Musical instruments are in so far of importance for cultural research as they partake, in an almost unparalleled degree, of the nature of both material and mental culture. They can be seen and handled and, in addition to this advantage, possess many qualities unconnected with their immediate purpose; purity, copiousness, and beauty of sound are historically the latest properties sought after, and aimed at technically. (For purposes of research everything must count as a musical instrument with which sound can be produced intentionally and, for this reason, it is advisable to use the term ‘sound-producing instruments’.) The fact of their giving forth sound classes them at once among ‘live’ objects and lends them an effect akin to that of speech and song. That their sounds are not those of the human voice invests them with a mysterious and superhuman potency. It would be hard to find a sound-instrument which had not originally a ritual or magical significance, and which had not served for an indefinite period as a secular amusement for adults before being finally passed on to the children. Ritual use is always therefore an indication of great antiquity. On the other hand, objects which are indiscriminately used at any time and by any person may be suspected of dating from a later period, or of having been imported from without.

Blood-Brotherhood is a pact of alliance formed between two persons by a ritual act in which each swallows the blood of the other. The pact is one of mutual assistance and is backed by powerful sanctions. It may bind only the two participants to certain obligations, or it may also involve the social groups of which they are members. Alliances based on exchange of blood have been recorded from many parts of the world, especially from Africa where they are exceedingly common. In some tribes the participants drink one another's blood directly from incisions made on their bodies, while in other tribes the blood is swallowed on a piece of meat or ground-nut or coffee-berry. But though the actual method of consumption varies in different cultures the purpose of the rite is always the same, and there is often much similarity between the ways in which it is carried out. Blood-brotherhood is not only widespread throughout Africa but it is also a ceremony which a European may inquire into easily and may even take part in without involving himself in social difficulties. It is the more surprising therefore that descriptive records of the ceremony by which the pact is formed and of the obligations which it entails are so scanty.

The following list of words and sentences is intended as a first guide towards the systematic recording of African languages. The number of African languages and dialects about which little or nothing is known is great, and it is desirable that such languages should be recorded before they die out or degenerate. In many parts of Africa the chief language or dialect of a district has been used in literature and has been well studied, while on others little work has been done and there is no published material available. Records of these lesser known languages as well as of dialects of languages already known would afford valuable help towards comparative study, and any one who contributes to the collection of reliable data will render a service to linguistic science in addition to furnishing material for the practical study of a particular language.

Readers of Africa cannot fail to be interested in the reason for the proposal by the recent Committee of Experts on Slavery, which was accepted by the League Assembly last autumn, that a small permanent Slavery Commission and Bureau should be created, the more so that the subject is likely to be prominent next year when we celebrate the Centenary of the Abolition of Slavery throughout all British possessions. That great achievement was the crowning triumph of long years of untiring effort by Wilberforce, Clarkson, Fowell-Buxton, and the group of Abolitionists whom they led; the story is admirably told by Professor Coupland in his Life of Wilberforce.

Étudier, au point de vue quantitatif, la composition d'une collectivité humaine; la comparer à d'autres; prévoir son évolution: tels sont les objets de la science démographique.

La démographie de l'Afrique centrale est fort mal connue. Les renseignements publiés sont rares, de valeur très inégale; la critique en est malaisée. Les pronostics sur l'avenir des sociétés indigènes sont le plus souvent dénués de toute base scientifique, fondés sur des impressions subjectives. Aucune comparaison entre démographie africaine et démographie civilisée n'a, croyons-nous, été tentée jusqu'ici.

The AmaMpondo are a Bantu tribe of the south-eastern group, living in a native reserve on the southern border of Zululand, and speaking a dialect of Xosa. They depend for their subsistence upon cattle farming and hoe culture. They have a typical Bantu ‘cattle complex’, cattle not only being of economic importance, but being a centre of men's interests and emotions and playing a large part in religion and marriage. They live in patrilineal kinship groups imizi (sing, umzi) which are scattered about the country at distances varying from some hundreds of yards to two or three miles. The average umzi now contains four to five adults, but formerly, when danger from man and beast made concentration necessary for defence, it is said that it was common for twenty married men, together with their wives and children, to live together in one umzi. Both chiefs and commoners practise polygyny, and a union is legalized by the passage of cattle from the groom's group to the bride's (ukulobola). Administration was organized on a territorial basis. There was a powerful paramount chief with district chiefs and sub-chiefs under him. Each sub-chief had a court, from which there was the right of appeal to his immediate superior and finally to the paramount. Cutting across the territorial groupings (amabandla) are patrilineal clans, iziduko (sing, isiduko). Iziduko are strictly exogamous, and the sense of difference between them, and oneness within them, is marked by the taboo on drinking milk, or eating sacrificial meat, of a strange isiduko, but the acceptance of either from a member of the same isiduko. Great emphasis is laid on the respect for elders, living and dead. Deceased ancestors, amatongo, are believed to have the power of blessing, or of sending sickness and poverty, and sacrifices of meat and beer are made to them. Besides being sent by ancestral spirits, sickness is thought to be caused by sorcerers, abatakati. Murder by sorcery is regarded as the worst possible crime, and was punished with torture and death. The fear of sorcery is ever present in the minds of AmaMpondo. The most powerful specialists in the society are the diviners, amagqira, who discover sorcery and who also treat sick persons.

In every continent in which it has taken root, the co-operative movement has assumed new forms and adopted fresh methods. In Europe, its original home, the consumers' stores of England and the credit and agricultural societies of Germany grew up almost independently of one another. When transplanted to America and Australia, it acquired peculiar strength in the field of large-scale marketing. In Asia the principal development has been that of credit for the peasantry, though with less emphasis on economic and more on moral elements than in Europe. In each of these continents the people, especially the poorer classes, have derived great benefits from their societies, the European in his domestic purchases, the American in the orderly disposal of his produce, the Asiatic in relief from the yoke of usury and in training of character by self-control and mutual control. The majority of Asiatic countries learned the lesson from India, whence the co-operative idea spread first to Ceylon, British Malaya, and Siam, then to the Philippine Islands and China. Japan is an exception, her national leaders after travel and observation having imitated in many respects the German system; Palestine and the Dutch East Indies, the latest recruits, also draw inspiration from both European and Asiatic sources. The general position now is that, save in a few regions where government is still unsteady, Co-operation is universal outside Africa.

The BaKxatla baxaKxafêla belong to the Sotho cluster of Southern Bantu peoples. They lived originally in the Rustenberg district of the Transvaal, where many of them are still found; but in 1869 the main body of the tribe, owing to trouble with the local Dutch authorities, crossed the border into what is now Bechuanaland Protectorate. Here they are now settled in a proclaimed reserve approximately 3,600 sq. miles in extent. Much of their land, however, is arid, poorly watered, and of little practical value. Their population inside the Reserve may be estimated at about 12,000 souls. Two-thirds of them live in the large central town of Mochudi. The rest are distributed over nearly a dozen much smaller villages to the south and west, at distances of six to thirty miles from Mochudi.

About the middle of the last century, an English marine officer, F. E. Forbes, caused a sensation among his contemporaries by the report that he had discovered an indigenous script in use among the Vai people of West Africa. The question immediately arose how these natives, hitherto hardly known even by name to the civilized world, and pursuing an unobtrusive existence in the seclusion of the primeval forest far from the course of the world's traffic, came to possess a cultural treasure of so high a quality, one usually met with only among peoples of ancient and rich culture. Little wonder then, that in the years that followed, the solution of this problem occupied the attention of a number of European scholars.

Ankermann has confined his investigations to the distribution of instruments within Africa, and the only idiophones of which he takes account are slit-drums, bells, the xylophone, and the sansa. Sachs arrives at his strata I-II by considering the length of the eastern dispersal-radius (from Asia by way of Oceania to America), without including the African occurrences; though, conversely, he arranges some later strata according to the African distribution. In accordance with the methodological principle that distribution over the whole world must be decisive for any system of grouping adopted, I have attempted in what follows to arrange the African sound-producing instruments according to their distribution both within that continent and outside it. It is not meant that all instruments now united in the same group necessarily belong to one and the same culture, but only that, in all probability, they are nearer to each other in time and more closely related in origin than they are to the members of any other group. A closer examination, especially if undertaken with a view to including consideration of all other cultural phenomena, will in many cases lead to subdivision into smaller groups, perhaps also to different arrangements, or even to a change in the entire scheme. The designations of the several groups are not meant to suggest a prejudice of any kind; they were added post factum, principally because it is convenient to have a name for everything. Those borrowed from the nomenclature of Frobenius and Struck should not be taken to mean that their notions of African ‘cultures’ necessarily coincide with our groups; they are only intended to suggest the directions in which contacts can be sought. The names of the instruments have been taken over from Sachs; the numbers appended to them refer to his strata.

The accuracy of a Census return is taken for granted in England; it is only when we turn to Africa that we realize how far it is the outcome of close and efficient administration, and of a people willing and able to do their part. The reader who passes from these fair-seeming tables to study the methods by which they were compiled, will conclude, all the more if he knows his Africa, that neither the will nor even the money are enough to obtain the information necessary for wise government. Africa presents us here with something of a vicious circle; knowledge cannot far outrun good administration; administration is therefore condemned to be empirical. Fortunately, however, the circle is not quite complete, and readers of Africa know that the Institute is doing its part to take advantage of the gap.

A well-known native in Tanganyika Territory was asked one day what would be left of European civilization in Africa if the Europeans left the country to-morrow. He replied unhesitatingly, ‘Football’. His reply was probably onlyintended to mean that this element of European culture made a very special appeal to him. Nevertheless, considering his comment as a suggestive, though unconscious criticism, there is perhaps sufficient truth in the remark to merit careful thought. Such thought and a cursory survey of the conditions under which vast numbers of natives live to-day, compared with those under which they lived prior to the advent of the European, is not very encouraging. It is true that the country is governed in peace, which was not so in the past, and abuse of power by the chiefs has been reduced to a negligible quantity. It is true that railways have been built, opening up the country. It is true that under the recently developed native self-administration, political self-realization and reawakened pride of tribe are becoming increasingly evident. Especially are all these things true of the advanced tribes of Nyasaland, Uganda, Bukoba, and Moshi. For these tribes and a scattered number of regularly employed natives, such as clerks and teachers, there has been progress towards economic standards. The people are comparatively wealthy, well provided with blankets, lamps, soap, and similar ‘luxuries’, and live healthier, more comfortable lives than their forefathers. On the other hand, the subjects of many of the other tribes, and in some instances even the chiefs themselves, still live in huts which would often be better described as hovels.

The fact that the Yearbooks of Education, 1932, 1933, edited by Lord Eustace Percy, devote a large portion of their space to education in British dependencies, and that the whole of the Educational Yearbook, 1931, of the International Institute of Teachers College, Columbia University, is devoted to a study of Colonial systems of education, with a liberal apportionment of space to British Colonial policy, shows the widespread interest that is now being taken in the education of the more primitive or indigenous races for which the more advanced countries are acting as trustees. The articles on British Tropical Africa and British India in the Yearbooks of Education, 1932 and 1933, and the survey of education in Tanganyika Territory in the Columbia University Yearbook, afford material for a comparison of educational aims in Africa and India, which may be of interest to the reader, as it certainly has been a source of profit to the writer of this article. The time has not yet come for passing any judgement on British educational policy in the African colonies, and it would be rash to predict the results of plans that have not yet matured and are constantly being adapted to changing conditions and newly discovered needs. But it is possible to survey as a whole the history of education in India from the date of Macaulay's Minute up to 1920, when education passed from the control of the central British Government to the charge of Ministers responsible to Provincial Legislative Councils. This history reveals risks to which tropical races brought into educational contact with western civilization are exposed, and suggests, by its record, of failure as well as success, means whereby these risks, so far as they are real in Africa, may be minimized. Sir Philip Hartog and Mr. Rivers-Smith are so well qualified for the work they have done in these Yearbooks, and have been so cautious in their presentation of the Indian and African situation, that no careful reader of their articles is likely to suppose that conclusions drawn from the one country are necessarily applicable to the other. But there is very much to be gained from a comparative study.

Baganda land tenure has always differed in important respects from most of the systems found in East Africa. Elsewhere the whole system rests on the principle that all land is the property of some kindred group whose controlling authorities administer it on behalf of that group, their supreme duty being to preserve it for the use of its members. Where powerful political authorities exist they usually exercise rights of disposal and readjustment which may conflict with the powers claimed by kinship heads, but these powers have never died out altogether.

The adaptation of the tribal structure to meet changing political conditions is a problem to-day, and this article gives the summary of an effort in that direction. It refers to a portion of the Nyamwezi tribe in Tanganyika Territory, and should be read in that restricted light.

The present organization is made up of one cohesive unit, to which are attached various vassal sections. The undermentioned are the titles of the various ranks recognized, though some had fallen into desuetude.

Die folgenden Ausführungen möhten als ein Versuch gewertet werden, wodurch mit dazu beigetragen werden sollte, dass die Aufgaben erkannt werden, die sich für die Missionskirchen innerhalb ders Länder der Bantu-Kultur ergeben. Denn neue Aufgaben sind dadurch erwachsen, dass Umwertungen und Umgestaltungen der gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Lebensformen der Bantu eingeleitet worden sind. Diese sind mit bedingt durch die von den Missionen eingeführte christliche Eheform und das darauf aufzubauende Familienleben.

La langue mandé ou mandingue est une des plus importantes de l'Afrique Occidentale Française. Les estimations faites il y a dix ans permettent de penser qu'elle était alors parlée comme idiome maternel par environ trois millions de Soudanais, tandis que deux millions d'autres s'en servaient comme de seconde langue. II est probable qu'une révision sérieuse de ces chiffres accuserait une augmentation assez forte des Nègres qui en usent, car elle a une tendance marquée à s'imposer, sous l'influence de la circulation commerciale, dans des régions qui étaient encore fermées au trafic il y a peu d'années, comme par exemple le pays des Bobo au Soudan Français et en Haute Volta, celui des Agni ou des Bété à la Côte d'lvoire.

The formation has been recently announced of a Department of African Linguistics at the London School of Oriental Studies. ‘The new department’, it is stated in a recent number of Le Maître Phonétique, ‘is to apply phonetics to the analysis of the structure of African languages, and will no doubt be instrumental in furthering the movement for introducing phonetic systems of spelling into Africa.’ It may be useful in the early stages of the project to call attention to some of the difficulties which have to be overcome in carrying out the latter implied part of it, and to make a suggestion as to a means of overcoming them. It is therefore proposed to give an account of the introduction of a phonetic script into one African territory, and incidentally to advocate a slight but desirable revision of the Institute's memorandum Practical Orthography of African Languages.