Scholars have commonly interpreted the emergence of claims of Israelite descent among African peoples as attempts of marginalized communities to construct empowering identities by drawing on biblical narratives. This article tries to make sense of such claims from a more emic perspective, not as an instrumental counter-discourse but as a genuine attempt to grapple with the nature of ethnic membership and the place of certain communities in relation to biblical genealogies, time and space. The article explores the claims of Nuer members of several Evangelical Zionist churches operating in western Ethiopia and South Sudan that the Nuer are among the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. It demonstrates how Nuer Zionists have reinterpreted Nuer identity, known for its permeability and constructivist nature, in light of contemporary premillennialist Zionist notions of history and peoplehood, which emphasize ethnic fixity and focus on lineages, exclusive bloodlines and biological descent. The article offers a new perspective on Israelite identities in Africa and on the influence of born-again Christianity on the construction of ethnic identities.

This article examines funding for HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and the relationship between foreign donors and the South African government. The recognition of the AIDS pandemic as an epochal crisis has led to a proliferation of international and donor organizations now directly involved in the governance, tracking and management of the pandemic in many African countries. In many ways, the heavy donor hand that is increasingly defining the pandemic and the global response to it feeds into a new imperialist logic that subordinates pan-African agendas, masks broader issues of access central to the fight against the pandemic, and strengthens traditional relationships of dependence between wealthy Western nations and poorer African nations. The South African government's relationship with foreign donors, however, has been shaped by its efforts to develop an African response to the pandemic not determined nor primarily funded by foreign aid. This article highlights the positive and negative implications of the sometimes contentious relationship between the South African government and foreign donors, as well as the Africa-centred, self-help agenda it pursues, highlighting the opportunities as well as challenges for African governments to define the global response to the pandemic.

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.

To an outsider the most striking feature of the Konzo circumcision ritual is the songs which can be heard almost constantly from the circumcision lodges. The teaching of songs is an important part of the instruction which takes place during the ritual and in many of them a special language is used which is, to a large extent, unintelligible to a person who has not undergone the rites. In this paper I shall analyse one of the Konzo circumcision songs and try to show how, by its special language, the song conveys to the initiands certain aspects of the circumcision ritual and suggest some of their wider implications on both the social and the individual levels.

Regarding the true classification of the numerous Bantu languages we are still very much in the dark. We need much more detailed information upon many areas and collation of work before the various types, languages, and dialects which go to make up the Bantu family can be accurately mapped out. We do know, however, that Bantu languages are associated together broadly into a number of zones or types, which to a great extent are determined by geographical position. The migration and counter-migration of tribes, however, naturally cause much overlapping of these types and the formation of numerous enclaves which have to be taken into account. On the question of nomenclature then, the term ‘type’ will probably be less objectionable than that of ‘zone’, though the actual names of the types will of necessity be regional, such as ‘South-eastern’, ‘North-western’, ‘Central’, etc.

In An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Professor Gluckman argued that in situations of conflict, pre-existing groups do not divide neatly into opposing halves, but that groups realign themselves according to the values, motives, and interests governing them at a given time; and that groups who are opposed when facing one situation may find themselves aligned when the nature of the situation differs. Similar studies of social change in Africa and elsewhere have further advanced Gluckman's contention. In all these studies the analytical procedure adopted was to interpret the situational behaviour of the actors in terms of the influence of the wider social system of which they were a part. However, a great deal of the ethnographic data anthropologists gather in the course of field research are derived from chance observations of social phenomena occurring in relatively unstructured situations within which the individuals involved have a wide range of choice in determining the way they interact with others. This paper is based upon just these sorts of ‘imponderable’ facts of Gurage life which, when first recorded in the field, appeared less clearly a part of what Malinowski once called ‘the real substance of the social fabric’ of a changing tribal society than they do now in retrospect. I attempt here to interpret the spontaneous and contradictory behaviour of individual Gurage and groups in the setting of an Ethiopian Christian religious ceremony known as Mäsqal. This analysis of situational behaviour is made in terms of selected aspects of historical or ‘processive’ social change in Gurageland, a tribal district in south-west Ethiopia.

In a recent article, Westphal has drawn attention to two important points which are in danger of being forgotten in attempts at linguistic classification:

1. Phonetic and phonological, lexical, morphological, and other relationships may differ as between the languages being compared. ‘Thus if we say two languages are related, we usually mean something more specific, e.g. they are phonologically related, they are morphologically related, they are lexically related, etc.’

2. In attempting to determine ‘genetic’ relationship, we should be careful not to speak about any language as if there were always only one ‘parent’. Not only may there be more than one ‘ancient language’ involved, but these may have come into the ‘family tree’ at different historical periods, so that one language or group of languages may have evolved from the impingement of one or more other language types upon a substratum. Languages that are of mixed origin in this sense are probably more common than has been suspected, and it would be possible to classify any such language (or group) in a number of different ways according to the different criteria mentioned under (1) above. Even on the plane of lexical relationships, the recent discussions on the position of the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ languages show that reasonable claims for the ‘Niloticism’ or ‘Hamiticism’ of these languages can be made, the point at issue resolving itself into a statistical one of percentages of words related to one or other of the two Larger Units, Nilotic and Hamitic.

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.

Làjɔɔ̀k myεεló dìe wóòr mà daánó ònëë̀nö̀(1). Ɛεn dooŋ cΐkó daakonε(2)

The Lajɔɔk dances by night when people sleep. He then informs his

ní: ‘eènòbaa, aan abècíʈó myεεl—daánô’. Dòoŋ daákónε dòoŋ

wife ‘look here, I am going to dance—to dance at man‘. His wife now

kwányó túʈù, dòoŋ ryébó dók túʈù piiny; dòoŋ kwányó tɔ̀bì ɔɔ̀nyɔ̀ ΐ

takes a filter-pot(3), then turns it upside down; then she takes leaven corn, and puts it

àgwaʈa megï, mà gïïn tiío gí tíìc dìe wóòr, gïïn ki cwáàrὲ gïïn aryεlóεló.

in their bowl with which they work at night, she and her husband, these two.

Dans un volume publié en 1942 par le Haut Commissariat de l'Afrique Française, L'Afrique Occidentak Françalse en 1942, j'écrivais, en tête du chapitre consacré à l'Institut d'Afrique: ' L'équipement de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler un pays neuf n'est pas fait que de rails, de camions et d'usines. L'édifice africain aura, on le sait aujourd'hui, plusieurs façades et les constructeurs, déjà, commencent, dans leurs plans, à en tenir compte. La politique et l'économie ont leur place, la science aura la sienne, la vie intellectuelle et spirituelle aurqnt la leur.

Food and nutrition together provide a subject with many ramifications, and yet one on which but little direct research has been attempted in Africa. To gain an all-round view one must digress on the one hand into subjects such as agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, economics and sociology, in order to understand what food supplies exist for the native, and how they are being or might be used; while on the other hand there are involved medical and physiological studies on the native himself in health and disease, in order to estimate the results of nutrition whether good or bad.

Ankermann has confined his investigations to the distribution of instruments within Africa, and the only idiophones of which he takes account are slit-drums, bells, the xylophone, and the sansa. Sachs arrives at his strata I-II by considering the length of the eastern dispersal-radius (from Asia by way of Oceania to America), without including the African occurrences; though, conversely, he arranges some later strata according to the African distribution. In accordance with the methodological principle that distribution over the whole world must be decisive for any system of grouping adopted, I have attempted in what follows to arrange the African sound-producing instruments according to their distribution both within that continent and outside it. It is not meant that all instruments now united in the same group necessarily belong to one and the same culture, but only that, in all probability, they are nearer to each other in time and more closely related in origin than they are to the members of any other group. A closer examination, especially if undertaken with a view to including consideration of all other cultural phenomena, will in many cases lead to subdivision into smaller groups, perhaps also to different arrangements, or even to a change in the entire scheme. The designations of the several groups are not meant to suggest a prejudice of any kind; they were added post factum, principally because it is convenient to have a name for everything. Those borrowed from the nomenclature of Frobenius and Struck should not be taken to mean that their notions of African ‘cultures’ necessarily coincide with our groups; they are only intended to suggest the directions in which contacts can be sought. The names of the instruments have been taken over from Sachs; the numbers appended to them refer to his strata.

The Banyankole, who live in western Uganda, East Africa, are made up of two ethnic groups, the Baku and the Bahima. The Bairu, who number about a quarter of a million, are Bantu agriculturists. The Bahima, on the other hand, are Hamiticized negro cattle people of north African origin. Although numbering only about ten thousand, the Bahima were able, before British control, to dominate the Bairu and rule them as serfs.

This article deals with an area about the size of England, Scotland, and Wales which, even to this day, must be regarded as relatively still unknown to the outside world. Little visited by Europeans, it seems to be the gathering-place of a welter of obscure tribes and sections of tribes, speaking a bewildering diversity of languages. In the last hundred years it has seen various explorers and a few anthropologists, and has lately been administered by government officials; and it is to these people that we must look for information which sometimes includes linguistic data. Only one Christian mission station has been established, and no portion of the Bible has been translated into any language of this area.

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.

May I say first how much I appreciate the compliment which you paid me when you invited me to address the International African Institute on this, the occasion of the twelfth Lugard Memorial Lecture. I am proud to be one of those to whom Dame Margery Perham referred in the first Lugard Memorial Lecture, one of those who knew Lord Lugard in his later years. As a young civil servant I was the administrative secretary of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, of which Lord Lugard was a member. As a kind of extension of my duties, I went to Africa as the secretary of Lord De La Warr's commission on higher education in East Africa. That commission's terms of reference charged it to work out a scheme for setting up a university college in Uganda, and of course Lord Lugard was interested because he had played such a leading part in bringing Uganda into the empire—first in commanding the military expedition and thereafter in conducting the campaign in Britain which persuaded Mr. Gladstone's government to proclaim the protectorate. Shortly after I returned from Uganda to London, I was walking in Whitehall when I saw Lord Lugard coming towards me—walking the length of Whitehall from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square although at that time he was 79 years of age. I wore a hat in those days, and in accordance with the civilized manners which young people then endeavoured to preserve, I raised it. To my surprise Lord Lugard recognized me, stopped me, and asked me to tell him about the commission and what it was likely to recommend. The conversation left me with a lively appreciation of Lord Lugard's great personal interest in education in Africa. If we could evoke, as Hubert Deschamps evoked when he pronounced the eighth Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘cette ombre auguste qui nous est chère’, I think that the august shade would be very willing that this memorial hour should be devoted to a discussion of educational problems.

This article explores the question of what happens when highly socialized and contingent forms of provisioning go wrong, and young men are forced to start again in unfamiliar urban contexts. The decline of George Mirembe's moneylending business in Kampala pre-empted his departure from the country and his arrival in Nairobi in search of new socio-economic opportunities. Lacking the documents and language skills necessary to enter formal sectors of the economy, George claimed asylum as a sexual refugee while working as a smuggler and a voice actor in the shadow film industry. His activities illustrate the advantages and limitations of the hustle as a framework for understanding the activities of transnational ‘others’ in African cities. I argue that translational practices of acting and storytelling have become a generalized tactic of survival among migrants in urban East Africa. Such practices are illustrative of a form of ‘uprooted hustle’ – or hustling on the move – that is oriented towards individual survival and exit rather than place-based transformation.