En Afrique comme ailleurs, l'urbanisation a plusieurs aspects: spatial, social et aussi culturel. Dans les villes africaines, on peut observer plusieurs sortes de réorganisation des relations sociales. Une nouvelle relation sociale fait apparaître un nouveau espace social. Dans ce nouvel espace urbain, cette relation qui est différente de celle de la société traditionnelle, demande un nouvel mode de communication. En d'autres termes, cenouvel espace social apparaît comme l'espace de communication. Et le processus de création et de changement de mode de communication est un aspect important de l'urbanisation.
À Abidjan, la plus grande ville de Côte d'Ivoire et des pays francophones d'Afrique de l'Ouest, il y a un espace social: la ‹rue›. Beaucoup d'enfants et de jeunes gagnent leur vie en excerçant des petits métiers ou bien en commettant des larcins dans la rue. Et ils développent un mode de communication qui couvre toute la rue. Ce mode de communication s'incarne dans leur langage sous forme d'argot. Il devient “langue” véhiculaire de la rue, parlée par presque tous les jeunes y vivants. Ces jeunes sont appelés ‹nouchi› par les ivoiriens et l'on appelle aussi leur “langue”: ‹nouchi›.
La “langue” ‹nouchi› fut développée dans la rue, espace fermé de communication. Mais depuis 1983, cette “langue” sort de cet espace fermé pour être utilisée dans les textes de Reggae (musique populaire fortement soutenue par les jeunes ivoiriens). Avec les chansons Reggae, cette “langue” est entrée sur la scène médiatique, et commence à circuler dans la société abidjanaise à travers la radio, la télévision et les cassettes. Nous voyons donc, comment l'urbanisation entraîne la création et le changement de modes de communication, dans la société médiatique.

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In anthropological studies of Africa, hunter-gatherer societies are commonly thought of as being egalitarian. This paper, however, opposes such understanding and regards such as related to the nostalgia held by those who recognize inequality in modern society. This paper reinterprets the so-called egalitarian society by examining the social life of the San, huntergatherers of the Kalahari desert, doing so by considering the evolution of cognition, thought and communication as originating in monkeys and continuing through to modern man.
In this evolutional transition from monkeys to man, it is assumed that two of the more important changes in social life concerned the reduction in the significance of dominant-subordinate relationship, and the emergence of food sharing. Among the San, the former is evident in diminishing forms of both dominant arrogance and subordinate self-restraint. With increasing individual independence, reaching agreement with another in a symmetrical role arrangement becomes an increasing important aspect of communication. One voluntarily and adaptively conducts interactions on grounds justified by eventual mutual agreement with the other.
With regard to the latter issue, the San, believing it proper, share foods as well as other things of daily use. The formation of an “ownership” concept is important for the emergence of sharing. Any interest in a desired object is mediated by mutual cognition that the object belongs to the “owner” and others are inhibited from direct access to it. Given such a cognitively based indirect relation with an object, one tries to realize agreement with the other's desire by means of sharing that object. As such an action is named “sharing”, it becomes a definite category of social conduct based on social reality, which ultimately gener ates an ideology directing people to share.
So-called “egalitarianism” is an ideology held by those who think that a bulwark against egoism, the selfishness of individuals, is needed. Egoism, however, is not a true character of humans, nor of animals. Egoism, and by virtue of contrast, egalitarianism, are ideologies not formulated until the emergence of modern society.

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Democratized South Africa was born about 2 years ago with high expectation both domestically and internationally. The Government of National Unity (GNU), however, has been faced with serious dilemmas such as high unemployment, high income inequality, and low competitiveness.
This paper attempts to evaluate the past industrial policies and to examine the direction of new policies in South Africa as a way of describing a solution for the urgent unemployment problem. It would be said that the South African government has actively intervened in her manufacturing sector with high political motivations. In particular, the industrial decentralization policy had been promoted to justify segregated racial development since apartheid was introduced as a constitutional model in 1948. The manufacturing sector has achieved development under the import substitution policy since the 1920's. Moreover, it has tried to increase exports under the export promotion policy since the 1970's.
But new South Africa must reduce the level of protection and terminate export subsidies under the GATT/WTO agreement. According to one estimation, trade liberalization would cause a negative impact on employment in South Africa's manufacturing sector. Hence, the direction of trade policy reforms was one of the hottest issues among the former government, the ANC, the private sector and the World Bank in the early 1990's. The development of small businesses has also been a focus for job creation.
In order to increase exports and to compete against import goods, the improvement of competitiveness would be crucial in South Africa. Thus the government, trade unions and employer's associations should make for cooperation to create more jobs with international competitiveness, especially concerning the wage policy; maintaining the wage rate within the rate of increasing labor productivity and providing a flexible wage level in the former homeland. Furthermore, the government should offer training incentives for manufacturers as well as encourage them to invest more into human resource development.

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Vernonia amygdalina (Compositae) has been suggested to be a medicinal plant used by wild chimpanzee in the Mahale Moutains National Park, Tanzania. From this plant, the bitter and related constituents were isolated. There were four known sesquiterpene lactones, and seven new steroid glucosides and two aglycones of these glucosides. The sesquiterpene lactones showed high cytotoxic activity against P-388 and L-1210 cells, and antibacterial activities against Bacillus subtilis and Micrococcus lutea. They also showed significant in vitro antischistosomal, plasmodicidal and leishmanicidal activities. Antischistosomal activity was also found in the major steroid glucoside, vernonioside B₁. A trend in the glucosides was observed for significant antischistosomal, plasmodicidal and amoebicidal activities when the sugar moiety was removed. Vernodalin, the most significant antiparasitic constituent in vitro, was tested for in vivo antischistosomal effect. However, vernodalin is highly toxic to the cercaria-infected mouse, and no effect was observed when orally administrated at below the lethal dose (2.5mg/mouse). Chimpanzees have been only rarely observed to ingest anything but the pith of the young stem. The occurrence of vernonioside B₁ and its aglycone vernoniol B₁, the major constituents among the steroid- related constituents, were detected at significant levels in the pith. However, vernodalin was abundant only in the leaves and bark. Thus, chimpanzees at Mahale were hypothesized to control parasite-related diseases by ingesting the young pith of this tree containing steroid-related constituents.

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The importance of combination of materials in the dietary culture of shifting cultivators in southeastern Cameroon is described and analyzed. First, the diet of an immigrant group living in tropical rain forest is described. It is then compared with that of their mother village situated in the savanna zone extending along the forest margin.
While the mother group depends almost exclusively on the thick porridge from bitter type of cassava as starchy food, the immigrant group has adopted plantain banana as their staple food, almost as important as their former staple, bitter cassava. This is due to the change in the natural environment and also to the contact with the forest-living neighbors who heavily depend on plantain banana.
Bitter cassava and plantain banana are, however, taken with different types of relish, in particular condiments; the former with gravy often with spices, nuts and/or sticky herbs, while the latter with oils or simple bitter soup, sosok, of Solanum sp. fruit.
While the immigrant group use both plantain and cassava, they show a strong preference to the specific combination of staple, relish and condiments. It is thus concluded that such cultural preference is one of the major factors for selection of food materials.

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In 1971 one of us observed soybean plants growing along the hedges in the rice paddies of the Mwea Irrigation Scheme in Kirinyaga District of Kenya. Again, in 1984 we observed soybeans in a farm close to the irrigation scheme but not in the scheme itself. Soybeans are not very popular among the Kikuyu and so, we sought to explain the presence of this nutritious but neglected crop.
The Mwea Irrigation Scheme, where we sighted soybeans first, was created by the British colonial government in 1954 in order to partly solve the land scarcity problem which had caused the disgruntled Kikuyu to rise in revolt in the war for land and freedom, of 1952-1960.
The British government, under the Swynnerton plan wanted to create a rural bourgeoisie among the Kikuyu by allowing a selected few, who were loyal to the colonial government and who were used to crush the revolt, to grow cash crops-tea and coffee.
In colonial Kenya Africans were not allowed to grow cash crops. These were the exclusive reserve of the European settler farmers. Soybeans had been experimentally tried as a cash crop by Europeans but were abandoned because they did not have the high commercial value that coffee, tea, wheat and even maize, could fetch. And since the colonial government in Kenya gave priority to European interests versus African interests, soybeans did not generate interest, even among Africans. Kikuyu nascent bourgeoisie wanted to grow those crops that Europeans grew. In Uganda, on the other hand, soybeans could be promoted as a food crop among Africans because there were no Europeans whose interests could compete with those of the Africans. Uganda Africans were even encouraged to grow cotton and coffee as cash crops.
When Kenya became independent, the African bourgeoisie who wielded power pursued the same agricultural development policies, favouring cash crops and neglecting food crops. In Kirinyaga District whose northern part has better rains because of proximity to Mt. Kenya, everbody went for the lucrative cash crops, coffee and tea. There was little interest in food crops. In the drier south, where Mwea is located those people outside the cash crop rice area took up soybeans more readily, because they were not as strictly controlled as the rice growers, and they could try new crops that were nutritionally beneficial to them because their lives and land was not dominated by cash crops.

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P. J. Wilson is an anthropologist who had carried out his nine months' field work on the Tsimihety people of the northwestern Madagascar from 1962 to 1963, and pullished its ethnography in 1992, titled Freedom by a Hair's Breadth: Tsimihety in Madagascar. In this ethnography, Wilson pointed out that “Land within the village communities was allocated annually, and land that was not in use could be reallocated by the people of “the master of land”, hence he emphasized that the system of reallocating land according to the needs of individuals and their households assures equality among the members of a village community and so prevents the growth of social inequality and political hierarchy that threatens contray to the traditional principle of social organization so called “egalitarianism”.
However, my field data and even the Wilson's field data itself which have been reported in his former articles can not support his “egalitarianism” schema, which is primarily based on the annual reallocation. First of all, I insist that this system does not work in the village communities but function in the sphere of family and close kin group, who share the equal rights or usefructs to rice fields, which are inherited from the common ancestor. Secondly, Wilson's field data, basically depending upon a certain village with small population, indicates that he has confused kinship/family affairs with those of village community. Why has he made such an “intentional” confusion? I think it comes from his “orientalistic” bias of “egalitarianism”. He assumes that the main social characters of the Tsimihety is “egalitarianism”, which distorts his interpretation of his own data.
It is this “orientalistic” notion of “egalitarianism” that has invented his imagination of the reallocation system of rice field as the system of economic equality. If he would be more faithful to his data, he could have realized that the main social character of the Tsimihety village community should be essentially very far from what he has “written up” in this ethnography.

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