Two related problems are raised: (1) why the persistence, and increase in scale, of funeral rites (with consequently much greater expenditure) both colonially and post-colonially; (2) what is the effect of this greater funeral expenditure on the economy of today's Asante? It is suggested that present-day funeral rites have only superficial religious significance; it is their economic and social importance that explains the vigour with which they are still performed. Far from being economically wasteful, they fuel economic activities that are on balance beneficial. It is the combination of economic and social utility that sustains, even enhances, the scale of the performance of the rites.

Scholars have recently begun to describe a speech form emerging in post-colonial cities which reflects the creative melding or ‘creolisation’ of elements from indigenous and former colonial cultures. These ‘urban varieties’ are not, strictly speaking, Creoles but rather indigenous languages whose structures and lexicons have been adapted to the complexities of urban life. A primary characteristic of such varieties is their ‘devernacularisation’. No longer tied to the cultural values represented by the languages in their more traditional forms, they reflect instead the new values and way of life found in the urban centres where they are spoken. This article, based on fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 1986 and 1989, describes the formation and role of one such urban linguistic variety, Urban Wolof. In particular, it focuses on Dakarois’ conflicting tendencies to accept Urban Wolof in Dakar as the most pragmatic form of urban communication while rejecting it as evidence of an undesirable creolisation between indigenous and French culture.

This article addresses the question of whether the aménagement/gestion de terroir approach, as it is currently being promoted by government, and. development organisations in the French-speaking countries of Sahelian West Africa, is compatible with the realties that agro-pastoralists in those countries face day-to-day. It is particularly concerned with three characteristics of life in the Sahel that have important implications for how agrarian populations manage resources, and whether the terroir approach, which, aims ostensibly to increase the effectiveness of local-level natural resource management, addresses or fails to address these characteristics. First, the Sahel is characterised by considerable agro-ecological diversity and socio-economic differentiation. Second, Sahelan populations are often very mobile as a result, of their efforts to deal with changing opportunities and constraints that affect their pursuit of a livelihood. And, third, Sahelian populations commonly use multiple strategies for risk management, including, but. certainly not limited to, those which focus on the terroir villageois.

In exploring; this question the term ‘action space’ Is used to describe the geographical and temporal distribution of the combination of more or Jess viable options that, smallholder agriculturalists and pastoralists exploit, as they pursue their livelihood. The concept of action space is more inclusive and more flexible than the concept of terroir villageois; and, as such, offers greater promise for understanding and addressing empirical realities in. the Sahel.

Entre le milieu des années 1970 et le milieu des années 1980, il est apparu un certain nombre de publications qui critiquait les premières ethnographies de maladies et de misfortunes d'avoir attacher trop d'importance a la causalité supematurelle et d'avoir négligé la causalité naturelle et le comportement médical pratique. En effet, à la suite de la première critique de Field par Warren (1974), il y eut ce qui équivalait presque à une croisade visant à prouver que les africains reconnaissaient traditionnellement un domaine médical séparé, dans lequel ils interprètaient les maladies surtout ' en termes empiriques et pratiques plutôt qu'en termes sociaux et moraux.

Cet article critique les efforts qui ont été fait pour jeter une lumière nouvelle sur les étiologies africaines. Poursuivant la discussion de la distinction entre les étiologies naturalistes et personnalistes, autour de laquelle toute la question pivote, cet article examine les critiques qui reprochent aux ethnographes d'avoir attacher trop d'importance à la causalite supematurelle dans les étiologies africaines; qui revendiquent que tandis que ces étiologies sont perçues de façon plus générale elles peuvent en fait être vues comme étant en grande partie naturalistes; et qui revendiquent que l'une des raisons pour cette tendance est que les ethnographies précédentes, en particulier celle d'Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic, n'ont pas été interpretées correctment. Une discussion de la description de l'étiologie des Zande par Evans-Pritchard lui-même, nous amène à la conclusion que les réinterprétations récentes de l'étiologie des Zande sont erronées. Ceci soulève la question: pourquoi ce désir soudain de délinéer des systèmes médicaux discrets? et pourquoi attacher tant d'importance à la causalité naturelle et l'activité pratique?

Faisant suite à une discussion au sujet de l'étiologie des Wimbum et le concept de médecine, basé sur des recherches dans les Grassfields au Cameroun, l'auteur arguments que l'insistance sur la causalité naturaliste et l'activité pratique dans la définition des systèmes médicaux africains ne les font pas s'élargir davantage comme les protagonistes le prétendent, mais les font au contraire se rétrécir davantage, et que les grandes descriptions des systèmes médicaux ne sont pas des représentations plus exactes de la manière dont les africains interprètent et affrontent la maladie, mais des constructions déterminees de manière biomédicale, imposées à la culture africaine à travers l'ethnographie médicale. Cet article se termine par un argument en faveur de la dissolution du concept, “systemes ethnomédicaux”.

The article represents an overview of the activities of members of the géwél caste, or Wolof griots, in present-day Senegal. While seemingly little has changed in areas where traditional ways of life are still dominant, in the westernised urban culture many traditional artists have learned to cope with the use of mass media. Far from being threatened by extinction, traditional artists and historians have managed to adapt their art to the requirements of modern life and to make it accessible to a wider audience.

In many parts of Africa, discourses on witchcraft and sorcery seem to follow a mod-ernisation process of their own. There are striking regional variations in the ways in which these discourses are articulated with State formation and the emergence of new modes of accumulation. A common denominator remains, however, the close connection between witchcraft and aggression from within the ‘house’. In many respects, witchcraft is still the dark side of kinship, even in modern settings.

It is against this background that this article explores the implications of a new type of witchcraft trial in the Eastern Province of Cameroon. Since 1980 State courts have started to convict ‘witches’ mainly on the basis of the expertise of the witch-doctors. This seems to be accompanied by the emergence of a ‘modern’ type of witch-doctor, more intent on punishing than on healing, who try to recruit their clients in very aggressive ways. In other parts of Cameroon the articulation of local witchcraft beliefs and State authority seems to follow different trajectories.

Cet article a pour but de rendre compte, en termes de dettes, du système de parenté des Bamiléké du Cameroun, qui résident dans la cheffèrie Bangoua. La relation d'alliance est ainsi sous-tendue par une dette symbolique, qui subordonne le preneur de femmes à ces donneurs (père et grand-père maternel de la fiancée),et la relation père–enfants est marquée par une dette de réciprocité. Les problématiques respectives de ces dettes, empruntés à Lacan, éclairent sous un jour nouveau l'interdit de l'inceste, la double filiation et le culte des ancêtres. Cette approche permet de faire ressortir que la loi sociale, marquee par la dette symbolique inhérente au langage, est garantie paradoxalement, dans cette société patrilinéaire, par les ancêtres du père de la mère.

The democratisation process which began in the early 1990s in many sub-Saharan African countries has led to renewed interest in the role of voluntary associations in the shaping of the political and social realms. This article maintains that the most effective way to understand the role of associational politics and developments in Africa is not by postulating what they should do according to Western democratic theory, but through an historical analysis of how associations functioned before the introduction of multi-party competitive elections and putative democratic rules in recent years. In this way it will be possible to attain a richer and more complex under-standing of state–society relations under one-party and military regimes, and thus of how these links are likely to change in a more pluralistic environment. This article explores these issues in the Côte d'Ivoire.

Spurred on in large part by the emergence of Jamaican and Anglo-Jamaican reggae music on to the global pop music scene in the mid-1970s, the Jamaican Rastafarian movement has within the past two decades managed to expand beyond its island home and attract a diverse and multi-ethnic international following. Apart from the various manifestations of ‘orthodox’ Jamaican Rastafarianism found in Africa today, one finds a number of religious and social formations which share similar features with and have been influenced to some extent by Rastafarian religion, music and culture. This article examines the various links that exist between one such group—the Muslim Baye Faal of Senegambia—and the beliefs and practices of the Jamaican Rastafari.

L'analyse spatiale du palais de Kano montre que les lois abolitionant le colonialisme, enforcées au Nigéria après la conquête britannique en 1903, ont affecté différemment a l vie et la place des femmes et des hommes esclaves. Ces différences provenaient des différences historiques concernant le placement et la fonction des femmes et des hommes esclaves dans le palais: tandis que les femmes esclaves habitaient et/ou travaillaient dans un domaine privé et très retire, et se livraient à la reproduction de la famille au pouvoir pour le compte de l'émir, les hommes esclaves du gouvemement habitaient dans des endroits publics et remplissaient des fonctions qui se rapportaient au gouvemement. Lés lois abolitionistes coloniales qui ont restructuré les sphères publiques traditionnelles de l'état, ont en conséquence vigoureusement transformé les places occupées par les hommes esclaves, tandis que le domaine privé des femmes ne fut pratiquement pas touché au début. Avec le temps, comme la protection des esclaves du palais devenait de plus en plus fragile, les femmes esclaves quitterent le palais pour suivre leurs maris esclaves et/ou leurs chefs de families qui avaient été exiles ou qui étaient à la recherche de meilleures occasions à l'extèrieur, provoquant ainsi une diminution dans la réserve des femmes esclaves d'où les concubines étaient choisies. La réserve déclina encore plus lorsque les hommes esclaves reçrent la permission d'épouser des femmes qui étaient nées libres, provoquant une diminution prononcée du nombre de concubines et une transformation prononcée dans l'organisation interne de la famille. L'organisation spatiale de l'esclavage des femmes du palais fut done affectée indirectement et le fut plus tardivement que celle de l'esclavage des hommes.

Cet article démontre l'utilité de l'analyse spatiale pour comprendre les changements historiques, et souligne la nécessité de prêter une plus grande sensibilité aux questions de genre, distinctions de classe, et de pouvoir dans les analyses de l'esclavage et de son abolition. Ce fut le genre, la richesse et le pouvoir des protecteurs royaux bien que la dextérité gouvemementale et l'autorité des hommes esclaves qui conduirent l'administration britannique à promoter l'esclavage au niveau de l'état pour arriver à leurs fins; ceci donnant des avantages aux esclaves que les femmes et/ou les maîtres aux moindres moyens ne pouvaient pas fournir. Ironiquement, ce fut parce que les hommes esclaves avaient tellement d'autorite que les fonctionnaires britanniques finirent par intervenir directement pour eroder leurs places et leur pouvoir. L'analyse établit que l'organisation spatiale de l'esclavage a été construite et érodée différemment selon le temps et l'endroit.

A feature of the ethnography of eastern and southern African cattle-keeping peoples is a high level of contradiction in the assessment of the status of women. Better understanding of the house-property complex, the property and inheritance system characteristic of these peoples, can resolve some seeming contradictions. In this system, all property (especially livestock) held by a polygynous family is divided and held separately by the nuclear family of each wife. Sons inherit from the property of their own mother's house rather than from a general pool of their father's property.

The article analyses variations in the norms of the house-property complex from one society to another. The institution is said to be ‘highly developed’ if more cattle are allocated as house property than are retained in men's residual herds, if women's rights in their house property are thought of as inalienable, if wives have some recourse should their husbands appropriate their house property, and if rules preventing redistribution of property or bridewealth between houses are rarely violated.

A frequently overlooked aspect of this property system is that it gives women well denned rights in property, despite public ideologies (often overstated, especially by male informants) that cattle belong to men. There are actually, in at least some societies, several named categories of cattle. In each category, different individuals have predominant rights. Women actively defend their interests in cattle in which their rights predominate, and manipulate those rights to gain their ends in social interaction. These points are illustrated with case material from Nandi District, Kenya.

The degree to which women have some control over property is obscured both by culturally endorsed simplifications and by the ethnographic situation in which male ethnographers historically interviewed male informants about property holding. Nevertheless, clues to women's participation in property management may be found in many classic ethnographies, and are cited in the article.

Over the past forty years, programmes intended to individualise rights to land have been introduced across Africa. These programmes are supported by an ideology which argues that individualisation is a necessary prerequisite of agricultural investment and development. Utilising data collected on the effects of the national title registration programme in Somalia, and drawing on similar studies of registration programmes in other African countries, this article challenges the assumption that individualisation and registration necessarily result in improved agricultural investment and productivity. On the contrary, the data reviewed here suggest that such programmes have contributed to concentration of ownership, growing landlessness, insecurity of tenure, wealth inequalities, and even declining productivity in many areas. The motivation behind individualisation and registration programmes is analysed, including an examination of the colonial and Western ideological distinction between African ‘communal’ land tenure and modern Western individualised tenure, struggles for power over control of resources, and a tendency to treat land tenure as solely an economic (rather than social) institution.

After giving some general information about children working on the streets of Harare, the article discusses the way children live on the streets when the streets become their home. It gives some reasons for their being on the streets, describes how they organise themselves and how they earn a living, and comments on their values. The article goes on to point out that there are a variety of perspectives on where the problem of street children lies, and to outline possible lines of intervention.

This article is a reinterpretation of blood brotherhood in three East African societies based on a reading of three ethnographic accounts, Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, Roscoe on the Baganda and Beidelman on the Kaguru. It argues against a construction of blood brotherhood as a single institution with one meaning, suggesting instead that the blood pact should be seen as a mechanism by which men formed ties of filiation with other men, in part on the basis of the kinds of relationships they idealised. In this way, blood was sometimes a magical substance and sometimes a fluid of reproductive power. This article suggests that scholars should look not only at the fluid of the blood pact but also at the part of the body from which blood is taken, in order to see the kinds of relationships men sought to establish with one another. Thus when the blood of blood brotherhood was taken from near the navel, or the chest, it suggested the intimacy of uterine ties, or the closeness of infant and nursing mother. When blood was mediated by cooked meat, it suggested a dilution of the power of blood and its association with the fluids of biological relationship.

In the current HIV debate there are diverse opinions about the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa and the reasons for it. Caldwell and his colleagues, for example, argue that the whole of Africa has a distinct sexuality which is inherently permissive. They claim moreover that no religious moral value is attached to sexual activity, and Christianity has thus not succeeded in changing matters. They find in this failure the reason for the failure of the fertility control programme in sub-Saharan Africa, and they argue that HIV/AIDS control efforts will fail similarly unless the fear it generates forces Africans to adopt the Eurasian model, with its religious, moral value.

The article re-examines Caldwell et al.'s conceptualisation of the role of moral value in social change. Without considering the internal expressions, mechanisms and social contexts within and through which moral value is maintained and changed, they assume that Christian moral values could lead to a change in sexual behaviour from permissive (as they see it) African sexuality to the Eurasian model. In making such an assumption they ignore the ethical and behavioural contradictions generally inherent in moral systems. Moreover they pay little attention to the process of change in Western societies, where Christian morality has lost a great deal of its control over behaviour. But even if we assume that internal contradictions and processes of change do not exist, the christianisation process in Africa fundamentally transformed local customs in ways that delinked their role in regulating behaviour, including sexual behaviour.

For discussions and decisions on options and strategies for the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS, identifying the nature and impact of that transformation is essential.

Parmi les Kel Ewey Touareg du nord-est du Niger, particulièrement dans les cercles de l a noblesse, la possession spirituelle est associée avec les origines culturelles serviles soudanaises; il en est de même pour la danse et le tambourinement. J'affirme qu'en exécutant un mouvement oscillatoire oblique de la tête et des épaules, considéré comme danse localement, les femmes en état de transe transforment la culture soudanaise. La danse de la tête, en tant que mouvement gracieux et contrôlé, et son trope central oscillant comme la branche d'un arbre, encapsulent des symboles culturels essentiels afin de les rendre presque acceptables en termes esthétiques et symboliques parmi les nobles Touareg traditionnels. Cependant, ce mouvement laisse supposer que l'on est malade ou seul ou dans état de sauvagerie ayant besoin d'exorcisme, un exorcisme qui doit être exécuté a la lisière du camp ou du village, à l'extèrieur de la tente, à la nuit tombée, mais en public, devant des spectateurs.

Cet article utilise une approche “synesthétique” pour montrer la connection étroitement liee entre les symboles. Il illustre les tension et les contradictions d'une société stratifée de façon traditionnelle, où les femmes exécutent maintenant une gamme d'activites à moitié serviles, des activités que les musulmans, les nobles, et les hommes en général désapprouvent et parfois contestent. La danse de la tête est un compromis élégant qui brouille la ligne entre la danse et la possession, qui prend des images acceptables dans des chansons et des façons de bouger appropriées, et les greffent sur un rythme particulier du tambourin, l'ensemble se servant de l'homonyme de la chanson/branche en tant qu'image centrale ou métaphore. Les symboles opèrent de manière synergique dans ce processus.

The aim of this study was to examine people's beliefs about the causes of marital instability in a rural population cohort in south-west Uganda. Results from a baseline survey of HFV-1 infection in the cohort of over 4,000 adults (over 12 years old) showed a twofold increase in risk of infection in divorced or separated persons when compared with those who are married. A purposive sample of 134 respondents (seventy-two males, sixty-two females) selected to represent different ages, religions and marital status were asked in semi-structured interviews to comment on the reasons for continuing marital instability in their community. The most common reasons suggested for marital instability were sexual dissatisfaction, infertility, alcoholism and mobility. Interviewees stated that men and women would be more likely to stay with someone who satisfied them sexually. It was reported that infertility, particularly of the woman, would lead a couple to separate. Alcoholism was said to lead to neglect of family responsibilities and decreased sexual inhibitions, while occupational mobility was a common cause of infidelity. HIV infection was not mentioned as a direct cause of separation, but a small independent study revealed that seven out often couples separated on learning of a positive HIV test result of one or both partners. Marital instability is not uncommon in this population; there is evidence that HFV infection is making the situation worse.

Cet article explore à la fois le sens du “odwira”, le rituel royal qui purifie annuellement la communauté de sa pollution, et la manière par laquelle le rite est utilisé pour négocier les configurations changeantes du pouvoir à Akuropon et dans le royaume d'Akuapem. Dans une petite société où les consensus sont requis en public et les conflits sont régiès en prive, où les rois avaient jadis le pouvoir de faire de leurs adversaires des esclaves et encore aujourd'hui peuvent leur dénier emploi et maison, l'opposition doit être discrète. Les rituels et les symboles sont bons pour faire une déclaration politique car une ambiguité ancrée leur permet d'être un terrain sûr pour une agression politique. Pour cette raison, bien que le rituel de purification du “odwira” soit considéré comme inaltérable dans sa représentation et sa structure symbolique, en pratique la politique explosive de la communauté est aussi reflétée dans les modifications occasionnelles qui sont faites au long precédéxs cérémonial chaque année.

The introduction of Christian missionary activity and the British colonial administration of Nigeria in the middle of the nineteenth century led to some of the most significant musical changes in the country. Perhaps the most far reaching was the emergence of modern Nigerian art music, a genre which is conceptually similar to European classical music. This study focuses on Ayo Bankole, one of the pioneer composers of Nigerian art music.

As an introductory study of Ayo Bankole, the article briefly discusses the musico-historical factors responsible for the growth of Nigerian art music as well as the nature of Bankole's musical training and experience. This provides an appropriate context for understanding and appreciating the stylistic features of Bankole's works. Drawing on examples from his works, the article establishes the eclectic nature of Bankole's style, in which European and African musical elements interact.

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.