Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigeria's political economy and its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion.

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.

In the autumn of 2004, a remarkable gathering of 102 scholars took place at St Antony's College, Oxford: they had come for an interdisciplinary symposium on ‘Trees, rain, and politics in Africa: the dynamics and politics of climatic and environmental change’. Symposium papers were grouped into panels that focused on either particular resources (such as trees and water) or particular aspects of social relationships (such as politics and discourses). This format resulted in a series of dialogues between the natural science and social science paradigms, and this first half of the present issue of Africa takes as its theme just one of those interdisciplinary conversations. Taken together, these authors demonstrate how the hybridization of natural science and social science can benefit understandings of the African past, interpretations of the African present and planning for the African future.1

This article examines popular understandings of diabetes, and conflicts and ambiguities in the management of diabetes care, in two areas of Cameroon. Conducted over a two-year period, comparative ethnography in Yaoundé and Bafut started in four diabetes clinics (two in each place). From there it extended outwards, first to the homes of patients with diabetes, and then on to a number of indigenous healers consulted by patients or their families. We explore here the tension between clinic-based demands for patients' ‘compliance’ with treatment guidelines, including repeated strictures against resorting to ‘traditional’ medicine, and patients' own willingness to alternate between biomedicine and indigenous practitioners, a process in which they subject the claims of both to a kind of pragmatic evaluation. The continuing importance of indigenous healing practices, and explanations for diabetes in terms of ancestral intervention or witchcraft, are considered in the light of recent anthropological debate about the ‘modernity of witchcraft’ in Africa.

The demise of springbok treks, the irruptive migration patterns of the species in South Africa's Karoo region, has long been attributed to the rinderpest epizootic understood to have coincided in both time and space with the last of the great springbok treks. This is incorrect. Instead the cessation of springbok treks can be attributed to a variety of anthropogenic factors. This article first examines and then rejects the case for rinderpest, before introducing alternative causal factors such as the increase in livestock and human populations, the effects of fencing and the double impact of hunting and concomitant drought. These factors, it is argued, acted in concert to effectively remove the conditions necessary for springbok treks and thereby end the phenomenon. It is suggested that the local extinction of this phenomenon – a keystone species and process – is an important and heretofore unconsidered element in the decline of the Karoo ecosystem.

This article examines funding for HIV/AIDS in South Africa, and the relationship between foreign donors and the South African government. The recognition of the AIDS pandemic as an epochal crisis has led to a proliferation of international and donor organizations now directly involved in the governance, tracking and management of the pandemic in many African countries. In many ways, the heavy donor hand that is increasingly defining the pandemic and the global response to it feeds into a new imperialist logic that subordinates pan-African agendas, masks broader issues of access central to the fight against the pandemic, and strengthens traditional relationships of dependence between wealthy Western nations and poorer African nations. The South African government's relationship with foreign donors, however, has been shaped by its efforts to develop an African response to the pandemic not determined nor primarily funded by foreign aid. This article highlights the positive and negative implications of the sometimes contentious relationship between the South African government and foreign donors, as well as the Africa-centred, self-help agenda it pursues, highlighting the opportunities as well as challenges for African governments to define the global response to the pandemic.

It is often considered probable that the recent rise of vigilante groups in Nigeria means an erosion of the state monopoly of legitimate violence as well as a marked decline in state sovereignty over the national territory. However, this conclusion does not take into consideration the fact that in Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a term initially proposed by the police in the mid-1980s as a substitute for an older practice known in the western part of the country since the colonial period as the ‘hunter guard’ or ‘night guard’ system. Hence, instead of looking at vigilante groups as a response to a supposed increase in crime or a supposed decline of the police force, we should consider them – initially at least – as a first attempt to introduce forms of community policing in order to improve the appalling image of the police. As such, in south-western Nigeria ‘vigilante’ is a new name for an old practice of policing that should be considered in an extended timeframe (from the 1930s onward), a period in which violent crime has been perceived as a potential danger. Finally, within the ongoing debate on the ‘privatization of the state’ in Africa, non-state policing in Nigeria testifies to a continuum existing since the colonial period rather than to the appearance of new phenomena in the 1980s or the 1990s.

In his inaugural editorial in Africa in 1928, Sir Frederick Lugard observed that the new institution that was responsible for publishing the journal, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures (it did not become the International African Institute until 1946) was entering a field already crowded with organizations dealing with Africa. His hope was that the IIALC would carve out a distinctive role for itself as a hub or central clearing house, coordinating a disparate international array of institutions and bringing ‘scientific study’ into contact with ‘practical affairs’. The core of scientific study would be anthropological and linguistic, and Lugard saw a useful future for research into African local law and custom, land tenure systems and changes in consumption patterns, among other topics (Lugard 1928).

The article puts forwards the argument that there is a pervasiveanxiety among Muslims over their security, both physical and spiritual, in today's northern Nigeria. It is an anxiety partly millenarian, partly political, that seeks to recreate a stronger sense of the ‘core North’ as dar al-Islam, with notionally ‘closed’ boundaries – just as it was in the pre-colonial Sokoto Caliphate. This has led first to the re-establishment, within twelve of Nigeria's 36 states, of full shari‘a law and then to the formation of a sometimes large corps of hisba (wrongly called ‘vigilantes’) – this despite Nigeria having a constitution that both is secular and reserves to the federal government institutions like police and prisons. The article explores the various dimensions, past and present, of ‘security’ in Kano and ends with the problem of ‘dual citizenship’ where pious Muslims see themselves at the same time both as Nigerians and as members of the wider Islamic umma.

During the twentieth century, the 20,000 hectares commons surrounding the village of Paulshoek as well as the neighbouring privately-owned farms have been significantly influenced by evolving land-use practices driven largely by socio-economic and political change in the broader Namaqualand and South African region. Land-use practices in the communal lands of Namaqualand were based initially on transhumant pastoralism, then on extensive dryland cropping associated with livestock production under restricted mobility, and more recently on a sedentarized labour reserve where agricultural production now forms a minor part of the local economy. For the first half of the twentieth century, farmers on communal and privately-owned farms shared similar transhumant pastoral practices and both moved across unfenced farm boundaries. By the middle of the century, however, fence-lines were established and commercial farming on privately-owned farms was increasingly managed according to rangeland science principles. As the population grew in the communal areas, families gravitated to new ‘service’ villages such as Paulshoek and became increasingly dependent on migrant labour and state welfare. While the majority of former croplands are now fallow, many of them for decades or more, communal livestock populations have remained relatively high, fluctuating with rainfall. The impact of this history of land use can be compared with that of neighbouring privately-owned farms where low stocking rates, coupled with a variety of state subsidies, have had a very different environmental outcome. This article charts the environmental transformations that have occurred in the area of Paulshoek as a direct result of the region's political history and the evolution of the regional economy. We present a variety of evidence drawn from archival sources, oral history, repeat aerial and ground photography, and detailed climate, cropping and livestock records to show that events far beyond the borders of Namaqualand's communal areas have had a profound influence on their environments.

Widespread assumptions about the extractive and self-serving nature of African elites have resulted in the relative neglect of questions concerning their personal ethics and morality. Using life-history interviews undertaken with a range of Ghanaian development workers, this article explores some of the different personal aspirations, ideologies and beliefs that such narratives express. The self-identification of many of those interviewed as ‘activists’ is examined in terms of the related concepts of ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’ and ‘sacrifice’. Much recent work within history and anthropology uses the ‘life-history’ as a way of introducing ‘agency’ that is purported to be missing in accounts focusing on larger social abstractions. Yet it is the very opposition between abstractions such as ‘history’ and ‘society’ and their own more ‘personal’ lives that such narratives themselves enact. The article thus interrogates the various ways in which development workers variously imagine their lives in relation to broader social and historical processes.

The sexual culture of sub-Saharan African peoples is variously utilized as an explanation for the high incidence of HIV in Africa. Thus it has been the target of behaviour change campaigns championed by massive public health education. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (using participant observation, individual interviews, focus group discussions, and a survey) in Masaka District, this article contests a reified, homogeneous and ethnocentric sexualizing of Africans. It engages with how prescribed ritual sex practices are (re)negotiated, contested, affirmed, policed, revised and given meaning within the context of a society living with HIV/AIDS. Among Baganda, sex is customarily a vital component for ‘completing’ individual prosperity, kin-group equilibrium and social cohesion. Various forms of prescribed customary sexual activities range from penetrative sex interaction between penis and vagina, to symbolic performances such as (male) jumping over women's legs or (female) wearing of special belts. Unlike portrayals of customary sex activities in anti-HIV/AIDS discourse, the notion of ‘dangerous sex’ and the fear of contagion are not typical of all ritual sex practices in Masaka. Akin to Christianity, colonialism, colonial medicine and modernizing discourses, anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns are the contemporary social policemen for sex, sexuality and sexual behaviour. In this regard, public health discourse in Uganda is pathologizing the mundane aspects of customary practices. The HIV/AIDS metaphor is variously utilized by Baganda to negotiate whether or not to engage in specific ritual sex activities.

Discourses on autochthony, citizenship and exclusion have become popular in Cameroon as well as in other parts of Africa, and lately even in Europe. This article considers the case of the Mbororo (agro-pastoral Fulbe) in north-west Cameroon (also known as the Western Grassfields) and their recent claims to regional citizenship and minority status.

The Mbororo are a minority in the region. They are perceived as strangers and migrants by local Grassfields groups who consider themselves their hosts and landlords. The Mbororo have long entertained host–guest and patron–client relations with their Grassfields neighbours. However, in the context of Cameroon's democratization and the constitutional changes of the 1990s, they have changed their political strategies, aiming at direct representation to the state. In 1992 MBOSCUDA (the Mbororo Social and Cultural Development Association) was founded and gradually developed into a nationally influential ethnic elite association. While confirming the Mbororo as regional citizens, it successfully portrayed them as an ‘indigenous people’ both nationally and internationally. Moreover, many Mbororo of the younger generation have gradually developed emotional bonds with their home areas. Neighbouring groups have mixed feelings about these developments, as they may generate new conflicts.

This article presents the case of the creation and expansion of Namaqua National Park in Namaqualand, South Africa, to highlight the contradictions between global interests in biodiversity conservation and local livelihoods. Despite the policy shift in the conservation literature from ‘fortress’ to community-based conservation, we argue that in practice conservation still tends to dominate when there is a trade-off between Western-style conservation and support to the livelihoods of marginalized communities. This can again be explained by the hegemony of a conservation discourse that is shared by a network of actors. The article highlights the role played by powerful environmental organizations and wealthy individuals supporting conservation at the expense of land redistribution in Namaqualand. The combination of scientific research and finances provided by this actor-network aided the creation and expansion of the Park. Local people, however, see the expansion of the Park as direct and unfair competition for land that they wish to acquire through the land redistribution programme, as well as an indirect challenge to their local livelihoods. Whatever the merits of their case, it seems clear that communities aspiring to more land, together with advocates of human rights and poverty alleviation, remain on the margins in terms of policy influence, especially when they pursue goals that are perceived by the conservation advocates to be in conflict with those of biodiversity conservation.

Oral accounts of the past play an important role in the construction of cultural memories as they are reconstructed in dynamic social contexts. Based primarily on participant observation in a peri-urban village in Dar es Salaam, and life-history interviews with twenty-five elderly residents, this article focuses on reminiscing and cultural understandings of neo-liberal policies in Tanzania's post-socialist context. The article examines how people use narratives to understand and to give meaning to their individual experiences in the context of broader socio-cultural, economic and political changes. Narrators' oral life-histories and illness narratives reveal the ways in which the transition from Tanzania's unique form of socialism (Ujamaa) to Western-style neo-liberalism has led to the erosion of social cohesion at the community level, disrupted existing social support networks and limited access to healthcare. Participant observation and analysis of discursive data draw attention to the fact that the expression ‘This is not our culture!’ and its attendant sentiment ‘Life is hard!’ have become formulaic pronouncements, especially among poor and socially excluded people. These expressions indicate a loss of community values, and a decrease in respect and deference towards the elderly in the post-socialist era that is inextricably bound up with the hardships engendered by neo-liberal economic policies.

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice. It is a lens on the politics of post-colonial Africa, on the current political economy of Nigeria, and on its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. The legitimation of vigilante activity has extended beyond dissatisfaction with current levels of law and order and the failings of the Nigeria Police. To understand the local legitimacy of vigilantism in post-colonial Nigeria, indeed, it is also necessary to recognize its internal imperatives. Vigilantism in this context is embedded in narratives of contested rights, in familiar everyday practices, understandings of personhood and knowledge, and in alternative, older registers of governmentality. In addition to mapping temporal and spatial communities in which young men are vested with the right to exercise justice, this article assesses the legitimacy of Annang vigilantism within cultural frameworks of accountability linked to conceptions of agency, personhood and power, and the oppositions this produces between vigilantes and thieves.

This article aims at contributing to our understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary West Africa by adopting a bi-focal analysis that looks both at power struggles within the urban elite and at the grassroots multi-ethnic setting in southern Guinea-Bissau. I pay close attention to the social dynamics of rural peoples' perspectives, coping strategies and inter-ethnic conflicts. Local conflicts are elucidated as an ongoing process that traverses times of war and peace. Although they are subject to manipulation by urban actors, local conflicts are also a matter of continuous negotiation and partial consensus at the grassroots. In stark contrast to this, the struggles in the ruling group are characterized by an escalating spiral of factionalism, diminishing compromises and elimination of rivals. By analysing the relationship between urban and rural actors and the role of cosmology, the article also aims to shed new light on the multiple shapes patron–client relations can assume in Africa.

This article examines innovations in livestock marketing that livestock traders in northern Kenya use to overcome a host of trading obstacles. Livestock trading in northern Kenya is one of the toughest and most risk-prone jobs in the region, yet livestock traders have been able not only to transform the ways in which trading is conducted through ‘home-made’ innovations, but also to mitigate trading risks. The article demonstrates how livestock traders have become resilient to risks and have been able to succeed in a trade that in the past many have had to abandon. Trust embedded in social networks and relations reinforces the adoption of risk-minimizing strategies. The article focuses on the broad field of pastoral risk management to illustrate how an innovative risk management strategy can be used to create a successful business entrepreneurship in a risk-prone environment. I draw on fieldwork conducted during 2001–2 among cattle traders in Moyale District of northern Kenya and Nairobi, and on recent work among Somali livestock traders-cum-ranchers in Garissa District of North Eastern and Coast provinces.

This article examines the role of women in the politics of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC), a militant ethno-nationalist movement of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria. Women's inclusion in the organizational structure and their typical roles within the OPC, the article suggests, expand the political agency of women but at the same time ensure that their contributions are contained within the OPC's overall politics. Women play important roles within the OPC, primarily by enabling and supporting the vigilante activities of male OPC members. In the provision of this support, women overwhelmingly draw on the knowledge and powers associated with typically female life experiences. As a result, women's interests are represented within the overall agenda of the OPC, but on the basis of complementary rather than egalitarian gender roles.

J. G. Mullen was a Gold Coast clerk who published his memoirs, in instalments, in the Gold Coast Leader from 1916 to 1919. In this unusual narrative, he describes his adventures in Cameroon before and during the First World War. His account combines real-life geographical and social details with flamboyant tropes probably derived from imperial popular literature. Mullen's biography and even identity have so far been otherwise untraceable. His text offers glimpses, always enigmatic, of the experience and outlook of a member of the new clerkly class of colonial West Africa. This contribution presents an edited extract from Mullen's text together with a contextualizing and interpretative essay. The full Mullen text is available in the online version of this issue of Africa.