This article reconsiders the relationship between ancestors and colonial power through a comparative analysis of the mortuary rituals of two Malagasy peoples, the Betsimisaraka of the east coast and the Karembola of the deep south. In contrast to analyses which emphasise an opposition between ancestors and colonial power, it argues that mortuary rituals construct striking analogies between the two. These analogies rest on similar conceptualisations of power as both enabling and enslaving, and are enacted in contemporary mortuary ritual through the incorporation of colonial goods and labour practices. By playing on similarities and differences between ancestral and colonial power, Betsimisaraka and Karembola mortuary rituals parody and critique mimetically appropriate colonial power, even as their appropriation of colonial symbols endows ritual practices around ancestors with the power to pull against the centralising power of the national sphere. Bakhtin's conception of heteroglossic language provides a useful way of conceptualising the multiple dimensions of ritual practices around ancestors.

In the plantation region of the Sambirano Valley in north-west Madagascar the spirits of wandering foreign dead haunt the region's forests. They are the displaced ghosts of migratory Antandroy, drawn here in search of employment. As pastoralists from the island's distant, arid south, Antandroy as an ethnic category are juxtaposed to self-perceptions voiced by indigenous Sakalava, whose kingdom coincides with this Valley. Tandroy difference is defined in reference to local constructions of savageness and strangeness: as pastoralists they are obsessed with herds; they migrate; they willingly participate in wage labour. In life, they are tolerated ‘guests’ of the region but in death they frustrate Sakalava with their persistent presence. Unlike any other migrant group, deceased Antandroy may continue to haunt the region, begging and stealing what is not rightfully theirs: food, wives, work, and fortune. Close analysis of these perplexing spirits reveals a localised ambivalence that characterises migrant identity and the meaning of work in an urban community shaped by the forces of multiculturalism and capitalism. By virtue of their persistent presence within the social and sacred geography of the Valley, the Tandroy dead threaten the integrity of Sakalava identity in a community (and nation) where indigenousness is defined by rootedness to the land. Central to the arguments presented here is the potency of the spiritual stranger, a social category that extends the anthropological analysis of religious appropriation beyond the boundaries of possession and embodiment. Further, the decipherment of complex meanings associated with alien spirits emerges ultimately as key to more general understandings of the symbolics of difference.

In the academic debate on labour migration and urbanisation in Southern Africa the persistence of links between urban workers and people in rural areas has proved a pertinent issue. As is implied by the term labour migration, economic forces have always been regarded as a major determinant of migratory behaviour. State-centred perspectives have dominated studies of rural–urban migration in Zimbabwe, where a restrictive legal framework regulated migration to urban centres during the colonial era in an attempt to prevent large numbers of Africans becoming permanent town dwellers. This ethnographic study of labour migrants in Harare originating from the Buhera district, however, shifts away from perspectives that reduce migratory behaviour to an effect of state intervention and/or economic forces. Such external forces are mediated by migrants’ networks that encompass both rural and urban localities. Rather than being only economically motivated, individual migrants’ participation in these networks has to be understood as an expression of a socio-cultural pattern in which rural identification and kinship ideology are of major importance. Viewing migration practices in this way—i.e. as observable outcomes of migrants’ socio-cultural dispositions—not only helps us to understand better the preferences that motivate economic behaviour but also challenges conventional perspectives in which the rural and urban are often viewed as distinct social worlds and the urbanisation process as part of a wider evolutionary development or transition towards a modern class society.

In the second half of the twentieth century the population of Kampala grew substantially and the long-remarked surplus of men over women began to level out. These general trends are equally evident in other African cities, but important differences show up when the balance of age cohorts within the male and female populations is considered. Thus in Kampala, along with population growth and a declining overall sex ratio, censuses show a growing excess of girls/young women over boys/young men. The article reviews these population data and two levels of (unenumerated) explanation for them. The first is extrapolated from Uganda's recent history; the second from observation and narrative in one densely populated parish. The argument is that changes in the age–sex ratio follow from change in the map of work options in Kampala. The disappearance of young males stems from the collapse of the formal economy, once the employer of men, and the developments in the informal economy which favour young women. This conclusion is supported by census data from Nairobi, where the formal employment structure remains relatively buoyant, and the comparable age–sex ratios are less extreme. The health policy relevance of the Kampala trend is underlined by official calculations of increasing HIV/AIDS incidence among teenage women. As long as sex work remains dominant among their options in the informal economy, one effect of their economic advantage is extra vulnerability to fatal disease.

This article explores local understandings of and experience with democracy in an Iraqw community in northern Tanzania. At independence, President Julius Nyerere in his development of a one-party state, argued that democracy in this new nation state would be modelled on that which is found in indigenous, pre-colonial political systems. In the Iraqw homeland, pre-colonial ‘democracy’ was expressed in elders’ councils in which male elders made decisions on behalf of the rest of the community. Differences of opinion were voiced but eventually the group would come to one opinion to achieve the state of being of ‘one heart’ before decisions could be put into effect. While Nyerere claimed that this practice of democracy and achieving consensus would provide the model for the post-colonial state, in actuality the state drew more on colonial models characterised by top-down decision-making and autocratic governance. Overlaying both the pre-colonial and post-colonial political systems is an ideological emphasis on ‘unity'. This article explores how the central notion of unity is expressed and perceived among the Iraqw in Tanzania and how it forms the screen through which people view démocratisation.

In the literature on pastoralist groups and the state, nomads are usually seen as increasingly marginalised today, whereas in the past nomads have often been described as ‘state builders’. But one interesting, if atypical, case has been overlooked: how a contemporary group of nomads, though they did not create a state, nonetheless came to conquer and dominate an existing one. The article starts by describing how the Tubu of Chad established dominance over the central government in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An evaluation is then made of the consequences this take-over of the Chadian state had for Tubu society. Admittedly the date for this evaluation are rather cursory and tentative, but it is possible to identify certain tendencies.