Christian missions in Africa have produced mountains of publications which, despite their collective mass often escape notice in the wider landscape of African studies. Some of the reasons for scholarly neglect are readily apparent. A secular age is inclined to under-rate the impact of religious forces born in another era; an anti-imperialist generation of scholars is repulsed by the generally unabashed cultural imperialism of nineteenth-century evangelists; the devolution of political power from white to black hands has produced an understandable preference for the study of purely African agents of change in the recent past. Myopia, embarrassment, and the looming presence of contemporary African nationalism all encourage a tendency to leave the study of missions to antiquarians and the professionally pious.

The point of departure for this paper is Rodney Needham's article, ‘The left Hand of the Mugwe: an analytical Note on the Structure of Meru-symbolism’ (Needham, 1960: 20–33). I will not try here to give further evidence for the system of dual classification which he presents in that article in order to prove or disprove it, but will dwell on his suggestion that it might be possible to draw conclusions about the origin of the Meru of Kenya by examining their symbolic structure (ibid: 27). My argument will lead not so much to conclusions about the origin of the Meru, but to conclusions concerning the ‘making’ of a society, particularly that of Tigania, a subtribe of the Meru people. My conclusions are based on a discussion of the theoretical and historical implications of the allocation of distinctive rights and duties to different divisions within Tigania.

The northern States of Nigeria have in the past 200 years experienced two great reform movements; both were accompanied by conquest by a distinct minority, and both sought to impose an external, universal culture with its set of written laws and distinct administration. The ideals, and their application by the two groups of reformers, have been strikingly similar, as has been the dissenting response of the disillusioned.

The study of kinship is by now recognized as being one of the key positions in the study of primitive culture. The series of studies to be undertaken by the Institute of the effect upon native culture of modern industrialization will to a great extent centre on the problem of changes in kinship structure, and the changing function of the different types of kinship organization. With this final aim in mind, the following sketch purposely pays attention to the formal aspect only of kinship organization. It goes without saying that such merely formal studies can never be an end in themselves. But there is, on the other hand, always the danger that in historical or functional studies of kinship problems this formal aspect may be unduly neglected. This consideration—that a clear understanding of these formal problems has to precede any attempt at a functional or historical interpretation—is the only reason why these forms of kinship organization as such have been singled out here for theoretical discussion. This discussion does not aim at presenting anything new to the student of kinship organization. It simply attempts to sum up in a form as concise as possible the main results—and the main problems—of modern anthropology in regard to the forms of kinship organization. This can probably best be done by giving definitions of the most important of these forms and discussing their relation to each other.

There are many Abajas in the Ibo country; there were, until recently, two village groups of this name attached to a single Native Treasury. Its Native Authority officials were wont to distinguish them as Abaja-Isu and Abaja-Green. The former has now been transferred to Isu Native Authority, the latter is the subject of a recently published study by M. M. Green. It forms the third-ranking village group of the Ehime ‘clan’ (tribe) which belongs to the eastern section of the Isuama division of the Southern Ibo. This section was classified by Talbot as the Abaja ‘sub-tribe’ after its most important ‘clan’ (tribe), and within this ‘sub-tribe’ he distinguishes as the Abaja-Osu ‘clan’ (tribe) the two related ‘clans’ of Ehime and Ugboma. With so many Abajas to confuse the local issue the reviewer proposes to follow the Mbano Native Authority procedure and to refer to the community with whose affairs Miss Green is concerned as Abaja-Green.

Le théâtre populaire à l'ouest de l'Afrique est de plus en plus le sujet de livres théoriques. Cependant, ce qui n'a pas été encore examiné dans cette littérature sont les changements historiques aussi bien au sein de traditions théatrales particulières que dans leurs rapports avec la société en général. Cet article commence à adresser cette lacune en se concentrant sur le parti concertiste ghanéen dans les années explosives entre la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale et les premières années de l'indépendance. Pendant cette période, le parti concertiste ghanéen avait subit des transformations profondes en ce qui concerne sa forme, son contenu, et ses modes de production et de consommation. A travers leur mobilité et leur large popularité les partis concertistes avaient participé directement à la transformation de la conscience publique. Tout autant que la presse populaire avait joué un rôle central dans la formation du nationalisme européen, le théâtre ambulant populaire avait joué un role pivotant parmi une population pour la plupart illéttrée durant la transition entre le colonialisme et l'état nation moderne au Ghana. Cet article interprète les conventions génériques à travers lesquelles le parti concertiste avait rassemblé et constitué son nouveau public. En dèploy ant une gamme éclectique de techniques officielles pour dramatiser les réaltiés journalières, les partis concertistes étaient devenu un mécanisme intégratif principal à travers lequel les publics avaient négotié une période historique tumultueuse.

I. L'Utilisation du Lait dans l'Alimentation. Il existe en Afrique tropicale quelques pays d'élevage où le lait figure, pour une part importante, dans l'alimentation. Le Fouta-Djallon (Guinée Française) est un de ces pays, et le Docteur Patenostre, dans un travail sur l'alimentation des Peuls au Fouta-Djallon, nous fournit au sujet de l'utilisation du lait les précisions suivantes:

It is a source of great pleasure to me, as it must be to all our friends here, that we are once again able to meet in an International Conference after the long years of war and its aftermath. I need not speak of what the War has meant to national welfare or the private lives of many here. But it was inevitable that it should have gravely affected the progress of the cultural studies to which this Institute is devoted, not merely because it has made so serious an interruption in their pursuit, but because it has for a time severed the international contacts and broken up the intellectual partnerships on which much of the vitality of our work depended. Even to-day, it is not easy to foresee the time when some of these partnerships can be resumed in their old form, much as we might ourselves hope that changes in national relations should not be an obstacle to association in the field of cultural studies.

Among the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana the fundamental notion about the nature and composition of man—a notion which has a significant bearing on their view of the relation between man and his social, natural and spiritual worlds combined—is that each person at his or her conception receives specific physical and spiritual elements from the genitor, genetrix and Nyame, the Supreme Being. These gifts are conceptualised as bogya (or mogya in the Asante dialect), sunsum and kra, equivalent English translations in literary and popular usage being ‘blood’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ respectively.

Anthropologists and historians of eastern African societies have long shared a common interest in the description and analysis of African religions and beliefs. Spirit possession, mediumship, witchcraft beliefs, diviners and divinatory techniques, the role of prophets and the nature of prophetic traditions are all subjects for which there is now an extensive, and still growing, body of literature. For virtually no group of the present ethnographic map of eastern Africa do these topics remain unstudied. Yet the sheer diversity of the material has contributed to a degree of confusion i n the analytical categories and labels that have been employed in describing such religious phenomena.

In the autumn of 2004, a remarkable gathering of 102 scholars took place at St Antony's College, Oxford: they had come for an interdisciplinary symposium on ‘Trees, rain, and politics in Africa: the dynamics and politics of climatic and environmental change’. Symposium papers were grouped into panels that focused on either particular resources (such as trees and water) or particular aspects of social relationships (such as politics and discourses). This format resulted in a series of dialogues between the natural science and social science paradigms, and this first half of the present issue of Africa takes as its theme just one of those interdisciplinary conversations. Taken together, these authors demonstrate how the hybridization of natural science and social science can benefit understandings of the African past, interpretations of the African present and planning for the African future.1

This article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus for civil society leaders who have become experienced in the political game. Indeed, actors’ social embeddedness in networks of solidarity demands that they capture and redistribute the spoils they receive. At the same time, however, their social and political legitimacy as civil society leaders rests on their ability to avoid becoming entangled in the game, and to avoid accusations of ‘playing politics’. In other words, civil society activists are embedded in the same social and political structures as state bureaucrats and politicians. In this context, civil society activists cannot maintain the moral high ground they often claim to occupy.

In this paper, the author discusses the power of vodun leaders in present-day Benin, and more specifically anti-witchcraft cults born from the encounter with world religions. Offering an analysis inspired by Louis Marin's theory on power in its representation, the author illustrates her analysis through the portrait of a vodun leader with a view to escape from a functionalist analysis of occult power or syncretism. With the baroque mirror metaphor conceived as a device, which underscores what it is that connects heterogeneous practices, Tall describes what is shown in the rituals and practices of a vodun leader and emphasizes the centrality of the transubstantiation phenomenon in the production of a community of believers.

Since 2012, the influx of affordable smartphones to urban Nigeria has revolutionized how young people take, store and circulate photographs. Crucially, this ever-expanding digital archive provides urban youth with a means to communicate new ideas of self, allowing a marginalized group to display fortunes that often belie their difficult realities. Through gestures and poses, fashion and style, the companionship of others, or the use of particular backdrops and locations, these photographs contain certain semiotics that allude to the subject owning the means for success in urban Nigeria. Similarly, as youth constantly store photographs of themselves on their handsets alongside those of celebrities, patrons and friends, coveted commodities and aspirational memes, they construct personal narratives that place them at the centre of global flows and networks. With the ability to constantly retake, update and propagate photographs, the discrepancies between in- and off-frame identities become ambiguous. This article explores how young people in Calabar, south-eastern Nigeria, use digital photographs on their mobile phones to cultivate new visions of themselves. Arguing that these photographs not only represent superlative aspirations but are also integral to social becoming, the discussion examines how digital images allow youth to reposition themselves within (and beyond) Nigerian society. Ephemerality is central: digital photographs can be easily circulated and retain some permanence on social media, yet these immaterial objects can easily be lost from handsets. In thinking about the futures of African youth and African photography, this article therefore interrogates the tensions of private and public archives.

In May 1984, the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi introduced a National Youth Service pre-university training programme (NYSPUT) for prospective university students. The programme was designed to instil discipline in Kenyan university students and inculcate them with a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Moi regime prior to their arrival on campus. This article argues that, in practice, however, the scheme had unintended consequences: it served to alienate student recruits from the ruling party and helped radicalize a small but vocal group of student activists, who, when they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of the 1980s. Relying on extensive interviews with former student recruits and archival research, this article highlights the key role that the NYSPUT played in shaping Kenya's young generation of 1980s student activists, who represented one of the most united and militant student movements in the country's history.

The introduction of dry-season vegetable cultivation on a large scale in Brikama, The Gambia in the early 1970s has led to the development of a new labour system amongst female farmers whereby strangers or clients are given access to land primarily in the dry season for vegetable cultivation in exchange for providing unremunerated labour for hosts for the cultivation of rice in the rainy season. Hosts, who either claim descent from the founding families or have married into founding families, have access to land and control its distribution for women's crops. This article examines the way in which social difference is played out in the acquisition of land and labour through the establishment of agrarian clientelist relations. Agrarian clientelist relations are about the maintenance of host–stranger distinctions and the management of social difference within a rapidly changing Gambian political economy. The nature of these clientelist relations is changing because of the changing relations of agrarian production, related in turn to the introduction of cooperative gardens in the region, the increasing scarcity of farming land and the increasing political power of strangers on a local and national level. The youth, particularly those who are educated, are moving out of farming altogether. Consequently, female hosts are increasingly reliant on their clients' labour. I argue that female hosts attempt to manage these processes of change out of a need to maintain the particular power relations that form the basis for host–stranger distinctions and their existing claims to land and labour. The article examines the tensions and the intra-gender struggles that emerge between female hosts and their client-strangers. In refusing to take the initiative to set up cooperative gardens, female hosts have maintained what they see as their rightful claims to their land and their clients' labour. Hegemonic notions of ‘the correctness of practices’, associated with host–stranger identities, have informed hosts' behaviour and that of their clients, and ultimately influenced the nature of resource allocation.

This article explores the making of gendered and religious identities among a group of Ghanaian Methodist women in London by bringing to the fore the complex and irreverent ways in which the women of Susanna Wesley Mission Auxiliary (SUWMA) negotiate their recognition within the predominantly patriarchal settings of the Methodist Church. If, on the one hand, the association and its members conform to Christian values and widely accepted Ghanaian constructions of womanhood, on the other hand, flouting expectations of pious femininity, they claim a unique, elevated position within the church. Their transgressive hedonism can thus be read as a performative assertion of their claims to respect, recognition and leadership beyond the narrow parameters of gendered modesty. Many of the women are senior church leaders and respected members of the diaspora. All are successful professional career women and economically independent. Their association is simultaneously about promoting the Christian faith while being recognized as successful, cosmopolitan, glamorous middle-class women. It is this duality which the present article highlights by showing how members of the association negotiate and construct their subjectivities both within the Methodist Church and the Ghanaian diaspora, while they also negotiate their relationship with the Methodist Church in Ghana.

For many decades, anthropologists have debated the question of matriliny, with some expressing concerns about its prospects of survival in a modern economy of private property and greater economic differentiation. In continuing this debate, this article provides new and contemporary evidence of the continued relevance of matriliny as a kinship practice that shapes the daily conduct of women. Using ethnographic evidence from the Asante town of Offinso in Ghana, the article demonstrates the crucial role of matrilineal kinship through the economic experiences of two market women living with their respective husbands. The evidence shows that the persistence of economic values that encourage female enterprise, norms of kinship that privilege maternal relations over paternal ones and marriage conventions that allow spouses to maintain separate economic resources create a social and economic environment in which women actively assert their independence from husbands. Women's strong allegiance to their matrilineage is mirrored in their economic conduct, further accentuating the antithesis between conjugal and lineage bonds. Put together, these factors point to greater social and economic autonomy for Asante women.

One problem that besets students of society is how best to combine a study of change through time, with emphasis on the flow of time, and the detailed analysis of relationships; how to write a social history with sufficient detail on all the aspects of relationships—economic, legal, ritual, ideological—to satisfy the anthropologist. Static models are too far from reality to be useful, but how can one create a model that moves? The difficulty consists first, in discovering the relevant facts and second, in integrating them into an intelligible account.