There is a general recognition, supported to a large extent by research findings, that in most of the Western industrialized world, women's participation in the salaried work force has a depressing effect on fertility (Kupinsky, 1977; Stycos and Weller, 1967). But research findings on this topic in the less developed world have been largely inconsistent. While a number of these studies find the fertility of women who work for wages to be lower than that of other women (Miro and Rath, 1965; Jaffe and Azumi, 1960; World Fertility Survey, 1980; and Lightbourne et al., 1982), the findings of other studies suggest very little or no differences in the fertility of wage working and nonwage working women (Stycos, 1965; Stycos and Weller, 1965; Okediji, 1976; and Mott, 1974). Furthermore, the findings of other studies suggest that it may not be the assumed role incompatibility between wage employment and familial role per se that leads to reductions in fertility, but rather the degree of approval/disapproval of domestic roles for women (Hass, 1972), normative conflicts (Mason and Pelan, 1981), or the degree of work commitment (Safilios-Rothschild, 1972).

There are almost three thousand Ibo in London, with men outnumbering women in the ratio of three to two. They tend to be between twenty-five and forty years old and to have been in Britain for between five and ten years. The majority came to obtain qualifications which would bring status on their return to Nigeria, but the Nigeria–Biafra war interrupted the process and as a result they are still here. If the defining characteristic of the immigrant is the tendency to remain in the new country, regardless of the intention to return, the Ibo are not immigrants but a migrant community in which departure is the norm although individual migrants make considerable investments in the new environment and some may never realise their ambition to return. In terms of the degree of their economic incorporation, cultural distinctiveness, ideological commitment to a ‘traditional’ way of life and belief in their own superiority in relation to outsiders, the Ibo have much in common with East African Asians; the difference lies in their declared intention to leave Britain and the success of many in achieving this ambition.

This article explores the movement of children between households in Zambia as a site of ‘moral navigation’. Moral navigation extends Henrik Vigh's concept of social navigation from contexts of conflict and migration to more socially stable contexts in which well-being depends critically on people's ability to manage relationships. The live, dynamic and mobile character of these relationships means that they require active, real-time cultivation and response. While having practical objectives, these negotiations are also moral, articulated with ideas of what ought to be, and seeking to fulfil sometimes competing ethical projects. Life history interviews present three main perspectives: recollections of times in childhood spent away from birth parents; birth parents’ reflections on having a child living with others; and adults’ accounts of taking in other people's children. Strong norms of kinship unity and solidarity notwithstanding, in practice terms of engagement are differentiated through gender, marital, social and economic status, plus relational and geographical proximity. The pursuit of personal benefit contains the seeds of both contradiction and convergence with the collective good, as a relational understanding of moral selves sees one's own gain as proper, rightful and virtuous when it is realized in and through providing for others.

The focus of this article is the intersection of the motivations for international migration and innovative new forms of religious organisation. An example is provided by the recent introduction of a prayer ritual called da’ira in the Muslim community of the Jakhanke Jabi in eastern Senegal. For centuries, supererogatory prayers mingled with local practices have been at the heart of the religious traditions of the Jakhanke Jabi marabouts. Yet their religious practice underwent considerable change when the young disciples began to migrate to Europe and the United States. Prayers raised during the ritual address the invisible saints capable of serving the needs of transnational migrants. At the same time the economic base of community agriculture shifted from labour provided by the students to donations increasingly coming from overseas groups of followers. Since then a great number of people—including politicians—seeking success in business, career, health or marriage have solicited the spiritual help and protection of Jakhanke Jabi marabouts.

The article draws on the life story of Musa, a Soninke man from a Gambian village, to shed light on the experience and subjective dimension of slave descent in West Africa. After spending most of his life abroad as a migrant, Musa retired to his home village and came to terms with his status identity as a slave descendant. Rather than by status hierarchies alone, however, Musa's social position was modulated by other aspirations and obligations, particularly those inherent in becoming an elder and a returnee. These predicaments of the self, constructed on the basis of age, masculinity and cosmopolitan knowledge, shaped his life and delineated the space in which he variously interpreted and navigated the legacy of slavery. By foregrounding the ways in which slave descent is dynamically refracted by this broader process of self-making, this article thus goes beyond a framework centred primarily on fixed status identities and on the dynamics of resistance/submission, highlighting instead the multifaceted, even contradictory, positioning of slave descendants in post-slavery Senegambia.

This article follows the careers of two African drivers in social environments that circumscribed their movement and access to technology. It begins with Vincent Njovu, whose memoir, The First Driver of Tanganyika, describes the driver's ability to navigate racial hierarchies of movement and technology, including the unlikely circumstances in which he fell in love with an ideal colonial machine. It then explores post-colonial cultures of gender and modernization by using the unpublished memoirs of Hawa Ramadhani, a woman who used automotive skills learned among nuns in the 1940s to become Tanzania's most respected driver. Paired together, the life histories of these drivers challenge historical narratives in which movement and technology (roads and motor vehicles, in particular) are used to discuss Africa's marginalization and decline. Instead, they show how transgressive practices of mobility can be used to challenge social and political orders and inspire new ways to think and act at uncertain historical junctures. Roads in these narratives are defined less by their danger than by their potential to turn unlikely individuals into heroes.

A Bird's eye view of the present Ibo linguistic situation is not in one sense an inspiriting prospect. A rich profusion of dialects makes intercommunication a problem both for the 3 1/4 million Ibo-speaking people themselves and for the Europeans who live among them. The European attempt—a gallant effort in the face of extreme difficulty—to produce a lingua franca known as Union Ibo will be regarded either as a mitigating factor or an added complication according to the onlooker's point of view. In any case it has become to some extent a bone of contention as has also the question of orthography. Two different scripts are at present in use in the country, adding thus to the difficulty of the Ibo who wants to read and write his own language and of the European who wishes to learn it. And the lot of the Europeans faced by a difficult tonal and dialect-riven language is made harder by the fact that few if any of them get adequate linguistic training before going to the country or enough time to work at the language after arriving in it.

The Konkomba live in Northern Togoland in both French and British Mandated Territory and principally about the banks of the Oti River, a tributary of the Volta. Their country lies between 9° and 9° 50' N. and 0° and 0° 50' E. The total population is about 45,000. Their language is one of the Gurma group of the Voltaic family. The great majority of them live on a grassland plain that lies between the low hills of eastern Dagomba and the Kotokoli hills. The plain is very low-lying and conditions are severe, alternating between considerable desiccation and severe flooding. The compounds are grouped in small hamlets of a dozen or so straggling along low ridges in the plain; in the wet season communication between hamlets is very difficult.

Where racial antipathies exist there is a tendency on the part of the dominant group to avoid personal contacts with the subordinate race or races. This is perhaps especially the case in the intimate relationship of marriage. The study of inter-racial marriage data may therefore provide useful indices to changes in caste and class relationships in multi-racial communities. In this paper figures are presented for racial intermarriage in the Union of South Africa since 1925, the year in which it became compulsory to state the race of the contracting parties, and suggestions are made as to possible reasons for the trends which can be observed.

Since the end of the war, the changes undergone by African society in the Belgian Congo have been a recurrent theme in colonial journals published in Belgium and in the Congo. We shall attempt to give here a brief survey of the present situation and of the problems which arise out of it, as they appear in some of these articles.

We have to start with this question: what are the different social or cultural categories into which the eleven million Africans living in the Belgian Congo can be divided? The main cleavage, which presents itself to any observer, is based on the character—tribal or otherwise—of the political institutions to which the individual is subject.

In a brilliant analysis of Kalahari religion, Robin Horton has suggested that ‘Kalahari readiness to identify their unitary tamuno with the Christian God, and to give it active worship in such a guise’, may be explained by the fact that ‘Christian evangelism coincided with a growing irruption of the wider world outside into the narrow enclave of village life, and hence with a growing need to come to terms with this wider world’. Mr. Horton may not have meant to draw this conclusion, but this assessment could be read to suggest that among the Kalahari there had been no ‘active worship’ of the Creator God until Christian missionaries arrived with the European trader and consul, that it was this irruption of the outer world that gave the Kalahari villager a reason for seeking actively to worship tamuno, the missionary arriving at the opportune moment to teach him how. The following account of a Creator festival and ritual among the Nembe or Brass people, living adjacent to the Kalahari in the Niger Delta, should serve to confirm that active worship of a supreme being antedated the establishment of Christian missions. As with the Kalahari, there was a later identification of the Nembe God with the Christian, but this did not mark the beginning of active worship. The impact of the new forces has, however, resulted in the giving up of traditional modes of worship for the new Christian procedures which are thought to be more effective, and the idu festival described here has not been performed for over a decade.

Water control has long appeared an attractive technological solution to risky farming i n zones dependent on rain-fed cropping systems, especially in semi-arid regions. From the early twentieth century, European technicians and administrators sought to develop irrigated agriculture in African colonies. In the French Soudan the earliest colonial waterworks date back to the 1920s, just outside Bamako, in the vicinity of Baguineda. From Baguineda the French went on to develop a much larger-scale irrigation project north of Segou known as the Office du Niger. This study uses archival documents to show that a new system of crop production was imposed on peasants by the colonial state. Using labour requisitions and in some cases forced resettlement, the colony introduced new crops and technology for rapid intensification, and in so doing organised a new agricultural system oriented primarily towards the market. The Baguineda project began as, and remained, an enclave, spatially distinct from the surrounding dryland grain and pulse cropping system oriented primarily towards lineage reproduction. In common with many subsequent introduced agricultural development projects in Africa, its lack of success was due in part to the conflicting interests of poor peasant workers and powerful foreign promoters.

Can an anthropologist work with evidence supplied by historical sources? Or rather, can he deal with sources written by foreigners to a culture, data so obviously different from his usual reliance on his own participant observation? The question becomes more relevant each day as more historical data are becoming available about African and Asian societies. In addition trends in theoretical anthropology require more and more diachronic evidence to test or refine existing structural or functional theories.

In this paper we examine the differential implications of kinship practices and, specifically, Crow kinship terminology for two societies, one African, the other Oceanic. The comparison is undertaken for the following reason. Keesing (1970:765) suggested that the gulf between the way he conceptualized the Kwaio system and the way Fortes (1969) and Goody (1973) conceptualized the African systems may well be far wider ‘than the gulf between what the Kwaio and Africans do. And if the gulf is generated more by the models than by the facts, we had better look very carefully at the models.’ The question arises, therefore, whether classic African descent models are different from Oceanic kinship models because the anthropologists are following different intellectual traditions, or whether these two sets of models are different because they reflect a very real difference in the institutional make-up of African and Oceanic societies?

The most significant movement of population in Ethiopia within the last 100 years has been the southward advance of northern Christians into areas inhabited predominantly by Muslim or pagan peoples. The initial impetus to this movement was given by the expansion of the Amhara Kingdom of Shoa in the 19th century when officers and men of the conquering armies were given land in the annexed territories. They were followed by a variety of adventurers, merchants and administrators all of whom benefited from their association with the Amhara rulers to carve a niche for themselves in the south. In these circumstances, it is understandable that analyses of inter-ethnic contact in Ethiopia have been dominated by the discussion of the relations between the Amhara and one or the other of the subordinate groups of the Empire.

This article focuses on the institutionalised relationship between a married woman and a younger woman of her lineage. This alliance implies that the older woman incorporates her clan sister into her household and later marries her off to a man of her choice, preferably her own husband or one of his (classificatory) brothers. This specific form of sororal polygyny is firmly based on rituals and the structure of kinship relation among the Bulsa of northern Ghana. Women bear the ritual responsibility for their brothers' offspring and therefore acquire the right to adopt their daughters.

Les pièces satiriques, objet de cette étude, se jouent chaque année en pays mandingue, dans certains villages malinké et bamana des cercles de Bougouni et de Bamako; c'est-à-dire, dans la partie méridionale du Soudan français.

Cette région est remarquable à plus d'un titre. Elle a vu se former au moyen âge, grandir, et décliner à la fin du XVIe siècle un des plus puissants empires du monde, le royaume de Mali ou Melli, dont les souverains entretinrent des relations avec le Maroc, l'Égypte, l'Arabie et le Portugal. Elle est le berceau d'une civilisation qui surprit tous les voyageurs arabes ayant eu l'occasion de l'observer. L'un d'eux, Ibn Batouta, traversa en 1351-2 une partie de l'immense territoire soumis au monarque de l'époque, le Mansa ou Massa Suleyman Keita, et qui s'étendait alors du Sahara à la forêt dense, et de la Nigeria actuelle au Sénégal; il fut vivement frappé de l'organisation administrative de ce pays, de la pompe déployée à la cour, et surtout de l'ordre et de la sécurité qui régnaient partout.