This article explores the hunting aesthetics of initiated Jula hunters of Côte d'Ivoire who call themselves dozos. It explains how their hunting aesthetic structures their relationship to Islam and the Ivoirian state. Although many Africans approach Islam in the context of tensions between local ritual traditions and modernizing Muslim reform, dozos approach Islam the way they approach the forests where they hunt, assimilating to both in order to tame them. They organize their hunting activities around an aesthetic centred on notions of sweetness and fullness; their contraries, difficulty and emptiness; and the process of mimetic transformation (shape-shifting) that mediates between these extremes. With these categories dozos assimilate themselves to and appropriate power from the forest to kill game. They also link themselves to pre-Qur'anic Muslim figures to legitimize themselves as Muslims. More recently, they tried to assimilate to the Ivoirian state to become a parallel police force. Stories of their tutelary spirit, Manimory, and the texts of their hunting songs, incantations, and epics encode diverse ways for dozos to relate to Islam, leaving room for dozos to eschew it as well. Their texts reveal a dynamic sense of history that defies classification in terms of tradition, modernity or postmodernity.

As we approach the post-colonial half century, transnationalism has become a major reality in Africa and the wider world with the proliferation of immigrants, refugees and displaced persons. But transnationalism is not a new development, and diaspora and globalization – both historical processes – have long served as contexts for the remaking of identity, citizenship and polity. Today, concepts such as ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘flexible citizenship’ are in vogue in a globalized world, as transnationalism challenges statist concepts of political citizenship. In this article, using the case of Ghana, I revisit the historic presence of a Lebanese diaspora in west Africa from the 1860s, and the intellectual and political obstacles that have worked against their full incorporation as active political citizens. I seek to understand why the prospect of non-black citizenship was considered problematic in black Africa during the era of decolonization, interrogating the institutional legacies of colonial rule and pan-Africanist thought. The intellectual rigidity of pan-Africanism on race is contrasted with current notions of the constructedness of identity. I probe the ways in which the Lebanese in Ghana constructed their identities, and how these facilitated or obstructed assimilation. As African governments seek to tap into the resources of the new African communities in Europe and North America, the article suggests the timeliness of exploring alternative criteria to indigeneity when defining citizenship in black Africa.

More than a decade after the genocide, Rwanda's local communities remain severely affected by the experience of the violence and horror. This is reflected in the way people remember their past, as well as in what they choose to forget. During fieldwork in Nyamata and Gikongoro it became apparent that even though the memory of the genocide as such, its pain and suffering, was essential for all interviewees, a clearer picture of the causes of the genocide had disappeared into oblivion. In this article I argue that this forgetting of pregenocide social cleavages reflects less a mental failure than a conscious coping mechanism. What I shall refer to as chosen amnesia, the deliberate eclipsing of particular memories, allows people to avoid antagonism and enables a degree of community cohesion necessary for the intimacy of rural life in Rwanda. While this is presently essential for local coexistence, it prevents the emergence of a critical challenge to the social cleavages that allowed the genocide to occur in the first place and impedes the social transformation necessary to render ethnicity-based violence impossible.

This essay describes (1) how mortuaries changed the Akan funeral culture of Ghana and (2) how that converged with the interests of relatives and hospital managers. Such a development would not have been possible, however, (3) without the money provided by well-to-do relatives staying abroad. Mortuaries enable relatives to stretch the liminal period between death and funeral as long as they want to while they prepare everything for a grand funeral. For hospitals, this new fashion means an attractive extra source of income, as the mortuary is more lucrative than its medical services. My observations derive from anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu, Ghana.

Based on field research carried out in 2004, this article focuses on how Ituribased Congolese relief workers negotiate humanitarian access with roadblock militias. Experiences and testimonies highlight the importance of sociocultural and political awareness during relief work induced by conflict. It is demonstrated that relief workers in conflict zones do not (and cannot) shed their ethnic identities; that instead they accept that a perceived ethnic identity brings strategic advantages as well as disadvantages. Further, a relief worker's bargaining power is shown to be influenced by militia perceptions of how his/her organization is positioned in the conflict. The overall argument responds to the renewed policy interest in debating the political context of humanitarian intervention.

Passenger cars and other small vehicles have for a long time been the backbone of transport in west Africa. The cars are usually second-hand, and they are sourced on overseas car markets, mostly in western Europe. During the 1990s the port town of Cotonou, Bénin, became one of the most prominent hubs in this car trade: car markets mushroomed, attracting large numbers and a wide variety of traders – including a prominent contingent of Lebanese. This article discusses the role of these Lebanese traders in the car trade through a reconstruction of their careers. It reveals that Lebanese business, which can go through a rapid succession of different economic activities, starts as kin-based enterprise, but gradually incorporates peers and friends. Close analysis of this practice suggests that Lebanese immigrant traders are to a large extent driven by the ideal of enjoying life by adopting an expatriate lifestyle.

On 14 October 1999, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first president of the United Republic of Tanzania, died in a London hospital. In Tanzania, musical bands throughout the country reacted to the news by composing scores of lamentation songs (nyimbo za maombolezo) that mourned his passing and assessed his contributions to the country he helped to create. While elsewhere in the world Nyerere is affiliated with the ‘African socialist’ platform termed Ujamaa that he theorized in his political writings and instituted during his tenure as president, these lamentation songs are notably silent on the topic of socialism. This silence indicates the ambiguity with which Tanzanians today relate to their socialist past. As a necessary prelude to analysis of the nyimbo za maombolezo, this article explores the practices, policies and values promoted in Tanzanian socialisms (mainland and Zanzibar) and in the postsocialist present. Competing rhetorics are revealed in these musical constructions of the ‘Father of the Nation’ and, by extension, the Tanzanian nation itself.

Based on ethnographic field research, this article explores religious discourses about proper ritual observance in The Gambia, a country where our understanding of processes of Islamization is largely lacking. These discourses centre upon the case of Berekuntu, a shrine guarded by a female saint in the village of Kartong. On the basis of three ‘texts’, the female saint's biographical narrative, a series of sermons delivered by reformist scholars, and a newspaper article based on an interview with the Supreme Islamic Council, the article shows that shrine and saint veneration are not relics of the past, but are part of a lively contemporary dispute about ‘authentic’ Islam and who represents it. While reformist Muslims seem to have conquered the public sphere during the last decade under the influence of President Jammeh's rule, the Sufi understanding of Islam, as embodied by the saint, still enjoys great support among the Gambian population. Although ‘reformists’ and ‘Sufis’ seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed, they sometimes borrow from each other. An analysis of the (re)negotiation of Muslim identities indicates that Islamization is not a single monolithic movement but, rather, a diffuse process happening at different levels.

This article outlines the history of a people known as ‘Nubi’ or ‘Nubians’, northern Ugandan Muslims who were closely associated with Idi Amin's rule, and a group to which he himself belonged. They were supposed to be the descendants of former slave soldiers from southern Sudan, who in the late 1880s at the time of the Mahdi's Islamic uprising came into what is now Uganda under the command of a German officer named Emin Pasha. In reality, the identity became an elective one, open to Muslim males from the northern Uganda/southern Sudan borderlands, as well as descendants of the original soldiers. These soldiers, taken on by Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, formed the core of the forces used to carve out much of Britain's East African Empire. From the days of Emin Pasha to those of Idi Amin, some Nubi men were identified by a marking of three vertical lines on the face – the ‘One-Elevens’. Although since Amin's overthrow many Muslims from the north of the country prefer to identify themselves as members of local Ugandan ethnic groups rather than as ‘Nubis’, aspects of Nubi identity live on among Ugandan rebel groups, as well as in cyberspace.

This article examines witchcraft, shape-shifting and other supernatural beliefs among the Talensi and neighbouring Gur-speaking peoples on the frontier of the Northern Territories Protectorate of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the first half of the twentieth century. Its starting point is the succession of religious movements dedicated to the eradication of witchcraft that swept through the southern forest region of the Gold Coast in the inter-war period. Most of these movements were animated by exotic deities originating in the savanna zone, a cross-cultural passage in part propelled by the ambivalence with which the Akan peoples of the forests viewed the so-called Gurunsi of the remote north. While the ‘Gurunsi’ were generally regarded as primitive barbarians, they were also seen to have an intimate relationship with the spiritual realm and therefore to be free from the ravages of malevolent witchcraft. This intimacy with dangerous spiritual forces was most clearly manifested in the widely reported ability of ‘the grassland people’ to transmogrify into animals. Evidence suggests, however, that far from being free from witchcraft, stateless savanna societies had their own problems with malevolent occult powers. Moreover, their reputation for shape-shifting was not simply a lurid, fantastic stereotype of northern brutishness on the part of the Akan. Animal metamorphosis – and especially the ubiquity of were-hyenas – was widely reported in the northern savanna, where it was imbricated with ‘witchcraft’ and with notions of personhood and collective identities.

In 1991 in the Republic of Congo, a sovereign national conference in Brazzaville inaugurated a peaceful transition from socialist one‐party government to multi‐party democracy. The pluralization of public voices in the newly liberalized country – in religious movements, political parties and independent presses – expressed new conditions of understanding about the nation and its affairs. At the same time, local networks and categories of perception inflected geopolitical pressures from foreign powers into quasi‐ethnic divisions in competition for power through government representation. Subsequent conflict over contested elections sparked devastating civil war in 1997 and resulted in the return to power of the former socialist leadership.

Given the uncertainties – indeed, the crises of institutions and of knowledge – during these times, how did Congolese diagnose the troubles through which the country passed? This article examines how national and socialist ideals and practices were evoked and reinterpreted to this end in public discourse through idioms of family, affliction, spiritual power and the living body. These modes of speech and action give evidence of longer‐term continuities in the region's political imaginations, as these incorporated changes brought by ongoing involvement in larger modern worlds.

This article explores the experience of one village in Ethiopia since the overthrow of the Marxist‐Leninist Derg regime in 1991. The new government introduced policies that have much in common with those dominating the international geopolitical scene in the 1990s and 2000s. These include an emphasis on democracy, grassroots participation and, to some extent, market liberalization. I report here on the manifestations of these policy shifts in Gamole village, in the district of Konso, once remote from the political centre in Addis Ababa but now expressing its identity through new federal political structures. Traditional power relations between traders and farmers in Gamole have been transformed since 1991 as the traders have exploited opportunities to extend trade links, obtain land and build regional alliances through participation in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. They have appropriated the discourse of democracy to challenge their traditional position of subordination to the farmers – and this, in turn, has led to conflict. While these changes reflect the postsocialist transition, they can also be seen as part of a continuing process of change brought about by policies of reform in land tenure, the church and the state, introduced during the Derg period. These observations at a local level in Ethiopia provide insights into the experiences of other states in postsocialist transition.

War has ravaged Acholiland in northern Uganda since 1986. The Ugandan army is fighting the Lord's ResistanceMovement/Army (LRM/A) rebels. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the article aims at exemplifying the ways in which non-combatant people's experiences of war and violence are domesticated in cosmological terms as strategies of coping, and it relates tales of wars in the past to experiences of violent death and war in the present. There has been a politicized debate in Uganda over whether or not the LRM/A rebels have the elders' ceremonial warfare blessing. In sketching this debate, the article interprets the possible warfare blessing – which some informants interpreted as having turned into a curse on Acholiland – as a critical event that benefits from further deliberation, regardless of its existence or non-existence. It is argued that no warfare blessing can be regarded as the mere utterance of words. Rather, a blessing is performed within the framework of the local moral world. It is finally argued that the issue of the warfare blessing is a lived consequence of the conflict, but, nevertheless, cannot be used as an explanatory model for the cause of the conflict.

This article investigates the anti-tsetse fly work of colonial entomologist K. R. S. Morris in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast between 1928 and 1951. Morris's main programme was directed at the Lawra District of the north-west, where he claimed to have eliminated the tsetse population and trypanosomiasis by the end of his tenure. This achievement allowed farmers to move into the formerly infested land and reclaim the area for agricultural development. As an added benefit, Morris also claimed, eliminating tsetse flies in the Lawra District reduced the incidence of sleeping sickness in the main market towns of north-west Ashanti. The article charts Morris's work, which is historically significant for a number of reasons. First, it reveals much about the connection between anti-tsetse work and colonial development doctrine in northern Ghana. Second, it highlights the importance of studying colonial practices. Morris's clearing programme appears to have worked, but it was almost certainly based on faulty theories of tsetse ecology. In this sense, the story of anti-tsetse work in the Northern Territories shows that we might learn as much from colonial practices as from colonial ideologies.

In the South African national elections of 2004 the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly within the poorer, black, rural voting districts. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted in Impalahoek – a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the Limpopo Province – this paper investigates reasons for this pattern of voting. With reference to a survey of 87 households I show that unemployment, crime and disease had increased dramatically between 1990/1 and 2003/4. Yet, at the same time, there have been considerable improvements in access to state pensions, housing, school feeding schemes and child support grants. In this context, I argue that the ANC's election campaign highlighted the capacity of government in service provision, and that voting for the ruling party constituted a strategic attempt to obtain access to state-controlled services. Hence the election was characterized by neo-patrimonial politics and by a transactional logic of voting. Voting for the ruling party does not amount to an ideological endorsement of its policies, and discontent is more likely to be expressed through boycotting the elections rather than voting for opposition parties.

Migration patterns among the Fulani of Burkina Faso have changed over recent decades from predominant transhumance, involving whole families, to seasonal rural-to-urban labour migration of young men. This article uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to examine the relationships between the new forms of migration and domestic organization. Specifically, it asks the following questions: (1) How do households accommodate the temporary loss of productive members? (2) Does the out-migration lead to new forms of domestic organization, and to changing roles and power relations within sending households? Various forms of flexibility in domestic organization are identified, which serve to maintain viable economic units in the face of the temporary absence of substantial numbers of young men. These include: flexibility in the processes of household division; rapid, temporary restructuring of domestic units; and drawing on extra-household support networks. One consequence of this flexibility is that intra-household gender divisions of labour and power have remained largely unchanged in the face of seasonal labour migration. The extent to which this will remain the case if migration becomes more widespread is uncertain.

This article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. ‘Youth’, as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist politics, and in the 1950s formed the Tanganyika African Nationalist Party (TANU), which instituted its own category of ‘youth’ with the creation of the TANU Youth League (TYL). Consisting mainly of young, under-employed men who failed to obtain sufficient educational qualifications, the Youth League challenged the late colonial state's theoretical monopoly over violence through voluntary and aggressive policing activities. After the work of independence was complete, there was practical way to demobilize this enormous, semi-autonomous police and intelligence-gathering force. The repeated reassertion of party control over its Youth League took many forms in the decade after independence – through the creation of a National Service and the militarization of development; frequent nationalist events and rituals where Youth League members controlled public space; and a war on urban morality led by Youth League shock troops. Control over youth also offered a potentially autonomous patrimony for ambitious TANU party members. The 1970s witnessed the beginning of the general failure of both state and party to generate sufficient resources to serve as a patron to patron-seeking youth, which has effectively decentralized youth violence and vigilantism ever since. A political history of ‘youth’, both as a social category and political institution, can shed further light on contemporary dilemmas of youth violence, meanings of citizenship, and hidden motors of party politics.

This article examines two opposing strategies – one used by government officials and businesses, the other expressed by urban workers – that have emerged in postsocialist Mozambique. On the one hand, government officials and businesses have pursued a deliberate strategy of what several writers in other contexts have called ‘organized forgetting', whereby they seek to airbrush the socialist past from history. They have revised the country's ideological orientation, built new coalitions of support among domestic and internal investors, and remade the ruling party's legitimacy following the abandonment of socialism and the transition to a free‐market democracy. On the other hand, some urban workers have revived and repackaged the language of socialism to protest against the effects of neo‐liberalism. Relying on collective and individual memories of socialism, they denounce ‘exploitation', ‘recolonization', ‘injustice’ and ‘inequality’ as they struggle to understand, resist or modify the impact of structural adjustment and privatization. I argue that, although the end of socialism has allowed a plurality of voices to surface in Mozambique, such discursive pluralism is characterized by increasing power inequities. The consolidation of capital and the ideological pronouncements that accompany it may ultimately silence the now dissident language of the socialist past.

This essay examines the changing perceptions of matatu crews from the 1970s to the present. In the early 1970s commuters and many Kenyans typically viewed the matatu operators as an important, enterprising group of people, contributing to the economic development of the new nation of Kenya. This perception changed drastically in the 1980s when commuters, and indeed many Kenyans of all ranks, increasingly saw the matatu operators as thugs engaging in excessive behaviour – using misogynistic language, rudely handling passengers, playing loud music and driving at dangerously high speeds. Worse, the matatu operators were forced to join cartels that fought against reform and enabled this kind of behaviour. Nevertheless, I argue that, in many ways, the commuters have been complicit in creating the notorious matatu man – a creature they purport to hate, and then have conveniently used as a scapegoat whenever they see fit. In other words, the commuters have created the monster and then attacked it in order to exorcise their collective guilt.