In 1976, Sokoto became the capital of the newly created Sokoto State, one of nineteen comprising Federal Nigeria. This caliphal city and former colonial provincial town subsequently experienced an exponential growth of population from some 80,000 to around 200,000 by 1980. The city expanded physically into the surrounding countryside and new buildings and infrastructures absorbed large areas of farmland, and encircled several villages. This urban advance into the countryside was exacerbated by the fact that it took place within a densely populated area of annual upland cultivation, dissected by tracts of dry-season irrigated floodland. Not surprisingly, access and rights to farmland have become highly charged and sensitive issues. The peripheries and hinterlands of many Nigerian towns have become arenas of conflict and change, where state expropriation and private accumulation have dispossessed and impoverished rural people. The state has taken over land for institutional use or agricultural development projects, while urban and rural capital have accumulated land for speculative building on the edges of cities and for farming within the surrounding countryside. The increased numbers of landless and, more important, the land-poor constitute new kinds and degrees of rural poverty.

In the popular consciousness, South African poverty is a phenomenon of the homeland or urban township and ghetto, more rarely of rural areas in the core economy. Such a perspective is determined largely by the higher visibility of the poor in the former localities in the recent past, for reasons of geography and political sensitivity. This study aimed to redress the balance, starting from two broad premises: first, that the technical and organisational changes in production and the growth of surplus labour observable in Hanover on a microscale are representative of secular trends in commercialised agriculture in the Karoo region as a whole; and, second, that the causes of poverty generation in that region cannot be satisfactorily examined in isolation from the wider political and economic processes within which they are embedded.

The proliferation and overlapping of spiritual beings is a feature of many religions. Saints in popular Catholicism and Vishnu's avatāras in Hinduism represent, in different ways, the possibility of spiritual beings that are simultaneously one and many, clusters or series of manifestations whose inner relationships are often not fully explained. Yoruba òrìṣà are in good company. However, the way in which multiple aspects of gods are made and maintained clearly varies from one religious repertoire to another. I suggest that it is important to look at the means or medium by which fractions of gods are established, in order to understand how the relationships between them are conceived. Yoruba òrìṣà can scarcely be apprehended without taking into account the specific textuality of the oral genres through which they are created, maintained and communicated with.

The Annaba economy today is Algerian. It is run entirely by Algerians except for the steel mill outside of town. The goods provided are tailored to its mostly Algerian customers (jillabas, harissa, henna), plus selected Western goods made in Algeria or imported from Europe (plastic buckets and gas bottles, Peugeot sedans for those with the money and connections, sitcoms for the few with TVs, commercial films for everyone). Goods are dispensed primarily in a modern suq, or bazaar, although the government also runs a supermarket and department store. French and other Europeans are physically absent from Annaba today for the most part, but Western economic influences persist, like only partly covered-over layers of historical sediment laid down orignally in the colonial period.

The system of divination called Ifa is among the most elaborate of African systems of divination and occupies a unique position in what is often called ‘Yoruba traditional religion’. That it is inappropriate simply to regard it as part of Yoruba traditional religion indicates the nature of our problem. For its saliency in Yoruba religion, as that has been conceived by commentators both Yoruba and non-Yoruba since the early nineteenth century, has precisely been because of its capacity to ‘ride’ social change, to detach itself from much of what Muslims and Christians call paganism, and to impose itself on the respectful attention of the modern educated.

This article is about the unseen world of war—the unrecorded consequences for children of large-scale horror. There are two parts to it. The first is on the need for healing: it is an account of children's suffering during Zimbabwe's War of Liberation and their part in the fight for freedom. The second describes the means for healing: it examines how traditional healers (n'anga) provided opportunities through ritual for reconciliation and the soothing of individual trauma.

Land is widely regarded as central to the politics of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Land was, ostensibly, the core issue over which the liberation struggle was waged. On the successful redistribution of land, in Shamuyarira's (1984: 8) view, will depend ‘the future reputation and credibility of the new socio-economic and political order among the Zimbabwean masses’. Land, then, is ‘vital’ (ibid.) to both leaders and led in Zimbabwe.

African religious history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been dominated by the rapid growth of Islam and Christianity. This has been especially true of the Senegambia region of West Africa, which has witnessed the adoption of Islam by approximately 80 per cent of the region's populace and the development of a small, but influential Christian minority. Among the Diola of the Casamance region of Senegal, Islam and Christianity have both enjoyed rapid growth. The approximately half million Diola, however, include the largest number of adherents of their traditional religion within the Senegambian region. They are sedentary rice farmers and are usually described as acephalous peoples. While Muslims and Christians have been in contact with the Diola since the fifteenth century there were few conversions during the pre-colonial era (Baum, 1986). During the colonial era Islam became the dominant religion among the Diola on the north shore of the Casamance river, and Christianity also attracted a considerable following (Mark, 1985). Among the south shore communities neither Islam nor Christianity became important until after the Second World War. Seeing the increased momentum of recent years, many observers are confident that the south shore Diola will follow the northern example and convert to Islam or Christianity. Louis Vincent Thomas, the doyen of Diola ethnographers, described Diola traditional religion as ‘a false remedy to a very real crisis; fetishism will become a temporary response that will be quickly swept away by another attempt, even larger and undoubtedly more profound: Islam and perhaps we could add, Christianity’ (Thomas, 1967: 225; translations are my own, unless otherwise stated).

This article addresses the changing nature of farm work in a peasant society in The Gambia, West Africa. The practice of farm labour has been transformed in the most palpable way by the advent of radically new technical and social relations of production associated with mechanised double-cropping of irrigated rice. Technical change, agricultural intensification and a new labour process are, however, all built upon the bedrock of household production, since peasant growers are socially integrated into the new scheme as contract farmers, specifically as contracted sharecroppers. Family labour continues to be the dominant social form in which labour power is mobilised, but under conditions directly determined and shaped by the contractors, namely project management. Irrigated double-cropping of rice production is particularly labour-demanding and makes expanded claims on customary structures of domestic labour recruitment. These new economic practices subject the culturally dominant representations of work, labour obligations and property rights—the constituents of custom and tradition— to the test of social practice. In our examination of Mandinka rice growers we suggest, following T. J. Clark, that ‘society is a battlefield of representations on which the limits and coherence of any given set are being fought for and regularly spoilt’ (Clark, 1984: 6). The introduction of a new production regime has converted rural Mandinka society into a contested social terrain; the primary struggle is a contest over gender and the conjugal contract in which property, or more accurately constellations of property rights, is at stake. By seeing economic life as, among other things, a realm of representations, we argue that the struggles over meaning and the manufacture of symbolic and material dissent in central Gambia—a proliferation of intrahousehold conflicts, juridical battles over divorce in the local courts, renegotiations of the conjugal contract—are the idioms of what Burawoy (1985) calls production politics.

This article examines well-known facts about Asante trade in the nineteenth century with a view to defining the contribution of trade to accumulation. The question of accumulation becomes significant when considered in relation to recent directions in Asante economic, social and political history. These have featured the role of the precolonial Asante state in the development of its economy (Wilks, 1967; 1975; McCaskie, 1980), stratification (Wilks, 1975; McCaskie, 1980; 1983; 1986; Arhin, 1983a; 1983b; 1986a), and what may be called the paradox of colonial rule, that it liberalised accumulative forces in order to enhance its exploitative opportunities (Arhin, 1974; 1975).

RENAMO is a shadowy movement and ill-understood, save for its well-established genesis as a military artefact of the Rhodesians, then its transition in 1980 to South African patronage. Lacking all the features we have come to associate with successful insurgencies in Africa, such as a charismatic leadership or easily identifiable ideology, it has failed to develop a political identity commensurate with its military strength. It has no clearly defined regional base, relies on widespread forced recruitment, and behaves with notorious brutality towards the civilian population. Yet it operates throughout the length and breadth of Mozambique, and holds the state in virtual paralysis. Since it lacks rear bases and therefore depends upon local provisioning, it must be able to obtain compliance over large areas of rural Mozambique. That also implies effective organisation.

The century-old Lebanese presence in West Africa has been the subject of mixed reaction from the host societies. While many Africans, including political leaders, have defended this presence in the belief that it has been very beneficial for their countries, others have strongly criticised it, arguing that the Lebanese have blocked the way to Africans in trade, repatriated their capital and used many kinds of malpractices in their trading activities. In Senegal, which is the subject of this article, French small and medium traders opposed the presence of the Lebanese during the colonial period because the latter became their main competitors. The groundnut trade was the country's main economic activity and there was a great demand for this product in Europe. The major European companies were keen to increase exports and, in this, they relied on the Lebanese who, in the first decades of this century, acted as middlemen.

The Mau Mau movement used a campaign of ritualised oath-taking to gain the support and co-operation of the Gikuyu masses. The oaths remain a continuing source of controversy in the literature on Mau Mau, little of which is directly anthropological. This article offers a tentative resolution to that controversy through an anthropological analysis of Mau Mau oathing rituals in the light of contemporary theories on the relation of ritual to ideology. I argue that the oathing rituals are to be understood as part of the ideological apparatus of the movement, along with rallies and songs. The effectiveness of the oathing rituals lies not solely in their symbolic reference to 'traditional practice' as Buijtenhuijs (1982: 87) has suggested, nor in some inherent mystifying property of ritual communication (Bloch, 1974: 67–76). Although a continuity between the oathing rituals and those associated with the legitimation of traditional authority is strikingly apparent, the success of the former as a medium for political recruitment is to be explained in its relation to ideology, and in the essential ambiguity of the central tenets of that ideology—‘land’ and ‘freedom’.

The Tarok of Plateau State in Northern Nigeria, or Yergam as they are better known, may have a unique kinship system.

Their kinship institutions, and especially their kyanship, that is, the positions and roles of the mother's mother's brother (MMB) and mother's brother (MB), raise fundamental questions about the nature of filiation and descent. To indicate the problem we first briefly describe Tarok forms of kinship and marriage and then concentrate on its distinctive feature, namely, the institution of kyanship. In closing we suggest how the system probably emerged and discuss its implications.

In recent decades a scripturalist, anti-Sufi interpretation of Islam has made steady gains in several parts of sub-Saharan Africa. For non-reformers who are confronted with this phenomenon it is easy to consider all active reformers as emerging from the same mould, as turning for inspiration and guidance to the same religious sources, differing only in the intensity of their fervour or commitment. The task of a more scholarly approach to ‘puritan’ Islamic reform, however, is to consider how it is integrated into different social contexts, how it can be used to change or reinforce the social arrangements and institutions of particular groups. This is the general aim of the present article, which considers the social background of factionalism in the emergence of a reform movement among the Songhay of Gao.

Few dispute the proposition that the Second World War marked the beginning of the end of colonialism in Africa. The thesis developed by Hodgkin (1956), Crowder (1968, 1978) and Schachter-Morgenthau (1964)—that coalitions of African veterans, disgruntled planters, peasants and chiefs gave rise to anti-colonialist, nationalist political movements in the immediate post-war era—has not been seriously challenged. The general acceptance of this view has resulted in a neglect of the history of the colonies during the war years themselves. While there is now a growing interest in this subject, most studies of the independence movements begin with the emergence, in 1946, of recognisable political parties in British and French Africa. They take as starting points such visible events as the Brazzaville Conference, the 1946 French Constitution, the launching of the Convention Peoples Party in Ghana, or the founding of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africaine (RDA) in Bamako. What is needed now are thorough case studies of the specific policies and practices of the imperial powers during the Second World War and a consideration of the extent to which they acted as internal catalysts in the struggle for independence. This article, which is offered as a contribution to that end, looks at one chapter in the war experience of the Cote d'Ivoire.

In 1938 an African building a house in the city of Ife, the cultural capital of the Yorubas and the mythical cradle of Yoruba civilisation, came upon an extraordinary cache of ancient Nigerian bronzes. In all, at least fifteen bronzes were uncovered in 1938 in a compound only 100 yards from the palace of the Oni of Ife. These bronzes were to prove of great historical and artistic significance. Until that time only two other bronzes had been unearthed in the Yoruba area, and one of those had disappeared, leaving Nigeria only a single original and a replica. In the disposition of the priceless new finds there ensued a tale of intrigue, prevarication, outraged nationalism, and narrow-minded ethnocentricism that drew into its maelstrom the British colonial government of Nigeria, the US Consulate in Lagos, and the USA's Department of State. Although the Ife bronzes, which today reside in a handsome if small museum in the city of Ife, are not so well known as, for example, the Elgin marbles or certain other antiquities taken from the Third World, the controversy surrounding their removal from Nigeria and their eventual return was filled with the same emotion and employed the same arguments heard today over the rightful location of national cultural treasures. The Nigerian dispute is made all the more poignant in that one of the major protagonists was not a money-seeking antiquities dealer, but a young American anthropologist destined to be one of the most astute and sympathetic interpreters of Yoruba culture.

In studies of change in indigenous political organisations under the impact of colonial administration, the precolonial situation in Africa is often depicted as essentially static. Anthropologists tend to project a relatively ‘uninfluenced’ state of affairs from the early colonial period into the past. Change seems to occur under European influence. This picture is the result less of the conviction of the authors that conditions were static than of a lack of information on precolonial development. This is especially true for ‘acephalous’ societies; centralised societies often possess detailed traditions concerning their institutional history. In the following case, of the political development of a village in the Nigerian Middle Belt, it has been possible to record precolonial changes of organisation in an acephalous society.