Iron smelting was still widespread in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century and was recorded in a number of areas by missionaries, administrators, travellers and the like. A wide variety of technical procedures and associated magic was observed in the process. The quality of these early accounts varies depending on the technical expertise of the observers and their interest in (or bias against) the ritual aspects. Reviews of the early literature, both technical and ritual, have been provided by Cline (1937) and others and no attempt in this direction will be made here. It will suffice to say that magic associated with smelting appears to be universal in sub-Saharan Africa, as are certain themes. These include the following:

1. For iron smelting to be successful, the smelters must be technically expert and a variety of supernatural forces must be propitiated. This propitiation takes the form of ceremonies and ritual and involves the application of special materials or medicines. The combination of ritual and medicines is referred to here as magic.

2. The iron smelters, especially the leaders, command the knowledge to carry out both the technical and magical components of smelting. This makes them more than ordinary craftsmen and gives them special status, usually high; alternatively they may be outcasts.

3. Sexual symbolism and taboos accompany smelting, often expressed through the exclusion of women from smelting in progress, compulsory celibacy for the smelters, or female anthropomorphic details added to smelting furnaces.

Law, particularly the law of property, may indeed be an instrument of the ruling class for the reproduction of any given social and economic formation, but few anthropologists have pursued this line of argument. Instead of examining how law was actually generated within particular political and economic contexts, anthropologists concerned with property law in colonial Africa tended to take for granted its existence at a particular point in time, and either to emphasise the institutional duality of colonial and indigenous assumptions and procedures concerning property or to stress the universal elements of legal behaviour despite these institutional differences.

There is a growing body of research that addresses issues of income distribution and the mechanisms of inequality in rural farming communities in Africa (see, for example, Hill, 1972; Matlon, 1981; Kitching, 1980; Sutter, 1981; Watts, 1983). Unfortunately a recognition of the importance of economic inequality in African societies dependent on animal husbandry has lagged behind. Much of the research on pastoral systems of production of the past several decades has been carried out by anthropologists whose work, to the extent that it addresses issues of economic heterogeneity at all, has emphasised the types of ‘levelling’ and ‘adaptive’ mechanisms common to pastoral systems. Recurrent issues of focus have been the ideology of equality which tends to predominate in pastoral societies, the limited development of political hierarchies, the limitations on herd size imposed by family labour and ecology, the wide-spread transfer of assets at critical moments in the life cycle, and the apparent similarities in consumption levels of different households (see, for example, Barth, 1961; Goldschmidt, 1971; Dahl, 1979a; Schneider, 1979).

Dans le très long et très riche débat sur la nature profonde de la condition swahili, tout ne semble pas avoir été dit. Pour d'obscures ou inavouables raisons, les politistes ont esquivé le problème alors même que les phénomenes d'identité collective, d'idéologie et de relations de pouvoir sont au cœur de leurs analyses. Pourtant, la question de la ‘swahilité’ constitue l'occasion idéale pour réveiller une attention assoupie par une tradition étatique lénifiante.

This article examines the role of spirit possession cults in the Swahili coastal area of Kenya and Tanzania, based on three years (1982–85) of doctoral dissertation research in seven field sites (including the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba). It provides a reassessment of the conventional theoretical viewpoint that such cults are peripheral to the wider society's value and socio-cultural structure, asserting that in this case they are, in fact, not only central to it but actually one of its most illuminating expressions.