This article examines the resurgence of hunter associations (donzo ton) in Côte d'Ivoire during the 1990s in the context of game depletion, rising crime rates, and a dysfunctional state. Initiated hunters (donzow) are widely respected by the general public for their mystical powers and potent amulets which protect them from malevolent forces in the natural and social worlds. The donzow's success in reducing crime in northern rural areas led to an expansion of the dozon ton to the national level, as donzow were increasingly employed as private security guards in the country's major cities. The government and political parties also employed donzow to complement the police and gendarmes in maintaining order during the 1995 presidential elections. The attempt by politicians to manipulate the donzo ton during re-election campaigns was frustrated by the decentralised structure of the hunters' organisation and the diversity of its membership. Fearing that the donzo ton would become a politically destabilising force, successive governments have attempted to restrict its activities to the northern savanna region. The policy of containing the donzo ton to its so-called ‘original cultural hearth’ is discussed in the framework of the national cultural identity ideology of ivoirité and its xenophobic political manifestations around the 2000 presidential elections.

This article explores the reasons for, and the repercussions of, a virulent and protracted crisis in the South West Province of anglophone Cameroon during the 1990s caused by the emergence of a Pentecostalism-inspired revival movement within the Roman Catholic Church. The so-called Maranatha movement and main-line Catholicism were viewed by both parties as incompatible, almost leading to a schism within the Church. The originally internal Church dispute gradually became a particularly explosive issue in the region when the politics of belonging, fuelled by the government and the regional elite during political liberalisation, became pervasive.

Achille Mbembe's ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ has become a canonical contribution to the literature on postcolonial African politics, yet the piece has also proved difficult to digest and build upon. This article focuses on Mbembe's thesis that postcolonial rulers and subjects share an ‘aesthetics of power’, involving ceremonialism and an emphasis on bodily functions and metaphors. It attempts to disentangle Mbembe's insights into such political dispositions from the state-centrism and radical pessimism of his account by examining its analytical indeterminacies and critically re-evaluating his theoretical deployment of Bakhtin. It then develops an alternative Bakhtinian approach to Mbembe's problematic through an analysis of the public staging of political relations in Buganda (Uganda). The standardised ceremony staged by local communities in Buganda to welcome visiting dignitaries—a ceremonial form here designated ‘political hospitality’—projects and enacts legitimate relations of reciprocity and communication between rulers and subjects through performative prestation and the giving and eating of food. It thus lends itself to political ceremonialism and the elaboration of corporeal political metaphors without entailing the pathologies that Mbembe (mis)identifies as intrinsic to such dispositions and discourses. The distorted magnification of this ceremonial pattern by the national state does contribute to the state–society impasse that preoccupies Mbembe. Yet, contrary to Mbembe's bleak vision, such local idioms also provide resources for popular critical consciousness and, thus, some grounds for cautious optimism regarding the postcolonial African political predicament.

Nigerian video films are often characterised as apolitical. A rare and significant exception is Gbenga Adewusi's Maradona (also known as Babangida Must Go), which was released in 1993 in response to the annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election by the military ruler Ibrahim Babangida. The film is a fierce denunciation of the annulment and of the whole political regime, employing a number of Yoruba and transnational cultural forms: the chanted poetic form ewi, skits by artists from the Yoruba travelling theatre tradition, the televisual forms of music videos, news broadcasting and call-in shows, and the resources of print journalism. This film demonstrates the political potential of the video film, but also the limitations of the video distribution system.

This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about Manjaco reveal about postcolonialist anthropology as it is currently being constructed? Evans-Pritchard drew a sharp distinction between the idealised ‘before’ and the all too unpleasantly real ‘after’ of the colonial encounter. In the Azande version of this dichotomy authority is ultimately intact and unquestioned on one side of the historic divide. On the other side authority is about to disappear, with colonialism's impositions being the catalyst of this disappearance. By contrast, Manjaco were more likely to revile than revere their kings, and they tended to treat this as an enduring fact rather than to historicise it. Manjaco were also bad subjects and citizens. Or so it has seemed to colonial administrators and revolutionaries. Are we to frame this pervasive cynicism about authority and order as a kind of degeneration—an extension of colonial-era malaise into the era of the postcolony? Or are we to take Manjaco attitudes at face value? The article suggests that, in posing such questions, an emerging postcolonialist anthropology is inevitably a reflection of our view of the capacity of people like the Manjaco to make society work in the postcolonial era.

The Jola of Lower Casamance in southern Senegal are involved in ‘turnaround’ (or circular), rural to urban migration. Using data from three Jola communities located in different geographical and cultural sub-regions, this article compares the dynamics of migration among the villages and explores variations along gender and generational lines. Special emphasis is placed on the number of young unmarried girls and boys who return to the village during the rainy season to help their parents with agricultural work. It has been argued that the movement of people from the countryside to the city has had a negative effect on local food production. ‘Turnaround migration’ mitigates to some extent the impact of the rural exodus on rural communities. It has important implications of its own for the future of agriculture in the various Jola sub-regions.