The area under consideration consists of 1,100 square miles of the Madagali, Cubunawa, and Mubi districts of the northern touring division of Adamawa emirate, whose sub-headquarters at Mubi is responsible to the administrative capital at Yola on the River Benue. It is occupied by a heterogeneous population of fairly primitive pagans, and some 400 square miles of the area are still declared closed territory under the Unsettled Districts Ordinance. Though there is a steady, if unspectacular, movement down to the plains, a large proportion of the people remain in their mountain fastnesses whither they fled in the nineteenth century to seek safety from the marauding Fulani cavalry during the slave-raids that characterized the period between the jihad and the British occupation.

Recent happenings in the Gold Coast, and particularly in Ashanti, have tended to focus interest upon the structure of the constitution and the struggle for political power. Ten years ago two other movements were attracting at least as much attention. In a preliminary report on the work of the Ashanti Social Survey, published in 1948, Fortes described these as first, an apparently insatiable demand for schools, and, second, an almost equally if not more powerful development of what he called ‘new witch-finding cults’. That the demand for education of all kinds continues and is gradually being met is well known; it would be interesting, and perhaps, in the light of occurrences in other parts of Africa, significant to learn what has happened to the new cults.

The last decade has seen a considerable revival of interest in the physical anthropology of the Bushman-Hottentot peoples. In the period 1952-5 no fewer than 34 papers with a bearing on this topic have been published, of a total of 46 in the decade 1946-55. This contrasts with 7 works in this category in the four years 1948-51. The subject-matter has been shared fairly evenly between studies on the living and those on skeletal remains. In the former category are studies on Nama Hottentots (Wells), Strandlopers (Dart), Koranas (Grobbelaar, Tobias), Sandawe (Trevor), Lake Chrissie Bushmen (Toerien), Northern Bushmen (Wells, Gusinde, Erikson, Williams, Tobias), River Bushmen (Hurwitz and Harington), Central Bushmen (Tobias), hybrids (Trevor, Wells, Tobias), and on blood groups (Zoutendyck, Kopec and Mourant, Grobbelaar). In the second category are craniological studies by Cosnett, Dart, Drennan, Dreyer and Meiring, Grobbelaar, Hope, Keen, Sauter, Tobias, Toerien, Wells, on a variety of recent, proto-historic, and prehistoric remains. Two thirds of all these studies have been focused primarily upon Bushmen. Furthermore, plans for additional anthropometrical and anthroposcopic surveys of surviving Bushmen are at present being elaborated in the Department of Anatomy of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg—from which Department, under the general direction and inspiration of Professor Raymond A. Dart, more than half the studies referred to have emanated. It is hoped that, in the coming years, a series of expeditions will visit Bushman tribes, more particularly in those areas which have not hitherto been studied from a physical anthropological point of view.

A good deal of ethnographic and sociological research has recently been undertaken, or is planned or currently in progress, in the four East African Territories of Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Zanzibar. This research is being and has been carried out under a number of different auspices. These include, as well as the East African Institute of Social Research at Kampala (which has organized and directed a large part of the research so far undertaken), universities and other sponsoring bodies in England and the United States (such as the Colonial Social Science Research Council, the ‘Scarbrough’ Committee, and the Goldsmiths' Company in England, and the Ford, Fulbright, and Carnegie foundations in America), Makerere College, the East African Statistical Department, and the territorial Governments themselves.

A l'encontre de nombreuses entreprises groupées sous l'appellation d'Artisanat indigène où les modèles sont plus ou moins imposés, où les artistes, éloignés de leur milieu originel, se livrent souvent à des activités réservées à des catégories sociales différentes de celles auxquelles ils appartiennent, où l'influence européenne est déterminante, l'École des Peintres de Poto-Poto constitue une expérience rare. Créée à Brazzaville en 1951 sur l'initiative du peintre Pierre Lods, elle fonctionne depuis cette date avec l'appui du Haut-Commissariat de la République en Afrique Équatoriale Française.

Die Nachkommen des sagenhaften Ngoε wohnen etwa 90 km. nördlich des Kamerunberges an den Abhängen des Kupé und Manεnguba, im zerrissenen Bergland Mbidεhin und im Tale des Kyidε. Ngoε ist der Sage nach aus dem kleineren (edib e njom ‘Mannsee’) der beiden Seen im Ebuɔgε-Krater (<ebuɔg ‘Schüssel, Trog’) entstiegen und traf am Rande des edib e mwad ‘Frauensee’ Asum' Ejaŋ, die seine Frau wurde und ihm viele Kinder schenkte. Durch diese wurde Ngoε der Vater verschiedener Stämme. Sein Sohn Asumε gründete in seinen Nachkommen die fünf Unterstämme der West-Kɔsi: Mwa-Nyɔ, Mw' Etuk, Mw' Asumε Ndεm, Mw' Εtan und Mbogmud. Andere Nachkommen des Ngoε gründeten die Unterstämme der Ost-Kɔsi: Ninɔŋ, Nlilɔg und Eloŋ, auch die Kundu und Londo jenseits des Mongo zählt man unter Ngoε's Nachkommen.

The classification of Masai and the Nilo-Hamitic languages with the Hamitic and JL Semitic language groups is a problem which is engaging the attention of linguists at the present time. In 1948 M. A. Bryan and A. N. Tucker, of London, published a short linguistic survey: Distribution of the Nilotic and Nilo-Hamitic Languages of Africa In this survey the generally accepted view was put forward that the Nilo-Hamitic and Nilotic languages, though they have a number of common features, show considerable differences. This theory is attacked by J. H. Greenberg of Columbia University, New York. In his opinion the relationship of the Nilotic and the ‘Great Lakes’ languages is so close that he combines both groups in the ‘Southern Branch’, i.e. one of the seven sub-groups of his ‘Eastern Sudanic’ language family; he rejects the term ‘Nilo-Hamitic’. In Volume III of the Handbook of African Languages, Tucker and Bryan refute the criticism of Greenberg, and put forward arguments to justify the distinction between ‘Nilotic’ and ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ and the retention of the term ‘Hamitic’ in the second title. A quite different approach to the problem in question may be found in the publications of A. Drexel and L. Homburger.

A Stable word may be defined as a form which is capable of standing by itself as a complete sentence, other than a free verbal tense. In Manyika the categories of words found stabilized are independent and dependent nominals, proper names and, but rarely, relative verbal tenses.

Dans le pays dogon qui se situe au coeur du Soudan français, dans la boucle du Niger vit une population dl'environ 220.000 individus, race vigoureuse et homogène qui a conservé intacte une civilisation millénaire, peut-être héritée de célèbres civilisations méditerranéennes aujourdl'hui disparues. Au cours des dernières années, les travaux d'une équipe ethnographique française ont fait des Dogon une des populations les mieux étudiées de l'Afrique Occidentale sur le plan des institutions et des croyances. Il n'en est pas de même de leur langue, qui n'a encore fait l'objet d'aucune étude d'ensemble, et dont la situation parmi les autres groupes de langues africaines reste mal définie. Delafosse, après avoir hésité entre le groupe voltaïque et le groupe mandé, penche pour ce dernier dans la dernière édition des Langues du Monde, où il classe le dogon dans le groupe nigéro-sénégalais (sousgroupe de l'Est, avec le samogho et le sia). Par contre, le R. P. Bertho, dans une récente étude, rapproche le dogon des langues voltaïques. M. de Lavergne de Tressan, dans son Inventaire Linguistique de l' A.O.F. et du Togo, juge préférable ‘d’opter pour la prudence, tant que les catégories grammaticales n'auront pas été étudiées’ (p. 211). Cette attitude de prudence sera aussi la nôtre; il ne semble pas que l'on puisse aboutir à des conclusions valables dans le domaine du comparatisme avant qu'une description aussi complète que possible ait été donnée, sinon de la langue dogon, du moins d'un de ses nombreux dialectes.

For the first time since 193O the Institute's Executive Council held its annual meeting in Rome. None of the fourteen members of the Council who attended the meeting in 1930 participated on the present occasion, though two of them—Professor *Westermann and General Derendinger—are life members of the Council, and three others—Dr. J. Oldham, Dr. E. W. Smith and Professor Labouret—still maintain their interest in African studies and in the fortunes of the Institute.

The meeting this year, though perhaps less formal than its predecessor, must have been an equally memorable experience, especially for those who were visiting Rome for the first time. This is not the place—even if it were possible—to attempt to put into words the impact of Rome, which a modern English poet has described:

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing for Africa (vol. xxv, no. 2, April 1955) Il Cannibalismo degli Asande by Renzo Carmignani. Since writing that review I have found among my Zande texts one written by my Zande clerk, Reuben Rikita, on the subject of cannibalism. The information was given by Kuagbiaru, a man who was completely honest and was also old enough to have had a reliable memory of what happened before the death of King Gbudwe (1905) and the taking over of Sudan Zandeland by the Anglo-Egyptian Administration. As it is unlikely that accounts of cannibalism by Azande who witnessed it can be collected any more it is useful to have so definite a statement on record. I give a fairly free translation of the text. I am not sure of the correct translation of the three Zande words I have placed in brackets. As the sense of the text is clear there is no need for a commentary.