The paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.

Issues relating to household and community are of central importance in social scientific research on contemporary Africa and the experience of its peoples in the twentieth century. Early anthropological theory categorized African social organization, for comparative purposes, with that of indigenous America, New Guinea, and other classless and early state systems. Most of these other peoples are now minority populations in colonized states, politically and economically marginal. Only in Africa have advancing capitalism and non-peasant, relatively weakly stratified, highly flexible forms of social organization been forced into a long-term working relationship with one another over such a vast area and such a wide variety of conditions. Most recent scholarship—and the scholarship I will limit myself to in this paper—is not only concerned with substantive questions of what has happened as a result of this confrontation, but also with the methodological problems of describing and explaining it in a comparative framework.

Over the last twenty years, this has resulted in two major shifts of approach, which cut across all the divisions amongst the classic theoretical schools of thought. They are, first, a shift from explanation of local forms in terms of local social and ecological conditions to consideration of their position in regional, national, and international structures; and, second, a shift from classification of local forms in typological schema, either synchronic or evolutionary, to understanding in terms of processes of change which are to some degree indeterminate.

Taking the first issue, the increasing use of terms like “household” and “community” constitutes a relatively new departure. They are classic analytical concepts in the study of peasant societies and carry with them the implications of a local social structure and tradition of life within a wider stratified political and economic system under a state form of government.

The straightforward logic of experience and the long route along the highways and byways of ethnography and theory have brought me to the same point: a conviction that in Africa in the centuries before its conquest social and cultural life was far more inventive from day to day than we can now easily imagine, steeped as old intellectual frameworks are in the equation between non-literacy and a repetitive “tradition,” and framed as our own social life has been by the organized repositories, routinized access and incremental growth patterns that ensure order and longevity to our own legacies of knowledge. Alongside the kinship, kingship and cult of classic social organizational analysis, attentive reading of African sources suggests another and different social project: the creation of variety amongst people in their skills and intellectual reach, not only reproducing a finite set of known roles and functions with respect to a “system of thought” but also endorsing a constant and volatile engagement on its boundless frontiers.

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.

Marginal Gains (2204) has been described as a surprising and bold book. Since the articles in this collection, which take one or other of its arguments as points of departure, share certain similar qualities, they can be treated as a collective effort initiating new debate with non-African economic research and thinking. This article reviews the argument of the book, highlights the concept and phenomenon of ordinal ranking in both the book and the articles, and then uses the findings to begin an appreciative critique of the ideas of Michel Callon. Although Callon's approach intersects with that of Marginal Gains in many ways, the scalar ranking of people, and the use of rank to exclude and divert, finds more prominence in the book's approach, which also has more relevance for Europe than economists seem to have acknowledged so far. The article ends with a new instance of ordinal ranking, from Cameroon.

Cities as elusive, invisible, yet to come. ‘[T]he city is no-man's land’ (Grace Khunou, p. 240 in Mbembe and Nuttall). ‘Lagos is no man's land’ (heard in Lagos by the present writer, August 2010). A picture of a strangely empty and disrupted man-made landscape (William Kentridge, pp. 349–350 in Mbembe and Nuttall), balanced by a dense but also personless urban scene (by the same author, pp. 35–6 in the same text). … The slippage between conventional social scientific terms of runaway urbanization, the teeming human vitality of African cities, and the elusiveness of the titles, sayings and images of these three books, opens up the rich vein for research and writing into which these authors work their ways. Johannesburg. Kinshasa. Pikine (Dakar). Winterveld (a South African urban area outside Pretoria). Douala. Jeddah. The books reviewed here are based on detailed field research in six particular cities. They all juxtapose the categories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘modernity’ to the category of ‘Africa’, all positing the anomaly this move may represent in the categorical social scientific mind. The subtitles immediately indicate a different starting point from the analytics of population, geography and governance. With an approach through ‘tales’ (De Boeck and Plissart) and ‘reading the city’ (Mbembe and Nuttall), the authors indicate an alternative intellectual reach. They start from visual imagery, the language arts and the social mediations through which the lives lived in urban ‘modern’ Africa are expressed, communicated, understood, configured and conserved. Their aims evoked in my mind the modern art – rather than the analytics – of other cities. So here we have ‘circulation’ and vehicles as symbols and sounds without too much attention to traffic (the Lagos ‘go slow’; the accidents); ‘bodies’ without much attention to food or toilet needs or aging; ‘authority’ evaded or permeating rather than personified in mayors, town councils and multitudes of other officials and employees. In the ether of the invisible, what circulates are symbols and expressions; what emanates from bodies is sexual tension, aesthetic sensibility and physical vulnerability (‘bodies in danger’, De Boeck and Plissart, p. 117); what bears down oppressively is constraint and neglect of all kinds. In brief, what strikes the perceptive mind is precisely what bursts out of the conventional forms and has not yet taken a newly conventionalized shape. Through this orientation, all three books bring the humanities and artistic sensibilities to the question of the spirits, souls, inspirations, dangers, images and memories that inhabit the crowded spaces between buildings and people, insects and people, people and people.

This paper is an empirical study of the cultural context and historical development of the division of labour by sex in the farming systems of two peoples of the West African cocoa belt: the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and the Beti of South-Central Cameroun. It examines the way in which cocoa as an export crop has been integrated into two different indigenous economies, one in which farming was predominantly a set of tasks for males in the pre-cocoa era, and the other in which farming was women's work.

African modernity surely comprises less pervasive outright violence than is suggested by popular representations ‐ the ‘New Barbarism’, as Paul Richards (1996) calls it. But by now it surely comprises more violent disjunctures than scholars like me, focusing on emergent and continuous change, have addressed. Uncertainty as a recurrent condition of the longue durée in productive and commercial life is rather different to theorize than violent ruptures in the very existence of collectivities or in people's capacity to imagine the future. It is one thing to link conditions to social organization, ecological knowledge and demographic regime (Iliffe 1995; Lesthaeghe 1989), for example to see the connection between the chronic historical vulnerability of the era of the slave trade and the political structures of the time (Ekeh 1990). It is really another to foreground each disruptive event in slow motion, one at a time, and ask how people created particular futures from particular pasts and presents. This shift of focus from chronic conditions to specific intrusions opens up in a new way the space between event history and the longue durée. It even puts the whole idea of the longue durée into temporary abeyance. Are long‐term processes better thought of as created by cumulative discrete and different memories and projections, perceptions and persuasions, rather than by responses straight out of the cultural/institutional repertoire? Or, at the very least, does the relationship of event to process need to be traced out explicitly?

The following articles are all authored by scholars who started out their research careers on African economies in the latter half of the 1990s. They had an unusual opportunity. The world they were studying posed new logistical challenges to researchers, while the realities they eventually came to know also challenged the theoretical co-ordinates with which they were familiar. Their work reflects these dilemmas; it represents a new engagement with the empirical situation and a corresponding new breadth of allusion to theory and to work from the past.

In an era when innovation in money and its various market dynamics is advancing at unprecedented speed, Western heroic optimism about the potentials that are unleashed by the logics of the world monetary system is distinctly tinged with fear: of massive outstanding deficits, whirlwind destruction of smaller economies, a roller-coaster rise on Wall Street, and sheer inappositeness to large numbers of development challenges. Old financial institutions have to create new forms of credit to address, for example, the transformation of the former socialist economies or the restoration of war-torn societies and polities. The enormous power of formal finance and its equally enormous limitations, and the contentious set of regulatory frameworks that surround both, should stimulate a new round of scholarship about what used to be termed ‘finance capital’ in modern social history.

La difficulté à appliquer le concept de diversité à la recherche empirique pourrait être atténuée par une spécificité empirique. En l'appliquant à la question particulière de savoir comment les modèles de cultures agricoles, dans une communauté au sein de l'arrière-pays de l'Ibadan, une région qui procure des vivres, ont changé dans les vingt années qui ont connues une plus grande orientation vers le marché, on peut à la fois illuminer les dynamiques agricoles et aussi exposer le concept de diversité à une critique.

Cette étude de cas au Nigéria indique que les agriculteurs individuels ont développé des modèles de production spécialisés plus balancés, mais tout en étant différent des uns des autres, si bien que la communauté entière a retenu un profile de diversité similaire à celui du passé. Les concepts et pratiques des Yoruba en ce qui concerne les individus et la diversité sociale devraient être au coeur d'une compréhension de ces modèles de changements.

Christopher Waterman quotes a Yoruba popular performer: “Our tradition is a very modern tradition.” The Study of Africa in the U.S. is a very modern tradition in several senses. In the great scale of things, it is very recent. During the presentation of a National Academy of Sciences project on The Population Dynamics of Sub-Saharan Africa last year, it was pointed out that only ten years ago the Academy had postponed work on this topic simply because the data were judged insufficient for a scientific synthesis. And it is a modern tradition in the sense of lively expansion and mutation. Most notably, over those same ten years or so the participants in both academic and non-academic study, and in popular culture, have become far more diverse.