Among the Northern Yaka of Zaïre the office and function of the chief is thought of as prior to and as the source of all things: the chief represents and surpasses his subordinates by his twofold function. First, he is a sovereign ruler who alone personifies unity, perpetuity and high authority. But the chief fails to live up to these chiefly ideals since his physical body ages and he cannot escape death or transcend the succession of generations and political scenes and factions. This failure seems to be remedied, however, not so much by concealing the chiefs bodily transitoriness through a mystifying cult, but by identifying the chief in his body with the origin of the political institutions. Embodying the founding ancestors, the chief ‘re-presents’ or makes present ‘the primal space–time order’ (yitsi khulu). The ruler thus personifies the legitimate political order: he re-presents and imposes the perennial hierarchical social organisation, territorial unity and moral order. In his enthronement and rule, he must re-enact the founding dramas of conquest and life transmission to renew cultural time by linking it to the ‘primal and permanent space–time order’. Sacrificial death, mortuary ritual, rebirth, purification, etc., re-enact the founding dramas and provide transformative metaphors, linking men and women, life and death, inside and outside, ascendant and descendant, before and after, the local territory and Yaka society.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the slogans which are so prominent and ubiquitous on motor vehicles as expressions of social stratification among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. I interpret the slogans in the context of the taxi owners' and drivers' social interactions, not just as disembodied expressions of a total Yoruba world view. In studying the slogans I pay particular attention to processes of accumulation of wealth, status mobility and the way these are affected by cultural values. It is argued that the vehicle owners make different claims at different stages of their careers. Their fears and hopes at each stage must be understood in the light of the contemporary Christian and traditional mix of beliefs about destiny, the world and God.

One of the most intriguing features of most African languages is that of tone, by which variations in speech tone generate different meanings (Pike, 1948, offers a valuable introduction to this subject and includes an extensive bibliography; Fromkin, 1972, is a comprehensive evaluation of specialised studies). In the Ewe language, for example, the word to [H] pronounced with a high tone means ‘ear’, as in To le venye (HLMM), ‘I have an earache.’ To can also mean ‘through’, Meto akonta me [MHLHML], ‘I have gone through the accounts.’ But as soon as the high tone is replaced by a low one the meaning of the word changes drastically: to [L] means ‘thick’ as in Dzogbo la to [LHHL], ‘The porridge is thick’. Similarly, mi [H] is a pronoun for the first person plural (Mieto adegbe, ‘We are on the way to the hunt’). The same word refers to ‘faeces’ as in [HL], ‘goat's faeces’. A shift of tone from high to low results in a change of meaning. Mi [L] is a pronoun for the second person plural (Mile tsi [LLM], ‘You (should) take a bath’); it also means ‘swallow’ (mi amatsi, ‘swallow [or take] the medicine’). The phenomenon is not restricted to monosyllables. Kuku [HH] refers to a ‘hat’ (Meɖe kuku na wo, ‘I remove your hat,’ which is a figurative way of saying ‘I beg you’). Kuku [LH] on the other hand refers to ‘death’. Asi [LH] is the word for ‘hand’, while asi [LM] denotes ‘market’. Tone is operative on a number of levels within the syntagmatic chain: on the level of syllable, word, phrase and sentence. Furthermore, a number of constraints—syntactic, international or natural factors—influence the disposition of speech tones (consult Ansre, 1961, for information about Ewe tone and Dakubu, 1988, for the most recent study of this and other aspects of Ghanaian languages).

The economic condition of workers in the fast-growing urban centres of African countries is of concern to scholars and policymakers interested in developing programmes to alleviate the persistent poverty. However, there is a dearth of micro-level research on the economic activities of the numerous occupations to be found in these settings. This information would provide a more realistic basis for policies and the assessment of competing theoretical models of social change (Moser, 1980). The aim of the present paper therefore is to provide baseline data on the economic situation of one group of workers within the urban economy—vendors of street foods. Street foods are defined as edibles which have been prepared outside the consuming household and are ready for consumption at point of purchase; however, the buyer may take them elsewhere. The study does not include those ready-to-eat foods prepared within the confines of modern establishments with four walls. Modern restaurants and the cafeteria sections of hospitals, prisons, colleges and universities were therefore excluded. The small-scale businesses under study are part of what is known as the informal sector. The study was conducted in Ile-Ife, a university town in Oyo State (Yorubaland). Among the Yoruba, women became active in small-scale trade following changes in the patterns of international trade and in farming since the fifteenth century. This process was also facilitated by colonial penetration into the socioeconomic fabric of the society (Afonja, 1981). Within the trading business the marketing of street foods was dominated by women (Bascom, 1951; Marshall, 1964; Fadipe, 1970). Central to the concerns of this paper therefore are the levels of income generated by these women, the problems associated with the enterprise and possible recommendations on how to improve the situation of food vendors in the urban economy.

Recent literature on Third World households suggests that the household is a critical unit of analysis in decision-making and economic organisation for development (Smith, Wallerstein and Evers, 1984; Netting, Wilk and Arnould, 1984). Increasingly, this literature is addressing intra-household behaviour, the ways in which households relate to other institutions and the degree to which they are autonomous or embedded in more comprehensive social structures (Guyer and Peters, 1984; Folbre, 1985; Moock, 1986). Indeed, the household focus requires not only close examination of the household's internal dynamics, but also its external context. That context includes the physical setting, international as well as national political and economic structures, and the local political economic and social systems.

The unexpected death of a citizen in 1977 triggered a series of events in one small Ghanaian kingdom, pointing to confusion in the locally accepted criteria for Christian conversion and to contradictions in the avenues to status and power. Since the deceased was a millionaire businessman, something of a huckster, and a person who was at the centre of an unusually complex constellation of social ties, his death forced the people of his local community to re-examine the relationships between traditional religion and Christianity, and between wealth, religious adherence and the display of status and prestige. There was long and bitter hostility between the two towns to which this man was affiliated by descent. Each town competed for the glory of ; claiming him as a member, and while once he too would have desired that, logically it could not be. There was also perennial conflict between the factions within the kingdom's capital. This enhanced the drama and helped explain the urgency of the respective townspeople's attempts to resolve the underlying structural contradictions which became manifest in the events following the death to their own advantage. At the same time this is the story of a self-made man, unusual largely because of his extreme wealth, who understood conflict and ambiguity, and who manipulated the social structure in which he found himself to his own advantage. The funeral of this one man, who simultaneously entertained contradictory belief systems and juggled opposing attributes of leadership, mobilised the attention of the entire population of both towns. It did so precisely because the ritual of his funeral was used to ‘describe in advance a desired but uncertain state of affairs. It [ritual] is about power and is itself more or less political’ (MacGaffey, 1986: 11, emphasis added).

It is widely recognised that seasonal labour bottlenecks present major obstacles to peasant farmers seeking to expand agricultural output in sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence from Nigeria and Sierra Leone, for example, reveals that labour shortages and limited income to hire off-farm labour have historically constrained rural producers from intensifying and enlarging their agricultural operations (Norman et al., 1979: 42–7; Watts, 1983: 202–3; Richards, 1985: 96). Many attempts by colonial and contemporary African States to promote food crop and export crop production failed, in part, because of peasant resistance to the threat of subsistence insecurity associated with labour conflicts in the agricultural calendar. Richards's (1986) study of the failure of a series of labour-intensive wet rice cultivation projects in central Sierra Leone illustrates the degree to which peasant agricultural practices represent adjustments to labour-supply problems. Given the pervasiveness and importance of seasonal labour constraints in African agricultural systems, it is surprising that ‘few studies have provided insights into the adjustment in labor use resulting from the introduction of cash crops and new technologies’ (Eicher and Baker, 1982: 99).

This paper describes the political organisation of transporting in Agege, a Nigerian town located on the northern boundary of Lagos. Its aim is to provide an anthropological interpretation of this important domain of modern entrepreneurship, for, while social anthropologists have increasingly studied African urban economies, the analysis of transportation remains the preserve of economists and geographers. When anthropologists do make mention of those who own vehicles geared to the movement of produce and passengers, their social and political significance is confirmed. Wealthy Hausa transporters emerge as key figures in Cohen's (1969) careful dissection of the Sabon Gari of Ibadan, while Peel (1983) details how those traders who were also transporting magnates exercised continuous influence in the political transformation of Ijesha throughout much of the present century. Despite such occasional commentaries, the organisation of transporting per se remains a field unexplored by anthropologists. Accordingly, it is the micropolitics of relationships between bus owners, drivers and conductors that constitute my major concern, although the analysis also leads to examining relationships between prominent transporters and those who exercise authority in the contemporary Nigerian state.

In the literature and accumulated folk wisdom of development in rural Africa there are numerous instances of government projects which are expensive, ineffective and unpopular. These include now classic failures of the past, such as the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme (Wood, 1950; Frankel, 1953), which are still cited as cautionary tales demonstrating the need for proper project appraisal. There are also numerous more recent examples, for the phenomenon of failure has persisted and governments and international agencies continue to implement schemes ‘little better planned than their more spectacularly misbegotten predecessors’ (Hill, 1978: 25). Among recent initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa the large-scale irrigation projects developed in northern Nigeria during the 1970s have attracted particularly extensive adverse criticism. This has focused on the social and economic impact of the introduction of irrigation and particularly on questions of land tenure (inter alia Wallace, 1979, 1980, 1981; Oculi, 1981; Adams, 1982, 1984; Palmer-Jones, 1984; Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Beckman, 1986). A number of accounts discuss technical aspects of the land survey carried out at Bakolori {Bird, 1981, 1984, 1985; Griffith, 1984), while others focus on economic problems (e.g. Etuk and Abalu, 1982). However, although economic and technical aspects of these developments have been criticised, it is the social impacts of project development and more particularly the political responses to those impacts which are of greatest interest (Wallace, 1980; Adams, 1984; Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Beckman, 1986). This paper examines the bature of the response of farmers affected by one of these schemes, the Bakolori Project in Sokoto State.

The emergence of the charismatic movements in Nigeria in the 1970s is a remarkable religious phenomenon. Their rapid growth and success could be attributed to many factors, but the central factor which clearly emerges is that the movements have been presented in a manner acceptable and relevant to Nigerians, and they have been adapted to the situation in Nigeria. The continuous growth of the movements into the 1980s suggests that they are acting as responses to certain areas of need in Christian commitment in Nigeria. The concept of contextualisation is therefore the major key to an understanding of their rapid growth. Were it not for their contextualisation, the movements might have crystallised without any growth or might even have condemned themselves to decline and dissolution.

This article is an ethnographic account of the economic importance of information in a particular society, that of the Northern Beja of Red Sea Province, Sudan, and of one social institution, the greetings ritual, vital in the transmission of information. As such it is intended as a contribution to the anthropology of information and to economic anthropology, but also to the study of greetings rituals and ceremonies. It suggests that it may in many cases be useful to approach the study of greetings from the perspective of their connection with information.

In earlier articles I have argued the merits of the method of controlled comparison, both for the study of hunter-gatherer social organisation and for the study of Khoisan kinship across the forager/non-forager divide. In this article I put these two interests together to examine specifically the relation between kinship, production and culture contact among the Khoisan, and particularly the Khoe-speaking, peoples. Certain kinship structures and practices are dependent upon the means and methods of subsistence, while others are not. The latter are products of Khoisan history and in general reflect linguistic relationships between economically diverse Khoisan peoples.

Religious conversion, a concept central to missionary activity and to the influence that Christianity has exerted in a variety of fields, embodies a wide range of meanings (Lonergan, 1971: 105–7). In the African context it has generally meant a change from a traditional to a universal religion, entailing a psychological transformation through which the convert's underlying assumptions about the world are reconstructed, accompanied by a socially recognised display of change (Jules-Rosette, 1976: 132–3). Robin Horton, among others, has devoted scholarly attention to the conversion process from the viewpoint of the Africans undergoing conversion but the missionaries, the advocates of conversion, have received no comparable attention (Beidelman, 1974: 235; cf. Beidelman, 1982).

In the present article, an analysis of the cooking hearth—‘a woman's place’—in Beti society provides the basis for reconsidering certain aspects of patrilineal organisation. Its aims are twofold: first, to demonstrate a continuity between female domestic roles and overall social structure, areas of concern commonly perceived as pertaining to separate domains and, second, to suggest the structural relevance of co-affinal ties, relationships largely neglected by current kinship theory.

This article examines the major visual and performing arts of one society and explores what changes have occurred to them over roughly one hundred years as a consequence of external religious and ethnic forces. This is a holistic, processual view of a people's arts in a particular region, providing a model to balance the excellently detailed studies of specific art forms which now exist for Africa. Using a holistic view we will raise certain issues concerning changes in African art. One of the most significant is the interrelationship of ethnicity and religion. Scholars (Bravmann, 1974, 1983; Prussin, 1986) have written extensively on the influence of Islam on African art, but have not seriously raised the question of the ethnic factor associated with Islam, which is equally important. In the case of Islam and its carriers there is a delicate intermixing of religion and ethnicity which is at issue and needs exploration. Further, the holistic approach employed here brings to the fore the reasons behind the wide range of responses to change of the various art forms of a people. Why do some syncretise, some disappear and others remain unchanged? Again, the holistic view allows us to ask to what extent the arts of a people merely reflect forces of change, or do they play roles in leading and directing it? The approach requires considerable background history, which is presented below.

L'anthropologue, tout comme le géographe, a besoin, pour ses analyses, de collecter des informations sur les sociétés qu'il étudie. En particulier lorsqu'on étudie les sociétés rurales d'Afrique, la collecte de ces informations présente des difficultés. En effet, de nombreux obstacles physiques (l'inaccessibilité, l'inconfort) s'interposent entre l'observateur et l'objet de son étude. Par ailleurs, il existe une forte interaction entre l'observateur et son objet d'étude de telle sorte que ce dernier ne se dévoile pas dans toute son authenticité. Les nouvelles technologies de l'information offrent un outil nouveau et utile pour l'anthropologue à cet égard. Il s'agit des satellites d'observation des ressources terrestres. Ceux-ci permettent d'appréhender avec une grande clarté le milieu rural aménagé par les sociétés agraires. Un outil nouveau signifie également une information nouvelle: la télédétection permet une vision spatiale synoptique (qui embrasse en même temps un vaste territoire) et répétitive d'une région. De nouvelles méthodes d'analyse soumises à une approche écologique et systèmique des civilisations agraires doivent être recherchées pour l'utilisation optimale de cet outil.

Over a period of some fifteen years I carried out ethnographic studies in north-eastern Uganda, firstly of the Kalenjin peoples on and around Mount Elgon, and subsequently of the Sor, a small mountain community of Karamoja.

The earlier study formed the basis of a thesis on the Sebei of Mount Elgon and lasted for ten years, during which time I was based near Kampala and made intermittent journeys to spend two to three weeks at a time in different parts of the Mount Elgon and western Kenya region.

Robert Buijtenhuijs's critique of my book Rural Rebels (1977) is interesting because it highlights serious flaws that can be made in critical analysis, among them the ‘I think the writer means’ fallacy, a false dichotomy, reductionism and a disregard for the quality of the data. Since space limitations prevent me from replying to all of Buijtenhuijs's criticisms (his critique is three times longer than my permitted reply) I will limit myself to the aforementioned that are matters of more general concern.

Technological change among the Anlo-Ewe of southeastern Ghana is a subject that has received little attention from scholars, but it is a theme which figures prominently in Anlo oral tradition. Of the technologies mentioned, those associated with lacustrine fishing and salt making are discussed in the greatest detail. Traditional accounts of the fishing industry, for example, agree that when the Ewe-speaking Anlo first settled in their present area (located on the Atlantic coast immediately east and south of the Volta River and Keta Lagoon system) the Anlo were not familiar with the use of boats. As a consequence they employed fishing techniques that restricted such activities to the more shallow sections of the Keta Lagoon. The first boat that was developed (the agowu, made by hollowing out the trunk of the fan palm [Borassus aethiopium]) was said to have been inefficient because it capsized easily (Greene, 1981b: no. 29). A more stable vessel, still in use today and known as the lewu, was introduced, according to the traditions, by Amega Le.