This study on the concept of oral tradition is based on three years of fieldwork, between 1980 and 1983, amongst the Gabra of northern Kenya, an Eastern-Cushitic (Oromo) speaking people who originated in southern Ethiopia and who live today on both sides of the Kenya–Ethiopia border. According to the 1978 national census figures, there are about 30,553 Gabra living on the Kenyan side of the border, mainly in the arid waste of the Eastern Province. In this hostile landscape, in the volcanic, boulder-strewn country on the edge of the Chalbi Desert east of Lake Turkana, the Gabra roam with their herds of cattle, camels, sheep and goats in constant search of pasture for their animals.

En 1936, feu Édouard De Jonghe publiait dans Africa une revue des sociétés secrètes du Congo Beige qui est demeurée l'étude classique sur le sujet. Après tant d'années cependant, une mise au point paraît justifiée.

The problem of the social adjustment of primitive races to European culture is one which is being and has been faced by a considerable number of officials and settlers in the various tropical countries of the world. Many of those who may read these words will have a far wider experience than the writer. To these men of experience the writer appeals for criticisms and suggestions. The article is written in the spirit of one who is anxious to learn. It is an attempt to think out the part schools should or could play in the general problem of social adjustment. It suggests how, by preserving and developing African tradition and culture in the schools, Africa may be helped to make a happy and satisfactory adjustment to her changed social environment following increasing contacts with Europe and the world. It outlines an experiment to be tried at Iringa, Tanganyika Territory.

This article discusses contemporary anxieties about buda spirit attacks around a marketplace in Amhara region, Ethiopia. It asks how we get from the immediate experience of a buda attack – an emotionally intense scene of sickness, fear and uncertainty – to a reflexive situation in which buda becomes a vehicle for discussing and understanding deep historic concerns about market exchange. I make two main arguments: first, that apparent connections between spiritual attack and the spread of capitalism in fact reflect a deeper-lying opposition, on the part of landed elites, between moral hospitality and immoral exchange. Second, I show how this historical consciousness develops from processes of verification and questioning through which immediate experiences of sickness and fear become interpretable as buda attacks associated with particular human agents and historical relationships. It is only by following this local epistemological work that we can understand how spirits become identifiable as historical agents within a web of other social relations.

This case study probes the close link between locality and musical production. The setting is Opuwo, a small city in northern Namibia, notorious for its many bars. Here the music of a local band, Bullet ya Kaoko, provides the soundtrack to the quest for belonging and identity that takes place in the marginal space constituted by these bars and pubs. Bullet ya Kaoko performances are characterized by the simultaneous articulation of paradoxical images and different models of identification: they use keyboards and synthesizers to rework an old genre (omitandu, praise songs), fuse Kwaito moves with the elders' warrior dance, and weave Herero polyphony into a jive-like beat and structure. Lyrics, music and dance address the challenges of (post-)modern life and give voice to uncertainty and fragmentation. At the same time, they embed people in kinship and place, evoking a strong yet encrypted sense of belonging. The music of Bullet ya Kaoko is ironizing: it questions, but does not answer. It challenges both the old and the new, but refrains from solving the tensions created by their juxtaposition.

Slam poets in Africa are part of an emerging social movement. In this article, the focus is on women in this upcoming slam movement in francophone Africa. For these women, slam has meant a change in their lives as they have found words to describe difficult experiences that were previously shrouded in silence. Their words, performances and engaged actions are developing into a body of popular knowledge that questions the status quo and relates to the ‘emerging consciousness’ in many African urban societies of unequal, often gendered, power relations. The women who engage in slam have thus become a voice for the emancipation of women in general.

A Previous article (Lux, 1971) dealing with the network of visits between rural wage-earners and their kinsfolk in Western Congo, presented a first set of findings collected during field-work conducted in July 1966 among a stratified random sample of 268 workers in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe. One-third of them are employed in the plantations, and two-thirds in the industrial, mainly wood-processing, sector of seven generally big enterprises. Some of these workers live in Lukula, a small town of 10,000 people, others in rural company camps. They are thus to a large extent rural industrial wage-earners. Many of them are fully committed to the modern wage economy, so that I have been forced in the previous article to question Southall's assertion that rural wage-earners are ‘still firmly embedded in the fuller kinship system of rural tribal communities’ (1961: 34). The degree of their commitment has been measured by their various occupational profiles, to which I shall turn later. Suffice it here to say that half of them are already second- or even third-generation workers.

Whereas Michael Lambek situates the exploration of the significance of ‘ordinary ethics’ in the everyday as the study of ‘the ethical in the conjunction or movement between explicit local pronouncements and implicit local practices and circumstances’, this article takes the opposite view by drawing attention to special events that appear to engage – or provide space for – extraordinary ethics. Special events and their extraordinary ethics bring into relief the implicitness of the ordinary in everyday ethics. Weddings in Botswana are moments in the social life of the individual, the family and the community that produce such event ethics. On one level, the event ethics relate to the execution of these highly stylized weddings in terms of concerns about their performance and marital arrangements. On another level, the event ethics can have tacit dimensions that belong to the special nature of the occasion. This article argues not only that ‘ordinary ethics’ may be privileged through the study of what is tacit in social interactions, but that ‘event ethics’ also demonstrate the importance of the tacit.

The relationship between the living and the dead looms large in Africa, but the study of such interactions is notoriously fraught with pitfalls and perhaps only now are we equipped with a valid conceptual framework to enable us to deal adequately with the problems posed by ancestor worship and by the various spirits of the dead in Africa. Fortes (1965: 16—20; 122—142) first gave us a comparative framework of ancestor worship in Africa but part of his conceptualization has been recently questioned by Kopytoff (1971) who argues that the distinction between elders and ancestors is not as clear cut as our own implicit dichotomy would seem to imply. However, his argument, stressing a continuity between the living and the dead, leaves out the fact that elders, when they die, very often become ancestor spirits and, even if they do not become such, take on new qualities and new powers that are different in nature from those they held when alive (Brain 1973; Sangree 1974).

Since 1991 Salafism has gained renewed strength in Ethiopia, spurred increased tensions within the Muslim community, and created concern among the Christian population. This contribution focuses on the early emergence of Salafism in the area of Bale, currently one of the movement's strongholds. It discusses its initial arrival in south-eastern Ethiopia, and pays particular attention to the developments in Bale during the 1960s. Challenging the notion that treats Islamic reform as seemingly homogeneous and as ‘foreign’ – distinctly separated from ‘local’ Islam – the contribution explores the arrival of the Salafi teaching from Saudi Arabia, and follows the process of reform embodied in an emerging group of local merchants and in graduates returning from studies in Saudi Arabia. The contribution highlights how socio-economic changes and developments of infrastructure facilitated the emergence of new groups of actors, transcending local boundaries and actively generating novel discourses about religious symbols and practices. It also demonstrates how a diversified body of situated actors was crucial for the appropriation and domestication of the Salafi message, and points to the trajectory of reform as a dialectical process of moulding that related such influences to the local context.

This article traces bricolage in the city of Lomé, Togo, as it is given meaning, practised and resisted by the ‘makers’ involved in the city’s makerspaces. While the Lévi-Straussian definition of bricolage as ‘making do’ given limited resources is heralded as an innovative practice in the Euro-American Maker Movement, Lomé’s makers appear to distance themselves from the concept due to its perceived stigmatization in both Lomé and Francophone Africa as a devalued survival practice through improvisation. Through their identification as ‘makers but not bricoleurs’, and their expression ‘we deserve new things’, I unpack the ambiguous relationship Lomé’s makers have with bricolage, and how their disavowal of the concept reveals more about the global infrastructural inequalities that surround it. By foregrounding the critical self-awareness of Lomé’s makers, I explore how ethnography allows for the de-centring and decolonization of foundational concepts and ideologies, as the makers challenge and reclaim bricolage to arrive at a future where it is no longer a necessity but a choice.

Pharmacy students at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar must research and write a thesis to graduate. Thésards who took topics in analytical chemistry and toxicology describe their thesis work as a temporary opportunity to perform ‘street-level’ public health research that they regard as ‘relevant’ to the quality of people's lives. Expecting futures in the private commercial sector, thésards regretfully leave the thesis behind. This article explores the parenthetical nature of this moment – its brief openings and more durable closures – as part of the history of ways of being a pharmacist in post-colonial Senegal. The thesis as an interlude in students’ biographies, curtailed by narrowed horizons of expectation, evokes other contractions: in the range of professional roles open to Senegalese pharmacists, and in the circuits of public health with which they might engage. For thésards, fieldwork, government work and commercial work entail spatial practices and imaginations; different ways of moving around the city and of tracing urban space that define pharmacists’ roles in terms of the modes through which they engage with broader collectivities. Mapping thésards’ parenthesis in Dakar is a means of capturing both their urban experience of work and the intertwining spatial, temporal and affective dimensions associated with this work. The past, probable and possible trajectories of pharmacy work are imprinted and imagined in the space of the city as field, market and polis. Pharmacists’ prospects and aspirations are caught up in broader shifts in how education, (un)employment and entrepreneurship animate relations of association and exchange in Senegal.

Since the Second World War, the Kenyan city of Kisumu has been an important site of medical research and public health interventions – on malaria and other vector-borne diseases, and lately on HIV and related infections. This article compares the work and lives of two generations of local workers in public health research, each central to science in the city at their time: staff of the Ministry of Health's Division of Vector Borne Disease (DVBD) in the decades after independence, and temporary employees of the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in its collaboration with the US government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the early twenty-first century. Against the backdrop of changes to the city, which stagnated during the 1970s and 1980s, became an epicentre of the East African AIDS epidemic, and underwent an economic boom of sorts from the late 1990s – at least partly driven by HIV research and intervention programmes – the article examines the spaces and movements of health research workers, and their experience of the city in time. The now elderly DVBD workers' accounts are pervaded by memories of anticipated progress and the convergence of life and work in the civic wholes of nation and city; by chagrin about decay; and by nostalgia for lost hopes. Today's young KEMRI/CDC workers' short-term contracts, and the fragmented city they inhabit and study, make for less bounded and predictable spaces and temporalities. Their urban lives and work take shape between remainders and remembrances of past projects, the exhaustion of everyday struggles to make a living and a meaningful life, and the search for new forms of urban order and civic purpose.

In a preceding article I discussed the organization and aims of modern Somali political movements in the light of the traditional political structure. Three types of political organization were distinguished: clan, regional (or tribal), and nationalist. These three types reflect traditional variations in the social structure and culture of different regions of Somaliland and also varying degrees of political evolution. I drew attention to the extent to which all parties—especially those with nationalist aims—have adopted a religious ideology and pointed out that Islam, through the traditional organization and aims of the Sufi Dervish Orders (ṭariiqas), has provided a precedent for pan-Somali solidarity. I now attempt to assess the extent of nationalist feeling in the different Somali territories, and examine the degree to which recent constitutional changes in government and administration have recognized the growth of nationalist aspirations and promoted their extension. I discuss first the present position in the five Somali territories: French and British Somaliland; Harar Province of Ethiopia; Somalia; and the Northern Province of Kenya. Finally, I consider the importance of Islam in furthering nationalism and in helping to overcome the cleavages of clan and Dia-paying group affiliation which oppose the formation of a unified Somali nation.

There are many Abajas in the Ibo country; there were, until recently, two village groups of this name attached to a single Native Treasury. Its Native Authority officials were wont to distinguish them as Abaja-Isu and Abaja-Green. The former has now been transferred to Isu Native Authority, the latter is the subject of a recently published study by M. M. Green. It forms the third-ranking village group of the Ehime ‘clan’ (tribe) which belongs to the eastern section of the Isuama division of the Southern Ibo. This section was classified by Talbot as the Abaja ‘sub-tribe’ after its most important ‘clan’ (tribe), and within this ‘sub-tribe’ he distinguishes as the Abaja-Osu ‘clan’ (tribe) the two related ‘clans’ of Ehime and Ugboma. With so many Abajas to confuse the local issue the reviewer proposes to follow the Mbano Native Authority procedure and to refer to the community with whose affairs Miss Green is concerned as Abaja-Green.

The study of kinship is by now recognized as being one of the key positions in the study of primitive culture. The series of studies to be undertaken by the Institute of the effect upon native culture of modern industrialization will to a great extent centre on the problem of changes in kinship structure, and the changing function of the different types of kinship organization. With this final aim in mind, the following sketch purposely pays attention to the formal aspect only of kinship organization. It goes without saying that such merely formal studies can never be an end in themselves. But there is, on the other hand, always the danger that in historical or functional studies of kinship problems this formal aspect may be unduly neglected. This consideration—that a clear understanding of these formal problems has to precede any attempt at a functional or historical interpretation—is the only reason why these forms of kinship organization as such have been singled out here for theoretical discussion. This discussion does not aim at presenting anything new to the student of kinship organization. It simply attempts to sum up in a form as concise as possible the main results—and the main problems—of modern anthropology in regard to the forms of kinship organization. This can probably best be done by giving definitions of the most important of these forms and discussing their relation to each other.

The Igala-speaking peoples of Nigeria live in the middle belt zone of that country, close to the confluence of the river Niger and the river Benue. Ancestor cults of various kinds are central to their religious system, but there is also an important cult of the earth as well as cults of diverse spirits known collectively as ẹbọ. The latter includes the spirit of smallpox, Iye, spirits associated with water, called Alijenu, and other spirits inhabiting the fringes of cultivated land. Culturally the Igala have many close affinities with the Yoruba from whom they are separated geographically by the intervening Niger and the settlements of other peoples. But the main emphases of Igala religion are slightly different from those of Yoruba religion. Thus the cult of ẹbọ which in a rudimentary way resembles the cult of orisha among the Yoruba occupies a more marginal place in Igala religion than the orisha cults do in the Yoruba system of belief. Ancestors and the earth cults play a more direct and central role in Igala than in Yoruba. One belief which appears to be basic to both systems of thought, however, is the belief in medicine, called ogwu in Igala. Yoruba beliefs about medicine have not been published in enough detail to make systematic comparison possible. But it is hoped that the account given here of the Igala side of the picture may stimulate further work on this potentially interesting comparison.

Brand marketing in its latest global advances offers ideologies of public participation and the audience–‘provider’ relationship that many in the developing world are finding compelling, even when consumer capitalism fails to produce its promised rewards immediately. Strategies of ‘branding’ are being explored in combination with older performance strategies, with new syncretic branded arenas emerging as a result. In Africa, music and dance have always been important for establishing certain arenas and mediating transactions within them. In the era of post-independence nationalism, ‘traditional’ dances were itemized and made more disciplined and spectacular to give new states an aura of inclusiveness, rigour and historical depth. As the image of a powerful African state declines, these same dance traditions are being hitched to commercial brands, and to the globalized consumerist/entreprenurial dream. This article considers the Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, an annual traditional music-and-dance competition sponsored by East Africa Breweries Ltd, which requires participants to compose ‘local’ songs and dances in praise of Senator Extra Lager. It focuses on the spatial and temporal architectures of events and the way these channel, and are complicated by, the energies and significances of dance. The ‘textbook’ brand–consumer relationship does not, it is argued, survive wholly intact.