What drives the formation of ties and networks in ethnically hybrid spaces despite the occurrence of conflict? We approach this question by examining the actors involved, the institutions affected, and the economic and environmental contexts surrounding such tendencies. This study explores socially thick arrangements between Maasai and Kikuyu in Narok and their role in the non-violent use of formerly contested lands. In Laikipia, we examine how young Samburu and Kikuyu cooperate in a dangerous yet economically beneficial network involving cattle-rustling ventures. We revisit the history of land settlement in Kenya's Rift Valley, particularly in the study areas of Narok and Laikipia, and show how access and settlement rights to land are negotiated peacefully, encouraging ethnic assimilation and cooperative social and economic relations. Based on this context and the exploration of our case studies, we argue that the formation of alliances in multi-ethnic settings tends to override other identities when mutual benefits drive such associations.

This article is an attempt to reconsider the representations that, in Senegal in the 2000s, linked the social history of the tirailleurs (African colonial soldiers) with the practical and symbolic processes at the heart of a number of migratory projects, especially among young people. The history of this social military body was rooted in almost a century of colonial domination, from 1857 to 1962. The tirailleurs played a part in all the battles of the French army and generated different kinds of social imaginaries that were woven between France and Africa. In the late 1950s, another figure, another ideal type, became established in the Senegalese public space: the migrant. After tracing the history of the way in which these two figures were constructed, I trace how, more recently, the younger generation has been able to mobilize the dominant memory of the tirailleur in its own aspirations of exile. Some preliminary methodological proposals will be needed to account for these migratory imaginaries.

As a precondition of belonging, professionalism is often a taken-for-granted feature of being middle-class. Yet ethnographic attention to experiences of work reveals that professional identity can be fragile. Drawing on ethnographic research among nurses in KwaZulu-Natal, this article traces the feelings of precarity about work and the ambivalence that pervades ideas of professionalism. This ambiguity arises partly out of a peculiarly South African story in which histories of professionalism are entwined with the repressive apartheid project of separate development. Many of the professionals working as teachers, nurses, lawyers and administrators today were trained in the former ‘homelands’. Practices of professionalism are entangled with those of clientelism inherited from this earlier period of homeland politics. These local histories combine with wider processes of neoliberalism, as conditions of austerity produce structural shifts towards casualization. The article traces these dynamics in the stories of two nurses and considers what may be at stake politically as middle-class trajectories are threatened. Moving away from a view of the middle classes as either democratic or anti-democratic, feelings of ambivalence about work make questions of political allegiance an ambiguous and fraught matter.

This essay explores the varied ways so-called ‘witchcraft’ powers are implicated today in an African society, the Tuareg of the Republic of Niger. There is analysis of the interplay of these powers and dangers in case studies and vignettes, suggesting that recent assertions of ‘witch-like’ powers are grounded in moral discourse that addresses negotiated social relationships rather than linear temporal transformations from ‘tradition’ into ‘modernity’. A comparative analysis of these powers in diverse contexts reveals that witchcraft discourses are multiple and invite less a lineal temporal question of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’, more a question of how moral discourses are reconfigured from cultural referents in intrinsically diverse repertoires.

In his inaugural editorial in Africa in 1928, Sir Frederick Lugard observed that the new institution that was responsible for publishing the journal, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (it did not become the International African Institute until 1946) was entering a field already crowded with organizations dealing with Africa. His hope was that the IIALC would carve out a distinctive role for itself as a hub or central clearing house, coordinating a disparate international array of institutions and bringing ‘scientific study’ into contact with ‘practical affairs’. The core of scientific study would be anthropological and linguistic, and Lugard saw a useful future for research into African local law and custom, land tenure systems and changes in consumption patterns, among other topics (Lugard 1928).

There are two factors affecting the diet of urban Natives: on the one hand there is the expansive influence of assimilation to and adoption of European food habits, and on the other hand there is active a restrictive influence in the shape of poverty. The urban Native, through his close contact with European culture which residence in an urban environment inevitably entails, has been introduced to an extraordinarily wide range of new foodstuffs and new ways of preparing food. Consequently the range of his food desires has been much increased. But his desires are not allowed free play among this new and wide selection. The factor which narrows down his choice and curbs his desire is his poverty. The urban Native eats according to the capacity of his pocket and his food is usually the first item of expenditure which is marked out for especial economy.

Dans le pays dogon qui se situe au coeur du Soudan français, dans la boucle du Niger vit une population dl'environ 220.000 individus, race vigoureuse et homogène qui a conservé intacte une civilisation millénaire, peut-être héritée de célèbres civilisations méditerranéennes aujourdl'hui disparues. Au cours des dernières années, les travaux d'une équipe ethnographique française ont fait des Dogon une des populations les mieux étudiées de l'Afrique Occidentale sur le plan des institutions et des croyances. Il n'en est pas de même de leur langue, qui n'a encore fait l'objet d'aucune étude d'ensemble, et dont la situation parmi les autres groupes de langues africaines reste mal définie. Delafosse, après avoir hésité entre le groupe voltaïque et le groupe mandé, penche pour ce dernier dans la dernière édition des Langues du Monde, où il classe le dogon dans le groupe nigéro-sénégalais (sousgroupe de l'Est, avec le samogho et le sia). Par contre, le R. P. Bertho, dans une récente étude, rapproche le dogon des langues voltaïques. M. de Lavergne de Tressan, dans son Inventaire Linguistique de l' A.O.F. et du Togo, juge préférable ‘d’opter pour la prudence, tant que les catégories grammaticales n'auront pas été étudiées’ (p. 211). Cette attitude de prudence sera aussi la nôtre; il ne semble pas que l'on puisse aboutir à des conclusions valables dans le domaine du comparatisme avant qu'une description aussi complète que possible ait été donnée, sinon de la langue dogon, du moins d'un de ses nombreux dialectes.

In his classic study of African Independent Churches in South Africa, Sundkler distinguishes two main groups. To the first belong the Ethiopian Churches, that is, Independent African Churches which have split off from European Mission Churches because they resented being administered by Europeans, yet did not want to alter church organization and religious teaching. In the second group belong the Zionist Churches which, as Sundkler writes, are theologically ‘a syncretistic Bantu movement with healing, speaking with tongues, purification rites and taboos as the main expression of their faith’. Sundkler states, however, that these categories are not exclusive, because ‘some Zionist Churches are gradually becoming more and more “Ethiopian” in ideology and behaviour.’

In central Nigeria, between 8° 30' and 10° 30' N. lat., lies Nupe-land. Two rivers form its boundaries, the Niger to the south and west, the Kontagora river to the north. Another river marks its central axis: the Kaduna. The boundary to the east is formed by the gradually rising land, which eventually reaches the hills of Gwari country. It is a low, open, fertile country, covering roughly 7,000 sq. m., inhabited by a population who were known from the ancient days, and all over Nigeria, as an industrious and able people. The census of 1931 gives their number as 326,000, but for various reasons one may safely take it to be considerably higher, probably up to half a million.

In this essay I propose to discuss three recent studies of African legal systems—Anderson's survey of Mohammedan law in British African territories, Gluckman's book on the Barotse (or Lozi, to mention the tribe mainly considered), and Howell's book on Nuer law. To begin with, this seemed merely a convenient way of combining three reviews; nor did the three books seem to have very much more in common than the date of their publication and the fact that they are all concerned with Africa. The types of law described and the scope of the descriptions differ widely. So does even the background of the authors; for Professor Anderson is a jurist, Professor Gluckman an anthropologist with legal training and interests, and Dr. Howell an administrator-cum-magistrate with anthropological training and interests.

The demographic transition which occurred in the West before 1900 has been attributed to the practice of delayed marriage and a significant degree of celibacy (Hajnal, 1953; 1965). In Eastern Europe where this transition occurred much later, the nuptiality patterns have been associated with historical differences in control over the nuclear family by the extended family unit (Sklar, 1974). Sklar has noted that in the late marrying Czech, Baltic, and Polish provinces, nuclear families had long been residentially and economically separate from the wider kingroup, while in the early marrying Balkans, nuclear families were intertwined with ramified kin networks.

There have been many movements of population in human history, and almost as many reasons for them. But all of them have one feature in common. They arose as a result of a change either in the external circumstances confronting a society or a section of it, or in the reactions of the people to their external circumstances. Migrations have always involved preferences, and occurred when preferences have changed. Perhaps the reception area has improved. Perhaps the other area has worsened. Perhaps both processes have occurred simultaneously. Whatever the causes of the change in relative preferences, whether it be the development of racial, political, or religious persecution, the occurrence or threat of war, the discovery of new continents or new sources of wealth, the effect of new medical techniques in enabling the opening up of hitherto uninhabitable countries, or the decline in fertility in the occupied area, it is the change that precedes the movement.

Le sens poétique du Peul nomade n'est pas, comme celui de son frère islamisé, orienté vers les formes littéraires alambiquées. Il ignore les poèmes mystiques religieux et n'émaille que rarement sa conversation des proverbes dont les sédentaires aiment faire usage.

Les seuls genres littéraires dont il fasse cas font partie de la littérature orale populaire. Devinette (tâlol), chanson (gimol), histoire vécue et conte (habaru, tâlol) ne sont pas l'apanage de quelques esprits subtils. Tous les connaissent, les racontent, les chantent, les écoutent. Le style, bref et naïf, est loin d'atteindre au raffinement de la littérature arabisée, mais ce genre plonge profondément dans la mentalité traditionnelle et la réalité quotidienne.

As forms of government have been autocratically imposed by us on the Africans, so have our laws. Doubtless much can be said to justify both impositions, but as regards our penal legislation in witchcraft matters it is arguable that it is ethically unsatisfactory, while politically it is demonstrably harmful. Devout modern Christians and agnostic scientists, who rarely see eye to eye, agree in considering the belief in witchcraft a baseless superstition, while anthropologists point out that Africans holding this belief have arrived at a stage common to all primitive races, and that with them, as with others, it is a phase that will pass. All of which seems to me singularly irrelevant, for what we are concerned with is Africa to-day and in the immediate future, and our law, representing the views of the governing race, fails in the dual test of good legislation, that it should be in the interests of and by the consent of the governed. The first is debatable, the second can be emphatically denied.

It is a very significant fact that the first memorandum issued by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures should be devoted to Practical Orthography, for in no branch of African study is there such diversity of practice as in the orthography of the languages. Moreover it is probably no exaggeration to say that, inasmuch as the reading and writing of his language form the Native's first step in education, no question is of greater urgency than this matter of presenting the written language in a way that shall be logically satisfactory.

On sait que beaucoup de sociétés africaines associent une position sociale originate à la pratique d'un art quelconque: musiciens ici, devins ou guérisseurs ailleurs, sont placés hors du commun. Dans ce domaine des rapports entre occupations et status le sort de la métallurgie est remarquable par l'élaboration symbolique qui partout s'y attache et par la place réservée à ceux qui travaillent le fer: parias ou aristocrates, les forgerons sont des êtres à part. Ces phénomenès attestés partout sur le continent prennent des formes très variables, et de nombreux auteurs se sont attachés à concilier ces deux aspects: l'extrême généralité de l'existence d'un symbolisme du fer et d'un status spécial des forgerons, d'une part, et l'extrême variété des configurations observées, d'autre part.

During the sitting of the West African Lands Committee in 1912, the witnesses who were called before the Committee from Egba Division emphatically stated that sales of both farm and town lands had been going on in Egbaland for some considerable time and had become accepted as normal. Equally significant was the vigour with which witnesses from all the other Yoruba sub-tribes countered the suggestion that sale of land existed or was permitted by the traditional land law and custom. H. L. Ward Price in his report also pointed out that sales of land had been going on in Egbaland for at least sixty years before he was writing in the 1930's. From the evidence he collected, it would seem that land sales dated back to between 1860 and 1880.