This article is concerned with the way an African ethnic group is represented in the medium of television. It is argued, first, that, in the broad spectrum of programmes, ethnographic films will never be in the top rank. Nevertheless, as part of a general range appealing to an intellectual and academic audience, ethnographic films will be competing in this market. One solution is to let ethnographic films become more attractive through a closer resemblance to fictional films. But it creates a dilemma for an ethnographic film screened on television, as it must legitimise its position by differentiating itself from fiction through establishing a certain realism while at the same time employing fictional devices to dramatise ethnographic ‘stories’. This leads to distorted and sometimes racist undertones. The second issue concerns the ambitions of the film team. Their temporary role in the locality becomes political when, as inevitably happens, they favour, and are favoured by, one section of the local community in order to fulfil their mission of producing an ethnographic film. A split in the community is caused by such external forces and justified by the fact that we are all ‘living in a global village’.

In their quest for material well-being Cameroonian women see the United States as a country of virtually boundless opportunities. It is Eldorado, offering chances of earning money by selling cosmetics that are guaranteed not to have been tampered with. It is the new frontier, the Far West, where mothers send their children to study in the hope that a job-oriented education will make it easier for them to return home. It is the future, prefigured in the New York skyscrapers; Cameroonian mothers dream of bringing forth American children, and so giving tham a better chance of absorbing this world of the future. When the American dream is not accessible, the United States still offers an imaginary space where women reinvent the conditions of their existence by adopting some of the signs of American culture in their everyday life in the tropics. The use of lipstick thus appears as the symbol of a world-culture behind which hovers the giant image of the United States. The experiences of Cameroonian women can be extended to women in other African countries and, beyond, to the men of Africa, also suffering the precariousness of the present, faced with the same challenges of the future and engaged in the same quest for material well-being.

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 arose out of an attempt to quantify the risk of transmitting blood-borne diseases, in particular Hepatitis B and HIV, through the practice of making incisions (umgcabo) and punctures (ukutshobha) in the skin for the purpose of introducing medication (muthi) into the human body. The intention was to examine means of containing the risk. It soon became apparent that the practice of these therapies was inextricably bound up with legal and economic issues arising out of the impact of colonialism on Zulu medicine. Any endeavour to contain them would first have to address these fundamental issues. The article takes a step in that direction by (1) examining in detail some of the practices of diviners and herbalists in their historical context and (2) showing how colonial and post-colonial legislation has affected traditional healers and their clients in rural KwaZulu/Natal.

The article examines relations between pentecostalism and politics in post-colonial Zimbabwe through a case study of one of Africa’s largest pentecostal movements, Zimbabwe Assemblies of God, Africa (ZAOGA). The Church’s relations with the state change considerably from the colonial to the post-colonial era. The movement began as a sectarian township-based organisation which eschewed politics but used white Rhodesian and American contacts to gain resources and modernise. In the first decade of independence the leadership embraced the dominant discourses of cultural nationalism and development but fell foul of the ruling party, ZANU/PF, because of its ‘seeming’ connections with the rebel politician Ndabiningi Sithole and the American religious right. By the 1990s ZAOGA and ZANU/PF had embraced, each drawing legitimacy from the other. However, this reciprocal assimilation of elites and the authoritarianism of ZAOGA’s leadership are in tension with the democratic egalitarian culture found in local assemblies, where the excesses of leaders are challenged. These alternative pentecostal practices are in symbiosis with radical township politics and progressive sources in civil society. Thus, while pentecostalism may renew the process of politics in Zimbabwe, it may itself be renewed by the outside forces of wider Zimbabwean society.

From a perspective based in ethnographic research this article reviews the historical evidence relating to the social organisation of the southern Funj in the Sudan during the nineteenth century. It goes beyond a characterisation of the region as one of pagan ‘tribes’ more or less successful in resisting subordination by a sophisticated Islamic state to discern a complexity of varied political relations radiating from an elite in a few regional centres and traversing all the communities of the region. The appearance of distinct ethnic groups under the colonial regime of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was preceded by a transitional geo-political division of the population into defiant highlanders and variously servile lowlanders under the Turco-Egyptian government which succeeded the Funj sultanate in the region.