The broad characteristics of the British West African colonies and their main social and economic problems are already fairly familiar from the relevant sections of Lord Hailey's African Survey (1938), and Professor Hancock's Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (1942). A recent article by Dr. M. Fortes (1945) helps to bring the analysis up to date and makes very clear how great and rapid are the changes taking place in the social and economic structure. In this present contribution, the result of a very brief study, I attempt only to underline some of the salient features as they appear to one new to the West African scene, and to estimate the problems from the point of view of sociological research.

L'étude complète de ce vaste sujet demanderait un volume. Le but de cet article est plus modeste. Il ne veut donner qu'un aperçu de la situation actuelle de la polygamie; exposer les causes qui la maintiennent et d'autres qui la font évoluer, commenter la position que prend l'Administration à son sujet, et pour finir indiquer l'attitude des Missions à son égard.

A cause de l'usage général, nous employons le mot polygamie au lieu de polygynie. Il est cependant à noter, à l'encontre d'une opinion largement répandue, que la polyandrie existe au Congo Belge. Elle est coutumièrement organisée chez les Bashilele du Territoire des Basongo. De là elle s'est introduite dans quelques villages de leurs voisins, les Badinga.

There can be no single right analysis of social change. The data are so complex and our tools as yet so crude that we must expect to work with various hypotheses and many types of abstractions. Some will be better instruments of analysis than others, and we must hope that we shall be able to subsume several of these in more comprehensive and consistent bodies of ordered knowledge. I immediately distrust such works as this latest polemic of the late Professor Malinowski's which is written in the strident terms of the one-and-only orthodoxy.

It is one of the disadvantages of the division of West Africa between various colonial powers that, in many instances, tribal and language groups are cut across or artificially limited. It is not always realized that the Yoruba-speaking peoples, so numerous in Nigeria, extend beyond the frontiers of that colony. Right across the centre of what is now the French colony of Dahomey is a band of Yoruba-speaking peoples, and even in Togoland this wave continues. These are not isolated groups of traders, such as may be found in many large coastal towns, but continuous towns and villages of people who, whatever their origins, speak dialects of the Yoruba language. These peoples are often denominated ‘Nago’ on French ethnographical maps, and the use of this term has been an additional factor in obscuring their kinship in language, and also probably in race, with their Yoruba neighbours in the adjoining British colony of Nigeria. The word Nago has entered maps and official documents; frenchified as Nagot, it sometimes even takes on the ugly feminine form of Nagote.