Academic literature on the topic 'Susu (African people)'

All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as “right” and forbidding others as “wrong.” When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider.But the person who is thus labeled an outsider may have a different view of the matter. He may not accept the rule by which he is being judged and may not regard those who judge him as either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. Hence, a second meaning of the term emerges: the rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders.Peter Hartwig was a German seminarian recruited by the Church Missionary Society in 1803 to serve as one of its first two missionaries in Africa. He was sent to Freetown, a settlement established for Africans and people of African descent who had returned to Africa from Britain and the Americas. Hartwig was to reside at Freetown temporarily and to be supervised while there by a locally-based Corresponding Committee composed of Sierra Leone Company officials. The Society directed that, after a year's residence in Sierra Leone, Hartwig and his fellow recruit Melchior Renner would establish a mission among Susu peoples north of Freetown, where they were to convert indigenous Africans to Christianity. Hartwig, however, failed to meet the Society's expectations, violated the norms of the Corresponding Committee that the Society had established at Freetown to guide mission progress, and left the Society's service within three years of reaching the coast. He seemingly had become unable to adjust to changing realities, a wrongdoer and a moral example to other missionaries of what to avoid becoming.3 How are we to interpret his failure from a sociological perspective?

In this study, I investigate nnoboa and rotated susu systems and how they operate as indigenous co-operatives that mobilize savings from its members. The nnoboa system, according to oral tradition, evolved out of the communal way of living in Africa, particularly Ghana. Nnoboa is a form of cooperative society whereby members of the society help to weed one another’s farm on rotational basis. Rotated susu is a group of two or more people who come together to save money and the lump sum (bulk money) is given to each of the group members on rotational basis. Both systems operate like the formal banking savings and loans systems. I employ a qualitative approach, comprising seven focus group meetings in seven communities in the Bibiani-Anhwiaso-Bekwai Municipality in the Western North Region of Ghana. The findings show that the rotated susu concept emanates from the nnoboa concept and the two systems are underpinned by the following values: trust, synergy, flexibility and empathy, commitment, tolerance and punctuality and promptness. Another finding of the study is that the nnoboa and rotated susu systems offer participants a lot of mileage: helping them to generate income, raise capital, increase their savings, providing them with a source of cheap labor (all nnoboa group members provide free labor for each other in turns so that it becomes affordable for each member to weed his/her farm or clear a parcel of land during the farming season since it is expensive to hire farm laborers), increasing their production, offering them opportunities for networking and bulk purchasing, the groups serving as collateral securities or guarantors as well as the display of love and affection. Based on these findings, I develop a theoretical model for nnoboa and rotated susu systems using grounded theory. The theoretical model of nnoboa and rotated susu systems has implications for researchers, practitioners and the unemployed in terms of how the poor can form groups and access cheap labor or raise capital for any venture. Therefore, the significance of this study is that extant literature on nnoboa and rotated susu with emphasis on their values and benefits and a theoretical model that supports such a system seem to be non-existent.

Studies into the behavioral ecology of wild boar and domestic pigs are promising, yet largely neglected, areas of archaeozoological research. Changes in both the diet and health of animals may reflect specific details about the possible scale and extent of human impact on hunted wild boar populations and domesticated pigs in the past. Histological and chemical ‘signatures’ of (for example) physiological stress, brought about by possible human influence, can often be recovered in the dental and skeletal tissues of Sus. However, a fuller interpretation of what the significance of these signatures might be can only be achieved if their aetiology is known, and that can only be done by studying these phenomena in modern extant populations. One of the many aspects of the human–Sus relationship is the exposure of wild boar to contaminants from anthropogenic sources. An example of this is the pollution of wild boar habitats by fluoride from power plants and other emission sources, leading to the occurrence of characteristic dental changes, known as dental fluorosis, in the affected individuals of Sus scrofa (Kierdorf et al. 2000). However, dental fluorosis also occurs in wild and domestic mammals (and in humans) living in areas with increased environmental levels of fluoride from natural sources (Shupe et al. 1983; Cronin et al. 2000, 2003; Garrott et al. 2002; WHO 2002). The macroscopic changes of dental fluorosis reflect a disturbance of the processes involved in enamel formation. Once the permanent dentition of an individual is fully formed, exposure to excess levels of fluoride will not lead to fluorotic enamel changes. Dental fluorosis can therefore be used as a highly sensitive indicator of excess fluoride exposure during the period of tooth formation in humans and other mammals (Fejerskov et al. 1988; DenBesten 1994; Boulton et al. 1999; Kierdorf & Kierdorf 1999; Kierdorf et al. 1999). Higher levels of fluoride also exert negative effects on the skeleton throughout the life of an individual, the pathological changes being known as skeletal fluorosis (WHO 2002). This crippling disability is a major human health problem in various regions of Africa, China, and the Indian subcontinent, where millions of people are affected (Finkelman et al. 1999; WHO 2002).

The archaeological record of Italy is long and complex, suggesting continuous peopling since the Middle Pleistocene (Mussi 2001; Mussi et al. in press). The evidence of Palaeolithic art, however, is rather restricted: Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) art is close to nil, including just a few notched implements; the Middle Upper Palaeolithic (MUP), admittedly, is much richer, with some twenty Gravettian Wgurines, the largest such sample in Western Europe (Mussi et al. 2000; Mussi 2004); parietal art is also documented at Grotta Paglicci, where painted horses and positive handprints were discovered (Boscato and Palma di Cesnola 2000; Zorzi 1962); when Late Upper Palaeolithic (LUP) lithic industries were produced which belong to the Epigravettian, portable and parietal art is known at a number of sites. In the late 1980s, Zampetti (1987) reviewed twenty-one Epigravettian cave sites, and a single open-air site, all of them with zoomorphic art. Three more have been discovered since: Riparo Dalmeri, Riparo di Villabruna, and Grotta di Settecannelle. I will examine below the artistic record of Sicily and Sardinia, both of them at the periphery of Italy, which, in turn, is secluded from Europe by the Alps. My aim is to contrast the effects of geographic isolation, with the circulation of people and ideas, if any, as documented by portable and cave art. Sicily, currently an island of 25; 700km<sup>2</sup> and the largest in the Mediterranean, lies 140 km from Africa, and a few kilometres off southern Italy. The strait of Messina is 3 to 25 km wide, but is far from easy to cross, because of violent tidal currents, and whirlpool, also known as ‘Charybdis’ by Greeks and Romans. The depth is just 72 m at the Sill of Peloro. Because of intense neotectonic activity, however, any palaeogeographic reconstruction is highly speculative. Analysis of the faunal assemblages, which during oxygen isotope stage (OIS) 2 include a limited number of species, none of which is endemic, suggests that intermittent connection with the mainland possibly existed around the Last Glacial Maximum (Mussi et al. in press). The large mammals, found in varying percentages, are the deer, Cervus elaphus, the aurochs, Bos primigenius, the small steppe horse, Equus hydruntinus, and Sus scrofa, the wild boar.