Pour les pasteurs nomades sud-sahariens, l'insuffisance ou l'irrégularité des pluies se traduit par une réduction des ressources fourragères annuelles et, par voie de conséquence, par un déficit alimentaire. Les calendriers historiques touaregs, qui privilégient pour chaque année l'événement majeur, resté vivant dans toutes les mémoires, voient périodiquement s'inscrire des années mauvaises, dénommees awetay wa n iba n allamoz, l'année de manque d'herbe—ou awetay wa n laz, l'année de la faim, ou encore, awetay wa n manna, l'année de la famine. Ces trois définitions font référence à un même phénomène, à une même catastrophe, en mettant l'accent, soit sur les troupeaux privés de pâturage, soit sur les hommes accablés par le manque de nourriture. En tamasheq, laz signifie la faim, alors que manna, associe la notion de famine à celle de sécheresse; c'est ainsi que Foucauld (1925/30: II 56) traduit dans un poème le terme de manna par la périphrase: ‘La famine provenant de la sécheresse, les tourmentait, je pense’. Si la sécheresse impose des modifications dans le régime alimentaire, il faut préciser que chaque cycle annuel apporte normalement une variation saisonnière de l'alimentation. Aussi insuffisantes en quantité qu'irrégulières dans leur répartition que soient les pluies, elles sont cependant concentrées en zone sahélienne durant la période estivale; c'est pourquoi chaque année voit se renouveler une saison bienfaisante où les pluies régénèrent les pâturages, remplissent les mares, réalimentent les nappes. Pendant deux ou trois mois, où le lait abonde, se joue pour toute l'année, le développement de la végétation et la constitution du stock de fourrage qui va permettre d'attendre le retour des prochaines pluies.

The Nharo are a Khoe- (‘Hottentot-’) speaking hunting and gathering people of the central-western Kalahari. Linguistically they are closely related to the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and to several other, lesser-known, central Kalahari and Okavango Bushman peoples of Botswana. They are more distantly related to the extinct Khoekhoe (‘Hottentot’) herding peoples of the Cape Province of South Africa, and more distantly still, to the Nama Khoekhoe of Namibia. Lexicostatistical, cultural and genetic evidence suggests that the Khoe hunter-gatherers in general have lived independently from their herding relatives for some 2000 years, and that the Nharo in particular have lived in close contact with the !Kung and possibly also the !Kõ (both non-Khoe-speaking Bushman peoples) for a considerable part of that time. The primary purpose of this article is to present a description of selected Nharo institutions and customs, with reference to sex differentiation; but first a brief look at the Nharo settlement pattern is necessary.

This paper is about a problem which arises from James Clyde Mitchell's study of the Yao village in southern Malaŵi. When writing about the Yao, Mitchell drew our attention to their system of group segmentation which he portrayed as though it were perpetual in character (Mitchell 1952: 18-20). Here I analyse the implication of this process of group segmentation in a situation which is governed by administrative regulations that make it difficult for segmenting groups to spread as freely as they used to do before Britain colonised the country in 1891. What I want to argue is that owing to changes in population, against the background of fixed administrative or even political boundaries, group segmentation in southern Malaŵi is bound to throw into the open the old scars of structural inequality. Two types of facts are, therefore, required to carry out this demonstration: demographic and historical. Consequently, I divide this paper into three major sections: one in which I present figures showing population densities in Malaŵi in general, and in southern Malaŵi in particular; one in which I give a brief historical outline of Malaŵi; and one in which I attempt to show that from the available historical information we can discern processes that led to the formation of classes in Malaŵi and how these classes were simplified by the formation of the colonial situation which reduced, at one stroke, all Africans into a dependent class vis-à-vis the European colonisers. But despite this over-simplified picture of the two classes in the colonial situation, there is evidence at the local level which shows that as land is increasingly becoming scarce, relative to population growth, village disputes over land illuminate the traditional structure of inequalities. I hold the view that the inevitable result of the contradiction between population growth and land shortage is class formation.

In his Economic History of West Africa (1973) Hopkins points out that relatively little attention has been paid to the history of food production by contrast with export crops, even though it has been clear since early research on African food systems (e.g., Johnston 1958) that patterns of production have been changing. The determinants of shifts in land use and crop rotations are complex but two major factors have been suggested: population pressure on land resources, and the relative prices of different crops. The population pressure argument tends to assume that subsistence is maintained, so that any change in the relationship of population to food land requires shifts in farming practice to allow the maintenance of the same level of living (Boserup 1965). The price argument tends to assume that the agriculture system is penetrated by the market principle, so that farmers' decisions to maintain subsistence production patterns depend on projections about the prices of the cash crops available for sale and the food items needed to purchase (Chibnik 1978). From work on African farming systems comes a modification which suggests that the management of both these constraints depends to some extent on the broader social and economic context in which decisions are made. In particular it has been suggested that the position of women farmers in both indigenous social organisation and national economies is different from men's; they work under different constraints in their farming and have different opportunities for alternative employment (Boserup 1970; Meillassoux 1975). If the sexual division of labour is an important aspect of farming, men's and women's differential access to resources might be expected to have an independent effect on cropping patterns.

Some years ago one of the very few structuralist anthropologists to contribute to Southern African studies complained that ‘Aucune étude n'a encore été consacrée à l'organisation spatiale et aux relations qu'elle implique chez les Bantu du Sud-Est’ (Roumeguère- Eberhardt 1963: 77). This was not strictly accurate. For example, Holleman (1940) had provided an important analysis of the Zulu homestead, borrowing something of the methods and concerns of the Leiden school's studies in Indonesia; and one cannot ignore Walton's (1956) wide-ranging if unsystematic treatment of the Southern African village. Yet the topic has been largely neglected despite the highly-ordered nature of the Southern Bantu homestead and the legal and symbolic significance of the traditional homestead plan.

One of the most important differences in technology between Africa south of the Sahara during the pre-colonial period and many other areas of the world, it is frequently suggested, was the almost complete absence in the former of any form of wheeled transport. The transport of goods overland in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa was normally done by pack animals, where these were available, or more generally by human porterage. This lack of wheeled transport, it might be argued, had crucial implications for the history of sub-Saharan Africa, since the high cost of transport by pack animals and human porterage has often been presented as one of the principal constraints upon the expansion of trade, and hence of economic growth generally, in pre-colonial times. The lack of wheels in sub-Saharan Africa, it is clear, cannot have been due simply to ignorance, since many areas of the continent had been in contact with wheel-using civilizations outside Africa for several centuries before the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as this article will show, there is abundant evidence that, in West Africa at least, the technology of wheeled transport was quite widely known, though put to only very limited use, in the pre-colonial period. The reasons why this technology, although readily available, was nevertheless not generally adopted are, however, very far from being clear.

Nous avons l'intention après avoir donné de brefs détails sur l'histoire de la production littraire ewe, de présenter un tableau d'ensemble de ses diverses composantes. Une telle étude aura pour intérêt de faire ressortir les interférences d'un corpus imprimé en langue africaine avec la littérature européenne. Cette analyse comparative s'impose à l'esprit si on admet l'état de fait qui le motive: d'abord les premiers géniteurs de la littérature ewe sont d'origine européenne, en l'occurrence de l'Allemagne, ensuite les littérateurs ewe sont, en tout état de cause, des produits de l'école classique anglaise ou française. Dans deux de nos articles à paraître (a and b) sur la même question, nous avons observé le conte et la poésie dans leur rapport avec l'oralité mais aussi et surtout dans leur sujétion aux modèles occidentaux.

La grande presse a fait assez largement écho à un article publié dans Science (Schmidt et Avery 1978) selon lequel on fondait il y a 2.000 ans de l'acier au coeur de l'Afrique. Grâce à une technique hautement sophistiquée, recourant notamment au préchauffage du vent, on obtenait un métal digne d'une aciérie moderne.

An obvious technique to employ in assessing the age of a non-literate individual among the Atuot is to pose the question, ‘how many years do you have’ (teke yin ruon na di) which invariably results in the simple response, ‘I've really no idea at all’ (cf. also Evans-Pritchard 1939). Age classification in Atuot society as in most others is a matter of social prescription and is evidenced in the course of daily life by divergent economic and symbolic attributes which accrue to distinct age classes. Often in Nilotic societies the factor of physiological maturity is self-evident (see eg Fischer 1964). The literature includes excellent descriptions of the economic tasks which accompany growth toward adulthood in pastoral Nilotic societies of the Southern Sudan (eg Lienhardt 1963; Evans-Pritchard 1936, 1951; see also Santandrea 1977) so it is not the primary concern of this essay to contribute to an already rich body of ethnographic data. Rather, I wish to consider certain aspects of Atuot age categories and how these are related to processes leading to marriage. This discussion is prefaced by some brief comments regarding eastern-African age set systems and a synopsis of the ethnography on this topic for a number of the Nilotic speaking peoples of the Southern Sudan.

It has only been in recent years that anthropologists have begun to investigate women as actors with resources important in the political field and to broaden the concept of political system to include the activites of women (see Collier, 1974 and Nelson, 1974 for another statement of the problem). The analysis of the political processes of the nineteenth century Kikuyu (Kenya) presented here lays the framework for the inclusion of women's subsistence activities and domestic decision making with the field of public or political relations.

Un jour la communauté des bêtes se dispersa, chaque bestiau s'en fut de son côté pour vivre sa vie, l'homme tua la mère de Vache et de Buffle. Buffle dit qu'il vengerait sa mère en attaquant les hommes dans la brousse; mais Vache dit qu'elle resterait dans les demeures des hommes et qu'elle vengerait sa mère en causant d'interminables disputes à propos de dettes, d'épouseurs à doter, d'adultères, toutes sources de conflits et de mises à mort parmi le peuple. Cette longue noise de Vache et d'Homme remonte à des temps immémoriaux, et jour après jour Vache se revanche de la mort de sa mère en provoquant la mort des hommes. D'où vient que les Nuer disent du bétail : ‘Il finira avec l'humanité’ car les hommes mourront tous pour des bêtes, et ils disparaîtront ensemble, eux et leurs bêtes.

As this important Nuer myth suggests, men's control of the disruptive forces around them is limited and problematic. In part this limitation stems from relations of mutual dependence which continually restrict the power and authority of men in Nuer society. In speaking of their dependence upon cattle, Nuer say: ‘“They will be finished together with mankind”, for men will all die on account of cattle and they and cattle will cease together’ (1940:49). Similarly, the dependence of men upon the reproductive and nurturing powers of women assures the latter an important source of control: mutual dependence implies a mutual independence. Women have an exclusive realm of activity and hence an exclusive domain ofxontrol and influence. Moreover, they can subvert political alliances and aggravate divisions within the male hierarchy through the manipulation of their children's loyalties. In this essay, I examine these bonds of mutual dependence uniting men and women in Nuer society so as to outline some of the sources, characteristics and limitations of male domination and authority.

The term ‘caste’ has often been applied to Senufo artisan groups. However, an analysis of the social, political and economic relationships of these groups and the farmers amongst whom they live indicates that the characteristics commonly associated with caste systems are often manipulated by the allegedly lower status castes to their benefit, rather than by the majority group of farmers.

The Abutia Ewe formed one of the colonial administrative ‘Divisions’ of Eweland under a so-called ‘traditional ruler’, the Divisional or Paramount Chief (fiagã). These Ewe Divisions are located in the southern half of the Volta Region (Ghana) and in southern Togo. Every Division is composed of a number of villages, each headed by a ‘Sub-divisional Chief’ (dufia). Only three villages are found in Abutia: Teti, Agove and Kloe. The fiagã or Divisional Chief comes from Teti.