The Gezira scheme has been the focus of considerable attention in the literature of development in tropical Africa, especially during the colonial period. This was because the scheme represented one of the largest agricultural projects initiated by a colonial government. Views on the scheme have been divergent: Gaitskell (1959) describes it as a ‘story of development’ while Barnett (1977) calls it an ‘illusion of development'. The focus of the studies, which are extensive compared to other Sudanese studies, has largely concentrated on the relationship (or so-called partnership) between tenants and government, production requirements and output, as well as occasionally on various aspects of the tenants’ lives and activities. Wage labour, which is the main form of labour, has only been given scant consideration. Even so, the focus has been on its contribution to the total labour requisite and its supply and demand patterns. The social relations of wage labour, and especially relations between tenants and wage labourers as the essential core of production relations in the scheme, have been awarded very little attention. This is the main concern of this article. Compared with most labour-market studies, my intention is to go beyond a mere study of factors affecting supply and demand. In conditions of transition to capitalism and fragmented labour markets, the perception of the social and cultural aspects of labour is indispensable for an adequate understanding of the internal mechanisms of the labour market.

The scope of this subject and convenient chronological divisions for it may be suggested by three quotations. The first comprises questions put to the Undersecretary for the Colonies in the British House of Commons, 1 and 8 September 1909, by Keir Hardie:

The State in its essential nature is power. Its character is determined by the force with which it asserts its distinction from neighbouring states, by its dealing with the organic bonds in which the life of the people finds expression, and by its success in absorbing into and developing within its own structure the underlying spirit of those bonds. The origin of the State's consciousness of power lies at the point in the interlacing roots of tribal organization where the tension between associations based on kinship and those based on age brings about a change of balance, and leadership begins to pass to the latter, the age-class becoming a warrior class which outgrows the clan and subjects kinship-groupings to its own leaders. Once this change in leadership has taken place, that is to say, when no longer the spirit of the clan but the spirit of the age-class becomes dominant, then, by reason of the resulting tightening-up of the forces of war and of expansion, it is only a question of time before the age-class associations pass into a system of vassalage, with leaders who emerge from the age-grade system and acquire an authority more or less political in character. With the individualization of the leadership goes the differentiation of function in the State, which is first required in the organization of the army. Henceforward the tasks in the service of the State are no longer dependent on a man's place in the tribal organization, but upon accomplishments which can be learned. To acquire these forms of skill, to become proficient in their use and to obtain the advantages secured by them becomes an absorbing task which is pursued in common and given stability by associations for the purpose. This is the birth of organization. Without such organizations the State cannot take form, for they alone ensure to it the concentration of the primitive forces of the tribe for the accomplishment of the aims of the State. Thus these organized associations become agencies to develop and foster the consciousness of statehood. The tribal community consciousness which still persists in the organic tribal relationships and in their leadership systems is gradually, under the absorptive power of the new state-consciousness, forced back into the realm of mere emotion and habit and finally deprived entirely of its spiritual leadership. So that what is in reality the starting-point of man's spiritual existence, namely, his membership of an organic and tribal order of society, comes to be regarded as something purely natural and as the sphere of the instinctive preservation of the species.

The policy of adapting ‘for the purposes of local government the tribal institutions which the native people have evolved themselves, so that the latter may develop in a constitutional manner from their own past’ depends for success on more than a general grasp of the outlines of native social organisation. Native standards of value as expressed in individual and collective behaviour, the operation of balances and checks in the social system, current trends which are tending to cause some institutions and customs to lose strength at the expense of others, and the economic forces that have been or are in the future likely to be operative in the society, must all be analysed and assessed in their mutual relations as interrelated elements in a complex process.

One of the outstanding features of Akan social organisation emphasised by ethnographers since Rattray's monograph on the Asante (1923: Chap. 2 esp.) is the interlacement of fundamental matriliny with prominent patrilineal traits. With particular reference to the Fante, on whom this paper is based, Christensen (1954: 5, 107) claims, on some wrong premiss though, that his study of 'the role and importance of the paternal line' leads him to conclude that ‘the Fanti manifest a system of double descent’. My own fieldwork (1966-70) on the Fante asafo – the most distinct social manifestation of their patrilineal tendency– indeed confirms the fact that the Fante still lay strong stress on agnatic descent groups, which in Asante and other Akan sub-groups have become more or less ‘obsolete’ (Fortes 1950: 265f, Busia 1954: 207, with reference to ntoro). This notwithstanding, the combination of patrilineal and matrilineal principles of reckoning descent remains a fundamental attribute of Akan culture as a whole. That is to say, the so-called Fante peculiarity is in fact only a slight variation of a general Akan type.

The Sukuma, like many other African peoples, believe that the living and the dead are a continuous line, in which death is not an end but only a transformation within the history of the family. The lack of children means physical and spiritual extinction, since the ancestor spirits depend for their survival on remembrance in the minds of their descendants. The unity of the living and the dead is expressed in their ceremonies when ancestors are referred to by kinship terms more appropriate to the living, whereas the word for ancestor spirit (isamva; pl. masamva) is rarely used in propitiation although quite common in everyday conversation.

The Abutia Ewe formed one of the colonial administrative ‘Divisions’ of Eweland under a so-called ‘traditional ruler’, the Divisional or Paramount Chief (fiagã). These Ewe Divisions are located in the southern half of the Volta Region (Ghana) and in southern Togo. Every Division is composed of a number of villages, each headed by a ‘Sub-divisional Chief’ (dufia). Only three villages are found in Abutia: Teti, Agove and Kloe. The fiagã or Divisional Chief comes from Teti.

‘As theories of development, dualist interpretations have difficulty in accounting for the origin and the dynamic of a system which is, on the surface, dichotomous’. Our acceptance of a dividing line between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ sectorsin African societies and the sectoral approach to issues of development allows for the continuing dominance of dualist assumptions in all fields.With the introduction of a differentiation in scale between ‘urban centres’, ‘small urban centres’ and rural areas it appears that we are in a position where the introduction of the idea of continuity between rural and urban sectors may be accepted:

Societies in transition are often a source of controversy, as they characteristically abound in ambiguities of both form and content. Historically they represent a dramatic juxtaposition of continuity and change.

J. G. Mullen was a Gold Coast clerk who published his memoirs, in instalments, in the Gold Coast Leader from 1916 to 1919. In this unusual narrative, he describes his adventures in Cameroon before and during the First World War. His account combines real-life geographical and social details with flamboyant tropes probably derived from imperial popular literature. Mullen's biography and even identity have so far been otherwise untraceable. His text offers glimpses, always enigmatic, of the experience and outlook of a member of the new clerkly class of colonial West Africa. This contribution presents an edited extract from Mullen's text together with a contextualizing and interpretative essay. The full Mullen text is available in the online version of this issue of Africa.

Je tiens à vous dire mon émotion d'avoir été désignée pour cette conférence, consacrée à la mémoire de Lord Lugard. Car je n'ai pas aujourd'hui l'intention de faire un exposé académique: en effet, je préfère vous apporter les premiers résultats d'une recherche ‘sur le terrain’ qui se situe dans un cadre assez exceptionnel, celui d'une cérémonie soixantenaire itinérante chez les Dogon du Mali. Je vous présenterai cette recherche dans l'état où elle se trouve actuellement, c'est-à-dire encore en cours d'enquête et d'examen; mon propos constitue une introduction aux films que vous allez voir, réalisés par notre collègue Jean Rouch, chaque année, depuis quatre ans, à l'occasion de ces cérémonies.

In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For example, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).

Following a localized Hutu uprising in 1972, the Tutsi-dominated state in Burundi embarked on a vast series of reprisals across the country, leaving between 100,000 and 300,000 dead. Prominent political leaders were liquidated, Hutu who were able or learning to read were arrested, and many who had achieved any marginal level of exceptionality in economic success or other social achievement were accused of treason and murdered. Described as a ‘selective genocide’, the means of this violence proved deeply informative of its nature and of the experience of those caught up in the bloodshed. In the northern province of Ngozi, selection was managed through roadblocks and lists of names, creating the inescapable image of a totalitarian and bureaucratic state order. These methods fuelled a strong reaction of obedience, both among the youth and other agents of the state who took part in the arrests, and among the victims, who are commonly described as reacting with ‘docility’ to the violence. A matter of ‘law-making violence’, the selective means of the genocide shaped the political and social order that emerged from it, the ‘implements’ of genocide substantially contributing to the recognition of discrete ethnic communities among the population at large.

During a recent survey of the non-Mande languages of Guiné (Portuguese Guinea), the writer took notes on the systems of numeration, and observed some of the ways of counting and indicating totals on the fingers and hands. It was found that a comparison of the numeral stems gives a fair index of the degree of lexical affinity between any of the languages.

From time to time there have appeared in this journal notes on the lingua franca spoken along the central section of the River Congo. On the usual principle of discarding the prefix in referring to the names of Bantu languages, this lingua franca has been called Ngala. In this case, however, we are obliged to retain the prefix to avoid confusion, as there exists in this area more than one language whose name is derived from this stem.

With the exception of such pioneering efforts as Evans-Pritchard's structural functional analysis of the Azande beer dance, which appeared in this journal in 1928, African dance has rarely been the focus of research. Thirty-eight years after that article appeared I can write, as Evans-Pritchard did then, that African dance is usually given a place quite unworthy of its social importance. The typical report on African dance is either a limited, vague description without reference to context, or a discussion of the context of a dance without explicit reference to its function, style, and structure.

The village of Ulu lies at about latitude 10° N. between the White Nile and the Blue Nile in the southern part of the Fung area of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The surrounding country is mostly thin savannah on black cotton soil but there are occasional outcrops of laterite as at Ulu itself. Water-holes are found and may be made in the larger watercourses after these have dried up at the termination of the rainy season. The dry season is roughly December to May. The inhabitants of Ulu call themselves Fung and are black Moslems of a possibly aboriginal stock. Wandering Araboid nomads of the Mesallamia and other tribes with camels, cattle, sheep, and goats may be encountered visiting traditional grazing areas. The Fung of Ulu cultivate millet, cow-peas and sesame seed as subsistence crops and in normal times surplus is bartered with the nomads for animals and no doubt clarified butter also. A small amount of cash is obtained by the gathering of acacia gum which is disposed of through the local Arab merchant.

This study on the concept of oral tradition is based on three years of fieldwork, between 1980 and 1983, amongst the Gabra of northern Kenya, an Eastern-Cushitic (Oromo) speaking people who originated in southern Ethiopia and who live today on both sides of the Kenya–Ethiopia border. According to the 1978 national census figures, there are about 30,553 Gabra living on the Kenyan side of the border, mainly in the arid waste of the Eastern Province. In this hostile landscape, in the volcanic, boulder-strewn country on the edge of the Chalbi Desert east of Lake Turkana, the Gabra roam with their herds of cattle, camels, sheep and goats in constant search of pasture for their animals.

The formation has been recently announced of a Department of African Linguistics at the London School of Oriental Studies. ‘The new department’, it is stated in a recent number of Le Maître Phonétique, ‘is to apply phonetics to the analysis of the structure of African languages, and will no doubt be instrumental in furthering the movement for introducing phonetic systems of spelling into Africa.’ It may be useful in the early stages of the project to call attention to some of the difficulties which have to be overcome in carrying out the latter implied part of it, and to make a suggestion as to a means of overcoming them. It is therefore proposed to give an account of the introduction of a phonetic script into one African territory, and incidentally to advocate a slight but desirable revision of the Institute's memorandum Practical Orthography of African Languages.

The relationship between the living and the dead looms large in Africa, but the study of such interactions is notoriously fraught with pitfalls and perhaps only now are we equipped with a valid conceptual framework to enable us to deal adequately with the problems posed by ancestor worship and by the various spirits of the dead in Africa. Fortes (1965: 16—20; 122—142) first gave us a comparative framework of ancestor worship in Africa but part of his conceptualization has been recently questioned by Kopytoff (1971) who argues that the distinction between elders and ancestors is not as clear cut as our own implicit dichotomy would seem to imply. However, his argument, stressing a continuity between the living and the dead, leaves out the fact that elders, when they die, very often become ancestor spirits and, even if they do not become such, take on new qualities and new powers that are different in nature from those they held when alive (Brain 1973; Sangree 1974).