This article is about the marital sexual relationships (MSR) and the timing of the next child among the Ekiti and Ikale sub-groups of the Yoruba. Contrasts in post-partum sexual practices between the two groups allow us to demonstrate the importance of parents' perception of their child's growth and their observance of prohibitions on sexual intercourse during the wife's lactation as factors shaping their decision to have another child. It is argued that the similarity in birth spacing among the two groups, derived from contrasting attitudes to post-partum abstinence, is evidence of an explicit decision on the timing of the next child. Such a decision takes account of the role of the child's growth and social development as it affects adults in the performance of their daily social and economic routines and goes beyond an unquestioned response to quasi-religious taboos. The implications of the findings for fertility prospects are also discussed.

This paper is concerned with aspects of reproduction and fertility among the Kwahu of southern Ghana, an Akan sub-group, and more particularly among the members of a lineage in one rural town characterised by profound socio-economic change and differentiation. Fragments of the field data presented are taken from a larger corpus of materials focusing on family life, sexuality and birth control collected during the early 1970s.

The data discussed here pertain to people's decisions whether or not to practise contraception, to have abortions, to carry pregnancies to full term – in short, whether or not to regulate their fertility by traditional and modern chemical and mechanical methods. We note as we proceed why some individuals will terminate a pregnancy at all costs, even risking life and health to do so, and why others have a fatalistic or casual approach to the results of their activities and the outcome of their pregnancy. These materials are presented within the context of a brief account of some current problems encountered in micro-economic demographic modelling exercises based on rational decision-making premisses, and of recent attempts to build bridges between ethnographers and economists.

Menstrual blood has proved a popular subject for discussion in the anthropological literature but, surprisingly, only a single theme has emerged: societies either do or do not consider menstrual blood and menstruating women to be polluting. If they are not considered polluting, it is taken as a sign of sex-role egalitarianism; conversely, if they are considered polluting, it is taken as a sign of women's lower status vis-a-vis men and/or of the potential danger or threat that women represent to men (e.g. Kessler, 1976: 72-4; Meggitt, 1964; Ortner, 1974; Sacks, 1974; Young, 1965: 155). Friedl (1975: 29) goes so far as to suggest that menstruating women are viewed as threatening and polluting because menstrual blood is a symbol of death: when a woman menstruates, it is a sign that she has not conceived a child and thus during this time she is ‘the antithesis of life’.

Like most southern Ghanian populations, the Abutia Ewe – one of the numerous ‘village leagues’ which compose the northern part of Eweland (Volta region)– have experienced far-reaching transformations in the last century, and nowhere more radically than in their matrimonial practices. In this article, I wish to concentrate on two aspects of these practices, namely the definition of marriage and the incidence of divorce.

Indeed, an adequate analysis of divorce requires some heuristic tools which enable us to decide whether particular couples are ‘married’ or not, a procedure made extremely difficult in the case of Abutia because of the changes in their definition of marriage. In the first part of the article, I shall briefly survey these changes and discuss the definitional problems they raise and, in the second, present the main findings of a quantitative survey which helps to measure the impact of the changes discussed. It also reveals that divorce was in fact common before 1890, when German colonial rule was imposed. In the third and last part I seek to explain this marital instability in ‘pre-colonial’ Abutia.

Nyavingi possession has had a long and varied history among the peoples who occupy the borderlands of northern Rwanda, south-western Uganda and eastern Zaire. Jim Freedman (1974, 1979), Who has studied the cult's early history and diffusion, has suggested that Nyavingi, or Nyabingi, as it is more frequently spelled, initially emerged in association with the rule of the Bashambo clan in the ancient kingdom of Ndorwa, although its role as a religious support for Bashambo rule may only date from the collapse of Ndorwa and the establishment of Bashambo kingdoms to the west of Lake Bunyoni in Kigezi and in the Mutara district of Rwanda at the end of the eighteenth century. While it is perhaps impossible to define the exact role which Nyavingi played in the Bashambo states, Freedman suggests that, at least in the successor states, Nyavingi represented a powerful spirit of a deceased female ancestor of the Bashambo. Hopkins (1969) notes, in addition, that, as a result of its support of Bashambo rule in northern Rwanda, Nyavingi became a focus of local resistance to Tutsi political expansion into the region.