The relationship of masquerade performance to social organization and to the differentiation of traditional power and authority in everyday life is scarcely noted in the literature on African ritual. And yet research among two Kuba-related groups (Northern Kete and Southern Bushoong) in south-central Zaire indicate an enduring relationship, such that we can better understand the one by examining the others. The appearance of masquerade figures during initiation rituals both reinforces and validates distinctions of power in Kuba culture. Furthermore, funerals for initiated men in conjunction with masquerade performance provide a setting in which some of the activities relating to these distinctions of power are acted out.

Wherever native courts have been established and maintain W records of their proceedings, there is available a mass of material concerning native law and custom which, properly regarded, may be of great value to the ethnographer as well as to the administrator. In Tanganyika Territory, from one portion of which the material for the present paper is derived, the making of elaborate records of evidence and judgements is deprecated at the present stage of development, as likely to interfere with the smooth working of the courts. A minimum is required of the names of parties, a brief statement of the subject-matter, and a short judgement signed by the holder of the court, be he chief, headman, or chairman of a council. Under such circumstances, a study of records will show, at the least, the types of social maladjustment which bring people to court, with the relative frequency of different kinds of case: the manner in which different types of case are viewed by the court, whether as offences against society or as affecting only families or individuals: and probably some general indication of the tone of the society. From this type of record there will be an upward range to the most valuable of all for the student, those containing a precis of evidence and a full reasoned judgement.

In Ghana, cultural festivals, usually initiated and organized by the chiefs, provide public arenas where local and regional political elites voice demands vis-à-vis central government, and where national politicians canvass for support. Festivals offer commercial opportunities, forums to promote ‘development’, and occasions for entertainment. Yet advocating for ‘our own culture’ stands out as their very raison d’être, offering a frame for cultural entrepreneurs to organize performances that express and reconfigure local styles of music and dance to fit national formats. In this article, we examine such processes of cultural creation for the Kakube Festival in Nandom, a paramount chiefdom in north-western Ghana. We analyse the cultural building blocks and their evolution during the festival's history as well as the context of changing national politics of cultural heritage in which the festival developed. We discuss the invention of a cultural festival to create local alliances and stake claims at the regional and national political level, and how the desire to assert a presence in the national political and cultural arena has transformed the ways in which local culture is defined and presented. We examine the tensions at the heart of such an event, where traditions of chiefly patronage and allegiance meet the requirements of modern political and bureaucratic systems of funding, and the criteria of excellence in cultural performance. Music and dance are essential components and we analyse the evolution and adaptation of these elements alongside the critical path management of the event that has led to its local and national profile.

From a perspective based in ethnographic research this article reviews the historical evidence relating to the social organisation of the southern Funj in the Sudan during the nineteenth century. It goes beyond a characterisation of the region as one of pagan ‘tribes’ more or less successful in resisting subordination by a sophisticated Islamic state to discern a complexity of varied political relations radiating from an elite in a few regional centres and traversing all the communities of the region. The appearance of distinct ethnic groups under the colonial regime of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was preceded by a transitional geo-political division of the population into defiant highlanders and variously servile lowlanders under the Turco-Egyptian government which succeeded the Funj sultanate in the region.

This article examines the recent re-release of the Biafran pound currency, previously used by the breakaway Republic of Biafra between 1968 and 1970, by the separatist-revival group the Movement for the Actualization of a Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in south-eastern Nigeria. It briefly traces the circumstances of its re-release, contextualizes it in the light of MASSOB's aims and activities and in reference to the original Biafran currency, and then works through rationales for such an action. The article first explores and then dismisses economic justifications for releasing an alternative currency, then examines the more meaningful political case, before moving to an examination of cultural factors which lie behind the choice to challenge a state's sovereignty via its currency. The broad label of ‘cultural factors’ is then unpacked to open a window on a rich tradition of political history centred on currency in the south-east Nigerian context, which spans the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial decades. The study also touches on contemporary studies of sovereignty and connects to wider debates on the nature of money as regards its ‘economic’ and ‘political’ functions as a token of value.

This article examines political oral traditions in the Sefwi (Akan) area of Ghana. Two types of narrative are studied: negotiations over the political status of stools within the kingdom and the claims to succession of matrilineal branches within stools. Narratives are analysed in relation to their claims to historicity, to the political conflicts in which they are generated and to their correspondence to legal criteria of attribution of ‘traditional’ political offices. It shows that pre‐colonial dynamic norms concerning stool status and succession turned into a fixed legal corpus in the twentieth century. Contenders’ histories have been used as evidence to judge ‘traditional’ stool disputes. Narrators have thus constructed narratives presenting ideal pasts considered worthy of legal attribution of ‘traditional’ political office. Narratives have consequently legalised narrators’ claims with reference to ancient history. The study of the context of the emergence of oral traditions—hostility between particular stool holders, national politics’ influence or conflicts over the sharing of stool revenue—shows that narratives and political conflicts have a history of their own which is carefully omitted from the narration.

Recent infrastructural developments in Senegal have severely impacted on the livelihoods of female bana-banas from Mali, a group of mobile traders operating in the Mali–Dakar corridor: transportation costs have significantly increased, travelling has become a more exhausting experience, and fatal accidents have become more frequent during journeys. Why did the bana-banas continue these arduous journeys? Why was their physical presence required in Dakar, and why did they not rely more extensively on social networks to facilitate their transnational trade? This article examines the conditions of autonomy, flexibility and limited trust that characterized the bana-banas’ livelihoods and necessitated their continued mobility from Mali. The recent infrastructural transformations have led to an increased commercialization and disarticulation of Malian trade networks in the Senegalese capital, and, due to personal circumstances, the women have often been cut off from networks. However, unlike general expectations of the ways in which networks evolve under conditions of neoliberalism, the bana-banas have not turned to personalized relationships of trust in Dakar, which might have facilitated their trade from a distance. The article contributes to the growing literature on social networks and trust by exploring how transnational trade does and does not work at this historical moment and in the context of gendered constraints.

This article examines the fiscal and administrative infrastructures underpinning global health research partnerships between the US and Uganda, and the power dynamics they entail. Science studies scholars and anthropologists have argued for the importance of studying so-called ‘boring things’ – standards, bureaucracies, routinization, codes and databases, for example – as a way to bring to the surface the assumptions and power relations that often lie embedded within them. This article focuses on fiscal administration as an understudied ethnographic object within the anthropology of global health. The first part of the article is a case study of the fiscal administration of a US–Uganda research partnership. The second part describes the institutionalization of some of the administrative norms and practices used by this partnership within the ‘global health enabling systems’ employed by US universities working in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. I analyse a case study and ‘enabling systems’ to show how these administrative strategies create parallel infrastructures that avoid direct partnership with Ugandan public institutions and may facilitate the outsourcing of legal and financial risks inherent in international partnerships to Ugandan collaborators. In this way, these strategies act to disable rather than enable (or build) Ugandan research and institutional capacity, and have profound implications for African institutions as well as for the dream of ‘real partnership’ in global health.

This article examines how the Gujarati-speaking Muslim trading class in South(ern) Africa was linked as a reading public through a newspaper, Indian Views, which had been founded in early twentieth-century Durban in opposition to Mahatma Gandhi's Indian Opinion. Under the editorship of Moosa Meer (1929–63) it was a conduit for sustaining existing social networks as well as offering common narratives that galvanized an idea of community embracing its geographically disparate readership. Between 1956 and 1963, Zuleikha Mayat, a self-described housewife born in Potchefstroom but married to a medical doctor in Durban whom she ‘met’ through the newspaper, wrote a weekly column that represented one of the first instances of a South African Muslim woman offering her ideas in print. She spoke across gender divides and articulated a moral social vision that accounted for both local and diasporic concerns. This article provides a narrative account of how Mayat came to write for Indian Views, a story that underscores the personal linkages within this diasporic community and, more broadly, how literacy and the family enterprises that constituted local print capitalism provided a material means of sustaining existing networks of village and family. It also reveals the role of newspaper as an interface between public and private spaces in helping to create a community of linguistically related readers who imagined themselves as part of a larger print culture.

This article concerns literary culture and the representation of romantic love in colonial Nigeria's print media. It examines how Nigerians, during the first half of the twentieth century, began redefining love, as both a biocultural and a historical construction, through what I call the modernization of African romantic passion. Through letters to editors and articles, print media showed that love, like education, politics and other institutions of colonial power, could be modernized to reflect Nigerians' quest to embrace ‘civilization’ and Western modernity. Modern romantic love did not just replace the precolonial or ‘traditional’ norms; rather, selective appropriation of precolonial gender and romantic norms created a hybrid that was neither African nor totally Western. While much has been written on African textual and print culture, gender, marriage and sexuality under colonial rule, the subject of romantic passion has received limited attention. Those few published works on the subject overlook it as a significant element of modernization that was championed by Africans who sought new avenues to express their emotion for the consumption of the reading public. This article attempts to retrieve the literary culture of colonial Nigerian youth by weaving textual analyses of representations of love into the wider socio-cultural transformation under alien rule.

This article argues that the politics of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the 1920s reshaped relations between ethnicity and territorial sovereignty in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands. A 1925 criminal trial involving Gadabursi Somalis began as what Britons deemed a ‘tribal matter’ to be settled through customary means, but became a struggle for Ethiopia's regent, Ras Tafari, to assert Ethiopia's territorial authority and imperial sovereignty. British claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction over Somalis amidst 1920s global geopolitical shifts disrupted existing practices of governance in Ethiopia's eastern borderlands and created a dilemma for Ethiopian authorities. In order to uphold international obligations, Ethiopian officials effectively had to revoke their sovereignty over some Somalis indigenous to Ethiopia. Yet Britons’ practical application of extraterritoriality to Somalis was predicated on assumed racial differences between Somalis and highland Ethiopians (‘Abyssinians’). Thus, Ethiopia's recognition of British extraterritorial jurisdiction would lend legitimacy to claims exempting Somalis from Ethiopian sovereignty due to differences in identity. The case reveals how assertions about race, nationality and ‘tribal’ identity articulated to subordinate Ethiopian rule to British interests and, in the longer term, to delegitimize Ethiopian governance over Somalis.

Nigerian newspapers, like newspapers elsewhere, are often established as part of the apparatus for the extension of personal or group interests, to mobilize and contest meaning in the overall project of constructing hegemony in an ethnically fractious polity. In this article, I trace the emergence of Alaroye, the best-known Yoruba-language newspaper today, by identifying its survival strategies and stabilization against the changing circumstances of a hostile environment. The article aims to demonstrate that, in challenging the oppressive activities of a military dictatorship led by the Hausa-Fulani and a media market dominated by English-language newspapers, Alaroye has been able to negotiate its existence within the contested space that is Yorubaland in particular and Nigeria at large. In this state of contestation and fierce competition, tabloidization has been central to Alaroye’s success, making it a leader whose example is being closely emulated by other Yoruba-language newspapers. Following from this, the article discusses the genres of Alaroye and the newspaper's genre-blurring innovations, including its oral written style, all of which point to its transformation into a tabloid, against the background of its initial failure at the newsstand and the factors responsible for its revitalization and stabilization after three failed attempts.

Admittedly though the Gurensi and Boosi, and for that matter the Frafras, living in the Bolgatanga and Bongo District Council Area have flourished for nearly over five hundred (500) years, their history and traditions have for these centuries laid almost buried and forgotten. Their history has in fact been relatively neglected by comparison with the period of the Mamprusi, Gonja, and Dagomba histories. The works of early researchers, ethnologists and so forth on the Gurene and Bone speaking peoples such as Allan Wolsey Cardinall (1921), R. S. Rattray (1932), T. E. Hilton (1956, 1959) and Dr Ludwig Rapp (1967) are devoid of the oral traditions and history of these people at the local level. In the case of R. S. Rattray and A. W. Cardinall, their works are not only brief, but they appear in a rather unusual sequence.

Sarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) believed that singing was for the public good and Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (1809–91) thought that speech tones should be preserved in writing. Their stories illustrate that diversity in thought may encounter obstacles, but can ultimately shape human consciousness. While this shows a positive side of missionary work, bringing people and ideas together, the transmission of Glover's and Crowther's ideas was mediated by the overlapping political, social and cultural hegemonies of the colonial era. Crowther was celebrated in the English-speaking world as evidence that the civilizing agenda – and colonialism – was good for all involved, but his orthographic approach was credited to the missionary linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller. Glover's innovations in music education have been misattributed to John Curwen and Zoltán Kodály. Drawing evidence from ethnographic work, field recordings, language surveys and literature from a variety of disciplines, this article asks the question: why is do-re-mi the preferred heuristic for Yorùbá speech tone? Glover's and Crowther's physical paths never crossed, but their ideas did, converging in a remarkable inter-continental and trans-disciplinary synthesis. The do-re-mi heuristic resists the pitch-height paradigm used in formal linguistics (low-mid-high). In a culture where drums can speak, it is unsurprising that a musical model filled a void in the (European) concept of what a language could be.

This article analyses how concerns about youth and violence intersect with the politics of managing religious coexistence in the coastal Kenyan town of Malindi. During extensive ethnographic research, I noticed that Muslim, Christian and ‘Traditionalist’ leaders, politicians and NGO officials often fear that the ‘idleness’ of young people leaves them susceptible to various immoralities, including political violence and ‘violent extremism’, that threaten peaceful ethnic and religious coexistence. The article explores how these concerns motivate leaders’ attempts to incorporate youth in development and peace projects, and how youth respond to these interventions. These projects are funded by Western donors, who often see ‘radical’ religiosity, especially among Muslim youth, as a security threat. Yet, leaders in Malindi accommodate donor policies to the (coastal) Kenyan context, and tend to understand immoralities and violence as resulting from a lack of religiosity among youth. The article argues that perceptions of ‘idle youth’ as potentially violent threats to peaceful religious coexistence and morality allow leaders to develop a ‘moral religiosity’ that is shared across religious divides. However, the ways in which youth strategically resist or comply with interventions to pacify them demonstrate that they do not necessarily agree with dominant moral and political constellations.

‘Chronicles of Bailundo’ is a fragmentary account of life in Bailundo, Central Angola. The manuscript, whose authorship and exact date are unknown, is available at the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) at Houghton Library, Harvard University. It was written in Umbundu, the vernacular spoken in Bailundo, by North American Congregational missionaries between 1903 and the 1930s. Although the source mentions no dates, it refers roughly to the period between the seventeenth century and the gradual establishment of Portuguese colonial rule and Christian missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It gives access to both the Umbundu then spoken in Bailundo and the perspective of Umbundu-speaking subjects on what it was like to live in this polity. The source addresses socio-cultural, political and economic aspects of life in Bailundo as well as significant historical events, such as the Bailundo War (1902–03). The text in Umbundu, published as supplementary material with this article, has been transcribed, translated into Portuguese and English, and annotated. The version published following the main introduction of the article presents an annotated sample of the source in English. The full version, published as supplementary material, comprises the complete original in Umbundu, its complete annotated translation into English, and a complete annotated translation into Portuguese. The article addresses the authorship, contents, form and context of production of the source.

Islamic charms and amulets (lāyā) are simultaneously fairly common, highly valued and ardently contested items among Muslims in Asante. Tracing their history and the relations in which Muslims in Asante manufacture, make sense of and debate them, this article places such amulets within relations and delineates the discourses surrounding them. For those who manufacture and request them, these amulets are part not only of the Islamic tradition but of the divine, which permeates them. For their critics, these are un-Islamic idols that contravene the religion of Islam as they ‘keep people away from God’. Such amulets and their usage – or their non-usage – are therefore central to people relating to the divine, and as amulets thus take part in various (re)makings of Islam, they matter and are part of larger processes that knit several elements together. If one considers such amulets as genuine sources, they provide a lot of information not only about how people conceive of, debate and live Islam, but of how Islamic lifeworlds come into being and of the various entities that participate in these processes.

In their quest for material well-being Cameroonian women see the United States as a country of virtually boundless opportunities. It is Eldorado, offering chances of earning money by selling cosmetics that are guaranteed not to have been tampered with. It is the new frontier, the Far West, where mothers send their children to study in the hope that a job-oriented education will make it easier for them to return home. It is the future, prefigured in the New York skyscrapers; Cameroonian mothers dream of bringing forth American children, and so giving tham a better chance of absorbing this world of the future. When the American dream is not accessible, the United States still offers an imaginary space where women reinvent the conditions of their existence by adopting some of the signs of American culture in their everyday life in the tropics. The use of lipstick thus appears as the symbol of a world-culture behind which hovers the giant image of the United States. The experiences of Cameroonian women can be extended to women in other African countries and, beyond, to the men of Africa, also suffering the precariousness of the present, faced with the same challenges of the future and engaged in the same quest for material well-being.

The articles that appear in this part issue focus on disparate topics, from rumours of electoral fraud to the production of art, and span the African continent from Guinea and Ghana in the west to Zimbabwe in the south. Despite their evident differences, the contributors see their pieces as united by a common theme: emergence. Elaborating on Simone's influential exploration of the intertwined concepts of emergence and emergency (2004), as well as prior research in Africa on informal economic practices (the exchange of goods and services unregulated by states) (Hart 1973; Piot 2010; Roitman 2004; Weiss 2009), we consider emergence to be the process by which new social formations become thinkable, repeatable, and even – at times – habitual. Although conditions of crisis or precarity or even revolutionary upheaval might be fertile ground for emergence, insofar as these social conditions represent ‘rupture[s] in the organization of the present’ (Simone 2004: 4), the articles here also show that new social practices do not emerge out of nowhere. Rather, these articles demonstrate that attention to quotidian encounters can illuminate how citizens mobilize previously existing norms and patterns of behaviour in response to social change or economic crisis.

In this short article I present some of my notes on what may broadly be called Nuer religion. It describes two important concepts of the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: biit, a curse, and cien, the vengeance of a ghost.

The curse of certain persons in Nuer society is believed to be effective if they have been wronged. If they utter curses without due cause (cuong) the curses will not harm those against whom they are uttered, but will either be ineffective or harm the speakers of them. A man curses another by uttering an invocation (lam)— which in this context is an imprecation—over, or about, him; and the Nuer distinguish different kinds of curse by reference to the relationship of the persons implicated in it—biit gwan, the curse of a father, biit nara, the curse of a maternal uncle, biit kuaara, the curse of a leopard-skin chief, and so forth. Some of these curses are regarded as weightier than others.