In his witty and thought-provoking Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘Et maintenant, Lord Lugard?’ (Africa, xxxiii. 4, 1963), Gouverneur Deschamps has provided us with an excellent general appraisal of the relative achievements and failures of French and British ‘native’ administration in Africa. But he does not do full justice to the fundamental differences between the two systems. Though he hints at these differences on several occasions in his lecture, he contends that, far from what is generally supposed, the two were in practice very similar, since they both reposed on indigenous chiefs. He insists that ‘la seule différence est que nous n'avons pas tenté, comme vous, Lord Lugard, de moderniser ces états anciens, ni de créer des embryons d'états là où il n'en existait point’; or‘…[our administrative practice] ne différait de la vôtre (au moins en Afrique noire) que par une allure plus familière et des buts moins définis’. This seems seriously to underestimate the nature of the differences between the two systems, which were rather those of kind than of degree.

For Kalanga of Southern Rhodesia hereditary guardian spirits known as mazenge are a sanction on correct relations among kinsmen and affines. Only women are possessed by these captious guardian spirits; and I shall refer to such spirit-possessed women as mazenge hosts. Kalanga perform a ritual of atonement seasonally and whenever the illness of the host or of any of her kinsfolk, particularly children, is attributed to the affliction of a guardian spirit. Ritual obligations then draw together a congregation typically not of agnates and other cognates alone, but also of affines.

Swahili culture can be roughly defined as the culture of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast whose activities show features of Perso-Arabian origin, features that are foreign to the culture of other Bantu peoples of East Africa. It cannot be described simply as Bantu culture plus Perso-Arabian elements, for some Swahilis have excluded from their way of life anything that can be labelled as Bantu; they may have Bantu blood, but their whole way of life is Muslim-Arabic.

The songs presented here were collected for me by Wäldä Sänbät Bänti. In my experience of collecting linguistic material in Ethiopia, Wäldä Sänbät deserves special mention. He is about twenty years old, a speaker of Gyeto which is a slight variant of Chaha. When I asked Wäldä Sänbät whether he would be willing to work with me on the Gyeto vocabulary, he readily agreed in terms that I at first considered rather boastful. He told me indeed that he was the most knowledgeable man in the dialect of Gyeto, a statement that I did not hear too often from my Ethiopian informants. The truth of the matter is that Walda Sanbat was the best informant I encountered in my linguistic work in Ethiopia. Not only did he know his language admirably well, but he was also a born field-worker. Without my prompting, he brought me all kinds of plants, cereals, and grasses and gave me their native names. He knew how to illustrate difficult terms with appropriate gestures and stories which explained the difficult word in context. Thus, having noticed his ability as a fieldworker, I asked him to collect Chaha songs dealing with any subject. Here again he showed that he knew the technique of a professional. When he presented me with the bill agreed upon in advance, he had added to it an item for which I gladly paid. Indeed, on several occasions he had found it necessary to offer the singer a bottle of native beer to put him in the mood to recite the song. So it was that he brought back to me at Addis Ababa a considerable collection of Chaha songs.

The structure of the Yoruba cosmos is broadly evident in their creation myth and can be discerned as presupposed behind many other myths, praise songs of the gods, and other symbolic utterances. These formulations help us, too, to construct a more detailed model of this cosmos than is available in any single mythical form. A model worked out from these sources is preferable methodologically to one derived from interrogating informants to get at their personal ideas and formulations, because these myths and liturgical expressions are relatively permanent features of Yoruba culture and are the materials for informants' constructs. Furthermore, it is not on intellectual grounds that myths survive and one must therefore beware of jockeying informants into making untypical intellectual abstractions from them and then using these abstractions as one's main primary source material. However interesting in themselves their own attempts at a generalized statement of the cosmos may be, informants can better be used to clarify over-condensed or allusive passages in myths and to check one's own interpretations, and again, to supply evidence for the details of the analysis through, for instance, their assertions about the locations of the various gods, spirits, and the ancestors.