bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
One hundred and fifty years of Christianity in a Ghanaian town
Authors: Middleton John
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

This paper deals with certain aspects of a Christian congregation in a kingdom of southern Ghana, in particular its growth over the past 150 years and the part it plays in the lives of the people of the capital town of the state. Most studies of the development of Christianity in Africa deal with questions of religious ideology (especially that of the conflict between different systems of belief), of conversion, and of the growth of syncretist and separatist movements. Here I am concerned with the development of a Christian congregation that is neither syncretist nor separatist and with its place as one element of a total local religious system which includes other faiths. It is the local congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in the town of Akuropon, the capital of the eastern Akan kingdom of Akuapem, in the Akuapem Hills that lie some twenty-five miles north of Accra, the national capital. The state has a resident population of about 70,000 and the town one of some 6000. However, the number of people who, wherever they live, regard themselves asAkuroponfo, ‘people of Akuropon’, probably amounts to some 20,000. Those who live elsewhere return to the town when they can at weekends, Christmas, Easter, and the great annual purificatory festival ofOdwira, held in September or October; and most hope finally to return to their ‘home-town’ (as it is known in Ghana) to be buried. Although not a large town, it is known widely as the seat of the main educational facilities of the Presbyterian Church since the arrival of the Basel Mission in the then Gold Coast in 1828. Due largely to this fact it has provided more than its share of political, educational and other leaders of Gold Coast and Ghanian society.
The Loonkidongi prophets and the Maasai: protection racket or incipient state?
Authors: Spencer Paul
Published: April 2006

Abstract

The Maasai are widely assumed to be a highly egalitarian society whose past success in dominating their neighbours owed much to the advice of their Prophets (loibonok, ‘laibons’). This article examines the practice of divination and prophecy in relation to the reputation of and the beliefs surrounding the principal family of, Maasai Prophets, the Loonkidongi. Undermining the egalitarian ideal, which is shared by the Maasai themselves, the Loonkidongi are shown to have been accepted as an elite. Throughout the twentieth century they have continued to dominate the Maasai in initiating and controlling sorcery, giving protection on the one hand and fostering the belief in Maasai vulnerability on the other. Living apart from other Maasai, with more wives and larger herds, with their own dynasty and dynastic feuding, with their penetrating mystical powers and networks of influence, the Loonkidongi have the symbolic trappings of a superior class of rulers. From this point of view the Maasai are not egalitarian, but are the clients of a protection racket that in pre-colonial times amounted to an incipient state. Today the Prophets continue to wield influence and are accorded more power popularly than elsewhere in eastern Africa, where surviving traditional rulers have been subordinated to the imposed state apparatus of colonial and post-colonial government.
Provisional notes on the postcolony
Authors: Mbembe Achille
Published: April 2006

The exercise of power in African states since independence—generalised here under the term the ‘postcolony’—has been marked by a liking for ceremonial and by an exhibitionism that is the more remarkable seeing how illusory are the states’ practical achievements. Furthermore, power is exercised with a degree of violence and naked exploitation that has its antecedents in previous colonial regimes. People's response is a ribaldry that revels in the obscene. The general question is why this power, despite its obvious limitations, is seemingly so effective. More specifically, why does the population apparently collude with its government; how can it laugh at the antics of its rulers and yet at the same time join in celebrating them? The argument put forward here along with evidence mainly from Cameroon and Togo is that, if analysis focuses on the detailed processes and rituals of collusion, it becomes clear that there is an intimacy, an almost domestic familiarity, in the relationship between ruler and ruled which effectively disarms both and turns power-play into performance.
Ethnoveterinary medicine in Africa
Authors: McCorkle Constance M. , Mathias-Mundy Evelyn
Published: April 2006

Local knowledge systems have won growing attention and respect within conventional science and in the international development community. Such systems have usually resulted from centuries of local people's empirical observation and experience and typically are highly ecologically sensitive. The information they embody and their associated materials and techniques can be of immense practical value in mounting cost-effective, socio-culturally and politically workable, environmentally benign, and thus sustainable, initiatives to improve human livelihoods and well-being. The present article overviews one pioneering branch of research and development for the continent of Africa: ethnoveterinary medicine. Indigenous healers, ethno-aetiologies, ethnopharmacology and toxicology, vaccination and surgical skills, and selected health-related husbandry practices are described. These data are then analysed from both social scientific and biological-technical perspectives, to identify limitations and potentials in putting African veterinary expertise to work in truly appropriate agricultural development. The authors conclude with recommendations for both immediate and future directions in the study and utilisation of this corpus of valuable, but endangered, knowledge.
Poverty and production in a rural microcosm: Hanover, Cape
Authors: Archer Sean
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

In the popular consciousness, South African poverty is a phenomenon of the homeland or urban township and ghetto, more rarely of rural areas in the core economy. Such a perspective is determined largely by the higher visibility of the poor in the former localities in the recent past, for reasons of geography and political sensitivity. This study aimed to redress the balance, starting from two broad premises: first, that the technical and organisational changes in production and the growth of surplus labour observable in Hanover on a microscale are representative of secular trends in commercialised agriculture in the Karoo region as a whole; and, second, that the causes of poverty generation in that region cannot be satisfactorily examined in isolation from the wider political and economic processes within which they are embedded.
Manufacturing dissent: work, gender and the politics of meaning in a peasant society
Authors: Carney Judith , Watts Michael
Published: April 2006

Introduction: The Manufacturing of Dissent

This article addresses the changing nature of farm work in a peasant society in The Gambia, West Africa. The practice of farm labour has been transformed in the most palpable way by the advent of radically new technical and social relations of production associated with mechanised double-cropping of irrigated rice. Technical change, agricultural intensification and a new labour process are, however, all built upon the bedrock of household production, since peasant growers are socially integrated into the new scheme as contract farmers, specifically as contracted sharecroppers. Family labour continues to be the dominant social form in which labour power is mobilised, but under conditions directly determined and shaped by the contractors, namely project management. Irrigated double-cropping of rice production is particularly labour-demanding and makes expanded claims on customary structures of domestic labour recruitment. These new economic practices subject the culturally dominant representations of work, labour obligations and property rights—the constituents of custom and tradition— to the test of social practice. In our examination of Mandinka rice growers we suggest, following T. J. Clark, that ‘society is a battlefield of representations on which the limits and coherence of any given set are being fought for and regularly spoilt’ (Clark, 1984: 6). The introduction of a new production regime has converted rural Mandinka society into a contested social terrain; the primary struggle is a contest over gender and the conjugal contract in which property, or more accurately constellations of property rights, is at stake. By seeing economic life as, among other things, a realm of representations, we argue that the struggles over meaning and the manufacture of symbolic and material dissent in central Gambia—a proliferation of intrahousehold conflicts, juridical battles over divorce in the local courts, renegotiations of the conjugal contract—are the idioms of what Burawoy (1985) calls production politics.
Defunct labour reserve?: Mambwe villages in the post-migration economy
Authors: Pottier Johan
Published: April 2006

Introduction

During the first few months of 1978, at the height of the rainy season, mourning lamentations hardly ever ceased at the mortuary of Mbala General Hospital. Infants and children were dying. Inadequate food intake, malabsorption of nutrients and malarial infection were the main causes of death.

Those who survived the ‘hunger months’ of 1978 lived in overcrowded quarters and were fed a diet consisting mainly of diluted maize meal (‘mealie meal’) porridge. They suffered from poor dietary variation and an unprecedented shortage of basic foodstuffs. The small and isolated township of Mbala could not provide for itself; it relied on maize flour imports from the Copper belt and from Lusaka. The arrival of a truckload of flour–the road to Kasama had not yet been tarred– was sufficient to bring the town community to its feet and cause long queues of despairing people.
Social differentiation and pastoralist sedentarization in northern Kenya
Authors: Little Peter D.
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

Sedentarization is often characterized by increased cultivation, which can result in either a partial or a total transformation from a livestock to a farm-based economy (Barth, 1961; Baxter, 1975; Nelson, 1973; Salzman, 1980). There are many possible permutations along this continuum from livestock to agriculture, and categories based on a sharp dichotomy between them are inadequate; even sub-units within a single ethnic group may show divergent patterns. Recent evidence reveals considerable intra-group variation in pastoral responses to agricultural opportunities (Alverson, 1979; Behnke, 1981; Haaland, 1977; Kjaerby, 1979; O'Leary, 1980). These differences are often in line with the generalization that large cattle herds are more closely associated with pastoralism than with agriculture.
Immigration, land transfer and tenure changes in Divo, Ivory Coast, 1940–80
Authors: Hecht Robert M.
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

The relationship between land tenure forms and the twentieth-century transformation of agriculture throughout much of Africa from a strong subsistence to a market orientation – and from food crop production to predominantly export crop production – is a topic of great importance both to Africanists and to policy-makers. From a scholarly perspective, contemporary Africa presents an unusual opportunity to study dramatic changes in land use and especially in land tenure, similar to changes which took place in other parts of the world as commercial farming developed. From a policy-maker's point of view, too, the current shift in land tenure has major implications for possible government measures affecting security of tenure and land distribution – and, in turn, patterns of agricultural investment, productivity and output.
Migration in West Africa: a savanna village prespective
Authors: Cleveland David A.
Published: April 2006

Local migration in response to population pressure is part of the history of northeast Ghana. First by physical coercion, then by economic coercion, colonialism drastically changed the pattern of migration to one of long-distance movement from north-east Ghana and the northern savannas in general to southern Ghana. Migration in turn affected social organisation, agriculture and population dynamics n i savanna communities. While colonial policy was not always consistent, one dominant and ultimately effective strategy seems evident: to break up locally self-sufficient economies and societies in order to stimulate the temporary migration of labour from largely subsistence agriculture to work in commercial agriculture, mining and public works in the south. These sectors were directly tied to the European economy for the benefit of Britain. Low wages and poor working conditions encouraged most migrants to return to their savanna villages when they were sick, injured or too old to work.

When Ghana gained its political independence from Britain this new pattern of migration had become firmly established and was maintained by changes in the social, economic and transport systems. Data from Zorse and the Upper Region show that migration at any one time takes about 50 per cent of working-age males and 15 per cent of working-age females to southern Ghana for periods of a year or more. Significantly increased dependency ratios mean that as a result of this migration each four remaining working-age adults must support themselves plus four dependants, instead of supporting only three dependants, as would be the case without migration. Since remittances by Zorse migrants are equal to only a small fraction of the value of their lost productive labour, the net effect of migration on the food consumption level of those remaining in the village will be determined by the balance between the increased output required of each remaining working-age adult and the decreased yield required of the total area of arable land. While I do not have all the quantitative data needed to resolve this question, statements by Zorse residents, evidence of chronic undernutrition, a long-term decrease in land productivity due to erosion and lack of organic matter, and serious labour shortages during periods of critical farm activity, suggest that the net effect of migration on Zorse is negative. That is, neither labour productivity nor land productivity is likely to compensate for the higher dependency ratio.

While it may be true that migrants vote with their feet, the choice of paths is often determined by forces in the larger system beyond their control. The good news is that indigenous agricultural and demographic knowledge and practices in Africa may provide the starting point for a sustainable future if the patterns established by colonialism and reinforced by ‘modern’ economic development can be changed.
The new pastoralism: poverty and dependency in northern Kenya
Authors: Hogg Richard
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

Recent studies of African pastoralism have come more and more to concentrate on its political economy and to note the increasing social and economic differentiation occurring within pastoral societies. As Swift and Maliki write of West Africa: ‘Since the 1973 drought, there has been an increasing process of proletarianization in the countryside which has particularly affected herders, who are in many places being transformed from independent rural producers into cowboys herding other people's animals on land they no longer control’ (1984: 2). In Kenya this process has become increasingly apparent since independence, as pastoralism has become dominated by a town-based elite (see Dahl, 1979a; Little, 1983, 1985a and b; Ensminger, 1984). In this article I trace the origins of a new kind of pastoralism in northern Kenya, and argue that poverty and dependence is becoming a permanent way of life to many pastoralists.
Self-help: the state and peasant leverage in Kenya
Authors: Holmquist Frank
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

The literature on general peasant–state relations in history, in Africa today, or in Kenya in particular, tells us that the peasants have little systematic political leverage over state policy. While I broadly agree with this assessment, I would like to comment on an exception. The changing nature of self-help in Kenya is analysed in order to argue, first, that peasants, in collaboration with other classes in self-help, have had some leverage on state policy and budgets in the realm of basic needs; second, that the fact of peasant initiative and political strength over time has served to alter subtly some aspects of everyday peasant–state relations to peasant advantage; and third, that self-help has historically been a doubleedged political sword. But, before proceeding to the Kenya context, it is essential to review theoretical and empirical aspects of peasant political weakness in contemporary Africa.
Some issues of theory in the study of tenure relations in African agriculture
Authors: Okoth-Ogendo H. W. O.
Published: April 2006

Prolegomenon

What has become known as ‘the African agrarian crisis’ is an extremely complex phenomenon. This much is clear from the fact that, despite the very considerable amount of literature which has been accumulated on the subject (Berry, 1984), there is still very little agreement as to its precise nature and dimensions and even less certainty on how to resolve it in the context of national level policies, plans and programmes. What this must mean,inter alia, is that explanations cannot be sought simply in pithy epigrams drawn from grand theories and hastily assembled micro-level data bases.
Environment and access to resources in Africa
Authors: Blaikie Piers
Published: April 2006

Opening Paragraph

This article has been written as a contribution to the future orientation of a research programme on the agrarian crisis in Africa, which has been set up by the Joint Committee on African Studies (JCAS) of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. The aim of this article is to provide an agenda for research on the environment and access to resources in Africa and is one of four which both provide a review of some of the most important research issues and suggest ways in which they might be tackled.
Continuity and change in the Gwembe Tonga family and their relevance to demography's nucleation thesis
Authors: Price Neil , Thomas Neil
Published: April 2006

Recent criticisms of demographic theory and methodology have pointed,inter alia, to the need to take on board advances in cognate disciplines. This case study of the Gwembe Valley Tonga of Zambia highlights the important methodological contribution that social anthropology can make to the sub-discipline of family demography. It provides evidence of the empirical invalidity of the ‘family nucleation’ paradigm, which holds that a shift towards conjugal marriage and nuclear household residence patterns is an inevitable consequence of globalisation, and a precursor of the social and economic changes necessary for the fertility transition. According to nucleation theory, evidence of increased conjugality will be reflected in the reduced symbolic importance of the lineage and ancestors; greater marriage stability; the demise of polygyny and widow inheritance; reduction in the size and significance of bridewealth payments; increasing age of first marriage for women, and decreasing age differentials between spouses. The case study therefore focuses on recent changes in the matrilineal kinship system, notably the emergence of localised lineages, and the extent to which these changes reflect family nucleation (largely but not exclusively in terms of increased conjugality). By analysing household structure and marital residence patterns, including the role played by the husband/father in family affairs, nuptiality (notably bridewealth, divorce and polygyny), inheritance and the role of ancestors, the case study demonstrates that changes in the family and kinship structure in response to local social and economic transformation can be equated not with nuclearisation but with the emergence of a modified form of family and kinship, quite distinct in structure and meaning from the nuclear family.
Loma political culture: a phenomenology of structural form
Authors: Højbjerg Christian K.
Published: April 2006

Upper Guinea political culture is often described as a system of dual sovereignty expressed in an idiom of bilateral kinship. The article examines whether this model applies to the Loma, a prototypical Upper Guinea culture. The result is largely negative. Empirical data suggest a more complex distribution of political and religious powers, and the analysis of the correlation between ritual and social structure in Loma society indicates a need to revise the current conceptualisation of Upper Guinea political culture. Thus, while matrilateral alliance is indeed central in shaping Loma social, political and religious organisation, there are certain important limitations on its cognitive potential, particularly when it comes to the influential so-called secret associations.
Who's for work? The management of labour in the process of accumulation in three Adja villages, Benin
Authors: den Ouden Jan H. B.
Published: April 2006

In the rural Adja region of south-west Bénin there is a labour problem. People who want to expand their businesses need cheap and reliable labour, but such labour is difficult to find and to manage. The sort of ‘big men’ known asalo-su amè dji—those mainly interested in investing in and dominating people—would like to keep up the appearance of being a ‘big man’ with many people under their control, but they cannot avoid the modern temptation of aspiring to personal wealth. Their style of management is to use mainly domestic labour, yet they face problems as the young begin to distrust the intentions of their household heads: the latter are suspected of looking after their own interests, while their followers doubt whether they will get a fair share of the assets when there are so many of them in a large family. Furthermore, sons and dependants find a long, very low-paid ‘apprenticeship’ increasingly unacceptable.

There is growing awareness of the difficulties of working with domestic labour and of the splintering effect of redistributing assets between a great many people. A small but growing number want accumulation for themselves and a limited number of descendants. This new style is associated with the sort of accumulators calledeho wu amè, people who try to maximise financial gain. They work with much less family than hired labour (and prefer a much lower rate of polygyny). But hired labour at economic rates is not easy to find and there are organisational problems.
The work of the ancestors and the profit of the living: some Nzema economic ideas
Authors: Pavanello Mariano
Published: April 2006

This article, based on fieldwork, explores the main economic categories of the Nzema, matrilineal farmers of South West Ghana, with the aim of reconstructing a local economic theory. The starting point is that any economic theory is logically founded in its own principles and that the internal coherence of a theory depends on its ability to represent the interests of the society to which it is applied. The work of ancestors appears as a founding idea in relation to other ideas like that of profit engendered by the work of the living.

The author, however, analyses these categories, particularly emphasising the use of terminology in various contexts of daily life and in the economic lexicon as a whole, in order to trace an unitary space in which the logic of a system of thought could be considered. In order to verify the coherence of this system the author conducts a comparative analysis between the Nzema categories and the corresponding western categories organised as different theories such as neo-classical marginalism, Marx's value of work and, finally, Chayanov's theory founded on an utility concept.

The central core of the Nzema's theory concerning work and profit is that the work of ancestors, first conceived as the ideological and juridical basis for the rights of their descendants over cultivable land, turns as well into a profit producer to the advantage of the living under the condition that it should be materialised as a means of production like, for example, the coconut trees, which were planted by the ancestors, and now produce a profit for their descendants.
‘Pillaging Jesus’: healing churches and the villagisation of Kinshasa
Authors: Devisch René
Published: April 2006

In Kinshasa thousands of prophetical churches of the Holy Spirit, particularly those in the Koongo area, fill in the ethical gap left, according to the people, by the marginalisation of traditional authority in the city, as well as the failure of civilisationist ‘white’ models, such as the collapse of public health and education sectors, and the dissolution of the State party. Confronted with economic collapse and miserable conditions in urban areas, these charismatic healing churches deconstruct the colonial and missionary heritage that ‘invented Africa’ in a white mirror, and the evolutionist utopia relating to modern progress. The dogmatic use that they make of biblical texts, their immoderate liturgy, and above all their ostentatious healing rituals parody and ridicule people's experience of post-colonial state constraints, the dichotomisation of the society operated by Christian conversion, and postcolonial mirrors opposing modernity and reactionary tradition, Christian values and pagan life. Healing churches deconstruct the daily seduction of the town folk by hedonistic ideals of capitalist consumption and Northern television channels which control the world. The Holy Spirit, as a substitute for the ancestral spirit, expresses itself in an heterodox manner and with multiple voices in the shape of glossolalia, dreams, and trance. During these very intense celebrations these communities, through the spirit, remobilise and, in particular, reinforce interpersonal links woven through the care of the body and from the mother within the matrifocal community or the matri-centered villagisation operating in the city. Here, in the daily quest for survival, people reassert their sense of criticism and community in the face of the fragments of state and tribal structures as well as their desire for moral integrity and sharing. And, above all, in this process of villagisation, healing churches recycle as symbolic capital the so-called forces of western imperialism, and particularly those which come from written material and electronics: the Bible, money, television, and satellite communication.
Cultural creolisation and language use in post-colonial Africa: the case of Senegal
Authors: Swigart Leigh
Published: April 2006

Scholars have recently begun to describe a speech form emerging in post-colonial cities which reflects the creative melding or ‘creolisation’ of elements from indigenous and former colonial cultures. These ‘urban varieties’ are not, strictly speaking, Creoles but rather indigenous languages whose structures and lexicons have been adapted to the complexities of urban life. A primary characteristic of such varieties is their ‘devernacularisation’. No longer tied to the cultural values represented by the languages in their more traditional forms, they reflect instead the new values and way of life found in the urban centres where they are spoken. This article, based on fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 1986 and 1989, describes the formation and role of one such urban linguistic variety, Urban Wolof. In particular, it focuses on Dakarois’ conflicting tendencies to accept Urban Wolof in Dakar as the most pragmatic form of urban communication while rejecting it as evidence of an undesirable creolisation between indigenous and French culture.
The livelihoods of traditional griots in modern Senegal
Authors: Panzacchi Cornelia
Published: April 2006

The article represents an overview of the activities of members of the géwél caste, or Wolof griots, in present-day Senegal. While seemingly little has changed in areas where traditional ways of life are still dominant, in the westernised urban culture many traditional artists have learned to cope with the use of mass media. Far from being threatened by extinction, traditional artists and historians have managed to adapt their art to the requirements of modern life and to make it accessible to a wider audience.
A note on space in the Ethiopian revolution
Authors: Donham Donald L.
Published: April 2006

There have been two major approaches to spatial analysis in social and cultural anthropology. The first insists that distance is culturally categorised, that a person 's experience of space is relative to particular ways of dividing and conceptualising spatial relations. The second approach, most often associated with central-place theory, takes the opposite tack. Distance, in this view, has certain universal predicates; for example, the inherent difficulty of transporting goods with a simple technology means that markets in agrarian societies have a limited set of recurrent features—no matter how space is locally encoded. These two modes of analysis are often taken as mutually exclusive ways of proceeding. In this article it is suggested that neither can be neglected if large-scale transformations like social revolutions are to be understood in their complexity. In the course of developing a pioneering study of the role of peasants in revolutions Eric Wolf offered the beginnings of a general theory. After summarising some of his hypotheses, the author confronts them with data from the Ethiopian revolution as it unfolded during 1975 in an area called Maale.
Militarism, gender and reproductive suffering: the case of abortion in Western Dinka
Authors: Jok Jok Madut
Published: April 2006

Studies of reproductive risk under war conditions pay a great deal of attention to statistics of sexual violence inflicted by one warring party upon women of the other. While such attention is justified, it mystifies the risk contained within families and local communities. This article examines the effects of the militarisation of youth in southern Sudan on women's reproductive well-being. The war has caused families to desire many children to make up for the high wartime infant mortality rate. The resultant social breakdown has prompted men to breach the rules of sexuality and sexual taboos to such an extent that women have lost much control over sexual and reproductive decisions. Women in Western Dinka, therefore, agree to conceive unwillingly. They also regard pregnancy as a difficult ordeal. Many, however, terminate pregnancy with unsafe techniques that risk infertility, infection or death.
Islam or Christianity? The choices of the Wawa and the Kwanja of Cameroon
Authors: Gausset Quentin
Published: April 2006

This article addresses two questions. First, it seeks to explain why the Wawa and the Kwanja (two neighbouring groups of Cameroon) converted to Islam and Christianity in the 1960s, and argues that they did so in order to adopt a respected identity which was seen as ‘modern’ and was associated with national citizenship. Secondly, it analyses the reasons why the Wawa converted to Islam while most Kwanja chose Christianity, and argues that their choices depended primarily on how they interact with, and define their own identityvis-à-visthe neighbouring Fulbe.
Development, demarcation and ecological outcomes in Maasailand
Authors: Homewood Katherine
Published: April 2006

The article begins by setting out the position of the Maasai, their territory and social organisation at the advent of the colonial period. It documents the progressive erosion of territory and the imposition of new boundaries on the Maasai from the 1880s to the present. It then uses the author's studies of the current Maasai land use and production system in Tanzanian Maasailand, together with comparative material from Kenyan Maasailand, to show how Maasai communities have dealt with these constraints. Data on livestock performance, wealth holdings, settlement size, diet and nutritional status are used as direct ecological indicators of the effects of boundary formation. It discusses the nature and extent of the response of the Maasai communities, whether in circumventing imposed boundaries, exploiting and in some cases attacking the resources the boundaries were designed to protect, or in developing strategies to incorporate and use to good effect the opportunities that boundaries can present.
On the creation and dissolution of ethnomedical systems in the medical ethnography of Africa
Authors: Pool Robert
Published: April 2006

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s a number of publications appeared in which earlier ethnographies of illness and misfortune in Africa were criticised for placing too much emphasis on supernatural causation and neglecting natural causation and practical medical behaviour. Indeed, following Warren's (1974) first criticism of Field, there was what almost amounted to a crusade to prove that Africans traditionally recognised a separate medical domain in which they interpret illness primarily in empirical and practical rather than in social and moral terms.

This article criticises the attempt to cast African aetiologies in a new light. Proceeding from a discussion of the distinction between naturalistic and personalistic aetiologies, around which the whole issue revolves, it examines the critics' claim that ethnographers have placed too much emphasis on supernatural causation in African aetiologies, that once these aetiologies are viewed more broadly they can in fact be seen to be largely naturalistic, and that one of the reasons for this bias is that earlier ethnographies, in particular Evans-Pritchard'sWitchcraft, Oracles and Magic, have been wrongly interpreted. A discussion of Evans-Pritchard's own description of Zande aetiology leads to the conclusion that the recent reinterpretations of Zande aetiology are mistaken. This raises the question: why the sudden desire to delineate discrete medical systems, and why so much emphasis on natural causation and practical activity?

Following a discussion of Wimbum aetiology and the concept of medicine, based on fieldwork in the Grassfields of Cameroon, the author argues that the emphasis on naturalistic causation and practical activity in the definition of African medical systems does not make them broader, as the protagonists claim, but narrower, and that the ‘broader’ descriptions of medical systems are not more accurate representations of how Africans interpret and cope with illness but biomedically determined constructs imposed on African culture through medical ethnography. The article concludes with a plea for the dissolution of the concept of ‘ethnomedical systems’.
Researching social capital in Africa
Authors: Widner Jennifer , Mundt Alexander
Published: April 2006

Scholars in several disciplines have recently turned their attention to the effects of community characteristics on attitudes and behaviour. ‘Social capital’ figures prominently in this new literature. This article explores the influence of trust, optimism, voluntarism and other standard components of social capital on political participation and institutional performance in two African contexts: Uganda and Botswana. It concludes that generalised trust and participation in social clubs help shape decisions to participate in formal politics, although their influence is dwarfed by gender and urbanisation. However, social capital bears no clear relation to institutional performance, as measured by residents' levels of satisfaction with government services.
The political economy of video marketing in Ogbomọṣọ, Nigeria
Authors: Lawuyi Olatunde B.
Published: April 2006

This article examines the character of Yoruba video viewers, the style of marketing and the politics of choice in Ogbomọṣọ, a Nigerian town on the northern fringe of Ọyọ State. As an itinerant trading community Ogbomọṣọ is a place where production is not the source of wealth; instead, big wealth is always repatriated from outside, raising a doubt, stemming from its largely invisible productive base, about human ability and achievements. The vocation of selling videos is growing, even if it is not successful yet as a money-making enterprise. But the business itself, by the attractiveness of its market culture, seems to be inviting gradual, systematic and progressive patronage. The business attracts customers, especially the young, by its guarantee of choice and a promise of negotiable power. Consumers can pick and choose among a variety of goods. They are free to collect or construct their relationships with the marketers, depending on what emphasis they place on cost, quality and quantity of goods. For the people of Ogbomọṣọ, whose craving for freedom and success have taken them far afield into other countries, the market enacts a self that can play many roles. The argument is that a local ideology of marketing promotes the sale of videos in their productive contexts and that those who buy them within those contexts act within the framework of the same ideology. Videos deal with knowledge and the various levels of its acquisition. The producers, the marketers and the consumers are engaged in a consideration of the political economy of their time. And, as a form of brokerage, the videos merge all expectations into a conception of history seen from a moralistic standpoint. They are also an illusion for sale when in the Nigerian context they talk about progress.
Second-hand clothing encounters in Zambia: global discourses, Western commodities, and local histories
Authors: Hansen Karen Tranberg
Published: April 2006

The rapid expansion in commercial exports of second-hand clothing from the West to the Third World and the increase in second-hand clothing consumption in many African countries raise challenging questions about the effects of globalisation and the meanings of the West and the local that consumers attribute to objects at different points of their journey across global space. This article draws on extensive research into the sourcing of second-hand clothing in the West, and its wholesaling, retailing, distribution and consumption in Zambia. Discussing how people in Zambia are deahng with the West's unwanted clothing, the article argues that a cultural economy is at work in local appropriations of this particular commodity that is opening space for local agency in clothing consumption. Clothing has a powerful hold on people's imagination because the self and society articulate through the dressed body. To provide background for this argument, the article briefly sketches recent trends in the global second-hand clothing trade that place the countries of sub-Saharan Africa as the world's largest importing region. There follows a discussion of Zambians' preoccupation with clothing, both new and second-hand, historically and at the present time. It demonstrates that the meanings consumers in Zambia attribute to second-hand clothing are neither uniform nor static but shift across class and gender lines, and between urban and rural areas. Above all, they depend on the cultural politics of their time. In dealing with clothing, people in Zambia are making sense of post-colonial society and their own place within it and in the world at large.
Trading on inequality: gender and the drinks trade in southern Tanzania
Authors: Green Maia
Published: April 2006

This article explores the economic logic of the domestic drinks market and its place in the subsistence strategies of men and women in a rural district of Ulanga in southern Tanzania, where women's brewing coexists with men's monopolisation of the sap alcohol market. The seasonal availability of sap alcohols, combined with the district's integration into national grain markets, creates a short-lived opportunity for some women to supplement their income from the production and sale of maize beer, an opportunity made possible oy the unequal economic interdependence of men and women and of different regions of Tanzania. The seasonal expansion of the market in maize beer occurs at a time when maize prices are high and household grain stocks are low. Brewers must choose between their immediate consumption needs and investing their small reserves of cash or grain in beer production in the hope that it will generate longer-term profit. As in other parts of Tanzania, the choice is idiomatically expressed through the contrast between ‘eating’ (kulia) and ‘generation’ (zalisha) through which grain, and the money to which it is explicitly compared, can be made to reproduce itself through careful investment.
Through the prism of a local tragedy: political liberalisation, regionalism and elite struggles for power in Cameroon
Authors: Eyoh Dickson
Published: April 2006

A prominent feature of political liberalisation in Cameroon (as elsewhere in Africa) is the increasing resort by elites to idioms of community (regional, religious and ethnic) and neo-traditional institutions like chieftaincy as a means of mobilising political support and reasserting control of local populations. Focusing on the anglophone part of Cameroon this study examines the historical roots of the salience of these phenomena in current struggles for power. It uses the circumstances surrounding the death of a chief in the South West Province to explain the ways in which elite reliance on these phenomena facilitates the linkage of locally specific, culturally encoded political conflict with competition for power at the national level, and provokes local populations into resisting state power, often through the reinvention of traditions of their own. The study concludes that popular scepticism about whether current political struggles will lead to fundamental changes in state–society relations is rooted in the ways in which elite politics are played out in local and regional spaces.
Power and the quest for recognition: neo-traditional titles among the new elite in Nso', Cameroon
Authors: Fisiy Cyprian , Goheen Mitzi
Published: April 2006

This article investigates the nature and structure of linkages between the urban elite and local institutions in their home villages in the Nso' area of north-west Cameroon. It argues that indigenous institutions provide a frame of reference for the negotiation of identity and the provision of security in a context where state institutions seem to have lost their raison d'être. The notion of a home village has become a defining factor in the urban–rural nexus which allows the elite to acquire resources from external sources which they in turn invest in the production of social and symbolic capital. The materialisation of this capital is manifested in the acquisition of neo-traditional titles. Under conditions of dire financial and material hardship some local traditional authorities have started to ‘commodity’ what was previously earned through merit and service to the group.
Islam, gender and urbanisation among the Mafa of north Cameroon: the differing commitment to ‘home’ among Muslims and non-Muslims
Authors: van Santen José C. M.
Published: April 2006

The history of the town of Mokolo, in the heart of the land of the Mafa (in northern Cameroon), exhibits a specific pattern of urbanisation that seems characteristic of Islamic frontier zones generally in Africa. The town was founded as a settlement for converted slaves towards the end of the nineteenth century by Fulbe chiefs who regularly raided the area. Since that time urbanisation has largely gone hand in hand with Islamisation. It has involved, therefore, a marked change of identity for Mafa converts in the town, with drastic consequences for their relationship with their areas of origin in the mountains. The article emphasises, moreover, that the implications of Islamisation/urbanisation differ along gender lines. Although for both men and women the Muslim community in town provided specific forms of social security, the motives for migration, and the ways men and women were included in the urban community, differed sharply. In the 1980s, owing to political changes at the national level, the pressure to convert to Islam decreased throughout northern Cameroon. Since then the number of migrants to town who do not convert has increased rapidly. Mokolo used to be a Muslim town. In the 1990s, however, it has become more and more a Mafa town, and thus symbolises the revival of Mafa ethnicity as a truly region-wide force.
Lords of the fly: colonial visions and revisions of African sleeping-sickness environments on Ugandan Lake Victoria, 1906–61
Authors: Hoppe Kirk Arden
Published: April 2006

Sleeping-sickness control in southern Uganda created ideological openings for the articulation of colonial visions of African environments. Competing colonial agendas, Ugandans' positions in their own environments, and Ugandans' resistance and responses to colonial schemes determined how such visions played themselves out in practice. The emerging power of colonial science played an important role in colonial attempts at constructing nature and defining Africans' relationship with their environments through disease control. The combination of forced depopulations, strategic clearings, and planned resettlement in British sleeping-sickness control schemes in southern Uganda set in motion a cycle of long-term land alienation from 1906 to 1962 that reflected the particular relations between British science, environmental intervention, and colonisation.
Child marriages in Rwandan refugee camps
Authors: de Smedt Johan
Published: April 2006

The Rwandan refugee camps in Tanzania witnessed the marriages of very young adolescents: girls as young as 13–14 married boys of 14–15 years, boys they often did not even know. These marriages usually did not last very long; after a few months many girls were forced to leave—sent away by their husband. People of both sexes and all ages, when asked about the problems in the camp, would always mention these child marriages as one of the biggest problems. They were worried not only about the loss of respect for Rwandan culture and traditional values but also about the future of the marriages and what would become of the children. This article is not based on extensive research into child marriages, but the author was able to interview a number of young people who had got married in the camps, and to collect information and the opinions of other people on these and other cases. Rather than describing marriage customs and wedding ceremonies in Rwanda, and comparing them with what took place in the refugee camps, the article aims to show the impact of (civil) war, the consequent poverty and the destruction of social structures on a community, in order to show how in these circumstances behaviour can change radically. Refugees have to build up a new life in a camp, and the new ‘society’ is likely to be different from the one they came from, with different rules and changed values. Among various examples of deviant behaviour child marriages were the most remarkable.