Scholars in several disciplines have recently turned their attention to the effects of community characteristics on attitudes and behaviour. ‘Social capital’ figures prominently in this new literature. This article explores the influence of trust, optimism, voluntarism and other standard components of social capital on political participation and institutional performance in two African contexts: Uganda and Botswana. It concludes that generalised trust and participation in social clubs help shape decisions to participate in formal politics, although their influence is dwarfed by gender and urbanisation. However, social capital bears no clear relation to institutional performance, as measured by residents' levels of satisfaction with government services.

Western concern with ‘conserving’ or ‘managing’ the rain forests of Africa has led to the setting up of a number of conservation projects. In such projects the ‘participation’ of the ‘community’ in forest conservation has become the new orthodoxy. However, proposals about local people's participation presume that defining the future of the forest is a straight contest between the alternatives of conservation or forest clearing. Such proposals also presume that the existence of communities is non-problematic. In contrast, this article documents that there is already considerable local debate about forest use and conservation, much of it among those excluded from the formal arena of politics and policy-making. Concern with ‘the environment’ includes concern about the perpetuation of society, and represents a clear continuation of West African village cosmologies focused on the societalisation of space. At the same time, conservation aims of ‘keeping the forest as it is’ have few resonances, since forest people see society itself as an artful, but often problematic, construction in which the conversion of the forest plays a central part. In conclusion, the article suggests that the key to environmental management must be for external agencies to articulate with the interests and values of those who hold a legitimate stake in African forest resources.

This article explores the strategies of acquiring and legitimating power in Ghana, taking the example of three ‘big men’ from the north, a paramount chief, a mine captain and a politician in the making. After offering some observations on the recent public debate on the (im)morality of power and ‘bigness’, it outlines the biographies of these three ‘big men’ and analyses how they skilfully combine different registers of power and legitimacy. It then analyses the strategies of legitimation and grounds of moral judgement which depend, at least to a certain degree, on the particular relationship of the ‘judge’ with the ‘big man’ in question. The article concludes by discussing the common ‘grammar’ that seems to regulate the debates on ‘bigness’, morality and interest.

If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their ‘canalising’ functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocating abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town within the local forms of history and knowledge that motivate their interpretation and performative power. After reviewing the cult's historical interventions in local political affairs, the article examines the repressed historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty and its associated line of civil chiefs as invoked by the song texts in two festival contexts. In the first—the Àjàkadì wrestling match—which occurs at night, male age mates from different ‘sides’ of the town fight to stand their ground and topple their opponents while young women praise the winners and abuse the losers with sexual obscenities. In the second festival context, during the day, the elder ‘grandmothers’ of Oroyeye target malefactors and scoundrels by highlighting their misdeeds against a discursive background of homage and praise. In this fashion the female custodians of a displaced ruling line bring repressed sexual and political sub-texts to bear on male power competition, lineage fission, and antisocial behaviour. More generally, they mobilise the fertility and witchcraft of all Yoruba women to disclose hidden crimes and speak out with impunity.

Studies of associations in West Africa have tended to focus upon the development of new development-related institutional forms. Other, so-called traditional, cultural groupings have tended to be ignored. This article points to transformations and changes in the masquerade society of the north-eastern Yoruba town of Ìkòlé and considers the continuing development of the masquerade society as an association. Changes in the masquerade society are being strongly promoted by younger men as a way to establish masquerade as a resource, promoting Ìkòlé's cultural identity. They are aided and funded by groups of elite citizens who are not necessarily resident in Ìkòlé. The article examines the relations between the various groups involved in masquerade, as well as the relationship between those often elite town members who support masquerades and Pentecostal Christian groups which would happily see their demise.

The 1996 cerebrospinal meningitis epidemic in Nigeria exemplified a medical situation that was linked with political concerns at the local, national, and international levels. It is argued that these political aspects must be understood, as they have implications for the treatment of future outbreaks. This article examines local attempts to stem the epidemic, on the basis of participant observation and epidemiological data collected from the north of Kaduna State. The epidemic is then considered in the national context: general deterioration of the health care system associated with economic decline, a national structural adjustment programme and crisis of political leadership. The local and national contexts of the 1996 epidemic are related to the view, held by many Nigerians, that reports of the epidemic's severity and the subsequent Saudi ban on Nigerians making the pilgrimage to Mecca reflected international politics, particularly the uneasy relations between the Nigerian, Saudi Arabian, and US governments, as well as health concerns. The article concludes with some recommendations for a national policy and for community health initiatives that take the politics and economics of cerebrospinal meningitis immunisation and treatment into account.