bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Violence and the Crisis of Conciliation: Suri, Dizi and the State in South-West Ethiopia
Authors: Abbink J.
Published: July 2008

This article examines the social and political background of escalating violence between ethnic groups in south‐western Ethiopia who until recently had customary and ritually sanctioned ways of resolving conflict. It highlights the impact of the emerging state hegemony in a local setting on ethnic groups not yet involved in the global political economy. The account also indicates the changing arenas of ‘ethnic’ self‐definition and economic opportunity for local groups in post‐1991 Ethiopia. As the report of a big reconciliation meeting held between the government and the groups involved (and discussed here) makes clear, in the efforts of state agents to mediate emerging conflicts in conditions of increasing resource scarcity and identity struggle, the use of customary mediation mechanisms and their cultural symbolism was rhetorically recognised. But at the same time efficient mediation was structurally impeded by the very nature of the exercise of authority by the agents of the state and by their incapacity to implement practical measures to establish local peace. This failure to reconstitute a new political arena of conflict resolution was matched by the inability of the (representatives of the) ethnic groups concerned to redefine their relationship in a constructive and culturally acceptable manner.
Where Have All the Young Men Gone? Evidences and Explanations of Changing Age–Sex Ratios in Kampala
Authors: Wallman Sandra , Pons Valdo
Published: July 2008

In the second half of the twentieth century the population of Kampala grew substantially and the long-remarked surplus of men over women began to level out. These general trends are equally evident in other African cities, but important differences show up when the balance of age cohorts within the male and female populations is considered. Thus in Kampala, along with population growth and a declining overall sex ratio, censuses show a growing excess of girls/young women over boys/young men. The article reviews these population data and two levels of (unenumerated) explanation for them. The first is extrapolated from Uganda's recent history; the second from observation and narrative in one densely populated parish. The argument is that changes in the age–sex ratio follow from change in the map of work options in Kampala. The disappearance of young males stems from the collapse of the formal economy, once the employer of men, and the developments in the informal economy which favour young women. This conclusion is supported by census data from Nairobi, where the formal employment structure remains relatively buoyant, and the comparable age–sex ratios are less extreme. The health policy relevance of the Kampala trend is underlined by official calculations of increasing HIV/AIDS incidence among teenage women. As long as sex work remains dominant among their options in the informal economy, one effect of their economic advantage is extra vulnerability to fatal disease.
The Chadian Tubu: Contemporary Nomads Who Conquered a State
Authors: Buijtenhuijs Robert
Published: July 2008

In the literature on pastoralist groups and the state, nomads are usually seen as increasingly marginalised today, whereas in the past nomads have often been described as ‘state builders’. But one interesting, if atypical, case has been overlooked: how a contemporary group of nomads, though they did not create a state, nonetheless came to conquer and dominate an existing one. The article starts by describing how the Tubu of Chad established dominance over the central government in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An evaluation is then made of the consequences this take-over of the Chadian state had for Tubu society. Admittedly the date for this evaluation are rather cursory and tentative, but it is possible to identify certain tendencies.
Markets in Africa in a New Era
Authors: Guyer Jane I. , Hansen Karen Tranberg
Published: July 2008

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.
Music Videos and the Effeminate Vices of Urban Culture in Mali
Authors: Schulz Dorothea E.
Published: July 2008

This article focuses on a number of highly successful female pop singers in Mali whose video music clips and music shows make up a major share of urban people's daily broadcast consumption. The article explores the reasons for the astonishing success of the singers by locating the consumption and interpretation of their songs in Malian popular and scholarly discourses on cultural authenticity and moral decline. Some Malian scholars emphasise that women's pop songs reflect the corruption and mixing of traditional oral genres characterised by historical knowledge, textual complexity and regional specificity. Their criticism is echoed by a number of older people in town and countryside. It is reminiscent of a tendency among urban consumers to express their fascination with and fears of life in town in the icon of the seductive, dangerous and immoral town woman. To many women of the urban middle classes, in contrast, the pop singers embody a desirable solution of women's daily dilemma: a Malian morality dressed up in the fashionable outfit of a ‘modern’ urban woman. Middle-class women respond enthusiastically to this art form because it praises them for upholding ‘traditional’ values in the face of adversity while absolving them of complicity in undermining such values.
The ‘True Nzema’: A Layered Identity
Authors: Valsecchi Pierluigi
Published: July 2008

Nzema has been used historically as a multiple term to describe different but interrelated social, political and territorial realities. Failure to understand the historical context fully has led to persistent ambiguity in writings about the area, especially in anthropological studies. The tendency is to isolate ‘ethnic groups’ as precise categories in a broad context which in reality is covered by a pervasive network of continua. This article deals with the historical ‘mapping’ of ‘what it is to be Nzema’ and therefore puts forward a framework for analysing the question of identity in its actual formulation or, in other words, in relation to local ideological and political processes. Finally, it attempts to identify some of the registers which inform the question and some of the criteria for the use of each specific register by individuals and communities.
Communal Land Rights in Zimbabwe as State Sanction and Social Control: A Narrative
Authors: Mbiba Beacon
Published: July 2008

This article takes a historical approach to argue that communal lands in Zimbabwe are a construct inherited from colonial days (prior to 1980) which governments in post-colonial Zimbabwe have found convenient to maintain rather than dismantle. The construct is not only a convenient framework for the delivery of collective consumption goods but in turn it enables the government to subtly use communal lands as a framework for social control, especially in terms of urban management. The continued existence of communal land areas and land rights also sustains processes of social control at the household level. However, these are issues that will not receive attention in land debates as long as the larger problem of redistribution of large-scale commercial farms remains unresolved.
‘Voodoo’ on the Doorstep: Young Nigerian Prostitutes and Magic Policing in the Netherlands
Authors: van Dijk Rijk
Published: July 2008

This article deals with the moral panic that emerged in the Netherlands when it became publicly known that under-age Nigerian girls were being smuggled into the country to be put to ‘work’ in the sex industry. A massive police investigation not only found hundreds of cases but also uncovered the fact that certain unknown and occult rituals played a part in how traffickers, ‘madams’ and other sex bosses appeared to keep the girls locked in this exploitative system. Soon an unspecified notion of ‘voodoo’ came to dominate the entire police operation, the public image of what was happening to these girls, and the way in which the girls were treated within the Dutch judicial system and its care. The article deconstructs the moral panic and all the images of Africa and the occult which became so crucial to the way the Dutch state tried to deal with the situation. It sets this analysis in the context of an anthropology of globalisation and a cultural exploration of how issues of morality and identity are affected by what the Comaroffs have called the occult economies of late capitalist relations. It concludes that to a great extent the scale of the moral panic can be understood by pointing at the rigidity of the identity politics of the Dutch nation state in previous years. Its policies were meant to curb some of the effects of globalisation (such as illegal immigration from Africa) in order to preserve its integrity, but it now found them seriously undermined by something the policies were not designed to cope with.
‘The Arrow of God’: Pentecostalism, Inequality, and the Supernatural in South-Eastern Nigeria
Authors: Smith Daniel Jordan
Published: July 2008

In September 1996 the city of Owerri in south-eastern Nigeria erupted in riots over popular suspicion that the town'snouveaux richeswere responsible for a spate of ritual murders allegedly committed in the pursuit of ‘fast wealth’. In addition to destroying the properties of the purported perpetrators, the rioters burned several pentecostal churches. This article examines the place of religion in the Owerri crisis, particularly the central position of pentecostal Christianity in popular interpretations of the riots. While pentecostalism itself fuelled local interpretations that ‘fast wealth’ and inequality were the product of satanic rituals, popular rumours simultaneously accused some pentecostal churches of participating in the very occult practices that created instant prosperity and tremendous inequality. The analysis explores the complex and contradictory place of pentecostalism in the Owerri crisis, looking at the problematic relationship of pentecostalism to structures of inequality rooted in patron-clientism and focusing on the ways in which disparities in wealth and power in Nigeria are interpreted and negotiated through idioms of the supernatural.
Urban Agriculture in Mwanza, Tanzania
Authors: Flynn Karen Coen
Published: July 2008

Many people living in Mwanza, Tanzania, provision themselves through urban agriculture—the planting of crops and raising of animals in urban and peri-urban areas, as well as in the countryside. This article compares Mwanza's urban farmers with those in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ghana. Like Zimbabwe's urban agriculturalists, more and more of Mwanza's are not among the poorest of the poor. Much like Ghana's urban farmers, those in Mwanza are often middle and upper-class males with access to scarce land and inputs. Urban cultivators in Mwanza differ from those in Kenya and Zambia with regard to gender, socio-economic class and the factors motivating their farming activities. These findings suggest that even though socio-economic differentiation is on the increase in Tanzania it has not reached the levels of divergence found in Kenya and Zambia. Many of Mwanza's wealthier males continue to face enough job/income insecurity to choose to plant crops to support themselves and their household in lean times. They may also engage in urban agriculture because they are unable or unwilling to take advantage of more profitable investment opportunities outside the food market, or because they desire to spread risk across a number of different investments.
‘War is Good for Thieving!’ The Symbiosis of Crime and Warfare Among the Kuria of Tanzania
Authors: Fleisher Michael L.
Published: July 2008

Among the agro-pastoral Kuria people of East Africa, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya, many young men are engaged in an illicit, violent livestock trade in which cattle stolen in Tanzania are sold to Tanzanian or Kenyan buyers for cash. This raiding is inextricably bound up with the phenomenon of warfare between mutually antagonistic Kuria clans, which not only serves to legitimise raids on the enemy's cattle herds so long as the fighting rages but which also fosters and sustains an atmosphere of inter-clan enmity that lends support to cattle raiding, particularly on the herds of former adversaries, even after hostilities have ended. Clan warfare emerges as both a cause and an effect of raiding as well as serving as a training ground for novice raiders. On the basis of field research in the Tarime District lowlands, the article argues that although Kuria cattle raiding, oriented to the cash market, owes its existence to capitalist penetration and is driven by the rising demand for cattle, particularly in Kenya, it remains heavily dependent on inter-clan warfare, which has two main causes: animosity engendered by commercialised cattle raiding, and boundary adjustments initiated by the government, either for administrative reasons or, paradoxically, in an effort to resolve existing disputes over access to pasture, grazing and water.
Stronger than the Maxim Gun Law, Human Rights and British Colonial Hegemony in Nigeria
Authors: Ibhawoh Bonny
Published: July 2008

This article examines the tensions and contradictions in the use of law as an instrument of coercion to consolidate British control in Nigeria and the legitimising rhetoric of human rights and social justice employed within the context of the operation of the law. The article explores the effects of laws introduced mainly to foster British colonial hegemony against the background of the aspiration to guarantee social justice and forge a ‘modern’ regime of rights and liberties for native subjects in the colony. It probes the circumstances that made the rhetoric of rights and liberty imperative for both the colonial regime that employed it to legitimise empire and the African elites who appropriated it to strengthen their demands for representation and self-rule. The aim is not so much to show how the colonial state fell short of its own liberal agenda as to examine the appeal ofthat agenda and the conditions that made it so central to the colonial project.
‘The Daughter she will Eat Agousie in the World of the Spirits’ Witchcraft Confessions in Missionised Onitsha, Nigeria
Authors: Bastian Misty L.
Published: July 2008

This article deals with witchcraft, missionisation, domestic slavery and social life on the emerging colonial ‘frontier’ of Onitsha, Nigeria, during the last years of the nineteenth century. The analysis centres on the confession of an accused witch and former domestic slave in the Waterside area of the town. It uses the document as a springboard for a larger discussion of the intersecting lives of Africans and Europeans in this marginal location at a moment when social relations there were undergoing radical transformation. By addressing such a text, taken down verbatim at the time of the confession, the author argues, we can gain a privileged insight into women's unofficial (and even prohibited) religious practice as well as the everyday lives of persons—notably female domestic slaves—who ordinarily receive little notice in the African colonial record. From Okuwan's confession we also learn something about how the increasing flows of commodities and new forms of colonial authority along this mercantile border were changing (and possibly devaluing) African women's labour as well as their religious power.
Politicians of the Sacred Grove: Citizenship and Ethnicity in Southern Senegal
Authors: Jong Ferdinand de
Published: July 2008

This article examines the traditional initiation of the former Senegalese Minister of Agriculture. At the age of fifty-five the Catholic Minister was initiated into the secrets of the sacred grove and thus acquired the status of adult man. The article demonstrates that Jola ethnic discourse, in which male initiation has become an important symbol, forced the Minister to enter the grove. His initiation turned him into a full member of the Jola ethnic group and qualified him as a trustworhty man capable of representing the people. In the campaign of the Socialist Party internal elections the Minister's initiation nevertheless became a major issue. The electorate did not show unswerving loyalty to ‘their’ Minister and nominated a non-initiate. The electorate suddenly changed their standards of apt political representation. The article contributes to the contemporary debate on citizenship and primary patriotism by showing that the Senegalese easily shift their position from subject to citizen, and thus empower themselvesvis-à-viselusive politicians. It also shows that politicians penetrate Jola practices of secrecy and thereby further the Jola's integration into the national public sphere.
Lineage Organisation of the Tallensi Compound: The Social Logic of Domestic Space in Northern Ghana
Authors: Gabrilopoulos Nick , Mather Charle , Apentiik Caesar Roland
Published: July 2008

Houses frequently embody culturally specific principles of social organisation. In this article Tallensi compounds in the Upper East Region of Ghana are examined in terms of compound layout and the kinship relations of their occupants. By comparing the patrilineal descent patterns of occupants with the topological organisation of multi-courtyard compounds, it is proposed that there is a correlation between these two variables. Further multidimensional scaling analysis shows that proximity in kinship space is reflected in proximate living arrangements. For students of material culture, this investigation demonstrates that lineage solidarity and politics can be played out in architectural form on the micro-scale of the domestic scene. From the standpoint of ethnoarchaeology, the processes governing the social logic of compound design can also assist archaeologists in interpreting house features in the remains of similarly constituted settlements.
The Uniqueness of Nguni Mediumistic Divination in Southern Africa
Authors: Hammond-Tooke W. David
Published: July 2008

Mediumistic divination is unique to the Nguni, as all other Bantu-speakers in southern Africa used a fairly ‘objective’ divinatory system involving a set of four incised bone tablets, or an assortment of astragals, shells and other objects (or a combination of both). Also, unlike non-Nguni, Nguni diviners were predominantly women. They were called to the profession through a life-transforming, ancestor-sent illness (thwasa) characterised by psychological and physical symptoms. The article discusses the nature, and possible correlates, of these differences. It is argued that the form of Nguni divination is connected with three related aspects of Nguni social arrangements that distinguish them from other southern African Bantu-speakers, namely the presence of strong patricians, the conceptualisation of the ancestors as a transcendent, undifferentiated collectivity, and the marked subordination of women. In addition, there is evidence of both the borrowing of certain aspects of the San trance dance, as an appropriate expression of female tensions, and, especially among Cape Nguni, of the concept of divinatory animals. This San influence is much less evident among the Zulu. The importance of appreciating the essentially selective nature of cultural borrowing is emphasised.
The Resilience ofJuok:Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda
Authors: Mogensen Hanne O.
Published: July 2008

‘It all comes down tojuok’ is the recurrent answer to enquiries about suffering and misfortune among the Nilotic Jop'Adhola of eastern Uganda. Understanding what it means to ‘believe’ injuokrequires a theoretical approach that recognises culture as a battleground between conflicting voices. This article explores the multiple and often contradictory ways to talk about, practise and believe injuokand how the notion ofjuokintersects with Christianity and biomedicine in ever changing constellations.Juok, it is suggested, can be seen as an image of intersubjective experience that allows the anthropologist insight into ways in which people in Eastern Uganda engage with each other and with the ‘other world’.Juokis one of the things people use when trying to activate events and overcome obstacles in life. As such it reflects the resilience of people confronted with suffering.
Environment, Society and the State in Western Eritrea
Authors: Naty Alexander
Published: July 2008

This article examines the relationship between the environment, society and the state in the Gash–Setit region of western Eritrea. Through an analysis of the environmental narrative of the local communities and the state, it explores the factors that have contributed to the environmental crisis in the region. These factors include population resettlement, the agricultural development policy of the state, war, drought and the collapse of traditional management of the environment. The combined effects have created environmental stresses which have far-reaching implications for state–society and inter-community relations. The analysis draws on historical, cultural and political dimensions in seeking to understand relations between the environment, society and the state.
The Cognitive Rationality of Taboos on Production and Reproduction in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Gausset Quentin
Published: July 2008

All over sub-saharan Africa, menstruating women, pregnant women and sexual relations are seen as incompatible with productive activities (hunting, blacksmithing, cattle herding, agriculture, pottery, beer brewing, etc.). The article argues that there is a certain rationality or logic behind the prohibitions which is independent of the social contingencies found in the different societies, and which is linked with the fact that all these activities are metaphorically compared to human reproduction. The metaphors help us to understand mysterious and delicate biochemical processes, characterised by recurrent misfortune, but they also introduce a cognitive threat by creating similarity between things which are very different. The taboos then try to prevent the conjunction of the things metaphorically compared, in order to forestall the possibility of misfortune related to them.
Manjaco Rulers After a Revolution
Authors: Gable Eric
Published: July 2008

This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about Manjaco reveal about postcolonialist anthropology as it is currently being constructed? Evans-Pritchard drew a sharp distinction between the idealised ‘before’ and the all too unpleasantly real ‘after’ of the colonial encounter. In the Azande version of this dichotomy authority is ultimately intact and unquestioned on one side of the historic divide. On the other side authority is about to disappear, with colonialism's impositions being the catalyst of this disappearance. By contrast, Manjaco were more likely to revile than revere their kings, and they tended to treat this as an enduring fact rather than to historicise it. Manjaco were also bad subjects and citizens. Or so it has seemed to colonial administrators and revolutionaries. Are we to frame this pervasive cynicism about authority and order as a kind of degeneration—an extension of colonial-era malaise into the era of the postcolony? Or are we to take Manjaco attitudes at face value? The article suggests that, in posing such questions, an emerging postcolonialist anthropology is inevitably a reflection of our view of the capacity of people like the Manjaco to make society work in the postcolonial era.
Patriarchies, Prophets, and Procreation: Sources of Gender Practices in Three African Churches
Authors: Crumbley Deidre Helen
Published: July 2008

The Celestial Church of Christ, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of the Lord (Aladura) are indigenous churches, which share the selective blending of Christian and Yoruba religious traditions; however, their gender practices, specifically female access to decision-making roles, vary dramatically. The Celestial Church's prohibition against the ordination of women is associated with ritual impurity. Christ Apostolic excludes women from ordination, but without an explicit ideology of impurity. The Church of the Lord (Aladura) ordains women but prohibits them from the sanctuary when they are menstruating. Do these institutionalised constraints derive from colonial or pre-colonial gender practices? What other factors might contribute to these gender patterns? This paper argues that these gender practices derive from intersecting ambiguities in Western and African gender practices, which both empower and disempower women. The paper also assesses the interplay of doctrine and institutional history on gender dynamics. Finally, it explores the interaction of cultural legacy and socio-environmental pressures on the ritualisation of the female body in this African setting.
The Talk Goes Outside: Argument, Privacy and Power in Mambila Society Towards a Sociology of Embedded Praxis
Authors: Zeitlyn David
Published: July 2008

In this paper the sociological implications of loud argument are considered, by taking a case study from the Mambila in Cameroon. Meetings of rotating credit societies are non-traditional forums where power and status are in dispute. These meetings contrast with both domestic arguments and with disputes held in the Chief's court. Rotating credit society meetings usually include arguments but these are dismissed as being unimportant by local informants. They pose a challenge for anthropological analysis since they are such a regular but disregarded—and disparaged—occurrence. Raised voices increase the range of bystanders as witnesses, so to argue loudly is a very social act.
Lifetimes Intertwined: African Grandparents and Grandchildren
Authors: Whyte Susan R. , Alber Erdmute , Geissler P. Wenzel
Published: July 2008

In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and they share a present that in many countries is being radically affected by historical transformations such as urbanisation, impoverishment and the scourge of AIDS.
Grandparents as Foster-Parents: Transformations in Foster Relations Between Grandparents and Grandchildren in Northern Benin
Authors: Alber Erdmute
Published: July 2008

This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents—as foster-parents—take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to their fostered grandchildren. The practices of grandparental fosterage, as well as changes in them, need to be understood in the broader context of widespread fosterage among Baatombu, where the majority of children grow up not with their biological parents but with foster-parents. The gradual decline of old forms of fosterage is affecting foster practices between grandparents and grandchildren. The grandparents’ generation evaluate this decline negatively and fear that changing fosterage patterns may adversely affect their social security in old age.
Grandparents and Grandchildren in Kwahu, Ghana: the Performance of Respect
Authors: van der Geest Sjaak
Published: July 2008

This description of relations between grandparents and grandchildren in a rural Ghanaian community argues that the quality of these relations varies according to age and gender. Literature on African kinship has almost entirely focused on very young grandchildren. This article draws attention to changes that occur when those children grow into adolescents and adults. Grandchildren—both young and old—speak respectfully about their grandparents, but older people regret that their grandchildren do not come to them for advice once they have grown up. Older men seem more ‘neglected’ by their grandchildren than older women. The second argument is about performance: respect, affection and relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren are demonstrated in public even when their ‘contents’ have dwindled. The article is based on anthropological fieldwork over a period of almost ten years.
The Value of Grandchildren: Changing Relations Between Generations in Botswana
Authors: Ingstad Benedicte
Published: July 2008

This article is concerned with the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in changing Tswana society. It argues that, in order to understand this relationship and how this has been changing, we have to look at different sets of relationships separately. The relationships between grandfathers/grandmothers and grandsons/granddaughters have quite different qualities depending upon whether their sons/daughters are married or unmarried. Moreover, these qualities are influenced in different ways by changes taking place in society. The data are analysed using Charles Taylor's concept of moral space and discussed in terms of ideals of respect, meaning and dignity.
Children's Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda
Authors: Whyte Susan Reynolds , Whyte Michael A.
Published: July 2008

This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, ‘experience-distant’, view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Bunyole County, eastern Uganda. Household survey material collected over thirty years in one village shows an increase in the number of grandchildren being cared for, as expected in an era when parents are dying of AIDS. However, it also qualifies the hegemonic historical narrative of AIDS by showing that other factors have been and still are at work in influencing the patterns of caring for grandchildren. The second analytical perspective is that of the intersubjective time of shared biographies and common experience. The emphasis here is on the ‘experience-near’ qualities and practice of relatedness as they are lived and talked about in the lifeworlds of social actors. They are evident in the dyadic relations between grandparents and grandchildren and also in the ways that these relations are embedded in other connections to children and in-laws. When grandparents take on the care of a daughter's children, they are mindful of the past, present and future of her relation to her husband and his family. The concept of ‘intersubjective time’ points to the intertwining of the lives of three generations and provides a rich complement to the more abstract concern with developmental cycles and historical processes.
The Transfer of Trust: Ethnicities as Economic Institutions in the Livestock Trade in West and East Africa
Authors: van Ufford Paul Quarles , Zaal Fred
Published: July 2008

This article explores the role of ethnic identity in the framework of the livestock trade in West and East Africa. It argues that ethnic identity was used as an instrument to build trust relationships that were vital to the development of pre-colonial livestock trade networks. With the onset of colonial rule, alternative marketing channels developed, none of which proved to be capable of providing reliable and low transaction cost services to both livestock producer and consumer. Nevertheless, the ethnic trade monopolies were threatened by the advent of formal colonial marketing institutions and the progressive ‘opening up’ of the market. This situation remained basically unchanged during the post-colonial era and with recent livestock and meat trade liberalisations. The evidence from Benin and Kenya demonstrates, however, that ethnic identity continues to determine the organisation of the livestock trade, albeit in a different way. The transfer of trust remains crucial to minimise transaction costs in a market that is characterised by a mobile commodity, long distances, and delayed payment in the absence of adequate financial institutions. In addition, it is argued that the specificity of the market environment equally facilitates the use of ethnicity for commercial purposes such as the delimitation of market niches.
The Internal Dynamics of Ethnicity: Clan Names, Origins and Castes in Southern Zimbabwe
Authors: Lindgren Björn
Published: July 2008

Since the late 1960s, researchers have primarily regarded ethnicity as the result of increasing international relations, and thus often as a comparative phenomenon. Although this research has been immensely important for its critique of essentialist notions of ethnicity, analyses of the historically formed specificity of ethnicity have been somewhat neglected. In this article, using an example from Zimbabwe, the author highlights the internal dynamics of ethnicity. The article shows how people in southern Zimbabwe use various clan names, origins, and ‘castes’ in a practice of naming, and how this practice breaks the category Ndebele into parts. The author argues that instead of studying ethnic categories as unbreakable wholes, focusing on smaller units of analysis gives a more complex picture of ethnicity. This view challenges some more or less established truths on ethnicity deduced from comparative studies.
Marginalisation of the Waata Oromo Hunter–Gatherers of Kenya: Insider and Outsider Perspectives
Authors: Kassam Aneesa , Bashuna Ali Balla
Published: July 2008

This paper examines how the way of life of a little known group of hunter–gatherers, the Waata Oromo, was brought to an end through British colonial wildlife conservation laws and the creation of national parks in Kenya. Through this policy and that of the containment of ethnic groups to ‘tribal reserves’, the Waata lost their place in the regional economic system and suffered loss of cultural identity. It also meant that when Kenya gained independence, the Waata were not recognised as a distinct entity with rights to their own political representation. Instead, they became appendages of the dominant pastoral groups with which they had been associated. They were thus doubly marginalised, in both economic and political terms. The paper describes how this situation has led some Waata in northern Kenya to claim separate ethnic status. It discusses the problem from the point of view of a Waata social activist and of an anthropologist. These two perspectives raise further issues for the etic/emic debate in anthropology.
In-Migrants and Exclusion in East African Rangelands: Access, Tenure and Conflict
Authors: Homewood Katherine , Coast Ernestina , Thompson Michael
Published: July 2008

East African rangelands have a long history of population mobility linked to competition over key resources, negotiated access, and outright conflict. Both in the literature and in local discourse, in‐migration is presented as leading to increased competition, driving poverty and social exclusion on the one hand, and conflict and violence on the other. Current analyses in developing countries identify economic differences, ethnic fault lines, ecological stresses and a breakdown in state provision of human and constitutional rights as factors in driving conflict. The present paper explores this interaction of in‐migration and conflict with respect to Kenyan and Tanzanian pastoralist areas and populations. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, patterns of resource access and control in Kenya and Tanzania Maasailand are explored in terms of the ways land and livestock are associated with migration status, ethnicity and wealth or political class. Contrasts and similarities between the two national contexts are used to develop a better understanding of the ways these factors operate under different systems of tenure and access. The conclusion briefly considers implications of these patterns, their potential for exacerbating poverty, and policies for minimising social exclusion and conflict in East African rangelands.
Intercultural Creativity in Joshua Uzoigwe's Music
Authors: Sadoh Godwin
Published: July 2008

This essay presents Joshua Uzoigwe as a Nigerian intercultural composer. A short biography of the composer shows the influence of two cultur—Nigerian (Igbo/Yoruba) and European—on his creative outputs. Uzoigwe's experience in the two cultures has enabled him to compose music which is indisputably a synthesis of Nigerian and European musical idioms. His works are classified into five categories, while the creative style exhibits purely original compositions and works in which Nigerian musical elements are directly utilised. A discussion of Uzoigwe's music includes elements of tonal organisation, elements of dance, elements of musical conception and instrumentation. The issue of bi-culturalism, national identity and the search for a Nigerian audience are some of the problems Uzoigwe attempts to solve in his compositions.
In the Belly of History: Memory, Forgetting, and the Hazards of Reproduction
Authors: Straight Bilinda
Published: July 2008

This paper examines the intertwined issues of memory and forgetting, focusing particularly on the question of precisely how, and by what social mechanisms, forgetting is accomplished. I discuss how collective and individual forms of forgetting are central to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, commenting that the habitus is a living paradox, foreclosing (unimagined perhaps because unimaginable) possibilities and opening others only when moments of improvised reflection intervene. Moreover, the systems of the habitus enact a forgetting of the strange, the marginal, the in-between, and even the singular and the autobiographical. I explore these issues through the juxtaposition of formalized, collective Samburu (Kenyan pastoralists) memory forms and the illicit sexual practices that underworld them.
Carrefour de la Joie: Popular Deconstruction of the African Postcolonial Public Sphere
Authors: Ndjio Basile
Published: July 2008

African postcolonial rulers have made of the public sphere a space where through the production of violence and coercion they attempt to bring their subjects' bodies under an endless process of tight discipline, subordination and servitude.Moreover, they havemanaged to set up a politically structured sphere that not only restricts citizens' freedom of movement, speech and assembly, but also rationalizes their way of standing, speaking and walking. But the governmental claim to exercise full control over the public sphere is incessantly challenged by popular practices of insubordination and impoliteness. This paper which focuses on thecarrefour de la joie(‘space for pleasure’) in Cameroon demonstrates how through ‘immoral’ and ‘indecent’ behaviour such as drunkenness, debauchery and indiscipline, Cameroonian subjects have been striving not only to evade the suffocating restrictions that the ferocious Cameroon People's Democractic Movement (CPDM) regime imposes on their rights, but also to formulate a sharp critique of this postcolonial power.
Fishing in Troubled Waters:DisquettesandThiofsin Dakar
Authors: Nyamnjoh Francis B.
Published: July 2008

This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signalling the intensified globalization of images of desire and opportunity, on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution, on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, language, sex, possession, loss, self-construction and self-corruption mutually shape each other. The paper seeks to represent the textures and intricacies that arise as the interdependencies among status, pleasure, appropriation, seduction and livelihood are worked out. It examines how these operations themselves elaborate a landscape of possibilities always on the verge of overflowing established sense and sentiments, yet somehow reined in, held, albeit in a highly tenuous relationship, to what is known and valued. The city makes itself urban, despite the nearly impossible economic and political conditions it faces, through a capacity to narrate these tales of fishing (as well as fishy stories), but also always trying to chase, to catch up with its capacity to proliferate words. Written against the background of the threat posed by HIV/AIDS in Africa, the paper also draws attention to the need for further scholarly research on the lethal cocktail of the twin globalization of consumerism and poverty in marginal sites of accumulation pregnant with contradictions and uncertainties such as Africa.
The Mortuary Sphere, Privilege and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Cameroon
Authors: Jua Nantang
Published: July 2008

Concern with new modes of accountability has foregrounded the politics of belonging, giving prominence to the concepts of autochthony and allogeny. In Cameroon, this has provoked a shift in policy-making from an earlier distinction between the disciplined citizen and the subject. Despite this distinction, all Cameroonians were considered rights-bearing citizens in the early post- Independence era and as such could settle anywhere in the country and not be discriminated against. This has been rolled back as a result of overcoding and the assigning of a code to a people and a people to a territory is now in vogue. This has far-reaching policy implications. It problematizes the question of identity and has engendered the argument that this can be resolved only at death – identity should be determined by where one is buried. The centrality of overcoding, especially its extension into the mortuary realm, has enabled confusion, both legal and symbolic, which is instrumentalized and manipulated by the state, traditional authorities and relatives of the dead to serve varying and varied interests. Death, though a private affair, has now been thrust into the public space. Focusing on the burial of four ‘big men’, this paper shows how these interests are negotiated and fought over. Since space, power and tradition impact on this process, outcomes cannot be determined a priori. It is this impossibility that has given renewed relevance to the question: ‘Whose corpse it anyway?’
Islam, Mondialisation Et Crise Identitaire Dans Le Royaume Bamoun, Cameroun
Authors: Mouiche Ibrahim
Published: July 2008

This article concerns the effects of globalization on Islam in the Bamum kingdom, Cameroon. Since its introduction into the kingdom at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islam has been closely intertwined with ethnicity and the local political system has been consensual. Politically, Bamum royalty – as the secular arm of central power – has had the unconditional support of Islam. For a long period, ‘Bamum Islam’, with its origins in the Tijaniyatariqa, withdrew in on itself, unlike other parts of Africa where sufism is dominant. But since the start of the 1990s, both political liberalization and Isalmic modernity have had their effects in Bamum through what is called in Foumban the ‘Wahhabite’ infiltration, namely, all those who have studied in Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The politico-religious foundation on which were based both the legitimacy of the royal household and the unity of the Bamum people has been undermined and disabled, provoking a crisis of identity. This crisis is evidenced, on the one hand, by the politicization of the Tijaniya on behalf of one opposition party, reforms and the destabilization of the dominant position of the Tijaniya, and, on the other hand, by a Tijaniya insurrection, open defiance and the weakening of the position of the Sultan-King of Bamum.
‘La Crise’: Lexicon and Ethos of the Second Economy in Lubumbashi
Authors: Petit Pierre , Mutambwa Georges Mulumbwa
Published: July 2008

The second, or informal, economy developed later in Lubumbashi (DRC) than it had in Kinshasa. The Katanga metropolis, long protected from the process of informalization thanks to its large industrial complexes, suffered seriously from the crisis of the 1990s which led to the collapse of the mining industry and, more generally, of the whole salaried sector. After a brief history of the city and of the state of play of the informal economy, this article attempts a detailed analysis of this economy's lexicon. Expressions newly created from Swahili, French and other languages provide an excellent point of entry into the concrete practices of this sector, as well as the representations and morality on which such practices are based. Strongly associated with expressions of energy, cunning and conspiracy, the vocabulary emerging from the second economy bears witness to the appreciation of the ‘anti-hero’ and demonstrates the inception of a new moral economy in which the state and the powerful have become targets of legitimate predation based on the principle of redistribution.
The Nile Perch in Lake Victoria: Local Responses and Adaptations
Authors: Pringle Robert M.
Published: July 2008

Introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s, the Nile perch has gained fame for prompting rapid regional economic growth and for driving scores of endemic fish species into extinction. This study uses oral and archival data to trace the historical development of the Nile perch fishery on Lake Victoria. Particular emphasis is placed on local responses and adaptations to (1) the Nile perch itself; (2) the abrupt integration of the Lake Victoria fishery with the global economy; and (3) the ecological changes that the Nile perch has precipitated. I also attempt to situate Lake Victoria's history in the larger debate about environment and African livelihoods. Because so much of Lake Victoria's species diversity has been lost within one generation – biologist E. O. Wilson (1992) has called this process ‘the most catastrophic extinction episode of recent history’ – the lake is an ideal case study with which to examine ‘local’ perceptions of biodiversity. The data suggest that species diversity is important and highly resolved in the worldviews of Lake Victoria's fishermen; yet, although the will for conservation is present, poverty obstructs its realization. These findings are discussed in relation to other work on indigenous environmental knowledge and ecological ethics. I argue that ‘intrinsic’ valuation of species diversity and ecological processes may be more widespread in rural societies than has traditionally been assumed by natural and social scientists, and that the preponderance of social studies highlighting oppositions between Western science and ethno-science, and between conservation concerns and local livelihoods, may have blinded us to synergies between them. More effort is needed to understand fully the nuances in these complex local ecological worldviews, perhaps via ‘social histories of extinction’ that explore the local consequences of species loss.