Valuable African archival materials are known to have been ‘rediscovered’ accidentally after having been ‘lost’ to scholarship for a time. Perhaps the foremost example of this in Lower Congo research is the eighteenth-century bibliography located by Jadin in the Vatican Library some time ago. A similar case which I shall discuss here is that of the KiKongo sources of Karl Laman's four volume ethnography The Kongo, a 775-page work detailing traditions, customs, lore, and legend from the BaKongo north of the Congo River at the turn of the century. These sources were ‘lost’ too, but in a different way. Through an obfuscating editorial policy and several translations from KiKongo to Swedish, and again from Swedish to English, their central role in the final work became completely obscured. A reconstruction of how Laman's posthumous ethnography in fact reached the stage of publication should be of help to those who find it difficult to work with as it is—although I must make clear that the work is, as it stands, already of outstanding value. An explanation of the editorial policy in terms of its premises should reveal the impact of tacit ethnological theory upon something as seemingly cut-and-dried as the posthumous works of an established scholar, already well known in his field.

It is thought that African rice (Oryza glaberrima), domesticated from the annual wild rice Oryza barthii, a plant of savanna river valleys and water holes, may have been first cultivated along the valley of the upper and middle Niger (Portères, 1970; Harlan, 1975). Cultivation under high rainfall conditions in the forest zone followed the development of ‘upland’ cultivars. Today, farmers in the drier savannas continue to depend on the seasonal rise and fall of flood water in valley bottom land for rice cultivation, and on occasion, this has developed into fully-fledged ‘irrigation’ agriculture (Linares de Sapir, 1970; Loquay, 1980), but elsewhere in the West African rice zone rain-fed ‘upland’ cultivation techniques now predominate. Where rainfall is more reliable ‘upland’ cultivation tends to be preferred because of its greater efficiency of labour use, but, as in ancient times, the occasional supplementary use of swamp to cope with bad years is not uncommon. This paper focuses attention on rice farming systems in Sierra Leone. Rice cultivation probably reached this area several thousand years ago (Atherton, 1979). Although in a few instances regular use of swamp land dates back to the later part of the nineteenth century (e.g. in the Bumban valley and the tidal swamps of the Scarcies estuary: Fyle, 1979, Carpenter, 1978) ‘upland’ cultivation still retains its former importance over large parts of the country.

The linguistic and religious affiliation of the peoples of the arid lowlands of northern Kenya and adjacent areas of the Horn is very heterogeneous. Although most of the populations east of Lake Turkana speak languages which belong to the Lowland branch of the Eastern Cushitic sub-family, within this branch Oromo speech (Boran, Gabbra, Sakuye, Orma) is not mutually intelligible with Somaloid languages like Rendille and Somali. Even within the Somaloid group, successful communication between monolingual Rendille and Somali is normally difficult, but a high degree of bilingualism is found.

Recent happenings in the Gold Coast, and particularly in Ashanti, have tended to focus interest upon the structure of the constitution and the struggle for political power. Ten years ago two other movements were attracting at least as much attention. In a preliminary report on the work of the Ashanti Social Survey, published in 1948, Fortes described these as first, an apparently insatiable demand for schools, and, second, an almost equally if not more powerful development of what he called ‘new witch-finding cults’. That the demand for education of all kinds continues and is gradually being met is well known; it would be interesting, and perhaps, in the light of occurrences in other parts of Africa, significant to learn what has happened to the new cults.

In the mid-1990s the village vigilantism known as sungusungu emerged, for the first time, in Tarime District, in northern Tanzania, in response to high levels of cattle theft and related violence—not in the form of independently organised but co-operating village vigilante groups, as it had first manifested itself a decade and a half earlier, in west central Tanzania, among the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples, but under state sponsorship. This article describes the organisation and operation of this form of state-sponsored vigilantism as it unfolded in a village of the agro-pastoral Kuria people, and argues that, while it offers a number of significant benefits both to the state and to local people, it nonetheless suffers from some of the same weaknesses that plague the official law enforcement system.

This article examines the tensions between memory, identity and livelihoods in the making and transformation of cultural patrimony among Fulani cattle keepers of West Africa. Two areas of cattle breeding are examined: the Grassfields of Cameroon and south-western Burkina Faso. Studies on Fulani livestock raising suggest that each group possesses a particular cattle breed that has not changed with time. While the Fulani are thought to be conservative pastoralists, their livestock management practices suggest otherwise. They cross and change cattle breeds in order to adapt to new ecological or socio-political conditions. These strategies of adaptation and adjustment of cattle seem to be in opposition to strategies of heritage conservation. The relationship between Fulani pastoralists and their cattle breeds shows that an animal patrimony is a social product that is susceptible to being reworked. Fulani cattle breeding shows that new crossbreeds can result in the construction of a new heritage over the medium and long term as long as it is transmitted from the present to the next generation and preserved for a period of time.

It has long been recognized that there is a distinctive category of African political systems, which is characterized by centralized authority. The preliminary analysis and classification of African kingdoms proposed in this article are based on comparison of most of the States in Central, South, and East Africa. Only a few data on West African kingdoms have been incorporated, but we feel that the classification will prove generally valid for West Africa as well.

In the course of the investigations carried out by the Missions Griaule in French West Africa during several decades, our attention has been drawn to the fact that numerous populations in the French Sudan and Upper Volta claimed to be descended from a common stock located in Mande. Mande is the traditional centre of the ancient Keita empire (called by the Arabs the Mali empire), which was founded in the thirteenth century by Soundiata Keita. The cultural centre of this area today is Kangaba, which the inhabitants call Kaba. A list of the peoples in West Africa who claim to have come from Mande has been drawn up and published.

From February to June 1995 approximately 300,000 people attended an anti-AIDS healing cult in Malawi. The name given to the cult was mchape. The article investigates the so-called ‘mchape affair’ and compares it with the anti-witchcraft movements which swept Malawi during the 1930s under the very same name. Against the background of this linguistic identity, the article reflects on the politics of healing, social memory and the public sphere as the national space in which the affair assumed its distinctive shape. Focusing on the perception of AIDS as encoding decay, it is argued that the mchape affair can be understood as a negotiation of the limits of power and the meaning of suffering nourished by the moral imagination of post-Banda society.

Traditional Somali politics was based on two dialectically related principles: kinship and contract (tol iyo xeer). Kinship was founded on the segmentary lineage system under which people traced their descent to common male ancestors. Agnates functioned as corporate political groups because they were blood relatives. But the blood relation was not sufficient to establish a political system. Agnates functioned as corporate political groups because they negotiated a social contract that defined the terms of their collective unity.

Interest in African sacred kingship has for long been centred upon its ritual aspects; descriptions of highly colourful ceremonies have provided a convenient introduction to the study of a people's religious beliefs, yielding also examples of the ritual sanctions by which the ruler enforces obedience. As a result the constitutional aspects of kingship have been largely ignored.

This article examines the role of women in the politics of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC), a militant ethno-nationalist movement of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria. Women's inclusion in the organizational structure and their typical roles within the OPC, the article suggests, expand the political agency of women but at the same time ensure that their contributions are contained within the OPC's overall politics. Women play important roles within the OPC, primarily by enabling and supporting the vigilante activities of male OPC members. In the provision of this support, women overwhelmingly draw on the knowledge and powers associated with typically female life experiences. As a result, women's interests are represented within the overall agenda of the OPC, but on the basis of complementary rather than egalitarian gender roles.

This article explores the ways in which efforts to expand private land tenure, coupled with the continued centrality of customary land administration in Zambia, produce a fractured system of land governance in which localized markets for land emerge but are forced to operate in a clandestine manner. Using ethnographic and archival data sources, I argue that despite the historical and contemporary relationship between land rights and economic ‘development’, the clandestine nature of land markets in rural Zambia tends to (re)produce many of the social ills that ‘development’ seeks to resolve. Using a case study of a clandestine market for land in a Tonga-speaking region of southern Zambia, this article shows how these markets undermine women's rights to land, while allowing for the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

This part issue of the journal Africa broadly explores the idea of frontiers and pioneers in the study of queer African lives. We envisage frontiers as exploring new openings in the study of sexuality by putting forward the practices and experiences of people across the African continent. We propose to study queerness as part of broader quotidian realities so as to further theorize the study of sexualities and queerness. We propose the term ‘pioneer’ for the interlocutors in our studies: (self-identifying) women, men and queerying persons who courageously explore contradictory paths in their various contexts. As such, we encourage an imaginative employment of queer as indicating a horizon of curiosity and imprecision. In making queerness not an object of study but rather a subject of its own theorization based on everyday experience, this special journal issue explicitly and deliberately asserts the vernacular and the mundane as a locus of knowledge. One implication is especially pertinent: knowledge on queerness cannot be prefabricated or preassembled in theoretical laboratories with the aim of merely applying it to an African context. By doing so, Africa functions – as it always has – only as a variable in the study of cultural difference, one that is different from, by implication, a Euro-American centre. ‘Or, as is happening too often, queer African voices and experiences will be absorbed as “data” or “evidence,” not as modes of theory or as challenges to the conceptual assumptions that drive queer studies’ (Macharia 2016: 185). Foregrounding the mundane rather than the urbane (as in ‘suave’, for which queer theory has a strong penchant), we are not trying to ‘define’ African queer sexualities; rather, we seek to provoke conversations about the terms and agencies of their expansion through the prism of frontiers and pioneers.

The article traces the history of debates on land transfers in northern Ghana and discusses the ways in which African and European views on land tenure influenced and instrumentalized each other. Using the case of Nandom in the Upper West Region, I analyse how an expansionist group of Dagara farmers gained access to and legitimized control over land previously held by a group of Sisala hunters and farmers claiming to be the ‘first-comers’ to the area. Both groups acknowledge that the Sisala eventually transferred land to the Dagara immigrants, symbolically effected by the transmission of an earth-shrine stone. However, the Sisala interpret this historical event in terms of a ‘gift’, invoking the language of kinship and continued dependency, while the Dagara construe it in terms of a ‘purchase’, implicating exchange, equality and autonomy. These different perspectives, as well as colonial officials' ideas that land ownership was ultimately vested in the ancestors of the first-comer lineage and therefore ‘inalienable’, have shaped early disputes about the Nandom earth shrine and Dagara property rights. Competing conceptions of pre-colonial African land tenure continue to provide powerful arguments in current land conflicts, and shrinking land reserves as well as the political implications of landed property, in the context of decentralization policies, have exacerbated the debate on the ‘inalienability’ of land.

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.

In this paper I illustrate an objective method for the determination of the meaning and values of social institutions, using data on the custom of praise-singing (roko) among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria. To direct attention to the method of analysis clearly, I shall present the field-data and their examination separately. I concluding, I shall indicate certain problems which seem to arise from this paper.

The certainty of the individual's extinction as a human being contradicts so outrageously the value and effort of living that most cultures minimize the confrontation with this certainty, or cushion it with assurances of some form of immortality. I am going to describe some of the ways in which the Yoruba express their fear of death, and the response they make to it, especially through their traditional religion, which is still the religion of a good proportion of the five million Yoruba in South-West Nigeria and Southern Dahomey. These examples show the wide range of their attempts to cope with this recurrent fear.

The savanna-forest boundary in West Africa is one of its most remarkable geographical features. The clarity with which the boundary is defined, whether seen from the air or from ground level, is, throughout most of its length, most striking. Moreover, the most casual observer will discover that many other features, particularly of settlement and of agriculture, reach the limit of their distributions at about the same location. Not the least significant feature, in sharp contrast with many other zones of vegetation change, is that the boundary is not an ecotone, or zone of gradual change in floristic composition and community structure in response to equally gradual changes in habitat character, but ‘a mosaic of communities representative of each region’. The zone of change consists of islands, salients, and enclaves of forest and savanna, sharply separated from one another. Only one community, the ‘transition woodland’, may in any sense be considered an ecotone. Even this, in some instances at least, may be a more or less transient sub-seral community, in view of the fact that forest trees within it are generally young, whereas the savanna trees are old.