This article is concerned with mass education in late colonial Ghana. The first part examines how people in the Ashanti Region interpreted and responded to a policy that was conceived in the period of power sharing between an African nationalist legislative assembly and a civil service that was still dominated by British expatriates. Literacy campaigns and related community development activities were shaped by the expectations and ideals of the Asantes who participated as learners, tutors, volunteer leaders and salaried employees. Mass education was popular partly because new skills, techniques and materials could be used to pursue older ideals about enlightenment, progress, cleanliness and good character. Government policy indicated that literacy campaigns and community development activities would help to build democracy from the grassroots, yet, in spite of its popularity, mass education remained beyond the control of elected local government. The later part of this article focuses on the small town of Kwaso in order to establish why this was so and what one local resident was able to do about it.

This article presents two themes: how young professionals personally experience sexuality and issues of cultural belonging or identification; and how these issues are interrelated in their lives. I identify ways in which ‘young professionals’ as a social group are in the vanguard in respect of societal reconfigurations of gender, sexuality and culture. I argue that this group embodies post-colonial transformations concerning reconfigurations in gender, sexuality and culture. I work out the complexities of sexuality and culture by focusing on public debates about African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality, on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-definitions on the other. Finally, I explore how sexuality has become central to self-expression and how cultural self-identification is an ambiguous concern for young professionals.

This article deals with the continuous flow of resources, values and goods that takes place within a Cape Verdean institution called tabanca. It examines the effects of some practices of the so-called Cape Verdean diaspora on local forms of sociality in Santiago's tabancas, in order to show that these flows have a remarkable conservative tendency and contribute to the reproduction of traditional forms of social organization. The Cape Verde I present in this article is at variance with the standard image of the country in current anthropological literature, which approaches social life in the archipelago using analytical tools developed in interdisciplinary fields such as globalization theory and post-colonial, transnational or diasporic studies. Through the ethnographic analysis of the flows within the tabanca, I put the Cape Verde case in the general context of West African political culture to argue that some of its attributes, which appear in literature on transnationalism, diaspora and globalization as the outcome of contemporary transformation, can best be explained in terms of a conservative structural continuity with the political culture that evolved in the northern part of West Africa, known as Senegambia.

Among the Gouro masks, Zamble, a composite animal figure, and Gù, a fine-featured woman's face, are known to art lovers around the world. Today their profane avatars, Flali and Zaouli, are at the heart of masquerades that are much enjoyed by audiences. But this appreciation concerns only the ‘pretty’ aspects, that is to say the civilized and orderly side of an ensemble that also has a reverse side: the disease masks, sprung from disorder, avatars of the more powerful Zàùlì, described as the wild brother or husband of Zamble in the genealogical idiom employed by the Gouro when referring to the masks. These masks are created by each generation of young people and are central figures in rituals of inversion that express the upheavals of the times. At the same time as they establish their creators’ reputations, they serve as a record of these events for the Gouro. Descended from the initial trio of masks (Zàùlì, Zamble, Gù), they prolong the trend to secularization of this family of masks from the sacred wood. In tracking this tradition over twenty years we can see a process of resacralization. When the youths’ comments are analysed in the light of encyclopaedic knowledge acquired in the course of anthropological research on health, we can understand the necessity of the mask figure, and going further can understand what an ugly profane mask is, what it presents and the role it plays. In return the Zamble mask and its associates take on another dimension, a dimension that opens up exploration of the unknown via their intrinsic ambiguity and the transgressive behaviour they allow during the time of the ritual.

This article examines the recent re-release of the Biafran pound currency, previously used by the breakaway Republic of Biafra between 1968 and 1970, by the separatist-revival group the Movement for the Actualization of a Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in south-eastern Nigeria. It briefly traces the circumstances of its re-release, contextualizes it in the light of MASSOB's aims and activities and in reference to the original Biafran currency, and then works through rationales for such an action. The article first explores and then dismisses economic justifications for releasing an alternative currency, then examines the more meaningful political case, before moving to an examination of cultural factors which lie behind the choice to challenge a state's sovereignty via its currency. The broad label of ‘cultural factors’ is then unpacked to open a window on a rich tradition of political history centred on currency in the south-east Nigerian context, which spans the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial decades. The study also touches on contemporary studies of sovereignty and connects to wider debates on the nature of money as regards its ‘economic’ and ‘political’ functions as a token of value.

This article departs from general anthropological debates about the nature of gender to focus more narrowly on the impact of political economy and religion on gender relations. It explores the dialectic between commodification, Islamic conversion and gender relations in the Hausa hamlet of Marmara, in northern Nigeria. Despite changes in political economy and in religion, there has been great continuity in gender relations. The article ends with a structural comparison between the Hausa of Marmara and the Giriama of Kaloleni (in Kenya). In this comparison, it appears that political economy can be privileged over religion in the understanding of gender. Over the long term, however, a deeper continuity in local moral concepts structures people's very understanding of political economy, religion and gender.