The Kuranko term for sacrifice is sarake (from the Arabic sadaqa). Any gift, offering or material object over which invocations to spirits are made is a sacrifice. Sarake thus includes offerings made to the three major categories of spirit: (1) Ala or Altala (God), (2) Bəmbanu or Fɔl' mɔryonu (‘Ancestors’ and ‘First/original people’ respectively), (3) Njεnnenu (Spirits of the wild or djinn). Sacrifice also includes material objects (medicines and fetishes) which are prayed over.

This is a study of Teso District, eastern Uganda, during a period of colonial administration from 1896 to 1927. A group of appointed chiefs was brought into being and maintained within a local political environment in which neither traditional rulers nor a principle of hereditary succession to political office were recognised. The growth of the bureaucratic and authoritarian aspects of client chiefship is traced, along with changes in the relations of the chiefs with the colonial regime and with the people they ruled. In time, their increasing powers of coercion and their accumulative control of patronage led to the emergence of a class interest among them. This became crystallised in the mid-1920s when, as a body, they maintained a conservative stance within a colonial administration geared to change.

Notre propos, dans cet article, n'est pas de tenter une analyse détaillée de la manière dont la monnaie moderne est actuellement maniée par les agriculteurs haoussas. Nous allons, plus modestement, nous contenter de souligner les mécanismes généraux auxquels obéit la circulation du numéraire au sein de la communauté rurale et, surtout, d'en faire ressortir les effets socio-économiques. Nous espérons pouvoir montrer ainsi comment l'argent constitue un des instruments privilégiés par lesquels se transmettent jusqu'au coeur du monde rural africain des influences déterminantes, issues de sphères économiques beaucoup plus vastes.

Fetishism, a word much in vogue in late nineteenth century anthropology, no longer appears in serious scholarly use, except among art historians, psychoanalysts, and Marxist economists. Tylor, the most influential voice in the definition of fetishism, regarded it as a development of animism; fetishism was ‘the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects. Fetishism will be taken as including the worship of ‘stocks and stones’ and thence it passes by an imperceptible gradation into Idolatry’ (Tylor 1874:II:144). Tylor went on to speculate that primitive man originally imagined the soul of a deceased person to inhabit some relic such as a bone; this idea once established, it evolved into a propensity to associate any unusual object with a spirit. If the spirit, with its capacity for action, were embodied in an object specially made to represent its character, the ethnographer would recognise an Idol.

A contrastive account of pre-colonial and colonial systems of land tenure in Malaŵi cannot avoid adopting thangata as its central concept. The 1921 Land Commission of Nyasaland asserted that the practice of thangata:

seems to have had a foundation in the conditions of purely [African] life under which the member of the village community worked for a certain period in the gardens of his chief, the latter assuming towards the former a responsibility which has its parallel in the relations of the best European landlords towards their native tenants today. The practice was known from the beginning by the [Cheŵa] word ‘thangata’ meaning ‘to assist’. In return for his right to occupy certain land the [African] ‘assisted’ his chief or his European landlord in the latter's work upon his own land.

There is a whole world of difference between traditional thangata and colonial thangata. The former is nothing other than a social institution which embodies a pre-colonial notion of reciprocal labour. In the colonial situation the term came to mean forced labour. In this paper I analyse the term in its colonial form. My aim is to show that thangata is a colonial institution in that it originated from processes of British colonisation of Malaŵi. This aim requires that the pre-colonial system of land tenure be characterised first before tracing the formation of the colonial system.

In a recent publication, Eleanor Preston-Whyte (1974: 209) has noted the comparative ‘flexibility’ of the Tsonga and Chopi kinship systems, which allow for a greater degree of ‘individuality’ among these peoples as compared with other southern African Bantu-speaking peoples. This paper examines the place of the systems of marriage, divorce, and succession in the socio-cultural matrix which gives rise to an egocentric rather than sociocentric emphasis which is unusual in southern Africa.

What happens when women are denied access, over a long period of time, to formal education of the type men are given? This paper is a preliminary examination of the effects on Central Accra Ga society of this process, which began in a significant form in the nineteenth century. It posits a detrimental effect, not only on the women but also on the whole society, and on the relation between the sexes, of the systematic channelling of men into Western style education, while women were encouraged to stay in trading and home production, or given the equivalent of ‘home economics’ courses if they were sent to school.