They also have inherited the demands for alms from the 730 tribes who occupy a country a little bit bigger than California. The firms must deal with the 1990s version of cargo cults. A few decades ...

Of course the cargo never comes. The cults nonetheless live on ... villages, clans and tribes into a wider religiopolitical unity. Once the people begin to develop secular political organizations ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In South Africa in 1856, the spirits of three ancestors visited a 15-year-old Xhosa girl called Nongqawuse.

The Polynesian cargo cults were newly discovered South Pacific tribes who were so awed by airplanes, and the Western food that arrived in said aircraft, that they built life-sized model airplanes ...