day's cloth may be seen as an expression of collective loyalty to the regime, one cannot assume that it represents a single, undifferentiated approach to authority. Licentious behaviour while wearing this pagne may even represent a real condemnation of moral and political power imposed on women. For the moment, however, this ritual and its popular mobilization are sufficient for the government's purposes: it is able to point to the event as an example of its capacity to mobilize its female citizens, thereby showing that its claims to legitimacy are well-founded.

This article explores the ways in which families are reproduced in Botswana's time of AIDS. It argues that conjugal relationships are transformed into kin relationships through a gradual process of recognition in which they become visible, spoken about and known to ever wider spheres of kin. For women, this process is often catalysed by pregnancy; for men, by marriage negotiations – and for both, recognition is key to self-making. However, every shift in recognition is risky and tenuous, even reversible, and marked by dikgang – ‘issues’, conflicts or crises – the negotiation of which is crucial to its kin- and self-making capacity. Tswana kinship and personhood, in other words, are constituted in crisis, making them both highly fraught and highly resilient. In this context, HIV becomes one of many risks entailed in intimacy and kin-making – suggesting one explanation for persistently high rates of HIV infection in Botswana, and indicating an unexpected capacity in families to absorb crises such as the AIDS epidemic.

Young women who live in the improvised urban spaces on the outskirts of Senegal's capital city, Dakar, extemporize their respectability in a time of fiscal uncertainty through personal photography. The neighbourhood of Khar Yalla is an improvised, interconnected and multilayered space settled by families removed from the city centre during clean-up campaigns from the 1960s to the 1970s, by families escaping conflict in Casamance and Guinea-Bissau, and by recent rural migrants. As much as Khar Yalla is an improvised neighbourhood, it is also a space of improvisation. When women pose for, display, and pass around portraits of themselves at key moments in their social life, whether in the medium of social networking sites or photo albums, they reveal as much as they conceal the elements of individual and social life. They index their social networks and constitute their urban space not as peripheral, but as central to the lives and imaginations of their siblings and spouses who live abroad. Photographs actively shape and construct urban spaces, which are often loud, unruly and fraught spaces with vast inequalities and incommensurabilities. How women deal with economic and social disparity, within their own families, communities, and globally, is the subject of this article.

In recent centuries indigenous West African society has experienced the impact of two external cultural forces, the one personified by Moslem invaders and migrants from the north, the other by European colonists from the West. With the spread of Islam, the way of life of whole peoples has been largely transformed, but the main changes which have occurred in the structure of African society are the result of Western and Westernizing influences. It is the purpose of this article to examine a particular aspect of these structural changes which is exemplified by the appearance of a new class of ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ individuals and their relationship with traditional society in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. The Protectorate, with which this article is exclusively concerned, comprises the hinterland of the Sierra Leone Colony, and is under a Native Authority system of government. In the Colony, political and legal institutions are modelled mainly on the English system. As explained later, the terms ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ are used throughout to denote relative degrees of Westernization due to education.