It is important to establish the date and route of the introduction of maize into West Africa for several reasons. It could throw light on early documents about the area, it would help to clarify certain questions of the contact of indigenous cultures with each other as well as with intrusive cultures, and it could introduce an element of absolute dating into the chronology of archaeological deposits in the area. The last point may well be the most important, since most techniques for dating archaeological material in absolute terms cannot be employed in the study of the ethnohistory of West Africa. The cob of the maize plant is widely used in West Africa as a decorative roulette on pottery, usually on the coarser wares. The presence or absence of such decoration is therefore used as a horizon in excavating archaeological sites in West Africa. (Cf. Goodwin, 1953, and Willett, 1959.) Moreover, botanists have studied the genetics of maize in West Africa in great detail so that a statistical study of maize impressions on pottery, although not permitting the identification of particular varieties of maize, could in theory permit the identification and relative location in time of changes in the maize population cultivated at a given site, and thus serve to date the pottery. (Cf. Jones 1959, Stanton and Willett.)

The importance of age as a factor of social grouping amongst East African peoples has long been recognized. Amongst the Kuria, a Bantu-speaking people who have been culturally influenced by Nilo-Hamitic neighbours, two distinct forms of age-grouping exist. In one ‘age-sets’ are recruited at regular provincial ceremonies of initiation, the historical sequence of sets then serving to rank their members by age seniority. In the other ‘generation classes’ are recruited according to a fixed cycle of named classes where the children of the men of one class are automatically ascribed membership of the succeeding class and where norms of coevality apply to each class in sequence. These two forms of age-grouping are institutionally distinct (status in one is in no way ‘tied’ to status in the other) and they operate in different ways within the society. Although both belong to what may empirically be called Kuria age-organization, they can conveniently be described separately. The following paper describes the generation classes.

This paper is concerned with the significance of environmental factors for the reconstruction and interpretation of the history of the Mbembe tribes during the period immediately prior to the first arrival of the Europeans in the late 1880's. It seems probable that developments occurring mainly during the nineteenth century led to differences between the tribes, both in the distribution of their populations and in the character of their villages. These in turn resulted in considerable divergences in political organization despite the fact that the tribes remained adjacent and culturally very similar, and that the main principles and assumptions on which their organization was based remained essentially similar. It would be possible to discuss these political differences simply in terms of the present variations in demography and village structure. But an attempt to discover the processes by which they came about will, I think, increase our understanding of the development of these divergent political structures.

In this paper I shall present some data on the marriage and family organization of an Eastern Ijo town, and shall try to analyse changes in this organization against the background of broader social changes affecting the area.

Okrika is the chief town of the Okrika section of the Ijo-speaking people of Nigeria. The Okrika dialect, with Kalahari and Bonny, falls into the North-Eastern group of dialects which are partially interintelligible with Brass-Nembe but not with the Central-Western dialects. The Ijo occupy the greater part of the Niger Delta. The Okrika section consists of eight towns and dependent villages on the extreme eastern edge of the Delta, where the saltwater creeks and mangrove swamps give place to the extensive dry ground of the mainland. Administratively, Okrika forms part of the Degema Province of the Eastern Region of Nigeria. With three other communities of the section, Okrika itself is sited on an island about half a mile long and a quarter broad.

There is little evidence to show that ethnic differences in Africa result in problems of lesser magnitude at the present day than in the past. In recent years the problems of ‘minorities’ have had to be considered in Nigeria, while in the Republic of Congo (Léopoldville) ethnic conflicts and the reappearance of past tribal enmities have produced numerous tragic situations during the last twelve months. The frontiers of Africa were delimited by the European powers half a century or more ago and their absurdity in relation to ethnic groups has been demonstrated recently in papers by Barbour and Prescott. They were drawn in ignorance of the different groups of people through which they passed and have now been inherited by independent African governments who will have to face the problems which have been created. To solve them these African governments will need to know more of ethnic groups and their distributions than did their European predecessors and the need for more adequate ethnographic maps is likely to increase rather than diminish.

The language families of Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic are generally recognized as belonging to the Hamito-Semitic group. As far back as 1844 Hausa was also occasionally compared with one or another language family of Hamito-Semitic or with Hamito-Semitic as a whole. I should like to mention only the studies of R. Lepsius, A. H. Sayce, L. Reinisch, F. Lexa, G. A. Barton, and particularly W. Vycichl, and recently J. Greenberg. Personally, I have no definite opinion on the relation between Hausa and the Hamito-Semitic group. However, in the course of my work on various Semitic problems I have come across a feature that occurs in Ancient Egyptian, Modern South Arabian, and Hausa. I have in mind the prefixed element ḥ that occurs in the above-mentioned languages and that so far has defied any explanation, at least in the Modern South Arabian group.