In recent literature on the social structure of African peoples much attention has been paid to the role of the lineage in village and local organization. Among one Central African people at least–the Mwinilunga Ndembu of Northern Rhodesia–the spatial separation of adjacent genealogical generations is a structural principle of equal importance. Other anthropologists working in Angola and western and central Northern Rhodesia have obtained data which suggest that this principle is widespread in Central Africa.

In recent centuries indigenous West African society has experienced the impact of two external cultural forces, the one personified by Moslem invaders and migrants from the north, the other by European colonists from the West. With the spread of Islam, the way of life of whole peoples has been largely transformed, but the main changes which have occurred in the structure of African society are the result of Western and Westernizing influences. It is the purpose of this article to examine a particular aspect of these structural changes which is exemplified by the appearance of a new class of ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ individuals and their relationship with traditional society in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. The Protectorate, with which this article is exclusively concerned, comprises the hinterland of the Sierra Leone Colony, and is under a Native Authority system of government. In the Colony, political and legal institutions are modelled mainly on the English system. As explained later, the terms ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ are used throughout to denote relative degrees of Westernization due to education.

The present article is based on a report submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture in Khartoum (Sudan) by an agricultural research officer and an inspector of agriculture and is the result of a preliminary study of the agriculture of a tribe which had been earmarked by the provincial administration for commercial production of sorghum. Most tribes of the Southern Sudan are sorghum cultivators, but none has taken to growing this staple food for sale despite the increasing demand for grain in townships. It was realized that some limitations, possibly of a social or cultural character, stood in the way of such development and therefore it seemed desirable to study the tribal customary agriculture by the methods of social anthropology, instead of approaching it only from the point of view of agronomy.

In recent years a new type of association, the improvement union or ‘meeting’, has become common in Southern Nigeria. Associations of this kind may be formed on a lineage, clan, village, village-group, divisional, or tribal basis, and may carry out various economic, educational, political, social, and general improvement activities directly related to changing cultural conditions. The present report is concerned with the development of this kind of association in the Afikpo villagegroup of the Ibo-speaking people. Its growth in this section of Ibo country has been more recent than in the more central Ibo areas, where European contact has been of longer duration, a circumstance that has made it possible to study its initial development in detail.

Among the different tribes of the Kuba group, three forms of initiation rites are practised: the eastern tribes (Ngende, Ngongo, and the Shoowa) follow a common form, the Kete of the Luebo region have their own, and the Bushong of the south have yet another form.

I was initiated according to the Bushong rites at the village of Mapey in the south from 23 October to 9 November 1953. Initiation rites at the capital have fallen into disuse and, apart from the capital, may only be performed in villages which pay a special tribute to the king and are known as ‘royal villages’. The people of Mapey allowed me to be initiated because the king himself vouched for me, and because they hoped that I would refute the allegations of immorality brought by the missionaries.

This paper offers an interpretation of some details of the myth and custom of two Nilotic tribes, the Shilluk and the Anuak of the Southern Sudan. Each of these tribes has a noble or royal clan in a centrally important position in its political system, and the royal myths of both tell of the founding of kingship. In both also we find represented in myth a conflict between the first kings and their maternal uncles and grandfathers. It is this representation of conflict which we attempt to explain, by reference to the political structures of the tribes.

The Yoruba, a people numbering over 5½ million, living in south-west Nigeria, need little introduction. They are almost unique among African peoples in that they live in large settlements, many of which were capitals of chiefdoms; 42 per cent, of them live in towns of over 20,000 people and there are nine towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Ibadan, now the capital of the Western Region of Nigeria, has a population of nearly half a million. Those towns which were capitals were, in the past, governed by kings (ɔba) and councils of chiefs (oloye or ijoye) who exercised sovereign powers throughout the town and its territory; the titles of these kings and chiefs were usually vested in lineages, so that a chief held a dual position as an elected representative of his lineage and as a member of the council of chiefs in the town. Other towns were governed in a similar manner, their rulers being subordinate to a king. The largest towns, especially those in Ibadan Province, owe their size to the influx of refugees from the crumbling Oyo kingdom in the early and mid-19th century; but it would appear that long before this the capitals of important rulers were towns of 10,000 or more inhabitants. The origin of Yoruba kingship is obscure; the first rulers may have come as conquerers, but their arrival cannot be less than seven centuries ago and may have been much earlier.

This paper presents an analytic description of the principles underlying the traditional kinship system of the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria in the community of Oshogbo. Aggregation into large-scale urban-like communities which are characterized by the close interdependence of their political constitution and their economic and religious systems is a striking feature of Yoruba social organization. In these communities we find that the behaviour of individuals to one another, in the past at least, was very largely regulated on the basis of kinship and it would be accurate, I think, to state that among the Yoruba kinship was the usual means of articulation between the various elements of the social organization. Today, under the influence of systematic and far-reaching contact with the West, new patterns of behaviour are beginning to or have already superseded the old. New values and attitudes have intruded and there is an increased fluidity in social norms. In the present generation the bonds of kinship have been greatly weakened as a foundation for social organization and as a mechanism for co-ordinating and regulating social behaviour. Yoruba society is indeed transitional in the sense that the old is in the process of disintegration and new forms are rapidly emerging. However, it is the internal and traditional patterns that determine the particular form and direction of the effects which the external alien forces of change exert. Consequently, in this paper, we shall place primary emphasis on the principles of kinship as they emerged as regulative factors in the traditional life of the Yoruba in the belief that, apart from purely ethnographic value, they will provide us with a better understanding of the manifold changes that have become apparent.

One of the Lecturers at the University College of Ibadan recently declared that a vital and often neglected source of information for the would-be anthropologist was the tribal court records. Here, written down with the ingenuous casualness of banality, is a treasure-trove of tribal lore and law, superstitions and suppositions, which can provide the anthropologically minded student with hours of absorbing, and sometimes original, research work. How often do we pause to consider what is entailed in the typical verdict entered in the tribal court book ?

I Propose to examine in this short paper, in the very limited time at my disposal, some of the ways in which a study of the Semitic languages of Ethiopia, ancient as well as modern, can and should be of use to our understanding of general Semitic linguistic phenomena and to a clearer appreciation of inter-Semitic relationships. At present we shall be concerned with the aid extended by Ethiopics to other languages rather than with the Ethiopian tongues at the receiving end, so to speak; with their active rather than their passive capacity, though I should not wish to pretend that it is always possible, or even desirable, to disentangle the two. In a minority of cases only can we detect a direct ‘influence’ of Ethiopic on other Semitic languages, i.e. impact at a time when these tongues were already fully differentiated from each other. Generally, the value of Ethiopian languages lies in their having preserved a feature lost elsewhere, or a root that has otherwise disappeared, or in revealing a parallel that may be significant to an assessment of general Semitic affinities.

En 1936, feu Édouard De Jonghe publiait dans Africa une revue des sociétés secrètes du Congo Beige qui est demeurée l'étude classique sur le sujet. Après tant d'années cependant, une mise au point paraît justifiée.

In this paper I consider some Lugbara notions about witches, ghosts, and other agents who bring sickness to human beings. I do not discuss the relationship of these notions, and the behaviour associated with them, to the social structure. The two aspects, ideological and structural, are intimately connected, but it is possible to discuss them separately: on the one hand, to present the ideology as a system consistent within itself and, on the other, to show the way in which it is part of the total social system. Here I attempt only the former.

Persons accustomed to dealing with languages of known and proven ancestry may have difficulty in believing that language classification can be problematic. They may be unaware that, whereas many modern languages may be classified according to historical evidence, those without a recorded past must be grouped in the light of present-day similarity or dissimilarity. None of the languages investigated by the western section of the Northern Bantu Border Survey has a history which goes back beyond last century, and many of them had never been previously recorded. Oral tradition, usually so informative on ethnic events, is generally vague, if not absolutely silent, on linguistic matters.

Le sens poétique du Peul nomade n'est pas, comme celui de son frère islamisé, orienté vers les formes littéraires alambiquées. Il ignore les poèmes mystiques religieux et n'émaille que rarement sa conversation des proverbes dont les sédentaires aiment faire usage.

Les seuls genres littéraires dont il fasse cas font partie de la littérature orale populaire. Devinette (tâlol), chanson (gimol), histoire vécue et conte (habaru, tâlol) ne sont pas l'apanage de quelques esprits subtils. Tous les connaissent, les racontent, les chantent, les écoutent. Le style, bref et naïf, est loin d'atteindre au raffinement de la littérature arabisée, mais ce genre plonge profondément dans la mentalité traditionnelle et la réalité quotidienne.

La nouvelle édition du dictionnaire de Kitching et Blackledge par Mulira et Ndawula fournit une base solide à l'étude comparative du Ganda. L'objet du présent article est d'exposer les règles de correspondance qui résultent de la comparaison du Ganda avec les formules du bantou commun posées par Meinhof, Homburger, Bourquin, et d'autres, et surtout de dormer des listes provisoires d'irrégularités réelles ou apparentes (voir la partie D). Celles-ci permettront à ceux qui étudient d'autres langues bantoues de rectifier certaines reconstructions, d'établir de nouvelles variantes, et de faire meilleure part aux emprunts et autres faits dus à des facteurs d'ordre géographique.

In a memorandum on education published in 1952, the Government of the Gold Coast declared that its policy was ‘to provide as soon as possible a six-year basic primary course for all children at public expense’. This policy has naturally led, not only to a rapid multiplication of the number of existing primary schools, but also to a widening of the individual classes, in order to make room for the increased number of children now entering school.

The material for this study was collected during the first two months of 1954, while camping in a Cokwe village about 50 miles north-east of Vila Luso in the administrative area of Camanongue, County and District of Moxico, Province of Bié, Angola. My chief informant was Sr. Francisco Casueka, aged 44, a Cokwe- and Portuguese-speaking African from the printing press at Boma Mission near Vila Luso. He was the ablest assistant I had among many good informants during my stay in Angola.