In his recent study of urbanization among the Xhosa in East London, Mayer (1961) reveals a new dimension in the pagan/Christian opposition. The Xhosa-speaking tribes, Mayer points out, distinguish between what they call Red people (abantu ababomvu) and School people (abantu basesikolweni). The former are conservative traditionalists, adhering to Xhosa custom; the latter are already westernized to a degree and value many aspects of European material and non-material culture. But, Mayer emphasizes, Red Xhosa must not simply be regarded as a backward residue of unfortunates who have lacked the opportunity, one way or another, of becoming westernized. On the contrary: the Red Xhosa, no less than School Xhosa, have probably had more opportunity than any other population in Africa to experience and adopt western culture. The point is that Reds are not only conservatives, they are positive conservatives. They represent those Xhosa who have deliberately rejected white civilization and chosen instead to maintain their traditional way of life. And theirs is not an easy choice: it is a constant struggle against the forces of change.

It has been claimed that Zea mays existed in Africa before the discovery of America, but the plant is more generally considered to be a native of America, which could have spread through other continents only in post-Columbian times.

This latter opinion has recently been challenged by several writers. Jeffreys, for instance, has since 1953 consistently maintained that on arrival in Guinea the Portuguese found Zea mays already well established there, as the cereal they called milho zaburro, previously introduced by the Arabs, who would have visited America long before Columbus. On the other hand, V. de Magalhães Godinho, pertinently refuting many of Jeffreys's reasonings and identifications, has put forward the view that, before the Portuguese voyages of discovery, there existed in Africa a variety of Zea mays, which was subsequently replaced by the American variety; the Portuguese would have become familiar with this variety in Morocco, and it would be this plant which they called milho zaburro, or milho maçaroca. To both these authors the designations milho maçaroca and Zea mays are indisputably synonymous.

With the exception of such pioneering efforts as Evans-Pritchard's structural functional analysis of the Azande beer dance, which appeared in this journal in 1928, African dance has rarely been the focus of research. Thirty-eight years after that article appeared I can write, as Evans-Pritchard did then, that African dance is usually given a place quite unworthy of its social importance. The typical report on African dance is either a limited, vague description without reference to context, or a discussion of the context of a dance without explicit reference to its function, style, and structure.