In countries where conditions favour the preservation of manuscripts and books, the survival value of much of the literature may not be directly related to its popularity. Unpopular works may remain neglected for long periods and then regain favour; but in the conditions which have prevailed in East Africa, only those literary works receiving the continued favour of the people have had any chance of survival at all. There have been no library stacks, no dry cupboards or shelves for storing manuscripts, but only the white ant and the damp. The love of the Swahili people for a good poem has been the means of retaining much valuable work that would otherwise have been lost. Even so, much more has been lost to posterity than has been preserved.

On a coutume de dire que certaines langues nègres possédent la numération décimale et d'autres la numération quinaire. C'est exprimer assez mal un fait qui n'a souvent qu'une existence apparente. On veut dire par là que dans certaines langues il y a un mot spécial pour chacun des dix premiers nombres, et que, dans d'autres, chacun des cinq premiers nombres seulement et le nombre dix sont représentés par un terme propre, six se disant ‘cinq plus un’, sept ‘cinq plus deux’, etc.

Depuis 1948 la population du village côdier de Mumford a doublé, et endix anssa flotille de peche est passée du canëoe à la voile aux bateaux à moteur hors–bord suivis de bateaux de pêche même. Cet article examine quatre questions: premièrement, les changements de la technologie de la pêche; deuxièmement, une analyse des changementset des continuités des structures de production et dela possession des moyens de production. Troisièmement il fourni une discussion sur la maniere dont I'économie locale a été incorporee dans l'économie capitaliste à titre officiel du Ghana, et il considère quelques unes des réactions a cette incorporation. Finalement, il examine certainesimplications socio–economiques cles pour la societe deMumford, tels que l'endettement, l'organisation sociale, une baisse du niveau d'alphabetisation et une conscience sociale en changement.

Annual festivals in Ghana celebrate the agricultural harvest and commemorate the political authority of local chiefs. Today, multinational corporations such as Guinness, MTN and Vodafone sponsor almost all aspects of festival production. Sponsor participation has transformed festivals into sites saturated with images of commodities and corporate brands. While some chiefs support corporate participation, others deplore sponsors, who they perceive as threatening chiefs' control over the festival arena. A critical medium through which chiefs police and participate in discourses about cultural and political legitimacy is dress: chiefs clothe members of their entourages alternatively in T-shirts with corporate logos and T-shirts with images of chiefs. During festivals, chiefs orchestrate embodied practices to assert new claims to their political authority based on the nobility of their lineage or their participation in global economic networks. Through an exploration of contemporary dress practices, I argue that what is at stake in corporate-sponsored festivals is the emergence of new logics of value that challenge people to reassess the social and economic relations that underlie the production of political power in Ghana.

This article deals with the Belgian colonial authorities’ obsession with classification and categorization, and explores how this obsession affected medical care in the city of Coquilhatville. Whereas the authorities aspired to medical care that was strictly segregated along ‘racial’ lines, providing separate hospitals for Europeans and Africans, in reality such rigorous segregation was unsustainable. I argue that it was the authorities’ inclination to categorize patients that eventually blurred the lines. Indeed, this article shows how the administrators became thoroughly enmeshed in their taxonomic zeal when members of the African upper class, the so-called évolués, demanded different treatment from other Congolese, to reflect their status. Furthermore, these upper-class patients insisted on being differentiated among themselves too. Responding to more and more claims to be discerned from yet another ‘lower’ évolué, and in an attempt to translate social space into physical space and thus provide the applicant with a more sophisticated hospital room, the authorities gradually ran out of options. As a consequence, they – albeit unwillingly – opened the doors to évolués of a hospital that was initially reserved exclusively for Europeans.

In Uganda’s refugee policy framework, food aid targets the most vulnerable – among them people with disabilities – using a categorization system. This article explores the entanglements of this technology of food distribution with disabled people’s socialities. It reveals that the system does not achieve its proposed rationale of creating equal opportunities for people who are disadvantaged within Uganda’s refugee policy of self-reliance, and that it falls short in enabling disabled people to fulfil roles and responsibilities. Nevertheless, food aid is a significant contribution that allows refugees with disabilities to cultivate family and non-kin relationships. Exploring these interdependent relations around food aid calls into question the ideas of equality and independence as fundamental principles of living together.

Indigenous Yorùbá poetry is often defined by such features as context, structure, tonal quality and the performer’s identity. Early taxonomy of the poetry focused on the poetics that could be deduced from a long tradition of practice. Recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies has been more interested in showing the ways in which the poetry is being inflected by encounters with postcolonial modernity. While these recent contributions demonstrate how new forms, such as ewì, distil expressive nuances from the older forms and invent new performative practices to address new publics, such studies encourage a generalization that credits to the new forms all the modern advances recorded in the indigenous forms themselves. Looking at specific indigenous forms in terms of how postcolonial modernity has reshaped them, rather than considering them another set of additions to a new generic category, allows us a clearer view of their transition. I track the inventions and changes in the practice of two Yorùbá forms, ìjálá and Ifá chants, using the performances of Àlàbí Ògúndépò and Yẹmí Ẹlẹ́buìbọn. I rely on ethnographic data to show how mutating audiences and electronic storage and retrieval systems have continually shaped composition and performance, discuss the imperatives of modernity and economy in the performative choices of the artists, and show how the performers simultaneously manage their resistance to and adoption of the modern.

In central Uganda, even a casual observer would notice the widespread presentation of often identical commercial services and goods – fruit vendors, street food or motorcycle taxis, for instance – in a small shared area. This article brings the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric of ‘bundling’, reflecting both on diverse examples from present-day Kampala and on some of the phenomenon’s historical and linguistic scaffolding. We take this phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of socio-economic exchange and growth, one that is distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of an unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, reflects an aesthetics in which both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The article suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as a process unfolding in ways that complicate and clog conventional economic imaginaries.

The Ashanti Nation was a federation of Akan tribes united in 1697 under the Golden Stool. This federation, while functioning effectively in war, was loose with regard to internal administration. The chiefs of the constituent tribes had very wide autonomy, and a tendency to assert their independence from the Asantehene at Kumasi.

The British occupied neighbouring territory on the Gold Coast and were primarily interested in trade. For trade to prosper it was necessary to have order in the area. There were two policies which would have made this possible: the British could have supported the power of the Asantehene, who would then have been sufficiently strong to keep his constituent tribes in order, or it could have taken the entire region under its protection and enforced peace among the tribes.

Nigeria is often portrayed as having a ‘Muslim north’ and a ‘Christian south’. Such representations oversimplify the complicated interrelationships between the two religious communities and their geographic locations. Similarly, while much has been written on the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, there has been less scholarly attention to the philosophical and communal relationships between adherents of the two religions in northern Nigeria. I argue that there are parallels in the way in which Hausa-speaking Muslim artists responded to a censorship crisis in Kano State in 2007–11 and in the way in which Hausa-speaking Christian musicians from Nigeria’s north-east responded a few years later to the Boko Haram crisis. I examine Muslim filmmaker Hamisu Lamido Iyantama’s response to the Kano State Censorship Board, alongside Christian musician Saviour Y. Inuwa’s response to Boko Haram. Iyantama and Inuwa both counter repressive forces by expressing parallel understandings of their identities as citizens in the pluralistic state of Nigeria and as righteous members of universal religious communities that emphasize God’s justice in the end times. I argue that these Hausa-language artists present a vision of cosmopolitan unity across ethnicity and religion, as an alternative to the repressive forces of both state censorship and the anarchic violence of Boko Haram.

The concept of the mythical charter, validating claims to ritual or political authority, is a familiar one to social anthropologists, although, due to a better understanding of the interaction of myth and history, there has been a tendency in recent years to speak of the ‘historical’ rather than the ‘mythical’ charter. Those who use such terms are not primarily interested in the charter as evidence of a system of ideas, worth studying for its own sake. Their emphasis is on the function of the charter, rather than on its meaning. However, a brilliant lead has been given in the exploration of myths as systems of ideas by Claude Lévi-Strauss who places a given text within the whole corpus of oral literature proper to a society. Going, perhaps, further than this, Victor Turner corrects the predominantly literary approach of Lévi-Strauss by his examination of the ‘positional meaning’ of the symbols employed by such texts—a meaning derived from a totality of elements, rites, and institutions within a whole culture.

The broad characteristics of the British West African colonies and their main social and economic problems are already fairly familiar from the relevant sections of Lord Hailey's African Survey (1938), and Professor Hancock's Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (1942). A recent article by Dr. M. Fortes (1945) helps to bring the analysis up to date and makes very clear how great and rapid are the changes taking place in the social and economic structure. In this present contribution, the result of a very brief study, I attempt only to underline some of the salient features as they appear to one new to the West African scene, and to estimate the problems from the point of view of sociological research.

The series of droughts in Africa and associated famine since the 1970s and the increasing reliance of most African countries on imported food are seen by many people to be key indicators of a crisis in African agriculture. At the same time there is a substantial difference between the story told by the macro-indicators of the crisis—foreign trade and grain production statistics from the formal sector, global famine statistics and environmental data—and by reports from individual village/community studies.

Within the past decade, several major fires involving key government establishments have occurred in Nigeria. These included fires at: the 10-storey Federal Ministry of Education building (5 September 1980); the 11-storey Republic Building of the Ministry of External Affairs (14 December 1981); the 37-storey External Communication Building, NECON House (24 January 1983); the 13th floor of the 23-storey building housing the Defence Ministry (27 October 1983); the Accounts Department of the Cabinet Office (19 March 1984); the Finance and Accounts Division of the Post and Telegraphs (Ministry of Communications) headquarters (4 December 1984); and the 32-storey Cocoa House in Ibadan (8 January 1985). The latest of these fires engulfed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Headquarters in Lagos on 12 April 1986.