This article explores how the state police in Mozambique tried to (re)encroach upon a former war zone and what their methods implied for state authority more generally. Post-war reform efforts to professionalize the police in accordance with the rule of law and human rights have had apparently paradoxical results. This is in part because efforts to constitute state authority have relied on both embracing and taming ‘tradition’ as an alternative domain of authority, order and law. Ethnographic fieldwork at police stations shows that the police increasingly handle witchcraft cases and spiritual problems. This, the article argues, does not only reflect a tension between local/customary and state/legal notions of order and justice. Equally significant is the existence of partial sovereignties. A spiritual idiom of power and evildoing constitutes an alternative articulation of sovereignty due to the capacity of invisible forces to give and take life. This is an idiom mastered by chiefs and healers. Police officers engage with invisible forces to gain popular legitimacy and manifest state power, and yet they never manage to fully master those forces. Consequently, state police authority remains uncertain, and must be continually reinforced by enacting hierarchies and jurisdictional boundaries and by using force.

Dans le très long et très riche débat sur la nature profonde de la condition swahili, tout ne semble pas avoir été dit. Pour d'obscures ou inavouables raisons, les politistes ont esquivé le problème alors même que les phénomenes d'identité collective, d'idéologie et de relations de pouvoir sont au cœur de leurs analyses. Pourtant, la question de la ‘swahilité’ constitue l'occasion idéale pour réveiller une attention assoupie par une tradition étatique lénifiante.

Concerning trading in the countryside of North-West Morocco, Michaux-Bellaire and Salmon writing in 1906 about the Ḫloṭ and Tlīq tribes, state:

‘Toute la vie commerciale de la tribu s'écoule cependant sur le marché hebdomadaire. Si on trouve en effet quelques industries, d'ailleurs assez peu développées, dans les douars, le commerce y est totalement inconnu. On n'y rencontre même pas, comme dans quelques dchour djebaliens, de rares baqqâl (épiciers), ou des établissements publics où les paysans, la journée accomplie, viennent boire quelques tasses de thé à la menthe, en fumant le kif’;

and Michaux-Bellaire, writing a few years later about the Jbâla tribes, states that the imported goods, tea, sugar, candles, spices, matches, cotton fabrics, and imported fine-wool fabrics,

‘se trouvent également dans les villages d'une certaine importance’

In this paper I shall describe the rites performed for Luguru girls at puberty, and attempt an interpretation of their symbolic significance and sociological functions. In a recent article (Brain 1977) I have re-examined the whole question of initiation rites, and I propose to treat the Luguru case in the light of the ideas developed therein.

Briefly, I see the rites as having both psychological and sociological importance. Psychologically, they compensate for male envy of female precreativity (Bettelheim 1954); affirm the culturally prescribed sex roles (Freud 1962 [1905] and Rank 1929); and provide a means of dealing with the threateningly anomalous nature of the transition from an asexual to a sexual world (Douglas 1966). Sociologically, they effect a transition from one status to another; clarify male and female roles and the nature of legitimate authority; and provide instruction in traditional lore and sexual conduct. It is plain that the psychological and sociological aspects overlap considerably. This is most evident in what I regard as the prime function of the rites: to correct any tendency on the part of women to assume a dominant role in a society where political and economic factors might permit them to do so.

Mrs. Eva Meyerowitz's book, entitled The Akan of Ghana, is the third of a four-volume work on the Ashanti and their neighbours. The first to appear was The Sacred State of the Akan (1951), the second Akan Traditions of Origin (1952), and the fourth, not yet published, is to be entitled The Akan Divine Kingship and its Prototype in Ancient Egypt. They are the fruit of Mrs. Meyerowitz's researches in Ghana which began in 1943 when, as Art Supervisor at Achimota College, she was commissioned by the Burlington Magazine to write a series of articles on Ashanti gold ornaments. Since then she has engaged in field research among the Akan-speaking peoples, which has been supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute, by the Colonial Research Council, and, in her latest studies, by the University College of Ghana.

The attention that has been devoted to Sukumaland, Tanzania, by development specialists has been attributed by De Wilde (1967) to the rapid expansion of livestock and cotton production in ways which have been the despair of professional agriculturalists and veterinarians. Cycles of drought, famine and disease have recurred at intervals of five to seven years while soil erosion has been an ever present phenomenon. Administrative responses to these problems have followed a cycle of education, persuasion, resettlement and coercion, to little avail. A number of studies, spanning many scientific disciplines, have sought to understand, change, or merely criticize, the existing state of affairs.

The collection of republished essays entitled Right and Left: Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification, edited and with a substantial introduction by Rodney Needham (the University of Chicago Press, 1973), has been long awaited. All of the essays are of great interest, and all are concerned with the binary mode of symbolic classification, something which appears to be found, in greater or lesser degree, in all human cultures. The work will no doubt be widely reviewed in the appropriate journals. What follows is not an attempt at an over-all review. It is rather a response to, and a critical examination of, some of the arguments Needham advances in his introduction to the book. As such, I hope that it may contribute, however modestly, to our understanding of some of the problems involved in the application of the ‘binary’ mode of structural analysis to ethnographic data. The context is the symbolism of the Banyoro of western Uganda.

This paper deals with certain implications of our ‘conventional understandings’ of the Kru and Grebo peoples of the Cape Palmas region of coastal West Africa. These ‘traditional’ scholarly understandings of ‘traditional’ political organization, when combined with misfocused questions about the nature of ethnicity, effectively preclude accurate knowledge not only of traditional polities but also of how a people's ethnic identity may be redefined with changing circumstances. Subjecting traditional perspectives as well as ethnographic data to re-examination may clarify the complex role of ethnicity among the Kru and Grebo.

This article examines the cultural dimensions of financial credit and debt, placing these against a deeper and broader background of entrustments and obligations. A standard response of the largest international aid agencies to African rural poverty has been to set up programmes to lend money and other resources to rural people without understanding what the borrowers already owe to other creditors and claimants, or how strong these competing claims are. The history of credit programmes has been a history of dismal failures and of disappointments for borrowers and lender alike, particularly where land mortgages have been involved. Intensive field research reveals that Luo farmers in Kenya, like other East Africans, already have a broad assortment of borrowings and lendings of their own, some far more meaningful to them than loans from banks, co-operatives, or marketing boards will ever be. Some are only partly economic in nature; some involve sacred trusts or important political contacts. Land, labour, animals, money, and humans themselves are all objects of entrustment and obligation among kin, neighbours, or other familiars. Farmers channel resources from socially distant institutions into uses that are often locally more meaningful than those their lenders intend; and they may not be at liberty to convert them back into liquid forms for repayment. Requirements of land title collateral misfit a cultural context where attachments to land, and to ancestral graves on it, symbolise an individual's or family's social identity. More broadly, the credit strategy of development aid needs rethinking. Rather than continuing to enmesh rural Africans in debts and uncertainties, those who purport to help reduce poverty in rural Africa should shift their strategy from lending to encouraging saving and investment, or to promoting other kinds of locally rooted initiatives not financial in nature.

This is a study of Teso District, eastern Uganda, during a period of colonial administration from 1896 to 1927. A group of appointed chiefs was brought into being and maintained within a local political environment in which neither traditional rulers nor a principle of hereditary succession to political office were recognised. The growth of the bureaucratic and authoritarian aspects of client chiefship is traced, along with changes in the relations of the chiefs with the colonial regime and with the people they ruled. In time, their increasing powers of coercion and their accumulative control of patronage led to the emergence of a class interest among them. This became crystallised in the mid-1920s when, as a body, they maintained a conservative stance within a colonial administration geared to change.

Discussions on culture contact are liable to be unprofitable because there is no general agreement as to what culture contact is. I have used the fashionable label in my title, but do not wish to delay over definitions. In my field-work I was chiefly concerned with one aspect of culture contact in Africa—the changes taking place in a Bantu community as the result of its contact with Europeans, and it is my methods of studying that aspect which are described here. My interest in culture contact is primarily practical. I want to know for practical ends what effect European economic activities, European administration, education, and Christian teaching are having upon a Bantu community. The nature and extent of the changes taking place in the Bantu community are my first concern, the mechanism of change a secondary one.

In this article, I focus on the narratives of two men, Patrick and Father Marko Mkandla. I ask whether their continued interactions with, and appeals to, Zimbabwe's politicized legal system were ‘foolish’. The two men inhabited different geographic regions and diverged in their economic positions, political engagement, and ties to Zimbabwe's human rights networks. They nonetheless both started their accounts by recollecting that they persisted in reporting cases of political violence to the Zimbabwe Republic Police. Their accounts show us that imagining, invoking and interacting with the law in Zimbabwe was often an ambiguous, occasionally dangerous, and very contradictory exercise. Under ZANU-PF's rule, judicial institutions were increasingly politicized as instruments for repression. The men nevertheless continued to interact with the state and its officials as if these were bound by rules. This allowed Patrick and Father Mkandla to perform their rights-based citizenship, to experience occasional ‘successes’, and to differentiate themselves from the ‘unprofessional’ politicized civil servants they encountered during their appeals. Rather than ‘foolishly’ invoking the law, some Zimbabwean citizens engaged it as a shared language through which they could articulate their imagination of, hopes for, and belonging to a rule-bound state in the future.

Colonial contact created many African ‘traditions’ that are in fact novel; part of this process involved translation, in which cultural accommodations were determined not just by the political interests of negotiators but by the challenges of moving between languages and conceptual universes. This article focuses on the cultural translation of land tenure and property in colonial northern Nigeria, as legal paradigms and principles of governance. Beginning in the early colonial period, Western paradigms came to shape the ways colonial authorities understood indigenous landholding, which in turned influenced how they governed small-scale farmers. The article traces how different intellectual traditions came together to create a ‘traditional’ system of land tenure with very little purchase on past practices, and a somewhat attenuated relationship with the lives of ordinary farmers.

This article revisits the modern political history of Niger during the 1960s to the 1980s through an analysis of relations between student activists and government authorities. It explores how a student organization, the Union des Scolaires Nigériens (USN), managed to bypass multiple layers of political control to become a well-structured political movement, capable of seriously challenging the legitimacy of the authorities. Specifically, the article examines interactions between the USN and different bodies of political power, including the Diori and Kountché governments, in the larger context of regional solidarities and the Cold War. It analyses key moments of this struggle by showing how two generations of student leaders (those of the 1960s to early 1970s and the late 1970 to early 1980s) nourished the creation of specific windows of political action, which found various outlets for expression depending on the form of state power as well as the form and methods of activist work.

This article examines the specialized knowledge practices of two sets of culturally recognized ‘experts’ in Senegal: Islamic clerics and craftsmen. Their respective bodies of knowledge are often regarded as being in opposition, and in some respects antithetical, to one another. The aim of this article is to examine this claim by means of an investigation of how knowledge is conceived by each party. The analysis attempts to expose local epistemologies, which are deduced from an investigation of ‘expert’ knowledge practices and indigenous claims to knowledge. The social processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission are also examined with reference to the idea of initiatory learning. It is in these areas that commonalities between the bodies of knowledge and sets of knowledge practices are to be found. Yet, despite parallels between the epistemologies of both bodies of expertise and between their respective modes of knowledge transmission, the social consequences of ‘expertise’ are different in each case. The hierarchical relations of power that inform the articulation of the dominant clerics with marginalized craftsmen groups serve to profile ‘expertise’ in different ways, each one implying its own sense of authority and social range of legitimacy.

The Oberi Okaime Christian Mission has for long attracted the attention of scholars because of the way it developed a special script and even a language of its own. As early as 1937 the International African Institute was encouraging study of it. Today there is again a revival of interest in both the script and the language, and specimens of both as used in 1986 are included below, so as to put them once again on record some fifty years after they were invented. But these are not the primary focus of this article, the purpose oi which is to outline a history of the church, and by doing so to call attention to the wider phenomenon of Christianity in the context of Ibibio culture. The way Ibibio so readily took up Christianity after about 1910 has yet to be understood in detail, while the Spirit Movement in the region needs to be differentiated from such superficially similar movements as the contemporary Aladura or the earlier Garrick Braide movements.