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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.