Bayaaye is a Luganda word meaning ‘hooligans’ used since the 1970s to both disparage Ugandan urban youth and celebrate their streetwise resourcefulness. The original so-called bayaaye were youth, often fresh from the countryside, who worked as street hustlers in the 1970s underground economy. This article focuses on how one Ugandan intellectual, M. B. Nsimbi, in his Luganda-language novel about the Idi Amin era, Kulyennyingi (1984), diagnosed the rise of the bayaaye as a national moral pathology. I discuss how this novel relates to earlier Luganda literary works, which advocated an idealized precolonial, rural African tradition as a moral reference point for modern living. A recent revised discourse about urban youth as ‘bayaaye’ or ‘ghetto’, accompanying the political rise of reggae star Bobi Wine, is considered in light of the earlier history of the bayaaye stereotype.

This article examines She Called Me Woman, a 2018 anthology of and by twenty-five queer Nigerian women. The text focuses on a variety of narratives by women as a way to challenge the confinement of queer Nigeria to the narratives of gay men. The article demonstrates how the multifarious queer(ying) experiences of women in different geographical and social contexts within Nigeria help to further contextualize the trope of what we understand to be queer in Africa. The stories in this anthology reflect the complex ways in which queer women in Nigeria negotiate their everyday lives against the backdrop of the frontier imposed by both anti-homosexuality law in Nigeria and global LGBT+ discourse. In examining the complexities of these women, this article argues that queer frontiers in Africa must necessarily be discussed elliptically, as a compendium of the known, the unknown, and perhaps the unknowable. The idea of queerness is taken up as a frontier of thought, imagination and modes of being: that is, an embodiment of identities at the crossroads of a complex convergence of the old, the new and the yet to be known.

This article explores how, in the village of Glendale in KwaZulu-Natal, residents and local government officials – including councillors and municipal technicians – ‘see’ the post-apartheid state. I show how residents of the village regard the government – despite extensive state intervention – as inadequate, complaining especially of their ‘invisible’ and ‘impersonal’ character. Indeed, for them, democracy has brought anything but ‘direct rule’. And yet, while chiefly rule is sometimes invoked as a favoured alternative, I argue that people's estrangement from democratic government is not the desire to return to ‘culture’ but rather an expression of structural difficulties central to South Africa's increasingly tenuous experiment with participatory democracy. I suggest that these difficulties are also not reducible to state failure or corruption but point towards contradictions in contemporary citizenship.

In Akropong-Akwapim, south-eastern Ghana, memories of a sorrowful or conflict-laden past are accessed by verbal and visual strategies that are allusive in nature. The name-response that a mother gives to her child, sites marked in the ritual landscape and a chief's gold-covered linguist staff with a carved narrative image are all sites of memory pertaining to the identity of persons or groups. Formalized, repetitive and felt to be obligatory, they commemorate continuity with a dangerous and/or painful past and simultaneously deny it. This essay concerns memory, ritual, and the deliberate obscurity of reference.

This article is an ethnographic account of the economic importance of information in a particular society, that of the Northern Beja of Red Sea Province, Sudan, and of one social institution, the greetings ritual, vital in the transmission of information. As such it is intended as a contribution to the anthropology of information and to economic anthropology, but also to the study of greetings rituals and ceremonies. It suggests that it may in many cases be useful to approach the study of greetings from the perspective of their connection with information.

The attention paid to the security threats hanging over Burkina Faso, while legitimate, has overshadowed the underlying transformations in Islamic associational life since the fall of President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. This major political upheaval had a significant impact on the participation of Muslims in socio-political debates, the relations between generations and, more widely, the bases upon which religious authority is claimed. This article analyses the competition for religious leadership between Islamic actors in the public sphere in Burkina Faso by focusing mainly on francophone ‘Muslim intellectuals’. First, the study shows the gap between the gerontocracy at the helm of the main Islamic associations and the Burkinabe youth, which widened throughout the 1990s and 2000s and came strongly to the fore after the popular uprising of October 2014. Second, taking advantage of the space left vacant by traditional community leaders during the transition process, some young francophone ‘Muslim intellectuals’ actively sought to portray themselves as the vehicles of a ‘civil Islam’ and strove to promote new forms of civic engagement through religion. Other Muslim organizations have also tried to take advantage of the new political context to strengthen their presence in the socio-political arena.

The aim of this article is to initiate a new debate on vigilantism in Nigeria by arguing for a re-examination of the links between crime and vigilantism. It contends that, although the existing literature has shed considerable light on the practice of vigilantism in Nigeria, it has also obscured entire dimensions of the problem. By focusing exclusively on vigilante groups or ethnic militias, scholars have failed to anticipate the shift of the bulk of the violence from these social agencies to spontaneous mobs. After highlighting the factors that help explain the marginalization of ‘mob’ vigilantism in the scholarship about Nigerian vigilantism, I use ethnographic materials from my own field research in Lagos to show how crime – or more precisely unexplained crime – fuels intra-community distrust, which in turn fuels vigilante mobilization and violence as it increases the social control that crime-beset communities apply to some of their members who resent such distrust and consider it unfair. The data presented provide fresh insights into one of the most intriguing features of Nigeria vigilantism: the involvement of social delinquents at the roots of urban insecurity.

A Detailed description of a kind of joking relationship among the Ambo is welcome for several reasons. The institution of funeral friendship is found in the cultures of a far wider region than that indicated by the writer. Not only do the tribes of the Bemba and Nyanja groups associate partnership in funeral obligations with freedom of mutual abuse, but this is also culturally accepted widely in Tanganyika and Portuguese East Africa. It seems that from the Zambezi in the south to Lake Tanganyika, and from the east coast to the Luangwa river, are to be found the main elements of the institution described for the Ambo. Hitherto they have been known by their vernacular names: banungwe for the Bemba, uzukuru for the Nyanja, Tumbuka and Lake Shore Tonga, mwilo for the Yao, utani for the Ngoni and neighbouring tribes of Tanganyika. In every case funeral obligations mutually accepted are made the basis of an alliance between persons belonging to different clans, or even to different tribes.

The Afro-Arab community living along the coastal belt of Kenya and Tanganyika contains persons claiming Arab nationality by either patrilineal or matrilineal descent in whom the biological Arab strain may vary between individuals born to pure Arab parents and speaking Arabic and those in whom the Arab strain is unobservable and who speak Swahili. It is not accepted that the term Swahili covers the social interrelationships between these variations. The Swahili-speaking Afro-Arabs can be adequately described as Swahili but they nevertheless wish to be regarded as Arabs by outsiders and to speak as much Arabic as they can learn. The cultural and social interrelationship is so strong that a term must be used which will include the Arabs at one end of the scale and the Swahili at the other.

L'un des aspects les plus remarquables de l'expression religieuse des églises sionistes zouloues est l'éclat des coloris des vêtements ou employés par ailleurs. II est surprenant que ceux qui ont étudié ces eglises n'aient porté leur attention qu'en passant sur cette particularité hautement visible; en tout cas aucun effort sérieux n'a été entrepris pour découvrir la signification rituelle du symbolisme de leurs couleurs. Avec pour arrière-plan les études anthropologiques sur le deploiement therapeutique de couleurs symboles en Afrique, et à la lumière de mes propres recherches chez les zoulous sionistes, cet article a pour dessein de montrer que les couleurs choisies par les sionistes parmi celles significatives pour les africains, expriment comment ceux-ci se situent vis-à-vis de leur monde social et tracent graphiquement l'avancement de leur façon d'y réagir en guérison rituelle.

The contemporary development of African chieftainship is a question of considerable practical importance. The attitude which it will adopt towards the native chief in his relations with his own people is one of the major questions of policy which every colonial government has to decide. Some hold that a native society can only be satisfactorily ruled by—or through (the words are not quite synonymous)— its traditional head; others that the first duty of the civilizing power is to free its native subjects from the oppression and tyranny of their own rulers; others make it their aim to steer a middle course, and preserve the native authority in his traditional position while adapting his functions to the requirements of the present day. All have in fact considerably altered by their mere presence both the nature and the basis of the chief's authority.

This article attempts to carry further the discussion of some aspects of the issues of the analysis of relations between African traditional thought and Western concepts of causation presented by Robin Horton (1967) in earlier articles in this journal. It will also be clear to some readers that its title has been inspired by the theme of Sir Karl Popper's two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which first appeared in 1945. In this work Popper makes a systematic attack on modern totalitarians and their predecessors, and in so doing contrasts two types of societies, ‘the open society’, which is the ideal aspired to by liberal democrats, and ‘the closed society’, which he equates with tribalism; and it is to a form of this tribalism, he contends, that the totalitarians would have us return. Popper belongs to a long line of thinkers, including philosophers, lawyers, economists, and sociologists, who have used tribal or so-called primitive man—or rather their conceptions of him—as a means of illuminating their analysis of the problems of society in general and of modern society in particular, and in so doing have often raised the hackles of social anthropologists, who, by virtue of having lived in non-literate societies, tend to consider themselves the profession most likely to know something about the people whom their social-science colleagues cite with deceptive facility. It so happens, I believe, that Popper's conception of tribal or primitive man implied in his picture of ‘the closed society’ is much nearer the mark than, say, Hobbes's picture of man in ‘the state of nature’ or of Rousseau's idea of ‘the noble savage’.

The Ethiopic syllabary employed for writing the classical Ge'ez and also, with certain modifications, the contemporary South Semitic vernaculars of East Africa, was formed by super-imposing a system of auxiliary vowel-marks upon a basic consonantal alphabet; this alphabet occurs, alongside of the syllabic script, in the Old Ethiopic inscriptions of the Axumite Kingdom in the fourth century of our era, and is a derivative of the Sabaeo-Minaean or Old South Arabic script found in the monuments of the south-west Arabian kingdoms. But although the Ethiopic syllabary is thus genetically connected with the other main branches of the Semitic alphabet, the traditional order of the signs, in which the consonantal component and the accompanying vowel are the primary and secondary determining factors respectively, does not agree with that of any Semitic alphabet hitherto known. There is no old or reliable native tradition as to the reason underlying the order of the signs; no help is to be had from numerical signs, which elsewhere, as will shortly appear, afford valuable testimony to the order of the letters; for Ethiopic borrowed Greek alphabetic signs for this purpose, while the South Arabian inscriptions used single strokes for the units, and for higher denominations the initial letters of the native words for five, ten, hundred, &c. The mnemonic word-groups reconstructed by Bauer and others are open to objection on grounds of language and sense. Other external criteria yield only tentative and inconclusive results, and the subject has accordingly remained one of speculation and controversy.

A moral code as ideology is gradually inculcated at different stages in the male life cycle among the Sidama of Ethiopia. The elders constitute a gerontocracy in control of the code, enabling them to link household and community in perpetuating a system of subsistence production which generates sufficient surplus to support rituals and symbols that maintain the ideology. They encourage oscillation of males between household and community until death, when the authority of the code becomes transcendent.

The peoples of the Western world, and not a few Africans who have adopted some Western ideas, are apt to think that in matters of hygiene and preventive medicine the peoples of Nigeria owe all their useful practices solely to Western civilization, while the traditional theories and practices are merely superstitions. But in fact, when one analyses these, one finds interwoven with them correct principles of hygiene and preventive medicine. It is true that Nigeria owes a great deal to modern medicine, but had it not been for an existing foundation of practical hygiene and preventive medicine among Nigerian peoples, it would not have been possible for them to derive full benefit from modern practices.