The history of the Black Volta region in what is currently south-west Burkina Faso and north-west Ghana has been marked by the agricultural expansion of Dagara-speaking groups. This article explores how and why these groups were able to expand at the expense of neighbouring segmentary societies such as the Phuo and the Sisala. Violence certainly played a role in their territorial expansion, but so did specific strategies of ritual appropriation of new territories. The Dagara system, with its characteristic fission of existing earth shrines and networks of interlinked shrines, allowed mobility and helped the migrants bring new territories under their ritual control. In addition, patriclans and matriclans as well as joking relationships, clan alliances and institutionalized friendship enabled the Dagara pioneers to recruit many new settlers within a short time. This was a crucial asset for the security of the newly founded settlements and the territorial encroachment on Phuo and Sisala lands. In addition, mobility was, and continues to be, supported by an explicit ethos of independence and autonomy. Focusing on the late pre-colonial periods, the article looks at different stages of Dagara expansion and the changing interethnic relations.

The Sereer-Safèn occupied a defensible refuge zone in Western Bawol, where forests and sandstone ridges provided protection against Wolof monarchy. The Safèn were part of a larger ‘Sereer’ world that defined itself by opposition to Islam in the period from 1700 to 1914. This religious divide made the Sereer targets for enslavement by the Wolof, but Sereer religion was also linked to Safèn resistance to Islam, slavery and monarchy. Religion was interwoven with an ethnic boundary, which emphasized the incompatibility of Wolof and Sereer society. Safèn religion was centered on the village ‘shrine’ or xérém, which served as the focal point of ritual, justice, communication with the other world and defense.

Land tenure was at the center of the struggle between settlers and Khoisan on the colonial frontier during the eighteenth century. Different perceptions of land claims and differing patterns of land use prevented the possibility of mutual accommodation. Although pre-colonial hunters and herders co-existed in the Cedarberg region, the introduction of competition from settler pastoralism challenged the survival of both San and Khoikhoi patterns of subsistence. The fight for territory was rooted in competition over specific locations – sites endowed with resources such as permanent water, defensible shelter and ritual significance for the San. Colonial social structure supported settler land claims, eventually enabling successful occupation of a rugged region relatively isolated from the rest of the colony. In the last quarter of the century some Khoisan individuals worked within this system to make land claims of their own. Superior technology and a tightly woven social structure did not alter the basic features of the landscape, so colonists continued to subsist from transhumant pastoralism throughout the century.

In the 1890s and 1900s in the Transkei, South Africa, colonial relations were severely strained as Cape colonial officials attempted to constrain African men's hunting activities by systematically poisoning and shooting their dogs. For colonial foresters, such efforts were part of a larger strategy to ‘protect’ flora and fauna by controlling African environmental activities and mobility more thoroughly. Yet on the ground in many areas, state-sponsored dog-killing was drawn into more complex understandings of, and popular frustrations with, transformations in local landscapes and livelihoods during this period. As rural men and women responded to the particular changes in their local political ecologies arising from colonial wildlife preservation policies, they also located conflicts over state forestry and its policies of exclusion within broader popular experiences of political, economic and ecological subordination. In several communities, rumors and stories proliferated, connecting the killing of dogs to other official attempts to poison and bewitch Africans, their animals and their landscapes. Such stories were ways for people to express deeper concerns over the spreading influence of colonial power in their daily practices and its toll on local communities’ health and welfare.

This article considers the different ways that Marirangwe purchase area farmers understood and used their farmland, resources and opportunities. In the pioneer period from 1931 to the 1940s, Marirangwe farmers favored extensive use of their land and its resources. However, as labor and capital opportunities changed, land became for some an expendable commodity. By the 1950s, the farmers' ability to generate capital through land sales paralleled the arrival of squatters in the area. With the help of these squatters and revenue from land sales, Marirangwe farmers prospered. This development, however, did not signal a change from the extensive farming habits of the pioneer period but rather a brief, and generally prosperous, period of specialization.

Madumo: A Man Bewitched. By ADAM ASHFORTH. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cape Town: David Philip, 2000. Pp. vii+255. Rand 90 (ISBN 0-226-02971-9).

Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. By LUISE WHITE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+351. £31.50/$50 (ISBN 0-520-21703-9); £12.50/$19.95, paperback (ISBN 0-520-21704-7).