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The paper describes changed elderhood in Sukuma-speaking villages in Tanzania through a combined situational and cultural analysis, starting with the traditional role of (re)generation and medicine in practices of greeting. Elderhood, I argue, has changed obliquely because of its interrelationship with medicine, whose union of recipe and rite was severed under globalizing pressures for ‘simplication’. By this we understand a process that simplifies a cultural practice, renders it predictable, through complicated substitution. Ethnographic synthesis demonstrates that the kul strand of natural growth and the kum strand of healing/regeneration are sources of production. Elders derive authority from the first source and augment it with the second. The latter’s medicinal claim to power antagonized the colonial administration in the 1930s and, for different reasons, also irritated the postcolonial state (with the exception of Magufuli’s presidency). The ‘simplication’ of medicine in the name of development has been aided by the demise of chieftaincy as well as by a national cultural divide and by dismissive attitudes to the institution of healing. Elderhood has indirectly paid the price. This research report has been reviewed by the editors of the special issue but has not been externally peer-reviewed.

This paper examines the active participation of some Bono chiefs in partisan politics in Ghana in the 1950s. Using interviews, archival data and books as the main sources of information and a qualitative approach, the research reveals that Asante’s administrative strategies thwarted Bono chiefs’ efforts to assert their autonomy from Asante rule in the pre-1950 era. The original aim of the Bono Kyempim Federation, formed in 1949, was to unite the chiefs’ ranks to rebuild the Bono Manso kingdom, destroyed by Asante in the eighteenth century. However, the chiefs eventually associated themselves with politicians and by 1959, a Bono-Ahafo Region had been created by the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), the political party that the chiefs supported. How far-reaching, was the chiefs’ relations with politicians? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.