The publication of a new translation of Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv invites reappraisal of Akiga himself as a local intellectual. This essay presents a biographical account of this early Tiv convert to Christianity, locating his celebrated History in its social, cultural, ethnic and historical contexts, and presents a provisional narrative of his career subsequent to the publication of Akiga's Story, the version of the History edited by Rupert East. As such, it is intended as an invitation to a full biography. The essay reconstructs, insofar as sources permit, the complex relationship between Akiga, East, the Dutch Reformed Church Mission and the International African Institute that led to the publication of Akiga's Story in the form known until now, comparing that version with the complete translation. Akiga's History emerges from this re-examination as a compellingly contemporary narrative engaged with the lived experience of ethnic identification under colonial rule.

This article pays tribute to Akiga Sai (1898–1959) and his iconic status as the first great Tiv writer who recorded Tiv history, customs, beliefs and experiences during the turbulence unleashed by colonization and missionary intervention in the early twentieth century. It offers an appreciation of Akiga's vivid writing style and his achievements as both a historian and a recorder of his people's way of life, which was fast changing. The article presents the perspective of a younger Tiv generation who encountered Akiga Sai's work in the course of their education. Akiga, from this viewpoint, is not only an individual pioneer and creative genius, but also the representative of a better era, after which moral decay and a decline in communal health and well-being set in.

This article introduces a new translation of Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv, a manuscript completed in Tiv by Akiga in 1935. Portions of Akiga's text, translated and annotated by Rupert East, were first published in English by the International African Institute in 1939 as Akiga's Story. But the new translation, available in the online version of the journal, is the first complete one: no section of the Tiv manuscript has been omitted, and the order of the material has been left as originally written by Akiga. This article tells the story of how Harold Bergsma, when working as a secondary school principal in Nigeria, rescued the Tiv typescript from the rubbish bin and deposited it in the University of Ibadan library; and how, some forty-five years later, he assembled a team of Tiv intellectuals to undertake the task of translation. It reflects on some of the linguistic challenges presented by the Tiv text, and draws attention to the rich and varied information the work contains – on clans, genealogies, plant and animal names, food preparation, marriage customs, the religious practices of the Tiv, and Akiga's own experiences of childhood, family, and encounters with akombo and witchcraft. The article is complemented by selections from Chapters 8 and 9 of the new translation, chosen and annotated by Richard Fardon.

Annual festivals in Ghana celebrate the agricultural harvest and commemorate the political authority of local chiefs. Today, multinational corporations such as Guinness, MTN and Vodafone sponsor almost all aspects of festival production. Sponsor participation has transformed festivals into sites saturated with images of commodities and corporate brands. While some chiefs support corporate participation, others deplore sponsors, who they perceive as threatening chiefs' control over the festival arena. A critical medium through which chiefs police and participate in discourses about cultural and political legitimacy is dress: chiefs clothe members of their entourages alternatively in T-shirts with corporate logos and T-shirts with images of chiefs. During festivals, chiefs orchestrate embodied practices to assert new claims to their political authority based on the nobility of their lineage or their participation in global economic networks. Through an exploration of contemporary dress practices, I argue that what is at stake in corporate-sponsored festivals is the emergence of new logics of value that challenge people to reassess the social and economic relations that underlie the production of political power in Ghana.

Based on a study of the International Women's Day (8 March), a truly popular event in Cameroon, this article attempts to understand the dynamics of state mobilization in this long-lasting regime. By observing the production and use of one of its symbolic objects, the pagne du 8 mars (a dedicated wax print), it sheds significant light on the social fabric of loyalty and the articulation of loyalist and disruptive popular mobilizations and allows us to move beyond ready-made, state-centred explanations. As an object of exchange and social distinction, the pagne provides women with a variety of ways of interacting (or not interacting) with the state and with men. Although, on the face of it, the act of dressing in the day's cloth may be seen as an expression of collective loyalty to the regime, one cannot assume that it represents a single, undifferentiated approach to authority. Licentious behaviour while wearing this pagne may even represent a real condemnation of moral and political power imposed on women. For the moment, however, this ritual and its popular mobilization are sufficient for the government's purposes: it is able to point to the event as an example of its capacity to mobilize its female citizens, thereby showing that its claims to legitimacy are well-founded.

This paper argues that the uniform, conceived as a special type of ‘social skin’, has been incorporated by individuals and groups into a complex chain of processes and meanings in the Cameroon Grassfields; I describe this practice as the uniformization of socio-cultural life. I demonstrate that uniforms, unlike ordinary clothing, are salient precisely because of their unique role as markers of collective identity but also because they embody and simultaneously express the paradox of similarity and difference. Central to these processes and construction of meaning are community-based associations that have elevated the uniform to a new kind of orthodoxy. These perspectives are borne out by ethnographic interpretations of the ways in which variously positioned subjects in the Grassfields relate to and embody the special object that the uniform represents.

Most literature on cloth focuses on its capacity as a medium of identity construction in relation to politics, economy, ethnicity, age and gender. As such, the equalizing properties of uniforms are often contrasted with the creation of individual styles of dress. This article discusses a further dimension in the complexity of the meanings of clothing: it explores the history, uses and local meanings of fabrics on which photographs of public personalities are printed in Bamako. In Bamako in the 2000s, entrepreneurs from different sectors of society, such as politics, religion, media, art, education and commerce, rediscovered this type of cloth as a business opportunity. They have produced decorated fancy textiles for events where large, heterogeneous groups of people participate most often, and where they multiply the image printed on their clothing. Some of these personalities distribute the cloth as promotional gifts, while others make their fans and followers purchase fabrics as evidence of their admiration. The uniforms decorated with photographs reflect a tendency towards asymmetrical relationships between the owners of the dresses and the personality depicted on them. Some of these relationships even encourage individual styles that transgress the uniform character of the dresses.