The Berti, numbering about 25,000, inhabit the part of the Northern Darfur district round their traditional centre, Melit, which lies about thirty-five miles north-east of El Fasher, the capital of the Sudanese province of Darfur. Their original language belonged to the Middle Sahara group and was closest to the Zaghawa language, but for several generations now they have been arabized. They form the sedentary population of the dry steppe of Northern Darfur and depend on agriculture with pennisetum as the staple, on animal husbandry and on collecting gum from the Acacia verek, which they sell at the local markets. Another, probably larger, part of the Berti now live in Eastern Darfur, where they migrated during the last century under pressure from the expansion of the neighbouring Meidob into their original territory in Northern Darfur.

The problem of the social adjustment of primitive races to European culture is one which is being and has been faced by a considerable number of officials and settlers in the various tropical countries of the world. Many of those who may read these words will have a far wider experience than the writer. To these men of experience the writer appeals for criticisms and suggestions. The article is written in the spirit of one who is anxious to learn. It is an attempt to think out the part schools should or could play in the general problem of social adjustment. It suggests how, by preserving and developing African tradition and culture in the schools, Africa may be helped to make a happy and satisfactory adjustment to her changed social environment following increasing contacts with Europe and the world. It outlines an experiment to be tried at Iringa, Tanganyika Territory.

Whereas Michael Lambek situates the exploration of the significance of ‘ordinary ethics’ in the everyday as the study of ‘the ethical in the conjunction or movement between explicit local pronouncements and implicit local practices and circumstances’, this article takes the opposite view by drawing attention to special events that appear to engage – or provide space for – extraordinary ethics. Special events and their extraordinary ethics bring into relief the implicitness of the ordinary in everyday ethics. Weddings in Botswana are moments in the social life of the individual, the family and the community that produce such event ethics. On one level, the event ethics relate to the execution of these highly stylized weddings in terms of concerns about their performance and marital arrangements. On another level, the event ethics can have tacit dimensions that belong to the special nature of the occasion. This article argues not only that ‘ordinary ethics’ may be privileged through the study of what is tacit in social interactions, but that ‘event ethics’ also demonstrate the importance of the tacit.

Among the Gouro masks, Zamble, a composite animal figure, and Gù, a fine-featured woman's face, are known to art lovers around the world. Today their profane avatars, Flali and Zaouli, are at the heart of masquerades that are much enjoyed by audiences. But this appreciation concerns only the ‘pretty’ aspects, that is to say the civilized and orderly side of an ensemble that also has a reverse side: the disease masks, sprung from disorder, avatars of the more powerful Zàùlì, described as the wild brother or husband of Zamble in the genealogical idiom employed by the Gouro when referring to the masks. These masks are created by each generation of young people and are central figures in rituals of inversion that express the upheavals of the times. At the same time as they establish their creators’ reputations, they serve as a record of these events for the Gouro. Descended from the initial trio of masks (Zàùlì, Zamble, Gù), they prolong the trend to secularization of this family of masks from the sacred wood. In tracking this tradition over twenty years we can see a process of resacralization. When the youths’ comments are analysed in the light of encyclopaedic knowledge acquired in the course of anthropological research on health, we can understand the necessity of the mask figure, and going further can understand what an ugly profane mask is, what it presents and the role it plays. In return the Zamble mask and its associates take on another dimension, a dimension that opens up exploration of the unknown via their intrinsic ambiguity and the transgressive behaviour they allow during the time of the ritual.

This article investigates the anti-tsetse fly work of colonial entomologist K. R. S. Morris in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast between 1928 and 1951. Morris's main programme was directed at the Lawra District of the north-west, where he claimed to have eliminated the tsetse population and trypanosomiasis by the end of his tenure. This achievement allowed farmers to move into the formerly infested land and reclaim the area for agricultural development. As an added benefit, Morris also claimed, eliminating tsetse flies in the Lawra District reduced the incidence of sleeping sickness in the main market towns of north-west Ashanti. The article charts Morris's work, which is historically significant for a number of reasons. First, it reveals much about the connection between anti-tsetse work and colonial development doctrine in northern Ghana. Second, it highlights the importance of studying colonial practices. Morris's clearing programme appears to have worked, but it was almost certainly based on faulty theories of tsetse ecology. In this sense, the story of anti-tsetse work in the Northern Territories shows that we might learn as much from colonial practices as from colonial ideologies.

The Accra–Kumasi road, one of Ghana's most important trunk roads, traverses numerous towns and settlements whose residents at times engage intimately with the road on their doorstep. In this article, I provide ethnographic insights into the ways in which roadside dwellers conceptualize – and spatialize – the road and its roadside through distinct repertoires of movement (performed and encountered), through localized storytelling and narratives, through self-reflection, and also through disruptive and vigilante actions. I describe the spatial practices that are at the core of the dwellers' ‘anthropological’ experience of the road and its roadside, a space that is continuously domesticated, appropriated and, thus, implicated in the mundane and everyday. The dwellers' everyday practices, as well as the exceptional performances oriented to the road, appear as closely intertwined both with the liveliness, socialities and opportunities the road affords, as well as with its dangers and potential for destruction and death. Thus the ‘ambivalent nature of road experiences’, in Masquelier's phrase – namely the experience of the road as a space of both perils and possibilities – is crucial to how roadside dwellers socially produce the Accra–Kumasi road.

Nigerian Pentecostalism continues to assume many of the externalities of popular culture in the country, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. In an emergent trend, church leaders invite popular entertainers into church services and other church-related events with the declared aim of energizing their congregations. Where does the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to performers and jesters come from? What light does the embrace of Nigerian Pentecostalism and popular culture – the theological and the theatrical – throw on both these worlds? Triggered primarily by these questions, and mobilizing insights and analogies from the economics of religion, this article analyses strategies of evangelization enacted by Pentecostal leaders in a context of religious saturation. It is argued that, given the strictures of a changing religious marketplace, the unique convergence of spirituality and entertainment, as encapsulated by this trend, is a function of spiritual entrepreneurs’ need not just to retain the patronage of existing religious consumers but also to attract new ones. Licensed by the foundational liberalism of the Nigerian Yorùbá world, a Pentecostalism that is accepting of popular culture generates new spiritual and artistic forms.

Published literature on the subject of the Shilluk is considerable and there are also many interesting accounts of specific subjects buried in the files of the Administration. Nowhere, however, is there a complete account of all aspects of Shilluk life. Moreover, there has been a tendency to concentrate on certain aspects, notably the Divine Kingship, to the exclusion of others. In 1941 Mr. M. E. C. Pumphrey and I published two articles: the first a general summary account of the Shilluk tribe based on Mr. Pumphrey's observations and wide experience; the second a more detailed analysis of one Shilluk settlement, the result of fieldwork carried out in 1937. In 1944 I had the privilege of attending the installation of reth Anei Kur and, together with Mr. W. P. G. Thomson, published a full account. Subsequently Mr. Thomson published his ‘Further Notes on the Death of a Shilluk Reth’, after the death of reth Anei in 1943. This, with Professor Evans-Pritchard's Frazer Lecture, The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan, represents the total of information published on the subject of the Shilluk in recent years.

For many years now Native courts have been a feature of colonial administration in British Africa. They are to be found in almost every district and they hear thousands of cases. Yet such is the confusion of thought that exists about their aims and functions that these courts have not yet made anything like the contribution to our knowledge of Native law that might have been expected.

This study is based on data collected as part of a series of demographic surveys conducted in 1961–2 in different parts of the Sudan. The primary aim of the surveys was to study fertility differentials in the country.

The study of marriage patterns, however, is a prerequisite for any serious investigation of fertility especially in a country like the Sudan where birth control, as understood in countries of the West European type, is almost unknown.

Orthodox theories of social change emphasise the importance of formal training in the structural transformation of traditional systems within less developed countries (Peil 1973; Dore 1978). It is assumed that through investment in human capital economically-backward societies will achieve modernisation and growth, and that a sequence of changes in the social and occupational structure following the typical Western model will occur. A close association between educational and occupational attainment is postulated which forms the basis for a new system of social stratification defined by educational qualification and income level (Foster 1977). Intervening between the academic achievement of individuals and their entry into the job market an important additional spatial variable is included in the dual sector model (Lewis 1954; Forde 1968). Given that rural-urban dichotomy exists between traditional and modern sectors the model suggests that considerable selective movement from countryside to town is an additional necessary condition for economic growth. Finally it is assumed that the resultant spatial separation of the educated from their traditional environment coupled by secure employment in town consolidates the process of acculturation into a Western value system (Foley 1977).

Many visitors to Africa do not realize that native life is undergoing rapid disintegration, and some of those who have lived for many years in the country do not seem to feel that it matters even if this is the case. The difficulty of realizing the extent and the gravity of these rapid changes is increased by two factors. We who bring the twentieth-century ideas and methods of the West into the midst of primitive peoples are by our very presence undermining the hold of age-long custom on the African tribes. The force of novelty and the prestige of the white man's habits are in themselves strong enough to shake the ancient authority. Moreover we are all in Africa for a purpose. We have work to do on a farm, in government or mission, and the very concentration on the achievement of our aims leads us, or most of us, to assume that what we feel necessary and right must be the best for the African. In this context very few Europeans can stop to observe, far less to study, the effects of the changes in the Africans themselves. Education shares the prevailing attitude. It becomes simply the communication of knowledge or the imparting of skill which, so we feel, must bring Africa to its desired haven.

Cet article contribue aux récents dialogues en antropologie et humanités africaines sur la traduction problématique et l'application des concepts occidentaux et non-occidentaux d'esthétique, par exemple, “authentique”, “original” et “touristique”, dans le domaine des pratiques artisanales. Il analyse, compare et contraste le patronage artistique parmi les Touaregs Nigériens dans des contextes sociaux ruraux et urbains. Le rôle du “forgeron” chez les Touaregs, un mot traduit de façon diverse dans les conversations locales et la littérature ethnographique, par “artisan”, “technicien”, et “bijoutier”, suggère le besoin de réviser les différentes perspectives culturelles sur les aspects céremoniaux, esthétiques et commerciaux de l'activité artisanale.

Cet article se concentre sur les rôles changeants, le matériel que les artisans utilisent, et les croyances qui entourent les forgerons. Il soutient que ces actions et ces croyances complexes n'ont pas seulement une influence sur les produits artistiques mais aussi sur les processus socio-économiques auxquels les producteurs, la clientèle, et le public contribue dans des milieux et contextes différents.

This paper rests on the belief that traditional oral poetry from many parts of Africa exhibits a number of common themes in the imagery with which it handles the fact of death. Further, it argues that these themes are often to be found in the work of contemporary African poets, writing in English or in French. Their treatment in such work may be the sort of sophisticated examination of inherited beliefs that we find in a writer like Euripides, but there can be no doubting the strength of this movement, among younger writers, to come to grips with Africa's traditional systems of thought and make them part of a living intellectual and emotional heritage. The old missionary-inspired dichotomy between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’, as that between ‘Christian’ and ‘heathen’, is gradually breaking down and giving place to the reunified culture that is painfully emerging. As this new cultural unity establishes itself, Africans will no longer be required to amputate a large part of themselves, and almost the whole of their ancestry, in order to qualify for civilization. Hence the importance of the role which African poets are playing in this whole process of restatement and reassessment. In their work the concern for bringing these things to the surface of the mind, for integrating them consciously with the personality, is more explicit and more personal that it can be with the novelist or the dramatist.

Among the many comparatively new factors bearing on native education policies in East Africa the administrative policy of Indirect Rule is one which must be reckoned with. Though already practised to some extent on the eastern side of Africa, notably in Uganda, it may be said that Indirect Rule as a definite policy of Government in East Africa dates from its introduction by Sir Donald Cameron as Governor of Tanganyika Territory in 1925. Sir Donald came from Nigeria, where he had helped to carry on the policy started by Lord Lugard during the years immediately preceding the War.

The growth and development of a town are mainly reciprocals of population growth, location of industries and specialization of the inhabitants. Nsukka and Awka represent two points on our developmental scale. Their growth and development while comparable in some ways are functions of different variables.

In an article, ‘A Contribution to the Study of Zande Culture’, which appeared in Africa in 1960 (vol. xxx, no. 4), I discussed the certain or probable borrowing by the original Azande, the Ambomu, in the course of their migrations, of their main cultivated plants, e.g. eleusine, maize, ground-nuts, manioc, sweet potatoes, bananas, and tobacco, from assimilated or neighbouring peoples. In a second article, ‘A Further Contribution to the Study of Zande Culture’ (Africa, vol. xxxiii, no. 3, 1963), the discussion of cultural borrowings was taken into the field of artifacts and technology: building, smithery, pot-making, carving, plaiting, oracles, and medicines. In the present and final essay some examples are given of borrowing in areas of the social life other than those of cultivation of plants and the arts and crafts.

Western journalists and other commentators offered two contrasting explanations for the results of the 1980 elections in Zimbabwe. The defeat of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council (UANC) by the guerrilla parties was explained in terms of immediate and short-term intimidation. On the other hand, the victory of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU(PF)) over Joshua Nkomo's Patriotic Front was explained in terms of primordial history. The Shona and the Ndebele, it was held, were divided by 'traditional' tribal history–and in the elections the majority Shona voted for Mugabe and the minority Ndebele voted for Nkomo.