Social memory, cultural memory, culture as memory, and memory as culture, landscape and memory, places of memory, regimes of memory—all these have been prominent topics in cultural studies, also in anthropology; in this work, attention is usually paid to remembering. Based on several prior inquiries into popular historiography and local regimes of memory, this paper is an attempt to include forgetting in a model of ‘memory work'. What this entails is shown with ethnographic evidence, the recording of a conversation made in Lubumbashi in 1986 with one of the African pioneers of the town. The text in French and Swahili, accompanied by an English translation, is accessible at www2.fmg.uva.nl/lpca.

The Republic of Benin has often been cited as a model democracy in the African context. After years of pressure from bilateral aid donors, particularly France and Germany, municipal elections were held in 2002. This article addresses three related questions. How have free presidential and parliamentary elections affected political dynamics at the local level, especially in the rural areas where most people live? What do rural people think about the change of national regime? How will decentralisation affect local government? Based on empirical research in rural Benin, it shows that démocratisation means more of the same hybrid and composite form of local government. The boundaries between the state and private organisations (including Northern NGOs), and between the national and local levels, remain blurred. Local political arenas are more fragmented than ever, and informal politics flourish. This not only dilutes power at the local level, as different veto powers block one another, it entails constant negotiation between those involved, making political processes less predictable and local political institutions less accountable. Decentralisation is only making matters worse.

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.

Holding people to account for their actions is a feature of all societies. This article examines two different mechanisms of accountability, both of which are used in the Arumeru District of Tanzania. The first is a form of ritual cursing called ‘breaking a pot'; the second is the local government financial audit. By placing both practices in the same frame the article aims to unsettle the conceptual divide between the rational and the irrational, the modern and traditional, the scientific and the occult. It also asks whether imported forms of local government, such as are represented by Arumeru District Council, might be made responsible via indigenous and indexical mechanisms of accountability, or whether imported institutions are best rendered accountable by ‘universal’ means.

The paper examines the changing shapes of territories in the Horn of Africa and the discourses which legitimise these different shapes. It starts with the ‘Horn’ itself, the different ways to delineate it, and the interests behind these. Then Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the de facto independent Somaliland are discussed and their justifications for being examined. These justifications are found not to follow the same pattern. The criteria for inclusion or exclusion of populations or territories differ and form a rich reservoir for future conflict. On a lower level, that of regional states comprised in a major unit, the Oromo of Ethiopia, the largest ethnic group in the Horn of Africa, are discussed in some detail. Accounts about how the Oromo have come to be and who is to be regarded as an Oromo are found to be mutually conflicting. In the last part, international and transnational relations in the Horn of Africa are looked at. Major groupings cross-cutting state boundaries are formed by states forming alliances with ethnic movements, opposition forces or warlords in neighbouring states or ex-states, against other states or spheres of power. Publicity of such alliances is kept low and few efforts seem to be made to give them an ideological basis or historical justifications. The logic followed in these cases seems to be simply that the enemy of an enemy is a potential friend.

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.

Colonial Onitsha provided the stage for John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939), a Manchester trader and poet, to perform the role of an educated gentleman. In his autobiographical writing, Stuart-Young created a host of famous metropolitan friends and constructed for himself a past through which he invited African readers to remember him. The extent to which Onitsha citizens accepted his version of his life is explored in this article, for during the period of Stuart-Young's residence in town, from approximately 1909 until his death in 1939, different sectors of Igbo society observed him closely, read his publications, worked with him and witnessed his patronage of young men. Local people, including the children, studied his behaviour over time and produced a range of African names and watchwords by which they remembered his life.

This article examines the current commercialisation and expansion of Asante funeral celebrations in Ghana. Funerals have always been the main public social events in Asante, but the growing funeral business significantly alters the way death is celebrated. The article takes as a point of departure a view of death as a field of strategic interaction, providing the ritual context for the creation of remembrance and identities, the elaboration of differences, the competition for status and power, and the negotiation of culture and social bonds and values. Within the framing narrative of respect for the dead and guiding the spirit to the next world, funerals are much about life. The article describes how, in shaping death, people deal with money to negotiate values of life and relations between the living, and shows that, contrary to both popular belief and critique on global commercialisation, in Asante the money economy and the social significance of the funeral tradition do not contravene, but rather reinforce each other. The funeral celebration is not wiped away by monetisation, nor is it a kind of last defence against it. Indeed, it is exactly through money and commodification that funeral celebrations are expanding, social ties forged, and cultural performances stimulated, albeit in new ways. In Asante funerals, people appropriate practices of consumption and commercial enterprise as well as indigenous traditions and exchange patterns in a process of ‘cultural bricolage’, and develop new, local styles of celebrating death, in which money has come to play a central role as social glue and as an expression of lifestyles, cultural values and ideals. It is argued that we cannot understand ‘traditional ritual’ unless we move beyond the rather rigid opposition between tradition and modernity still prevalent in ritual studies to acknowledge the open, flexible nature of tradition that makes it so vibrant in modern African life.

This article deals with political culture in northern Cameroon. By analysing two happenings—the arrival of a Minister in his home town and his speech to the traditional elites—it shows how neopatrimonial politics is practised in a given locality. Important aspects of neopatrimonialism—such as the personal distribution of public resources and the conflict between different moral obligations which results in illusory appearances—are described and analysed. Yet the complexity of symbols, behaviour and metaphors outlined in these two happenings suggests that we have to go beyond the neopatrimonial model of thinking if we want to gain a better understanding of politics in Cameroon.

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.

This article examines the problematic relationship between Eritrea and Tigray as represented by the Eritrean and Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Fronts. The EPLF won independence for Eritrea in 1991, at the same time as the TPLF seized power in Ethiopia; the two movements had had a difficult relationship, beginning in the mid-1970s, during their respective armed struggles, and the issues which had caused disagreement remained unresolved as the movements made the transition to government. This paper examines the nature of those issues and the degree to which the war of 1998-2000 between the two countries can be seen to have reflected much older tensions and indeed contradictions in the Eritrean–Tigrayan/Ethiopian relationship. Thus, the paper begins with an overview of Eritrean opinion, during the recent war, about the relationship in question, and then moves back in time to the era of the liberation struggle. Here, the author attempts to explain the complexities of the respective Eritrean and Tigrayan revolutions insofar as each impinged on and influenced the other, with particular reference to the issues of frontiers, nationality and ethnicity, and sovereignty. The paper, finally, considers the apparent paradoxes in the perceptions which Eritreans have of Tigray and Ethiopia, and suggests that changes in attitude are necessary on both sides of the Mereb river border if the relationship is not to be defined by perpetual confrontation.

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 contribution considers the current position of the Ghanaian migrant community in Botswana's capital, Gaborone, at a time of rising xenophobic sentiments and increasing ethnic tensions among the general public. The article examines anthropological understandings of such sentiments by placing them in the context of the study of nationalisms in processes of state formation in Africa and the way in which these ideologies reflect the position and recognition of minorities. In Botswana, identity politics indulge in a liberalist democratic rhetoric in which an undifferentiated citizenship is promoted by the state, concealing on the one hand inequalities between the various groups in the country, but on the other hand defending the exclusive interests of all ‘Batswana’ against foreign influence through the enactment of what has become known as a ‘localisation policy'. Like many other nationalities, Ghanaian expatriate labour has increasingly become the object of localisation policies. However in their case xenophobic sentiments have taken on unexpected dimensions. By focusing on the general public's fascination with Ghanaian fashion and styles of beautification, the numerous hair salons and clothing boutiques Ghanaians operate, in addition to the newly emerging Ghanaian-led Pentecostal churches in the city, the ambiguous but ubiquitous play of repulsion and attraction can be demonstrated in the way in which localisation is perceived and experienced by the migrant as well as by the dominant groups in society. The article concludes by placing entrepreneurialism at the nexus of where this play of attraction and repulsion creates a common ground of understanding between Ghanaians and their host society, despite the government's hardening localisation policies.

Actors in fluid African urban environments try to make collaborative social action work, collective responsibility enforceable, and instruments of power effective and legitimate. These efforts give rise to an uneasy tension between the adoption of normative discourses concerning urban management and governance, the ways in which urban residents attempt to adapt to a vast range of new opportunities and crises, and the role of the city as a place of experimentation. Given this tension, what are diverse groups of African urban residents doing to make cities habitable and to use cities as a means of enlarging the spatial parameters in which they operate? Focusing on the site of one of urban Africa's major governance restructuring projects, Pikine, Senegal, the article discusses a particular instance of translocal economic collaboration among three discrete groups of women. Whereas the major intervention, the City Project, sought to promote greater co-ordination among the localities making up Pikine, ‘real’ co-ordination, as exemplified by these women's collaboration, may be taking place in unanticipated and relatively invisible ways. Through examining some of the intricate difficulties actors often face in operating at translocal levels, ‘small leaps’ across scale are sometimes significant accomplishments and potentially important precursors to new extended forms of economic collaboration.

This article deals with the interrelationship of ethnic and national processes in a rural district in Wollega at the time of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. It describes how the state policy of ‘official nationalism’ and Amharisation on the one hand, and the policy of land confiscation and land grants on the other, affected two different categories of Oromo: the small, educated elite, and the peasants. The government promoted Amharic as the language of state, whilst the Oromo language was banned from public contexts and not allowed in print. The government feared popular involvement in politics, and all political parties and organisations were banned. University students voiced demands for modernisation and land reform whilst the war in Eritrea raised the ‘question of nationalities’, but there was not yet any Oromo nationalist claim for statehood. Among the farmers, opposition to the state centred on land tenure and taxes and on the abuse of authority by the government. Most Oromo-speaking regions had been conquered and incorporated into the empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Land was confiscated and granted to warlords, or to local leaders who collaborated with the emperor. The original inhabitants became tribute-paying tenants under the new lords. As most landlords were immigrants to the area, ethnicity was an obvious aspect of property relations. In Wollega, however, local Oromo who had collaborated with the emperor were in control of much of the land and both landlords and share-croppers were Macha Oromo. They shared basic value-orientations by which performance is judged. Memories of the moral economy of an earlier time provided an alternative to the existing situation. Reference to history implied an active selection of elements in the formulation of a critical discourse on power and property that addressed the basic opposition between society and state. The last part of the article describes how educated and farmers met in a political meeting that was organised by the local authorities in 1976 to celebrate the revolution and its land reform. The occasion turned into an intense celebration of local values and, at least to some of the participants, this was a moment of new ethnic awareness and a call to revive gada, the Oromo ritual system. Threatened by ethnic identification, the state responded with brutal repression, and several people were murdered. Shortly after, some activists joined the Oromo Liberation Front to wage guerrilla war against the state.

The article brings together archival material, past ethnography, and memory on the one hand, and up-to-date eye-witness and newspaper reports on the other, to set current traumatic events in the very long view. The presentism of contemporary developmental and research approaches has precluded such perspectives. Thus the current disarmament programme being forced on the Karamojong of north-east Uganda by the Uganda People's Defence Force is no more unprecedented than the armed conflicts it is intended to resolve. The advent of colonial administration and memories of it are examined to illuminate the constraints of the present exercise. Events are not occurring solely in a local context, still less just on the national scene, but in the global context directed by world power. Thus the significance of cattle-raiding, the nature of which has not been drastically changed by firearms, has been exaggerated as part of a threat to world peace that must be tackled by international action. This has provided the rationale for repeating the brutality of the small wars of imperialism on a larger scale and with less prospect of an ensuing peace. The article proposes a rediscovery of African agency in Karamojong religious ceremonies that are not controlled by world orders.

The Celestial Church of Christ, the Christ Apostolic Church, and the Church of the Lord (Aladura) are indigenous churches, which share the selective blending of Christian and Yoruba religious traditions; however, their gender practices, specifically female access to decision-making roles, vary dramatically. The Celestial Church's prohibition against the ordination of women is associated with ritual impurity. Christ Apostolic excludes women from ordination, but without an explicit ideology of impurity. The Church of the Lord (Aladura) ordains women but prohibits them from the sanctuary when they are menstruating. Do these institutionalised constraints derive from colonial or pre-colonial gender practices? What other factors might contribute to these gender patterns? This paper argues that these gender practices derive from intersecting ambiguities in Western and African gender practices, which both empower and disempower women. The paper also assesses the interplay of doctrine and institutional history on gender dynamics. Finally, it explores the interaction of cultural legacy and socio-environmental pressures on the ritualisation of the female body in this African setting.

This article compares encounters with tourism in two African communities, the Dogon in Mali and the Kapsiki in north Cameroon. The societies are comparable in many respects, but the effects on them of the tourist presence quite different. The Dogon react to tourism by bolstering their cultural pride and self esteem, and they develop inventive ways of gearing their cultural performances to tourist demands without compromising the rituals to which the performances belong. For them, the tourist presence signals the importance and intrinsic interest of Dogon culture. The Cameroonian Kapsiki (called Higi in north Nigeria) interpret the attention bestowed upon them and their country as indicating that they are marginal, living at the rim of the habitable world. They translate the tourist quest for ‘authenticity’ as being ‘backward’ and left out. The reasons for these different reactions are traced to processes inherent in cultural tourism, to the specific agenda of tourism in either place, and to some characteristics of the host '. The overall effect of tourist encounters with local communities seems to be to reinforce existing patterns of identity construction and to restate the images of the relevant ‘other’ already current in those cultures.

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.