In the first part of this article I set myself two objectives, each of which took its cue from a generalization made about the political and social organization of the Tiv by their principal ethnographers, Laura and Paul Bohannan. I proposed to challenge the related views (1) that the political organization of the Tiv could adequately be described as a segmentary lineage organization and (2) that their organization was atypical of the area of middle-belt West Africa in which the Tiv live. Confining my attention to Tiv ethnogaphy, I argued in Part I that a persuasive case could be made for a more complex account of Tiv political processes which recognized the salience not only of descent but also of marriage, kinship and local competition for the achievement of personal prestige through manipulation of marriage strategies, mastery of the major akombo or cults and claims to the possession of legitimate tsav or supernatural power. Tiv society still retains remarkable features on this view of its political processes, but they are not those of complete atypicality. Instead, it becomes apparent that, while sharing many of its core institutions with neighbouring societies, Tiv culture combines them in a unique manner. The uniqueness of the combination becomes visible through the effects of Tiv social organization, the more important of which I would itemise as:

1. The persistence of Tiv culture and identity in a region of generally fragmented populations.

2. The capacity for expansion of Tiv society.

3. The capacity of Tiv society to absorb so many circumstances conducive to the development of hierarchy yet to remain, by and large, acephelous.

The idea that the knowledge of an individual is an articulation of a culturally shared paradigmatic framework of concepts is now familiar in anthropology. It is one derived from the work of T. S. Kuhn (1962), who argued that, for natural scientists, the definitions and solutions of problems normally take place within an existing framework provided by the paradigmatic work of a great scientist. Since then several attempts have been made to indicate that, in fields other than the strictly scientific, the knowledge which people have of their physical and social environments is similarly an articulation of paradigmatic ideas (Ardener, 1971, 1978; Barnes, 1969; Buckley, 1976, 1982, 1983; Willis, 1967, 1972, 1978). This article will attempt to develop this methodology in the field of Yoruba religion. Its focus will be Sònpònnó, the Yoruba god of smallpox, a ferocious and vindictive god who not only causes smallpox, but who is also responsible for a form of madness.

The relationship between land tenure forms and the twentieth-century transformation of agriculture throughout much of Africa from a strong subsistence to a market orientation – and from food crop production to predominantly export crop production – is a topic of great importance both to Africanists and to policy-makers. From a scholarly perspective, contemporary Africa presents an unusual opportunity to study dramatic changes in land use and especially in land tenure, similar to changes which took place in other parts of the world as commercial farming developed. From a policy-maker's point of view, too, the current shift in land tenure has major implications for possible government measures affecting security of tenure and land distribution – and, in turn, patterns of agricultural investment, productivity and output.

‘A translation of the meaning of the Holy Koran into the Hausa language’ – this is the careful wording of the title of the work sponsored by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam (whose President is the Sultan of Sokoto) and signed by Abubakar Mahmoud Gummi, the chairman of its executive committee and former Grand Khadi (Gummi, 1980). It is, in short, as official a Muslim publication as there can be in Nigeria. The Arab text (set in a standard Beirut naskh typeface) is on the right of the page, the Hausa, in roman script (boko), on the left; yet colleagues say that the Hausa still reads as if it was simply part of an oral, abbreviated tafsiri transcribed for printing. Though it is nowhere labelled as tafsiri, it has some footnotes and a sentence introducing each sura; and it is a truly vernacular translation – that is, it is not as awkward to read as, say, the books translated by Haliru Binji into what one could best describe as ‘malamanci’. Lastly, the printed text originally was circulated in sections – in part, it is said, to assess people's reactions to a Hausa translation of the Holy Koran being sold in the streets of Nigerian cities. It is a measure of the public's acceptance of this work – which is in reality no more than a printed version of the various oral ‘translations’ one can hear every year in public, on the radio or on tape – that not merely has it now appeared as a single volume but that it has already gone into a second edition; indeed, Alhaji Nasiru Kabara has now almost completed the process of producing his own version.

In few other places in the creative traditions of sub-Saharan Africa is the factor of Islam more prominent and influential than in Senegal. Manifested in form and subject matter and spanning a wide cross-section of talent in both the traditional and modern media of creative expression, this prominence and influence can be attributed to a number of factors ranging from the artistic maturity, religious sensibility, intellectual astuteness and ideological orientation of individual artists, to the more general impact that Islam as a dominant religious force is perceived to have had on secular life in Senegal. These factors to a large extent determine the various ways in which individual Senegalese artists define themselves and their art vis-è-vis Islam in particular and society in general. These definitions are creatively translated into choice of form, thematic focus and, to use a cliché, ‘message’.