For many years British administrators and others concerned with the developing countries of tropical Africa have criticized Western-type schooling introduced there for what they believe to have been its bad effects on the life of rural peoples. They have complained that such schooling is prejudicial to rural life, since it produces a distaste for agriculture and leads to a drift from the land. They say it promotes in schoolchildren a desire to be clerks or white-collar workers and, because of their schooling, they develop a strong dislike for manual work and a reluctance to soil their hands with physical labour. They assert that these values inculcated by Western schooling lead finally to an almost complete rejection of rural life, a contempt for agriculture, and therefore to a decrease in rural productivity. Finally, they maintain that this is particularly serious in view of the fact that, as far as we can see at present, many African countries will have to depend on agriculture and the land for a long time to come, for it is only through such dependence that it seems likely that they will achieve economic viability which will be an important factor in making a success of political independence.

It has long been recognized that there is a distinctive category of African political systems, which is characterized by centralized authority. The preliminary analysis and classification of African kingdoms proposed in this article are based on comparison of most of the States in Central, South, and East Africa. Only a few data on West African kingdoms have been incorporated, but we feel that the classification will prove generally valid for West Africa as well.

During my field study of Yoruba art (1955–7) little of the symbolic meaning of the forms and component elements of the ritual sculpture was revealed to me through straightforward answers to straightforward questions. Indeed, it soon became evident that if meaning with any degree of resonance was to be arrived at, such a technique had to be abandoned in favour of an interpretative analysis in relation to myths and praise songs on the one hand, and the observation of the use of sculpture in ritual on the other.

This paper suggests that important economic problems in the Republic of the Sudan (the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan until independence in 1956) arise from attitudes associated with the heritage of slavery. After briefly outlining the nature of indigenous slavery, and the essential interrelatedness of its economic and social characteristics, it uses primarily official documents to analyse the economic effects of slavery abolition in the northern Sudan. Present-day economic ramifications of the slavery heritage are then discussed.