In his introductory notes to Bargery's dictionary, Westermann summarizes the early historical records of the Hausa-speaking peoples and, in particular, discusses the name ‘Hausa’ itself, without forming any theory as to its provenance. He points out that, apart from a reference to Ḥauṣiyin by Ibn Sa‘id, an Andalusian Arab writer who died in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the first reference to the word is four centuries later, in the Tarikh-es-Sudan. Ibn Sa‘id incidentally—if we are to believe Ibn Khallikan—got no nearer to the Western Sudan than Tunis, so it seems that his information was as secondhand as that of most of our other Arab authorities for the area. In the interim four centuries, though Ibn Batuta uses such names of individual Hausa chiefdoms as Kūbar (Gobir), the only generic name used was by Al Maqrizi, an Egyptian, whom Hiskett suggests got the name from some Bornu source, without knowing much about the people it referred to. This was Afnū, which is still the name used for the Hausa by the Kanuri and other related peoples of the Chad area. While making no suggestion himself as to a possible source of origin, at the end of the first section of his notes, Westermann makes reference to the conquest of Hausaland by Muhammadu Askia of Songhai, and to his ultimate repulse by Muhammadu Kanta, chief of Kebbi, in 1513.

Western scientific culture finds itself in a singular position with respect to the magico-religious system embodied in medieval culture from which, after strenuous resistence from the contemporary ecclesiastical authorities, it originally broke free. That is to say, it has still not succeeded in forming a theory concerning that very class of phenomena with which it was sometimes obliged violently to struggle in order to constitute itself as an autonomous discipline. And we, despite the proliferation of ethnographic and historical studies of extremely high quality, are hardly more advanced than in 1902, when Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert (1950: 138) wrote: ‘Until now the history of religions has relied on a rag-bag of vague ideas … the science of religions does not yet possess a scientific nomenclature’.

In this paper I propose to describe in some detail how the particular mechanism in which I am interested in the United States is working inside the food situation, and then to go on from that to a consideration of the more general problems involved.

The United States began a nutrition campaign just before the war. It is, perhaps, an interesting example of the different effects of timing in the two countries that so many of the measures which we took in connexion with nutrition among our own people were associated with the period of the depression, and with measures of recovery from the depression. In Britain the same kind of measures have been associated with the war, and have been subsequent to the height of the British war effort; they are therefore associated with the crest of a successful war effort, whereas we associate them with the less uplifting feeling of coping with the depression.

Though the Tsimihety tribe is the subject of three monographs by Molet (1953, 1956, 1959) and a number of papers by various authors (e.g. Mattei, 1938; Magnes, 1953), its social structure has not yet been adequately described. Indeed, there is no adequate account of the social structure of any Malagasy group, although Ottino's (1963) analysis of aspects of Vezo social structure is very illuminating. The primary aim of this paper therefore is to describe two of the major features of Tsimihety social structure—kinship and descent. As there are facets of Tsimihety kinship and descent that have some bearing on recent discussion of these topics, a secondary aim is to contribute, in a minor way, to that discussion.

As contract farming gains ground as a form of agricultural production in Southern Africa, there is growing interest in its effects on patterns of investment and production as well as in its potential to provide small farmers with access to export markets. However, the relation between contract farming and the region's long history of labour migration has largely escaped analysts and scholars working on Southern Africa. This article traces the changing livelihoods of those who experienced the demise of the migrant labour system and displacement during the civil war, and who now engage in contract farming in Angónia, a densely populated district in Tete Province, central Mozambique. In the decades since the end of the war, contract farming thrived among former migrants with access to land and few alternative sources of income and employment. If historical labour migration from Angónia involved attempts by employers to externalize the responsibility for social reproduction onto households, contract farming amounts to the internalization by households of the opportunities, risks and tensions involved in the production of high-value export commodities. By analysing farmers’ accounts of producing under contract and linking this to their households’ longer histories of labour mobilization, this article sheds light on people's experiences of working for wages, working on their own account and hiring workers, as households became the new sites of commodity production.

In West Africa, both cyber fraud and cyber policing are mainly about storytelling. Based on fieldwork in the Ghanaian police, this article explores criminal investigations of email scams; it shows how actors rely on, make use of, lose faith in and reinvent stories. Each cyber fraud case can be understood as a series of connected tales, and all involved try to change the direction of the narrative. While the first tale takes place in virtual spaces between continents, the later ones are located in Ghana and are about police work there. The actors' stories both tap into and create social imaginaries, and the involved actors thereby craft conflicting notions of order and disorder. However, not only the fraudsters' stories but also the police officers' and victims' stories are often factually inaccurate and are partly fictional. Ultimately, all actor groups struggle to create believable stories under current conditions.

Professor Greenberg, in his series of linguistic studies, writes: ‘From the present series there will emerge a complete genetic reclassification of the languages of Africa. These results are so at variance from the commonly accepted scheme that a brief methodological foreword seems in order.’ This is a clear and frank statement and a great promise. Until now, in spite of several attempts, no satisfactory classification of African languages has existed. Though it may seem natural not to be satisfied with an analysis of individual languages but to aim at a synthesis, to see the whole and its interrelations, there was in many quarters a definite aversion from a holistic approach; it was even said to be more important to stress the differences than to try to find relationships. It is certainly necessary to study each single language in all its peculiarities, but it is wrong to maintain that a comparative investigation should not be undertaken until every African language has been analysed; that would defer the matter ad kalendas graecas. It is not necessary to analyse every Bantu language in order to show the characteristic features of Bantu languages and their relation to other languages. We are grateful to Professor Greenberg for his attempt, which reveals a familiarity with the problem and a sound and extensive knowledge of many African languages. Though not every point he makes is new, yet he indicates new roads and provides food for reflection and discussion.

The heroic Bacwezi, founders of kingship in Ankole and in other East African interlacustrine states, are said to have ‘disappeared’ because of their subjects' ungrateful insurrection (Oberg 1940: 124). The moral of the legend—that revolts against Ankole's kings, successors of the Bacwezi, are doomed!—has been curiously adhered to.

The early years of the 1970s saw two important milestones for the political economy and historiography of Kenya. The ILO report of 1972 was a major critique of Kenya's development efforts since independence that identified growing problems of poverty and inequality which were the result of policies that in many other respects achieved desirable objectives (International Labour Office, 1972). The ILO diagnosis and proposals had some direct influence on government policies, notably in the Third and Fourth Development Plans, for 1974–78 and 1979–83 respectively, and several but by no means all or even the majority of the proposals were acted upon, e.g. in policies towards agriculture (Clayton, 1978). Equally important, however, was its indirect effect on creating a climate of opinion that emphasized a ‘basic needs’ approach (Ghai et al., 1979) and ‘redistribution through growth’ (Chenery et al., 1974) and brought the attention of the public, the government and of scholars to the problems of rural and urban poverty in Kenya at a time when they seemed to be growing alarmingly.

A Snake was out riding on his horse (runs a Hausa fable) when he met a Frog. ‘That is not the way to ride,’ said the Frog,‘all curled up in the saddle. If you get down, I will show you.’ The Snake dismounted, and gave his horse to the Frog. The Frog mounted, and sitting firmly in the saddle galloped twice down the road and back. ‘That is the way to ride,’ he said, as he dismounted. ‘Very good indeed,’ said the Snake; ‘and now give me back my horse. Having is better than knowing how. Since you have no horse, your horsemanship is of little use to you. I, on the other hand, having a horse, need not learn to ride, unless I wish.’

Der. Begriff ‘hamitisch’ gehört mit zu den bisher am schwersten zu fassenden Problemen der Afrikanistik. Die Gründe dafür liegen einerseits in der phänotypen Verschiedenheit innerhalb der als ‘hamitisch’ geltenden Volksstämme, andererseits aber in dem sichtlichen Mangel einer einheitlichen Linie des geschichtlichen Werdegangs der Sprachen solcher Völker, soweit man einen solchen nach den Methoden der modernen Linguistik theoretisch festzustellen versucht hatte. Hier versagen solche Methoden, wenn auch nicht innerhalb des Einzelidioms, so doch im Hinblick auf einen historischen Sprachstamm. Während sich demgegenüber die rassisch auch nicht einheitlichen sogenannten Bantu schon durch den linguistisch einwandfrei und exakt festzustellenden historischen Bantu-Sprachstamm als eine geschichtliche Schicksalsgemeinschaft denkassimilierter afrikanischer Völker erweisen, so fehlt es auf dem Gebiete des ‘hamitisch’ genannten Volkstums durchaus an auch nur einigermassen systemfähigen allgemeinen Sprachkriterien. Während nämlich der moderne Afrikanist heute an der Hand von Meinhofs Vergleichsmethodik jederzeit imstande ist, schon bei erster Durchsicht eines in einem bislang noch unbekannt gewesenen afrikanischen Eingeborenenidiom abgefassten Textes eindeutig festzustellen, ob das Bantu ist oder nicht, und wenn ja, welche Stellung dieser Sprache im Rahmen des Gesammtsprachstammes zukommt, so war man bezüglich der Kriterien der Hamitensprachen bis vor Kurzem in der Hauptsache genötigt, ein mehr oder minder irrational formuliertes Allgemeinbekenntnis zum Glauben an eine sprachliche Einheit des Hamitischen abzulegen. Wer dann der gehörten Botschaft gegenüber seinen fehlenden Glauben betonen zu müssen meinte, den konnte man auch nicht widerlegen, selbst wenn er den ganzen Fragenkomplex rundweg negativ abzutun bereit war.

The classification of Masai and the Nilo-Hamitic languages with the Hamitic and JL Semitic language groups is a problem which is engaging the attention of linguists at the present time. In 1948 M. A. Bryan and A. N. Tucker, of London, published a short linguistic survey: Distribution of the Nilotic and Nilo-Hamitic Languages of Africa In this survey the generally accepted view was put forward that the Nilo-Hamitic and Nilotic languages, though they have a number of common features, show considerable differences. This theory is attacked by J. H. Greenberg of Columbia University, New York. In his opinion the relationship of the Nilotic and the ‘Great Lakes’ languages is so close that he combines both groups in the ‘Southern Branch’, i.e. one of the seven sub-groups of his ‘Eastern Sudanic’ language family; he rejects the term ‘Nilo-Hamitic’. In Volume III of the Handbook of African Languages, Tucker and Bryan refute the criticism of Greenberg, and put forward arguments to justify the distinction between ‘Nilotic’ and ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ and the retention of the term ‘Hamitic’ in the second title. A quite different approach to the problem in question may be found in the publications of A. Drexel and L. Homburger.

A Previous article (Lux, 1971) dealing with the network of visits between rural wage-earners and their kinsfolk in Western Congo, presented a first set of findings collected during field-work conducted in July 1966 among a stratified random sample of 268 workers in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe. One-third of them are employed in the plantations, and two-thirds in the industrial, mainly wood-processing, sector of seven generally big enterprises. Some of these workers live in Lukula, a small town of 10,000 people, others in rural company camps. They are thus to a large extent rural industrial wage-earners. Many of them are fully committed to the modern wage economy, so that I have been forced in the previous article to question Southall's assertion that rural wage-earners are ‘still firmly embedded in the fuller kinship system of rural tribal communities’ (1961: 34). The degree of their commitment has been measured by their various occupational profiles, to which I shall turn later. Suffice it here to say that half of them are already second- or even third-generation workers.

This article examines the commodity chain and value chain of half-litre water bags (referred to as ‘pure water’ or ‘sachet water’) in Niamey, Niger. We begin with a focus on the discarded bag and work backwards through the commodity chain to consumers, vendors and finally producers of ‘pure water’ to reveal the underlying power structures, cultural perceptions and assumptions that ultimately resulted in the discarded bag and landscapes of waste. We assert that the economic value of the plastic bag, largely assigned during the stages of its production, is based on four characteristics: the label, the temperature of the water, the time of year it is sold, and the apparent ‘purity’ of the water. We further demonstrate how characteristics of economic value are steeped in cultural perceptions and social relationships in Niamey. Using interviews with agents and actors at all levels of the commodity chain, we reveal how this local, hybrid system is connected to and affected by larger, global economic and political forces.

In this article we examine labour politics and unionization at a scientific research station: the former Institute of Malaria and Vector Borne Diseases (‘Amani’) in north-eastern Tanzania. Drawing on an analysis of an archive found at Amani, this paper approaches the process of decolonizing and Africanizing science and medical research from the perspective of African technicians. The technician cadre at Amani was drawn to scientific employment as it seemed to offer the promise of training, education and advancement. The union at Amani argued that African labour was crucial to the production of scientific knowledge at the station and that there ought to be a ‘ladder’ of promotion and progress that led from auxiliary scientific technician to independent researcher. The daily politics of the decolonization of science was conducted as everyday contentious labour relations and as increasingly vociferous claims upon the cultural power of science by African workers. Drawing attention to the social and spatial practices of African workers at Amani in the 1960s, we argue that Amani functioned not just within globalized networks of tropical medicine and scientific research but as a place bound both to local economies of labour and to larger geographies of African ambition and aspiration.

This paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the uniformization of socio-cultural life. I demonstrate that uniforms, unlike ordinary clothing, are salient precisely because of their unique role as markers of collective identity but also because they embody and simultaneously express the paradox of similarity and difference. Central to these processes and construction of meaning are community-based associations that have elevated the uniform to a new kind of orthodoxy. These perspectives are borne out by ethnographic interpretations of the ways in which variously positioned subjects in the Grassfields relate to and embody the special object that the uniform represents.

An outstanding feature of the kinship organization of the Baniyankole is its lack of uniformity. Here we have an African tribe composed of pastoralists and agriculturalists, whose respective kinship organizations reveal marked differences, despite the fact that they have for a long time inhabited a common territory, spoken a common language, and practised many similar customs. Besides these two, so to speak, original forms there are the more recent variations due to European influences. If we are to study the family, for instance, we shall have to consider several types. There is the family of the Muhima herdsman, the family of the agricultural Mwiru of the old type, the family of the peasant who owns cattle and grows coffee, and the family of the government clerk or school teacher. Similarly, if we were to study the political organization, we should have to consider the old form of Banyankole kingship as it existed when the British took over the administration of Ankole, the outlines of which we are able to construct not only from the present form of government but also from official documents and the memories of missionaries and natives who lived at the time, and the series of changes that have taken place in this form of government. It at once becomes apparent that we are here dealing with variations and change. Differences in time and space are as much facts of the case as are the peculiarities and general features of a given item of culture. Any realistic approach to the variations and changes in the kinship organization of the Banyankole, therefore, calls not only for description but for comparison and interpretation.

The Kru, a West African Negro group, inhabit the central and southern part of Liberia. They are surrounded by the Basa peoples to the north-west, by the Grebo to the south-east and by the Putu to the north-east. The informant, Thomas Tarbour (Sieh Tagbweh), from whom the following material was derived, was a native of Grand Cess (Siglipo), a large coast town near the border of the Grebo country. The Kru, along with other related groups in that part of West Africa, have a tradition of having migrated from far to the north-east. The physical type is that of the short, stocky Bush negro. No archaeological work has been done in the region, and such ethnological material as has been collected is a mere beginning.

The initial spread of Swahili from the coastal areas of Kenya and Tanganyika during the last century must, in large measure, be attributed to the Swahili traders, who, with their often unsavoury reputations and their caravans, took the language as far as the Congo. Where these traders settled in any numbers, as at Tabora, Mwanza, Ujiji, Usumbura, Lake Nyasa, and, to a smaller extent, at Mumias, small Islamic islands of coastal-Swahili-speakers have persisted: some flourishing like Usumbura, others, like Mumias, declining. In general, however, the language became more emasculated the farther it extended from the coast, so that in North Uganda and parts of the Eastern Congo it is essentially a highly simplified means of communication for individuals of widely differing groups; pruned of all refinements, its link with the coast is a tenuous one.

En 1936, feu Édouard De Jonghe publiait dans Africa une revue des sociétés secrètes du Congo Beige qui est demeurée l'étude classique sur le sujet. Après tant d'années cependant, une mise au point paraît justifiée.