bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Personal Relations: Beyond Neopatrimonial Practices in Northern Cameroon
Authors: Hansen Ketil Fred
Published: July 2008

This article deals with political culture in northern Cameroon. By analysing two happenings—the arrival of a Minister in his home town and his speech to the traditional elites—it shows how neopatrimonial politics is practised in a given locality. Important aspects of neopatrimonialism—such as the personal distribution of public resources and the conflict between different moral obligations which results in illusory appearances—are described and analysed. Yet the complexity of symbols, behaviour and metaphors outlined in these two happenings suggests that we have to go beyond the neopatrimonial model of thinking if we want to gain a better understanding of politics in Cameroon.
Reaching the Larger World: New Forms of Social Collaboration in Pikine, Senegal
Authors: Simone AbdouMaliq
Published: July 2008

Actors in fluid African urban environments try to make collaborative social action work, collective responsibility enforceable, and instruments of power effective and legitimate. These efforts give rise to an uneasy tension between the adoption of normative discourses concerning urban management and governance, the ways in which urban residents attempt to adapt to a vast range of new opportunities and crises, and the role of the city as a place of experimentation. Given this tension, what are diverse groups of African urban residents doing to make cities habitable and to use cities as a means of enlarging the spatial parameters in which they operate? Focusing on the site of one of urban Africa's major governance restructuring projects, Pikine, Senegal, the article discusses a particular instance of translocal economic collaboration among three discrete groups of women. Whereas the major intervention, the City Project, sought to promote greater co-ordination among the localities making up Pikine, ‘real’ co-ordination, as exemplified by these women's collaboration, may be taking place in unanticipated and relatively invisible ways. Through examining some of the intricate difficulties actors often face in operating at translocal levels, ‘small leaps’ across scale are sometimes significant accomplishments and potentially important precursors to new extended forms of economic collaboration.
Saint Mediation in the Era of Transnationalism: TheDa'Iraof the JakhankeMarabouts
Authors: van Hoven Ed
Published: July 2008

The focus of this article is the intersection of the motivations for international migration and innovative new forms of religious organisation. An example is provided by the recent introduction of a prayer ritual calledda’irain the Muslim community of the Jakhanke Jabi in eastern Senegal. For centuries, supererogatory prayers mingled with local practices have been at the heart of the religious traditions of the Jakhanke Jabimarabouts. Yet their religious practice underwent considerable change when the young disciples began to migrate to Europe and the United States. Prayers raised during the ritual address the invisible saints capable of serving the needs of transnational migrants. At the same time the economic base of community agriculture shifted from labour provided by the students to donations increasingly coming from overseas groups of followers. Since then a great number of people—including politicians—seeking success in business, career, health or marriage have solicited the spiritual help and protection of Jakhanke Jabimarabouts.
Rebounding Nationalism: State and Ethnicity in Wollega 1968–1976
Authors: Hultin Jan
Published: July 2008

This article deals with the interrelationship of ethnic and national processes in a rural district in Wollega at the time of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. It describes how the state policy of ‘official nationalism’ and Amharisation on the one hand, and the policy of land confiscation and land grants on the other, affected two different categories of Oromo: the small, educated elite, and the peasants. The government promoted Amharic as the language of state, whilst the Oromo language was banned from public contexts and not allowed in print. The government feared popular involvement in politics, and all political parties and organisations were banned. University students voiced demands for modernisation and land reform whilst the war in Eritrea raised the ‘question of nationalities’, but there was not yet any Oromo nationalist claim for statehood. Among the farmers, opposition to the state centred on land tenure and taxes and on the abuse of authority by the government. Most Oromo-speaking regions had been conquered and incorporated into the empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Land was confiscated and granted to warlords, or to local leaders who collaborated with the emperor. The original inhabitants became tribute-paying tenants under the new lords. As most landlords were immigrants to the area, ethnicity was an obvious aspect of property relations. In Wollega, however, local Oromo who had collaborated with the emperor were in control of much of the land and both landlords and share-croppers were Macha Oromo. They shared basic value-orientations by which performance is judged. Memories of the moral economy of an earlier time provided an alternative to the existing situation. Reference to history implied an active selection of elements in the formulation of a critical discourse on power and property that addressed the basic opposition between society and state. The last part of the article describes how educated and farmers met in a political meeting that was organised by the local authorities in 1976 to celebrate the revolution and its land reform. The occasion turned into an intense celebration of local values and, at least to some of the participants, this was a moment of new ethnic awareness and a call to revive gada, the Oromo ritual system. Threatened by ethnic identification, the state responded with brutal repression, and several people were murdered. Shortly after, some activists joined the Oromo Liberation Front to wage guerrilla war against the state.
The State as Raider Among the Karamojong: ‘Where There are no Guns, They use the Threat of Guns’
Authors: Knighton Ben
Published: July 2008

The article brings together archival material, past ethnography, and memory on the one hand, and up-to-date eye-witness and newspaper reports on the other, to set current traumatic events in the very long view. The presentism of contemporary developmental and research approaches has precluded such perspectives. Thus the current disarmament programme being forced on the Karamojong of north-east Uganda by the Uganda People's Defence Force is no more unprecedented than the armed conflicts it is intended to resolve. The advent of colonial administration and memories of it are examined to illuminate the constraints of the present exercise. Events are not occurring solely in a local context, still less just on the national scene, but in the global context directed by world power. Thus the significance of cattle-raiding, the nature of which has not been drastically changed by firearms, has been exaggerated as part of a threat to world peace that must be tackled by international action. This has provided the rationale for repeating the brutality of the small wars of imperialism on a larger scale and with less prospect of an ensuing peace. The article proposes a rediscovery of African agency in Karamojong religious ceremonies that are not controlled by world orders.
Concluding Comments: Collective Identities in a Complex World
Authors: Donham Donald L.
Published: July 2008

As I write, the United States and the United Kingdom have begun their invasion of Iraq. Thus, the most developed forms of violence are being brought into relationship with some of the world's most complexly layered local identitites—all on global television. The unpredictability of this situation points, I believe, to one of the more profound aspects of the post-Cold War order.
Forgetful Remembering: A Colonial Life in the Congo
Authors: Fabian Johannes
Published: July 2008

Social memory, cultural memory, culture as memory, and memory as culture, landscape and memory, places of memory, regimes of memory—all these have been prominent topics in cultural studies, also in anthropology; in this work, attention is usually paid to remembering. Based on several prior inquiries into popular historiography and local regimes of memory, this paper is an attempt to include forgetting in a model of ‘memory work'. What this entails is shown with ethnographic evidence, the recording of a conversation made in Lubumbashi in 1986 with one of the African pioneers of the town. The text in French and Swahili, accompanied by an English translation, is accessible atwww2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca.
Money and Death: Funeral Business in Asante, Ghana
Authors: de Witte Marleen
Published: July 2008

This article examines the current commercialisation and expansion of Asante funeral celebrations in Ghana. Funerals have always been the main public social events in Asante, but the growing funeral business significantly alters the way death is celebrated. The article takes as a point of departure a view of death as a field of strategic interaction, providing the ritual context for the creation of remembrance and identities, the elaboration of differences, the competition for status and power, and the negotiation of culture and social bonds and values. Within the framing narrative of respect for the dead and guiding the spirit to the next world, funerals are much about life. The article describes how, in shaping death, people deal with money to negotiate values of life and relations between the living, and shows that, contrary to both popular belief and critique on global commercialisation, in Asante the money economy and the social significance of the funeral tradition do not contravene, but rather reinforce each other. The funeral celebration is not wiped away by monetisation, nor is it a kind of last defence against it. Indeed, it is exactly through money and commodification that funeral celebrations are expanding, social ties forged, and cultural performances stimulated, albeit in new ways. In Asante funerals, people appropriate practices of consumption and commercial enterprise as well as indigenous traditions and exchange patterns in a process of ‘cultural bricolage’, and develop new, local styles of celebrating death, in which money has come to play a central role as social glue and as an expression of lifestyles, cultural values and ideals. It is argued that we cannot understand ‘traditional ritual’ unless we move beyond the rather rigid opposition between tradition and modernity still prevalent in ritual studies to acknowledge the open, flexible nature of tradition that makes it so vibrant in modern African life.
Sharing Home, Food, and Bed: Paths of Grandmotherhood in East Cameroon
Authors: Notermans Catrien
Published: July 2008

This article focuses on relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren in an urban society in East Cameroon. It argues that despite fluid generational demarcations between grandmothers and mothers, women perform their grandmotherhood differently from their motherhood. As a result of the claims grandmothers often make on their children's children, grandmothers easily replace mothers but they do not rear children in the same way. The sharing of home, food, and bed is central in the performance of grandmotherhood and differs from relationships of sharing in the mother-child bond. The article also argues that grandmotherhood in East Cameroon is not a clearly bounded, unambiguous life stage but that it contains multiple trajectories that do not occur in the same time or in the same order. Multiple trajectories, characterised by both agency and constraint, are explained in terms of differences within and between grandmothers’ life courses. The article shows that grandmothers play vital roles in complex practices of marriage and descent and, in contrast to previous studies in the area, that matrilineages are closely linked to patrilineages.
Shared Lives: Exploring Practices of Amity Between Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Western Kenya
Authors: Geissler P. Wenzel , Prince Ruth J.
Published: July 2008

This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of ‘love’ (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of grandmotherhood in particular and of sociality in general. We shall intertwine these concerns of the first generation of social anthropologists, in what were then imagined as pre-modern societies, with the concerns that contemporary, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren have with love. Love or amity, and their attendant everyday practices of sharing, retain their importance both for the grandmaternal bond and for broader Luo sociality. Rather than providing an unquestioned and unequivocal prescriptive framework, these practices of relatedness are situated within an imaginative field which is often explicitly dichotomised. Some practices stress individual selves and autonomous subjects, while others emphasise the sharedness of the self and the primacy of relations over subjects. Rather than adhering to one or the other of these poles of relatedness and personhood, modern Luo grandmothers and grandchildren create their everyday lives between them, drawing on divergent ideas and practices, while enjoying, where possible, the pleasures of'love’.
Gendered Ritual Dualism in a Patrilineal Society: Opposition and Complementarity in Kulere Fertility Cults
Authors: Frank Barbara
Published: July 2008

Although a favourable position for women is usually anticipated where they occupy important economic roles in the context of matrilineal descent, such a position may well exist in a patrilineal society, especially if women organise as in West Africa. Here there exist well-organised women's cult associations which are well known from Liberia and Sierra Leone and occur also in western Cameroon and south-eastern Nigeria. The present article demonstrates the existence of a comparable women's association in middle-belt Nigeria among the Kulere. The article focuses mainly on the manner in which through the cooperation of certain men's and women's associations ‘gender symmetry’ was ritually expressed in the sphere of agriculture and fertility. The practical foundation of this symmetry in fertility cults was a relatively even division of labour between the sexes and a favourable position for women in marriage, since they could decide independently whether to stay with a husband or leave him. Cult associations were predominant in public life. Women were strictly excluded from men's associations which held political–ritual offices and channelled advantages in ritual consumption to men. Notwithstanding this exclusion, women had their own association in which they could regulate their own affairs as well as pass decisions for the whole community including the men. The women's organisation held major responsibilities for the protection and the fertility of the fields, both practically as well as ritually. In this responsibility the women's association cooperated with a men's association which otherwise intimidated women. This association of males protected the fields through the presence of supernatural guardians which was sometimes staged in masquerades. The corresponding duties and cooperation of both associations were enacted ritually through the use of common shrines and when the women contacted water spirits to increase the harvest under the protection of male masqueraders. The Kulere case shows a patrilineal society where women had a relatively independent position which was publicly acknowledged through gender dualism in the ritual organisation of agriculture in which their special capabilities with respect to fertility and sustainability were recognised.
Transacting Obasinjom: The Dissemination of a Cult Agency in the Cross River Area
Authors: Röschenthaler Ute
Published: July 2008

During the twentieth century, Obasinjom became one of the best known and most effective cult agencies in the Cross River area of Cameroon and Nigeria. This paper aims at reconstructing the history of Obasinjom and some of its variants. Unlike many other witch-hunting cults, Obasinjom usually did not disappear after accomplishing the immediate job for which it was acquired. The owners additionally desired to possess the institution because it created wealth, influence and prestige for them as well as their village as a whole. Obasinjom and other cult agencies (as well as women's and men's societies and dance associations) spread from village to village across ethnic or language boundaries. Along with their dissemination, something of their identities and agency diffused and was incorporated into their histories over time and space. As intellectual property they were owned by the buying village and at the same time remained the property of the selling village. Obasinjom, as well as more important institutions, created decentralised networks of owners who had no definite knowledge of all the other participants. The recently formed pan-Obasinjom association, however, has changed this situation and, at least among some owners, created a feeling of identity and a greater sense of unity.
Reflections on Witchcraft, Danger, and Modernity Among the Tuareg
Authors: Rasmussen Susan J.
Published: July 2008

This essay explores the varied ways so-called ‘witchcraft’ powers are implicated today in an African society, the Tuareg of the Republic of Niger. There is analysis of the interplay of these powers and dangers in case studies and vignettes, suggesting that recent assertions of ‘witch-like’ powers are grounded in moral discourse that addresses negotiated social relationships rather than linear temporal transformations from ‘tradition’ into ‘modernity’. A comparative analysis of these powers in diverse contexts reveals that witchcraft discourses are multiple and invite less a lineal temporal question of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’, more a question of how moral discourses are reconfigured from cultural referents in intrinsically diverse repertoires.
Drinking, Rumour, and Ethnicity in Jimma, Ethiopia
Authors: Mains Daniel
Published: July 2008

This paper is an investigation of the relationship between identity, politics, and rumours in Jimma, Ethiopia. The introduction of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia after the fall of the Marxist Derg regime in 1991 has been the topic of a significant amount of academic discussion, but little attention has been given to the day-to-day experience of this change. Consequently, post-1991 Ethiopian politics have been viewed primarily in terms of ethnic power struggles. An analysis of rumours that are circulated through casual conversation enables a better understanding of popular reactions to ethnic federalism. In particular, rumours regarding the drinking habits of Oromo Muslims and the political behaviour of Protestants reveal that ethnicity is closely intertwined with religion and nationalism. This analysis also demonstrates how a particularly Ethiopian form of discourse functions as a means both of resisting and coping with loss of political power and economic decline. Finally, it explores how international news media coverage of Christian–Muslim conflict and anxieties about globalisation are interrelated with local power struggles. In this paper, rumours are treated as a discourse that provides a window into the worldview of the speaker in order to explore how individuals negotiate political change and construct difference at the everyday level.
Entrustment and its Changing Political Meanings in Fuladu, the Gambia (1880–1994)
Authors: Bellagamba Alice
Published: July 2008

The practice of entrustment is a form of voluntary allegiance for the sake of protection, one which historically lies at the core of host–stranger relationships along the River Gambia. Deeply woven into the social fabric of local communities, it was appropriated by various historical subjects during the twentieth century in order to construct networks of political confidence and mutual assistance at a local and national level. This article traces this dynamic process of re-elaboration. In so doing, it takes into account the history of a Mandinka commercial settlement in eastern Gambia from the late nineteenth century to post-Independence times, and questions the shifts that occurred in the political significance of entrustment with changing social and economic scenarios. Contextualised in the longue durée, the practice of karafoo shows its relevance as a cultural resource encouraging the creation of networks of trust and interdependence in social settings historically characterised by seasonal and more stable forms of migration.
Making Ethnic Elites: Ritual Poetics in a Cameroonian Lycée
Authors: Ignatowski Clare A.
Published: July 2008

This case study of youth cultural production in Cameroon examines how lycée students introduce idioms of tradition and the ancestral past into the lycée context by creating a club modelled on a dance society popular in the region. In pre-colonial rural Tupuriland, the gurna society was a key site for the moral–sexual socialisation of youth and a cultural–political arena where competition was staged between individuals and villages during death celebrations. Today, the gurna remains popular in Tupuri villages, though it has been recreated in urban contexts and modern institutions where members use its forms to mediate new social relations and modern realities. This paper explores the meanings, functions, and effects of the creation of the ‘Gurna Club’ by students in the Lycée de Doukoula, by examining students' Youth Day dance performances, vibrant song discourse, and nostalgia for earlier forms of indigenous socialisation (e.g. the gurna, youth initiation, and wrestling). By inserting the communal poetics of the gurna into the lycée, Tupuri youth seek to yoke multiple facets of their identity, making visible their desire to be gurna, even as they pursue their civic obligations as students. In creating the Gurna Club, students begin to participate in an increasing trend in Cameroon toward the use of idioms of parochialism (such as ethnically based elite associations) as strategies for garnering national power and recognition.
‘Decentralised There, Centralised Here’: Local Governance and Paradoxes of Household Autonomy and Control in North-East Ethiopia, 1991–2001
Authors: Adem Teferi Abate
Published: July 2008

This article discusses whether Ethiopia's recent reorganisation into broadly decentralised, ethnically based regions was also accompanied by significant changes in the images and administrative practices through which state powers have been locally understood and experienced by ordinary citizens. Different scholars and politicians have viewed the local effects of these changes differently. Government officials and some scholars report ‘radical reversals’ from decades of monarchial despotism and socialist dictatorship to enhanced local autonomy and self-governance, while others counter this by noting the ‘continuation’ of earlier administrative practices. I draw on ethnographic material from fieldwork in Aba Sälama, a local administrative unit in Amhara, to show that decentralisation has increased the significance of local government as a site for competing interpretations of household autonomy and local-governance. Party members and elected farmer officials used the newly enhanced constitutional powers and funds of the local government to strengthen their own personal standing vis-à-vis their superiors at the district capital and fellow farmers in the community. Farmers for their part seized the rhetoric to demand more autonomy from local government which they still viewed as an extension of central state control over their lives and resources. As a consequence, one observes in Aba Sälama both decentralised and centralised administrative practices as local officials seek to accommodate this tension when performing their governmental duties.
Legacies of Biafra: Marriage, ‘Home People’ and Reproduction Among the Igbo of Nigeria
Authors: Smith Daniel Jordan
Published: July 2008

This article examines the ways in which the legacies and collective memories of Biafra, the secessionist state established at the time of Nigeria's civil war from 1967 to1970, shape contemporary Igbo practices and experiences of marriage, rural–urban ties and reproduction. The importance of appropriate and permanent marriage and the perceived necessity of dependable affinal relations for contemporary Igbos are analysed in relation to recollections of marriage during the war. The intense identification of migrant Igbos with place of origin and the importance of ‘home’ and ‘home people’ are situated in the context of the legacy of Biafra. The importance of kinship relationships for access to patron–client networks is linked to the Igbo perception of marginalization in the wake of Biafra. Igbo ideas about the significance of reproduction and the vital importance of ‘having people’ are reinforced through collective memories of Biafra. Igbo people's conceptions of Nigerian politics, their understandings of the social and economic importance of kinship and community in contemporary Nigeria, and even their reproductive decisions can be better explained by taking into account the legacies of Biafra.
The Widow in Blue: Blood and the Morality of Remembering in Botswana's Time of Aids
Authors: Klaits Frederick
Published: July 2008

Popular talk and silence about AIDS in Botswana have been shaped by survivors' efforts to manage the ways in which they remember relationships arising from procreation. The emotional force of death induces the immediately bereaved and wider communities of survivors to recollect who has shared blood with whom through sexual intercourse. Such acts of remembering may have decisive repercussions on relations of kinship, marriage and mutual support. For Batswana, ‘remembering’ is a form of acting as well as feeling, possessing a capacity to shape moral conduct for the long term. In the context of death, local debates about what and how to remember reflect contested endeavours to make relations based on blood persist beyond a person's passing. Focusing on a particular set of local perspectives on the morality of remembering, the article shows that members of an Apostolic church in Gaborone encourage one another to remember in a manner reflecting distinctive methods of maintaining relations of kinship and care.
Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-Apartheid South
Authors: Posel Deborah
Published: July 2008

Unexpectedly, sexuality has become one of the principal sites of contestation in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper demonstrates and accounts for the politicization of sex and sexuality in South Africa since 1994. The first part examines the discursive constitution of sexuality and the ways in which this has been informed by wider dimensions of the post-apartheid social order. Drawing on this discussion, the second part proposes a reading of the notorious HIV/AIDS controversy, which drew President Mbeki directly into the political fray. The paper argues that the controversy, although immediately concerned with the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS, is also a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatizes the ways in which recently contentious struggles over the manner of sexuality are enmeshed in the politics of ‘nation-building’, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it.
Going Home? Belonging and Burial in the Era of AIDS
Authors: Whyte Susan Reynolds
Published: July 2008

In Eastern Uganda, a married woman should be buried at her husband's home, raising questions such as: which husband? were they really married? These questions become urgent when a woman dies at the home of her parents or brothers, a situation that has become increasingly common as women ill with AIDS seek care from their families of orientation. In Bunyole, the ways in which a woman ‘belongs’ to two different homes are brought out as discussions proceed about where she should be buried. This article uses accounts of cases where there was uncertainty about the burial site to show how people justify the choice of a ‘final home’. ‘Arguments of cultural rules’ are used to underwrite demands about bridewealth, while ‘arguments of affection’ are put forward in sympathy for women who needed care or were loved by children. The location of the grave provides a vantage point for looking at how home and marriage take on significance for women in distress. The explanations provide a window on the ways families reason about rights, obligation, virtue and compassion. They show the enduring importance of a woman's natal family; in the era of AIDS, mortally ill women are usually cared for by parents and siblings even though their corpses may be carried to a husband's home for burial.
Whose Unkulunkulu?
Authors: Weir Jennifer
Published: July 2008

UNkulunkulu was a term taken up by certain missionaries in Natal as synonymous with the Christian God. Though the idea of uNkulunkulu is now well entrenched in African as well as missionary Christian theology, historically the concept of uNkulunkulu, as the High God of all, is inaccurate. This paper will argue that there was actually a multiplicity of oNkulunkulu (plural of uNkulunkulu) in the early nineteenth century – including females. UNkulunkulu was simply a generic name for particular significant Zulu ancestors – family, chiefly or ‘national’. The development of the concept of uNkulunkulu, as the High God of all, obscures important aspects of the relationship that formerly obtained between chiefs and their departed ancestors. The attainment of Zulu political ascendancy, which has so often been viewed in purely secular terms, had a critical religious dimension.
Immunizing Strategies: Hip-Hop and Critique in Tanzania
Authors: Stroeken Koen
Published: July 2008

Tanzania has in the last decade seen a vibrant form of hip-hop emerge that is gaining wide public exposure thanks to its political tenor. First, this article illustrates how rap lyrics reflect Tanzanian political history and in part determine it. Bongo Flava, as the local hip-hop genre is called, has gained credibility by reinterpreting Nyerere's normative legacy and by expanding freedom of expression in the country, while unhampered by factors that normally mitigate the social impact of popular culture. Second, the article explores the global relevance of their social critique. Bongo Flava attempts to outwit the sophisticated indifference and neoliberalism of postcolonial rulers and ruled. Partly inspired by African American popular culture, many songs expose the postcolonial strategy of survival, which is to immunize oneself against the threat of commodification by fully embracing it, the contamination yielding extra power. The lyrics, in their irony and pessimism, exhibit the same immunizing tendency. However, this tendency is curbed by two principles that safeguard streetwise status: the rapper's willingness to ‘duel’ and the Kiswahili credo of activatingbongo, ‘the brains’.
The Need for Speed: Contrasting Timeframes in the Social Life of Kenyan Miraa
Authors: Carrier Neil
Published: July 2008

This article contrasts two very different timeframes in the ‘social life’ of the plant stimulant miraa – known elsewhere as khat – in Kenya and beyond. One timeframe is connected with the old miraa trees growing in the Nyambene Hills District of central Kenya: these are known as mbaine, and are greatly respected for their age and link to the past. The miraa from these trees is put to much ceremonial use by the Meru inhabitants of the Nyambenes. The other timeframe is the very different one of the harvested stems. These stems are highly perishable and so must reach the consumer quickly, leading to urgency in their trade and transportation: the ‘need for speed’. The globalization of the miraa trade has intensified this urgency further: the stems are now desired as far away as North America. Miraa trees have not escaped this ‘commercial’ timeframe, and some farmers experiment with chemical sprays to speed up the production rate. The article concludes by arguing that such attempts to speed up the timeframes of the trees are met with resistance, and have not diluted the cultural significance of ancient mbaine trees and their ancestral links.
Sung and Unsung: Musical Reflections on Tanzanian Postsocialisms
Authors: Askew Kelly M.
Published: July 2008

On 14 October 1999, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the first president of the United Republic of Tanzania, died in a London hospital. In Tanzania, musical bands throughout the country reacted to the news by composing scores of lamentation songs(nyimbo za maombolezo)that mourned his passing and assessed his contributions to the country he helped to create. While elsewhere in the world Nyerere is affiliated with the ‘African socialist’ platform termedUjamaathat he theorized in his political writings and instituted during his tenure as president, these lamentation songs are notably silent on the topic of socialism. This silence indicates the ambiguity with which Tanzanians today relate to their socialist past. As a necessary prelude to analysis of thenyimbo za maombolezo,this article explores the practices, policies and values promoted in Tanzanian socialisms (mainland and Zanzibar) and in the postsocialist present. Competing rhetorics are revealed in these musical constructions of the ‘Father of the Nation’ and, by extension, the Tanzanian nation itself.
Diagnosing the Crisis in the Republic of Congo
Authors: Eaton David
Published: July 2008

In 1991 in the Republic of Congo, a sovereign national conference in Brazzaville inaugurated a peaceful transition from socialist one‐party government to multi‐party democracy. The pluralization of public voices in the newly liberalized country – in religious movements, political parties and independent presses – expressed new conditions of understanding about the nation and its affairs. At the same time, local networks and categories of perception inflected geopolitical pressures from foreign powers into quasi‐ethnic divisions in competition for power through government representation. Subsequent conflict over contested elections sparked devastating civil war in 1997 and resulted in the return to power of the former socialist leadership.

Given the uncertainties – indeed, the crises of institutions and of knowledge – during these times, how did Congolese diagnose the troubles through which the country passed? This article examines how national and socialist ideals and practices were evoked and reinterpreted to this end in public discourse through idioms of family, affliction, spiritual power and the living body. These modes of speech and action give evidence of longer‐term continuities in the region's political imaginations, as these incorporated changes brought by ongoing involvement in larger modern worlds.
Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique
Authors: Pitcher M. Anne
Published: July 2008

This article examines two opposing strategies – one used by government officials and businesses, the other expressed by urban workers – that have emerged in postsocialist Mozambique. On the one hand, government officials and businesses have pursued a deliberate strategy of what several writers in other contexts have called ‘organized forgetting', whereby they seek to airbrush the socialist past from history. They have revised the country's ideological orientation, built new coalitions of support among domestic and internal investors, and remade the ruling party's legitimacy following the abandonment of socialism and the transition to a free‐market democracy. On the other hand, some urban workers have revived and repackaged the language of socialism to protest against the effects of neo‐liberalism. Relying on collective and individual memories of socialism, they denounce ‘exploitation', ‘recolonization', ‘injustice’ and ‘inequality’ as they struggle to understand, resist or modify the impact of structural adjustment and privatization. I argue that, although the end of socialism has allowed a plurality of voices to surface in Mozambique, such discursive pluralism is characterized by increasing power inequities. The consolidation of capital and the ideological pronouncements that accompany it may ultimately silence the now dissident language of the socialist past.
Between Death and Funeral: Mortuaries and the Exploitation of Liminality in Kwahu, Ghana
Authors: van der Geest Sjaak
Published: July 2008

This essay describes (1) how mortuaries changed the Akan funeral culture of Ghana and (2) how that converged with the interests of relatives and hospital managers. Such a development would not have been possible, however, (3) without the money provided by well-to-do relatives staying abroad. Mortuaries enable relatives to stretch the liminal period between death and funeral as long as they want to while they prepare everything for a grand funeral. For hospitals, this new fashion means an attractive extra source of income, as the mortuary is more lucrative than its medical services. My observations derive from anthropological fieldwork in Kwahu, Ghana.
Manimory and the Aesthetics of Mimesis: Forest, Islam and State in Ivoirian Dozoya
Authors: Hellweg Joseph
Published: July 2008

This article explores the hunting aesthetics of initiated Jula hunters of Côte d'Ivoire who call themselves dozos. It explains how their hunting aesthetic structures their relationship to Islam and the Ivoirian state. Although many Africans approach Islam in the context of tensions between local ritual traditions and modernizing Muslim reform, dozos approach Islam the way they approach the forests where they hunt, assimilating to both in order to tame them. They organize their hunting activities around an aesthetic centred on notions of sweetness and fullness; their contraries, difficulty and emptiness; and the process of mimetic transformation (shape-shifting) that mediates between these extremes. With these categories dozos assimilate themselves to and appropriate power from the forest to kill game. They also link themselves to pre-Qur'anic Muslim figures to legitimize themselves as Muslims. More recently, they tried to assimilate to the Ivoirian state to become a parallel police force. Stories of their tutelary spirit, Manimory, and the texts of their hunting songs, incantations, and epics encode diverse ways for dozos to relate to Islam, leaving room for dozos to eschew it as well. Their texts reveal a dynamic sense of history that defies classification in terms of tradition, modernity or postmodernity.
‘We are all the same, because we all Worship God.’ The Controversial Case of a Female Saint in the Gambia
Authors: Janson Marloes
Published: July 2008

Based on ethnographic field research, this article explores religious discourses about proper ritual observance in The Gambia, a country where our understanding of processes of Islamization is largely lacking. These discourses centre upon the case of Berekuntu, a shrine guarded by a female saint in the village of Kartong. On the basis of three ‘texts’, the female saint's biographical narrative, a series of sermons delivered by reformist scholars, and a newspaper article based on an interview with the Supreme Islamic Council, the article shows that shrine and saint veneration are not relics of the past, but are part of a lively contemporary dispute about ‘authentic’ Islam and who represents it. While reformist Muslims seem to have conquered the public sphere during the last decade under the influence of President Jammeh's rule, the Sufi understanding of Islam, as embodied by the saint, still enjoys great support among the Gambian population. Although ‘reformists’ and ‘Sufis’ seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed, they sometimes borrow from each other. An analysis of the (re)negotiation of Muslim identities indicates that Islamization is not a single monolithic movement but, rather, a diffuse process happening at different levels.
Doing Politics in Bushbuckridge: Work, Welfare and the South African Elections of 2004
Authors: Niehaus Isak A.
Published: July 2008

In the South African national elections of 2004 the ruling ANC (African National Congress) increased its majority, particularly within the poorer, black, rural voting districts. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted in Impalahoek – a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the Limpopo Province – this paper investigates reasons for this pattern of voting. With reference to a survey of 87 households I show that unemployment, crime and disease had increased dramatically between 1990/1 and 2003/4. Yet, at the same time, there have been considerable improvements in access to state pensions, housing, school feeding schemes and child support grants. In this context, I argue that the ANC's election campaign highlighted the capacity of government in service provision, and that voting for the ruling party constituted a strategic attempt to obtain access to state-controlled services. Hence the election was characterized by neo-patrimonial politics and by a transactional logic of voting. Voting for the ruling party does not amount to an ideological endorsement of its policies, and discontent is more likely to be expressed through boycotting the elections rather than voting for opposition parties.
The Idiom of Age in a Popular Kenyan Newspaper Serial
Authors: Ogola George
Published: July 2008

This article examines the narratives constructed around age in Kenya. Noting the ‘spatial crossings’ of the Kenyan subject, who is as much attuned to the village ethos as he is to the globalized world, the article problematizes our approach to the study of age in Africa. It discusses the multiple narratives now constructed around age within the context of a society in rapid flux, especially underscoring its relationship to authority. The article proposes that there are multiple ways – some new, others merely reinvented – in which social and political relationships are now (re)constructed around age in Africa. The article is based on a critical reading of popular fiction, an important site of popular cultural production where the performance of political power is manifest and narratives around power are created and enacted. The work is based on a popular Kenyan newspaper serial ‘Whispers’, an important site of cultural production in the 1980s–1990s. This period witnessed ruthless political repression in Kenya when spaces of popular expression were all but monopolized by the government. It is in such sites as ‘Whispers’ that ‘spaces of freedom’ emerged, narrating the travails of the period and challenging the ‘bounds of the expressible’. Through ‘Whispers’, the article explores how age and gender are used as ‘instrumentalities of political survival’ but also how African maledom reacts to the challenges of globalization that threaten to disrupt the status quo, especially regarding the normative grammar of patriarchy. Further, the article explores how the twin elements of gender and age are manipulated by the Kenyan polity but also simultaneously reproduced and contested by society, resulting in a largely contradictory discourse that challenges but at the same time reaffirms the (il)legitimacy of gerontocracy and the sanctity of the male order.
Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Authors: Buckley-Zistel Susanne
Published: July 2008

More than a decade after the genocide, Rwanda's local communities remain severely affected by the experience of the violence and horror. This is reflected in the way people remember their past, as well as in what they choose to forget. During fieldwork in Nyamata and Gikongoro it became apparent that even though the memory of the genocide as such, its pain and suffering, was essential for all interviewees, a clearer picture of the causes of the genocide had disappeared into oblivion. In this article I argue that this forgetting of pregenocide social cleavages reflects less a mental failure than a conscious coping mechanism. What I shall refer to aschosen amnesia, the deliberate eclipsing of particular memories, allows people to avoid antagonism and enables a degree of community cohesion necessary for the intimacy of rural life in Rwanda. While this is presently essential for local coexistence, it prevents the emergence of a critical challenge to the social cleavages that allowed the genocide to occur in the first place and impedes the social transformation necessary to render ethnicity-based violence impossible.
Roadblock Ethnography: Negotiating Humanitarian Access in Ituri, Eastern Dr Congo, 1999–2004
Authors: Pottier Johan
Published: July 2008

Based on field research carried out in 2004, this article focuses on how Ituribased Congolese relief workers negotiate humanitarian access with roadblock militias. Experiences and testimonies highlight the importance of sociocultural and political awareness during relief work induced by conflict. It is demonstrated that relief workers in conflict zones do not (and cannot) shed their ethnic identities; that instead they accept that a perceived ethnic identity brings strategic advantages as well as disadvantages. Further, a relief worker's bargaining power is shown to be influenced by militia perceptions of how his/her organization is positioned in the conflict. The overall argument responds to the renewed policy interest in debating the political context of humanitarian intervention.
Recollections of Childhood Experiences During the Nigerian Civil War
Authors: Uchendu Egodi
Published: July 2008

During the three decades following the end of the Nigerian civil war little attention has been given to the children who lived through the hostilities. This article on the recollections of present-day adults who experienced the crisis in their childhood, gathered by means of a qualitative research methodology, tells the story of the Nigerian civil war as the narrators perceived it in their childhoods. It probes their feelings and responses to the conflict, their lives under hostilities and some of the effects of the war on child survivors.
Constructing Locality: TheTerroirApproach in West Africa
Authors: Bassett Thomas J. , Blanc-Pamard Chantal , Boutrais Jean
Published: July 2008

This article examines the origins and evolution of theterroirapproach as an organizing idea in development planning in West Africa. We consider the evolving meaning of theterroirconcept in three distinct periods: as a research approach crafted in a French geographical school; as a site for research-development programmes, and, most recently, as a tool for conservation planning, territorial restructuring, and land privatization. An important shift in the meaning of theterroirconcept is apparent in its evolving uses. For theterroirschool, theterroircame to represent the socio-natural heritage of a group in which its social organization and pattern of resource use became inscribed in the landscape. The concept took on new meaning in the late-1980s as an appropriate location for on-farm research by agricultural development planners. Theterroirbecame both an alternative research site and a setting for mobilizing rural populations to adopt new land management and farming techniques. The meaning of the concept shifted again in the 1990s with the advent of thegestion des terroirsapproach. In the hands of conservation and development planners, theterroirwas conceived of as a scale of intervention for a host of government, aid donor, and NGO programmes. In summary, a significant change in the meaning of the concept has taken place from one in which the notion of local heritage was dominant to one that emphasizes territory and boundary clarification.