In February 1957 we visited the homestead of Laduma Madela, member of a small Zulu clan. He belongs to the PondolweNdhlovu regiment, i.e. he was born about 1906. He had been described to us as a somewhat mysterious but particularly knowledgeable person. One of us had established preliminary contacts and gained his confidence. When we visited him for the first time, neither of us anticipated that we should meet in him a unique Zulu personality, a man who, although ‘uneducated’ in the Western sense, possesses a remarkable breadth of vision and grasp of detail concerning his own culture.

The material for this study was collected during the first two months of 1954, while camping in a Cokwe village about 50 miles north-east of Vila Luso in the administrative area of Camanongue, County and District of Moxico, Province of Bié, Angola. My chief informant was Sr. Francisco Casueka, aged 44, a Cokwe- and Portuguese-speaking African from the printing press at Boma Mission near Vila Luso. He was the ablest assistant I had among many good informants during my stay in Angola.

The ‘title deed fix’ – resurgent globally since the 1990s – is part of a wave of market-led agrarian reforms whose outcomes have been mixed. Kenya was the first African country to experiment – starting six decades ago and continuing today – with state-mandated formal land registration and private titling. Today it is among a handful to begin a transition to a digitized land registry. Behind both paper and electronic land documents, however, is a persistent temporal fiction that undergirds state-backed title registries – namely, a constructed present that is out of sync with intersecting biographical and structural temporalities, and that can efface socially recognized pasts, commitments or testimonials. We analyse some consequences of those temporal dissonances, unstable rights durations, and an ensuing limbo that can last decades, through family land stories shared with us during long-term ethnographic research in Kenya’s fertile central highlands. Especially vulnerable to temporal erasure and dispossession when title deed limbo spans decades are divorced or single women and their children, particularly as farmland and non-agricultural employment become more scarce and land markets overheat. Multitemporal family narratives powerfully illustrate why title deeds of any age are best taken as provisional truths rather than legal certainties, and why tenure security is an unstable and reversible process rather than a present or absent condition.

This article deals with metida avoidance practices as they emerge in daily and ritual practice among the agro-pastoral Datoga-speaking peoples of Tanzania. The elaboration of the avoidance practices varies starkly between and within Datoga segments, but these practices are commonly particularly elaborate in connection with death or death-like events, and with birth or birth-like events. In the study area women may spend years of their lives with severe restrictions on their conduct in terms of movement and socialization. We argue that in making sense of such avoidance phenomena the strong influence of Mary Douglas's ‘dirt’ and ‘pollution’ concepts has hindered an understanding of the fact that the metida seclusion does not only isolate substances perceived to be dangerously contaminating, but in similar ways secludes fertile and vulnerable elements in order to protect them. A Strathern-inspired transition to a focus on bodies as open and dynamic systems that mingle with other bodies in intimate flows or exchanges of bodily fluids may be fruitful in this context. We indicate, however, that incautious substitution of a ‘pollution’ concept with the concept of ‘flows’ may lead to challenges not entirely dissimilar to those that attended the employment of Douglas's concepts.

Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African-American Muslims have travelled or relocated to the rural yet renowned city of Medina Baye, Senegal. They were invited there by Shaykh Hassan Cisse, a Senegalese Islamic scholar and leader in the Tijani tariqa (Sufi order). This article focuses on the experiences of African-American and fellow diaspora Black Muslims living and learning with African Muslims in the Tijani hub of Medina Baye. It interrogates the assumptions, expectations and misunderstandings that characterize relationships between the two groups. I argue that, as members of the Tijani tariqa, diaspora Black disciples become integrated within the local system of collective care modelled by African disciples. Complicating analyses of African–diasporic exchanges that tend to differentiate and hierarchize the interconnected economic hardships facing diaspora Black and continental African communities, I argue that the relationship between these groups illustrates the role of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse’s branch of the Tijani tariqa as a counterhegemonic social movement offering new paradigms of social and economic reciprocity that enable Black Muslims on both sides of the Atlantic to mitigate the contemporary impacts of racial capitalism and global apartheid.

Quatorze berceuses Gurage d'Ethiopie, dans leurs transcriptions inor et leurs traductions anglaises, sont brièvement introduites et annotées. L'inor appartient au groupe linguistique de l'ouest du Gurage; cette série de berceuses complémente celles d'eza (une autre langue de l'ouest du Gurage) qui avaient été publiées auparavant par l'auteur.

Full descriptions of the kinship terminology of the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria are rare. One important reason for this is that, although the basic principles of kinship organization are similar over much of the Ibo culture area, terminology reflects, on the one hand, the extreme degree of dialect variation and, on the other hand, local variation in details of the kinship organization itself. Such variations occur sometimes over a very few miles. Certainly there is no single Ibo kinship terminology; there is only in a broad sense one southern Ibo terminology; while the area which can be said to have one terminology in the narrowest sense of an absolute identity of every term is often very restricted. Although this situation may be confusing to the investigator, it is not necessarily so to the Ibo. Every Ibo is conversant with kinship terms within and often far beyond the radius in which he may seek a wife, just as he is aware of dialectal variations in any other field of terminology. Thus it is that terminology in the literature has tended sometimes to be dialectally eclectic as well as incomplete. The growing body of publications in Ibo, both in the Onitsha and the Central dialects, also illustrates this tendency when kinship relationships are mentioned. It would therefore seem to be worth while to record one specific system of terminology in detail, within the social context of its area.

With some previous knowledge of these people I had expected to ascertain on inquiry that they had a set if simple form of government and something more or less regular in their group and tribal organization, whereas I find that there is no cohesion or co-operation between groups or collections of groups, chieftainship hardly exists, and there is little or nothing in the way of a judicial system. What may have been custom seems to have been replaced to a great extent by habit and impulse, the interest of the individual is paramount to the exclusion of the good of the community—in short their mode of life, in spite of what may be said cf co-operative food quest, is the most complete expression of individualism, and any man who in astuteness and cunning, bravery and endurance, or in other similar qualities shows himself to be ahead of his fellows becomes their unacknowledged leader.

The comparative philology of former times mainly occupied itself with the collection of such words in different languages as showed some similarity in sound, and even this phenomenon was not thought worthy of too much attention. It was not before the beginning of the nineteenth century that the scientific importance of the problems here involved were recognized, and it was seen that they called for thorough and exact investigation. First of all, the differences in structure that exist between the various European languages were examined more closely than had been done before, and those languages that were seen to possess a number of characteristics in common were then brought together into one group, which was called the Indo-European family of languages. Next, another group was found, namely that of the Semitic languages, the relationship to each other of which had been recognized long before on account of the greater uniformity in grammar and vocabulary. Indo-European and Semitic were then both classed together by virtue of their being ‘inflecting’ languages, that is to say, they change words not by means of endings only, but also through vowel change within the stem, and have grammatical gender.