A Previous article (Lux, 1971) dealing with the network of visits between rural wage-earners and their kinsfolk in Western Congo, presented a first set of findings collected during field-work conducted in July 1966 among a stratified random sample of 268 workers in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe. One-third of them are employed in the plantations, and two-thirds in the industrial, mainly wood-processing, sector of seven generally big enterprises. Some of these workers live in Lukula, a small town of 10,000 people, others in rural company camps. They are thus to a large extent rural industrial wage-earners. Many of them are fully committed to the modern wage economy, so that I have been forced in the previous article to question Southall's assertion that rural wage-earners are ‘still firmly embedded in the fuller kinship system of rural tribal communities’ (1961: 34). The degree of their commitment has been measured by their various occupational profiles, to which I shall turn later. Suffice it here to say that half of them are already second- or even third-generation workers.

Recent publications on the rock art of Africa have again focused attention on the tremendous wealth of painted and engraved sites in that continent (Brentjes, 1969; Cooke, 1969; Lee and Woodhouse, 1970; Rudner, 1970). At the same time, however, it is made all too clear that the collection of data is largely unsystematic and subjective and, because of the incomplete nature of the evidence, valid analysis or comparison is difficult. Small wonder, then, that there is such a diversity of often conflicting views on the significance of the art (Vinnicombe, 1972).

‘Lutte’, ‘mobilisation’ pour le développement: les termes et le thème sont familiers, de cette familiarité des objets qui ont tellement servi qu'on ne sait plus à quoi ils servent.

During the decade from 1958 to 1968 when Mali was ruled by a socialistically inclined, modernization-oriented party, the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, the Malian theatre was one of the principal ways in which the ideas and programmes of the government were put forward. The purpose of this article is to explore the relations between the theatre as an art form and as a channel for ideas in Mali, and to evaluate the consequences for action of the ideas contained in the theatre. My data are based on my observations of the theatre in a provincial town; my theme is that the Malian theatre was consciously didactic, reflecting the propaganda ends of the government, but that the tradition of stagecraft on which the theatre was based emphasized satire. The gap between the didactic language sought by exponents of the government and the satirical language favoured by the people in the audience was frequently covered by combining the two, often to the detriment of the theatre itself. To understand this we have to look at the content of the plays, as well as at the social context in which they occurred, and at the form of the vehicle. The processes of combining form and content into a cultural entity that would unify rather than divide are what makes the study of the theatre rewarding for the anthropology of aesthetics and creativity.