The student of English education who tries to envisage the development of African education is apt to be misled by the picture he has in his mind of its development in England. It is difficult for one brought up in the British tradition to divest himself of his national prepossessions, and it is hoped that any reader of this article will discount the limitations imposed by what seems to him to be British insularity. None the less, it may not be altogether without interest to readers of an international journal to see how this British tradition affects the approach to African problems. The English student is tempted to think of a vigorous and progressive Local Education Authority as part of the general local government of an area, managing and controlling schools, employing its own staff of administrative officials, building its own schools, and employing its own teachers. That picture is (of course) far from complete, for in England other parties are involved. There is the central government, which supplies from national (as distinct from local) revenue the bulk of the necessary funds. There are, too, the Churches, particularly the Anglican and the Roman Catholic, with their long educational history and their vast contributions to the educational system. Moreover, we have in England the further characteristic complication of a great and powerful body of teachers, who seem to the outsider to be partly state officials protected by the central authority and partly employees of the local authority. It is natural that in considering the supply of educational facilities in Africa we English should be in danger of being misled by our insular prepossessions. We must, therefore, be clear in our own minds as to what we mean when we speak of ‘Native Authorities’ and ‘Central Government’, and Churches, and the place and status of the teaching staffs in Africa.

This note on the distribution of the Sanusiya order in north Africa and western Arabia is a supplement to the article on the history of the order which appeared recently in Africa (vol. xv, no. 2). Use has been made of earlier efforts to list its lodges. The earliest authorities were mostly relying on hearsay and later writers have sometimes copied their lists without further inquiry. On the whole, however, their records are fairly accurate and, though many of the names they give are so badly transliterated that they would be unrecognizable to anyone dependent on maps alone, they can easily be identified by anyone who knows the countries at first hand. Even when a name cannot be identified it need not be assumed that it is necessarily incorrect, because lodges are often known by more than one name, sometimes, especially in the Marmarica, by the name of their Shaikhs. I have also been able to make use of a list of 128 lodges drawn up for me by al-Sayyid Ibrahim (whose father al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif was the last head of the order), though it contains a number of inaccuracies; and of my own observations and inquiries, which cover Cyrenaica and, more superficially, Tripolitania and Egypt.

This article deals with an area about the size of England, Scotland, and Wales which, even to this day, must be regarded as relatively still unknown to the outside world. Little visited by Europeans, it seems to be the gathering-place of a welter of obscure tribes and sections of tribes, speaking a bewildering diversity of languages. In the last hundred years it has seen various explorers and a few anthropologists, and has lately been administered by government officials; and it is to these people that we must look for information which sometimes includes linguistic data. Only one Christian mission station has been established, and no portion of the Bible has been translated into any language of this area.