In exploring the difficulties experienced by the traditionally politically uncentralised Somalis in establishing a stable and effective state, based on their ethnicity, this article compares ethnicity, nationalism and lineage identity. In this case, ethnicity and nationalism are local products, influenced but not created by the colonial experience. They have had to contend with the intractable force of segmentary lineage identity, which has proved extremely difficult to adapt and accommodate to the requirements of modern statehood. In its cultural context, agnation is all the more pervasive and powerful in constituting an ‘invisible’ bond, conceived by Somalis as a biologically based distinction like ‘race’. Unlike race, it is almost infinitely elastic and divisible. Ethnic identity, which rests on external distinctions such as language, culture and religion, cannot be broken down into a series of formally equivalent segments, but is less binding as a social force. Today, after the collapse of the state of Somalia in 1991, following protracted grass‐roots peace‐making between clans, two parts of the nation—the former British Somaliland, and the north‐eastern region of Somalia (‘Puntland’, based on the Majerteyn clan, and other closely related clans)—have developed separate local states. Although Somaliland claims complete independence, which Puntland does not, both polities incorporate parliamentary institutions that accommodate traditional, and modern political leaders and processes. The ex‐Italian residue, Southern Somalia, still without any form of government, is in what appears to be the final throes of its long‐running, fourteenth grandiose international ‘peace’ conference in Kenya. Thousands of delegates, in various configurations, have already spent over eighteen months in these talks. Although its embryonic constitution now recognises ‘clans’ as constituent political units, this attempt to re‐establish Somalia is based on the usual ‘top‐down’ approach, rather than on spontaneous local negotiations amongst ‘stakeholders’ on the ground, such as those on which Somaliland and Puntland are founded. With contingents of foreign ‘experts’, the whole process seeks to reinstate a familiar Eurocentric state model, unadapted to Somali conditions.

This article explores the role of ethnic identity in the framework of the livestock trade in West and East Africa. It argues that ethnic identity was used as an instrument to build trust relationships that were vital to the development of pre-colonial livestock trade networks. With the onset of colonial rule, alternative marketing channels developed, none of which proved to be capable of providing reliable and low transaction cost services to both livestock producer and consumer. Nevertheless, the ethnic trade monopolies were threatened by the advent of formal colonial marketing institutions and the progressive ‘opening up’ of the market. This situation remained basically unchanged during the post-colonial era and with recent livestock and meat trade liberalisations. The evidence from Benin and Kenya demonstrates, however, that ethnic identity continues to determine the organisation of the livestock trade, albeit in a different way. The transfer of trust remains crucial to minimise transaction costs in a market that is characterised by a mobile commodity, long distances, and delayed payment in the absence of adequate financial institutions. In addition, it is argued that the specificity of the market environment equally facilitates the use of ethnicity for commercial purposes such as the delimitation of market niches.

In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and they share a present that in many countries is being radically affected by historical transformations such as urbanisation, impoverishment and the scourge of AIDS.

This essay explores the varied ways so-called ‘witchcraft’ powers are implicated today in an African society, the Tuareg of the Republic of Niger. There is analysis of the interplay of these powers and dangers in case studies and vignettes, suggesting that recent assertions of ‘witch-like’ powers are grounded in moral discourse that addresses negotiated social relationships rather than linear temporal transformations from ‘tradition’ into ‘modernity’. A comparative analysis of these powers in diverse contexts reveals that witchcraft discourses are multiple and invite less a lineal temporal question of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’, more a question of how moral discourses are reconfigured from cultural referents in intrinsically diverse repertoires.

This article focuses on relationships between grandmothers and grandchildren in an urban society in East Cameroon. It argues that despite fluid generational demarcations between grandmothers and mothers, women perform their grandmotherhood differently from their motherhood. As a result of the claims grandmothers often make on their children's children, grandmothers easily replace mothers but they do not rear children in the same way. The sharing of home, food, and bed is central in the performance of grandmotherhood and differs from relationships of sharing in the mother-child bond. The article also argues that grandmotherhood in East Cameroon is not a clearly bounded, unambiguous life stage but that it contains multiple trajectories that do not occur in the same time or in the same order. Multiple trajectories, characterised by both agency and constraint, are explained in terms of differences within and between grandmothers’ life courses. The article shows that grandmothers play vital roles in complex practices of marriage and descent and, in contrast to previous studies in the area, that matrilineages are closely linked to patrilineages.

The paper provides insights into an illicit trading system and explores the logics that contribute to its proliferation. It joins the literature on informal trading networks and revises conventional wisdom about what is necessary to sustain them. Gold traders have established intricate webs of relations based on personal dyadic affiliations. These extended networks are very heterogeneous, involving a multitude of actors, spanning regional, ethnic and social categories. Unlike many other examples in the anthropological literature, the gold trade is not a business carried out by members of a single ethnic group. Yet, explanation is required as to why, despite this heterogeneity, confidence between all actors is created, particularly in this case where there is no legal recourse when informal contracts are broken. I argue that a patron–client system of risk-sharing at various economic levels is the basis both for economic rationales and cohesion among all actors.

Somalia has been without a government for the past thirteen years. After the ousting of Siyaad Barre in 1991 observers were left with the question why a promising, even democratic, society sharing the same ethnicity, one religion, a common language and a predominantly pastoral culture was overtaken by a devastating civil war. Analysts stressed the significance of kinship and clan politics in the maintenance of sustained conflict. They argued that Somalia's state collapse must be placed in a historical context taking into consideration the cultural heritage of Somali society and the legacy of the colonial past. The purpose of the article is twofold: first, it seeks to explore an alternative explanation for the breakdown of Barre's dictatorial regime; and second, to analyse the social consequences of political and economic exclusion that followed the state collapse. The paper argues that Somalia's state failure can be explained by the unjust distribution of new sources of wealth in postcolonial Somalia. This modernisation process was accompanied by violent clashes and continued insecurity. The breakdown of the former regime did not create a representative government. Instead, faction leaders fought for political supremacy at the cost of the lives of thousands of civilians. In the absence of a functioning government that could guarantee security and protection, clan loyalties gained importance. Clan affiliation became a condition of being spared from violence. Unjust distribution of pockets of wealth, such as the high‐potential agricultural land in the riverine areas in southern Somalia, led to localised clashes. It will be argued that horizontal inequalities, or inequalities between groups, are based on both material and imagined differences. Somali faction leaders use these differences instrumentally, to maintain and to exercise power. Irrespective of the existence of invisible and physical markers, it is important to understand what existing social boundaries mean to their participants. A localised clan conflict in Lower Shabelle between the Jido and the Jareer clan families illustrates the consequences of social and economic exclusion. Groups who felt excluded from economic and political life, such as the Jareer, took up arms. Violence became a means of being heard and taken seriously in the current Somali peace talks in Kenya.

This paper is an investigation of the relationship between identity, politics, and rumours in Jimma, Ethiopia. The introduction of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia after the fall of the Marxist Derg regime in 1991 has been the topic of a significant amount of academic discussion, but little attention has been given to the day-to-day experience of this change. Consequently, post-1991 Ethiopian politics have been viewed primarily in terms of ethnic power struggles. An analysis of rumours that are circulated through casual conversation enables a better understanding of popular reactions to ethnic federalism. In particular, rumours regarding the drinking habits of Oromo Muslims and the political behaviour of Protestants reveal that ethnicity is closely intertwined with religion and nationalism. This analysis also demonstrates how a particularly Ethiopian form of discourse functions as a means both of resisting and coping with loss of political power and economic decline. Finally, it explores how international news media coverage of Christian–Muslim conflict and anxieties about globalisation are interrelated with local power struggles. In this paper, rumours are treated as a discourse that provides a window into the worldview of the speaker in order to explore how individuals negotiate political change and construct difference at the everyday level.

The introduction of dry-season vegetable cultivation on a large scale in Brikama, The Gambia in the early 1970s has led to the development of a new labour system amongst female farmers whereby strangers or clients are given access to land primarily in the dry season for vegetable cultivation in exchange for providing unremunerated labour for hosts for the cultivation of rice in the rainy season. Hosts, who either claim descent from the founding families or have married into founding families, have access to land and control its distribution for women's crops. This article examines the way in which social difference is played out in the acquisition of land and labour through the establishment of agrarian clientelist relations. Agrarian clientelist relations are about the maintenance of host–stranger distinctions and the management of social difference within a rapidly changing Gambian political economy. The nature of these clientelist relations is changing because of the changing relations of agrarian production, related in turn to the introduction of cooperative gardens in the region, the increasing scarcity of farming land and the increasing political power of strangers on a local and national level. The youth, particularly those who are educated, are moving out of farming altogether. Consequently, female hosts are increasingly reliant on their clients' labour. I argue that female hosts attempt to manage these processes of change out of a need to maintain the particular power relations that form the basis for host–stranger distinctions and their existing claims to land and labour. The article examines the tensions and the intra-gender struggles that emerge between female hosts and their client-strangers. In refusing to take the initiative to set up cooperative gardens, female hosts have maintained what they see as their rightful claims to their land and their clients' labour. Hegemonic notions of ‘the correctness of practices’, associated with host–stranger identities, have informed hosts' behaviour and that of their clients, and ultimately influenced the nature of resource allocation.

Since the late 1960s, researchers have primarily regarded ethnicity as the result of increasing international relations, and thus often as a comparative phenomenon. Although this research has been immensely important for its critique of essentialist notions of ethnicity, analyses of the historically formed specificity of ethnicity have been somewhat neglected. In this article, using an example from Zimbabwe, the author highlights the internal dynamics of ethnicity. The article shows how people in southern Zimbabwe use various clan names, origins, and ‘castes’ in a practice of naming, and how this practice breaks the category Ndebele into parts. The author argues that instead of studying ethnic categories as unbreakable wholes, focusing on smaller units of analysis gives a more complex picture of ethnicity. This view challenges some more or less established truths on ethnicity deduced from comparative studies.

This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents—as foster-parents—take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to their fostered grandchildren. The practices of grandparental fosterage, as well as changes in them, need to be understood in the broader context of widespread fosterage among Baatombu, where the majority of children grow up not with their biological parents but with foster-parents. The gradual decline of old forms of fosterage is affecting foster practices between grandparents and grandchildren. The grandparents’ generation evaluate this decline negatively and fear that changing fosterage patterns may adversely affect their social security in old age.

The social basis of ecological change in Somaliland during the colonial period was politics, especially imperial politics: the division of the Somali country into various colonial spheres, the loss of territory under the 1897 Anglo‐Ethiopian Treaty, and the pacification wars. These events, as it were, reduced the land available for use by the pastoralists, which led to overgrazing, soil erosion and ecological degradation. Moreover, the income of the population declined throughout the colonial period. Even though during the late colonial period the ‘nominal’ price of pastoral goods increased, the ‘real’ price of pastoral commodities did not increase to cover the loss of income caused by inflation and the high cost of imported goods. These two processes—on the one hand ecological degradation and on the other the decline of income—could be understood if they were read contrapuntally. Such reading is possible only if we give full attention to political ecology: why ecology had changed, the politics of that change, and the impact it had on the income and everyday life of the population.

This paper examines how the way of life of a little known group of hunter–gatherers, the Waata Oromo, was brought to an end through British colonial wildlife conservation laws and the creation of national parks in Kenya. Through this policy and that of the containment of ethnic groups to ‘tribal reserves’, the Waata lost their place in the regional economic system and suffered loss of cultural identity. It also meant that when Kenya gained independence, the Waata were not recognised as a distinct entity with rights to their own political representation. Instead, they became appendages of the dominant pastoral groups with which they had been associated. They were thus doubly marginalised, in both economic and political terms. The paper describes how this situation has led some Waata in northern Kenya to claim separate ethnic status. It discusses the problem from the point of view of a Waata social activist and of an anthropologist. These two perspectives raise further issues for the etic/emic debate in anthropology.

The practice of entrustment is a form of voluntary allegiance for the sake of protection, one which historically lies at the core of host–stranger relationships along the River Gambia. Deeply woven into the social fabric of local communities, it was appropriated by various historical subjects during the twentieth century in order to construct networks of political confidence and mutual assistance at a local and national level. This article traces this dynamic process of re-elaboration. In so doing, it takes into account the history of a Mandinka commercial settlement in eastern Gambia from the late nineteenth century to post-Independence times, and questions the shifts that occurred in the political significance of entrustment with changing social and economic scenarios. Contextualised in the longue durée, the practice of karafoo shows its relevance as a cultural resource encouraging the creation of networks of trust and interdependence in social settings historically characterised by seasonal and more stable forms of migration.

East African rangelands have a long history of population mobility linked to competition over key resources, negotiated access, and outright conflict. Both in the literature and in local discourse, in‐migration is presented as leading to increased competition, driving poverty and social exclusion on the one hand, and conflict and violence on the other. Current analyses in developing countries identify economic differences, ethnic fault lines, ecological stresses and a breakdown in state provision of human and constitutional rights as factors in driving conflict. The present paper explores this interaction of in‐migration and conflict with respect to Kenyan and Tanzanian pastoralist areas and populations. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, patterns of resource access and control in Kenya and Tanzania Maasailand are explored in terms of the ways land and livestock are associated with migration status, ethnicity and wealth or political class. Contrasts and similarities between the two national contexts are used to develop a better understanding of the ways these factors operate under different systems of tenure and access. The conclusion briefly considers implications of these patterns, their potential for exacerbating poverty, and policies for minimising social exclusion and conflict in East African rangelands.

This description of relations between grandparents and grandchildren in a rural Ghanaian community argues that the quality of these relations varies according to age and gender. Literature on African kinship has almost entirely focused on very young grandchildren. This article draws attention to changes that occur when those children grow into adolescents and adults. Grandchildren—both young and old—speak respectfully about their grandparents, but older people regret that their grandchildren do not come to them for advice once they have grown up. Older men seem more ‘neglected’ by their grandchildren than older women. The second argument is about performance: respect, affection and relatedness between grandparents and grandchildren are demonstrated in public even when their ‘contents’ have dwindled. The article is based on anthropological fieldwork over a period of almost ten years.

This article discusses whether Ethiopia's recent reorganisation into broadly decentralised, ethnically based regions was also accompanied by significant changes in the images and administrative practices through which state powers have been locally understood and experienced by ordinary citizens. Different scholars and politicians have viewed the local effects of these changes differently. Government officials and some scholars report ‘radical reversals’ from decades of monarchial despotism and socialist dictatorship to enhanced local autonomy and self-governance, while others counter this by noting the ‘continuation’ of earlier administrative practices. I draw on ethnographic material from fieldwork in Aba Sälama, a local administrative unit in Amhara, to show that decentralisation has increased the significance of local government as a site for competing interpretations of household autonomy and local-governance. Party members and elected farmer officials used the newly enhanced constitutional powers and funds of the local government to strengthen their own personal standing vis-à-vis their superiors at the district capital and fellow farmers in the community. Farmers for their part seized the rhetoric to demand more autonomy from local government which they still viewed as an extension of central state control over their lives and resources. As a consequence, one observes in Aba Sälama both decentralised and centralised administrative practices as local officials seek to accommodate this tension when performing their governmental duties.

This article is concerned with the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren in changing Tswana society. It argues that, in order to understand this relationship and how this has been changing, we have to look at different sets of relationships separately. The relationships between grandfathers/grandmothers and grandsons/granddaughters have quite different qualities depending upon whether their sons/daughters are married or unmarried. Moreover, these qualities are influenced in different ways by changes taking place in society. The data are analysed using Charles Taylor's concept of moral space and discussed in terms of ideals of respect, meaning and dignity.

This case study of youth cultural production in Cameroon examines how lycée students introduce idioms of tradition and the ancestral past into the lycée context by creating a club modelled on a dance society popular in the region. In pre-colonial rural Tupuriland, the gurna society was a key site for the moral–sexual socialisation of youth and a cultural–political arena where competition was staged between individuals and villages during death celebrations. Today, the gurna remains popular in Tupuri villages, though it has been recreated in urban contexts and modern institutions where members use its forms to mediate new social relations and modern realities. This paper explores the meanings, functions, and effects of the creation of the ‘Gurna Club’ by students in the Lycée de Doukoula, by examining students' Youth Day dance performances, vibrant song discourse, and nostalgia for earlier forms of indigenous socialisation (e.g. the gurna, youth initiation, and wrestling). By inserting the communal poetics of the gurna into the lycée, Tupuri youth seek to yoke multiple facets of their identity, making visible their desire to be gurna, even as they pursue their civic obligations as students. In creating the Gurna Club, students begin to participate in an increasing trend in Cameroon toward the use of idioms of parochialism (such as ethnically based elite associations) as strategies for garnering national power and recognition.

Although a favourable position for women is usually anticipated where they occupy important economic roles in the context of matrilineal descent, such a position may well exist in a patrilineal society, especially if women organise as in West Africa. Here there exist well-organised women's cult associations which are well known from Liberia and Sierra Leone and occur also in western Cameroon and south-eastern Nigeria. The present article demonstrates the existence of a comparable women's association in middle-belt Nigeria among the Kulere. The article focuses mainly on the manner in which through the cooperation of certain men's and women's associations ‘gender symmetry’ was ritually expressed in the sphere of agriculture and fertility. The practical foundation of this symmetry in fertility cults was a relatively even division of labour between the sexes and a favourable position for women in marriage, since they could decide independently whether to stay with a husband or leave him. Cult associations were predominant in public life. Women were strictly excluded from men's associations which held political–ritual offices and channelled advantages in ritual consumption to men. Notwithstanding this exclusion, women had their own association in which they could regulate their own affairs as well as pass decisions for the whole community including the men. The women's organisation held major responsibilities for the protection and the fertility of the fields, both practically as well as ritually. In this responsibility the women's association cooperated with a men's association which otherwise intimidated women. This association of males protected the fields through the presence of supernatural guardians which was sometimes staged in masquerades. The corresponding duties and cooperation of both associations were enacted ritually through the use of common shrines and when the women contacted water spirits to increase the harvest under the protection of male masqueraders. The Kulere case shows a patrilineal society where women had a relatively independent position which was publicly acknowledged through gender dualism in the ritual organisation of agriculture in which their special capabilities with respect to fertility and sustainability were recognised.