The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute is attempting a comparative study of the tribes of British Central Africa and of the processes of change affecting their lives to-day. Social anthropologists have been sent to tribes selected both for the variety of forms in their indigenous social organization and for the different ways in which they have been absorbed in the modern world-system. Though we, of the Institute's staff, are spread over thousands of square miles, and have had very different trainings, we have tried to collect our data on comparable bases and to study similar problems. This short symposium, which opens what we have come to consider a crucial problem, is the first-fruits of our collaboration.

The Banyankole, who live in western Uganda, East Africa, are made up of two ethnic groups, the Baku and the Bahima. The Bairu, who number about a quarter of a million, are Bantu agriculturists. The Bahima, on the other hand, are Hamiticized negro cattle people of north African origin. Although numbering only about ten thousand, the Bahima were able, before British control, to dominate the Bairu and rule them as serfs.

Les traditions unanimes des principaux groupements, qui peuplent actuellement le bas-Dahomey et le bas-Togo: Adja, Allada-nu, Ouatchi, Ewé, etc., indiquent clairement que leurs ancêtres sont venus de l'ouest, et elles permettent de localiser quatre étapes successives dans leur marche vers l'Ouest:

1. Le pays Yoruba, à Pouest du fleuve Niger, en Nigéria Anglaise.

2. La région de Kétou, au Dahomey (région située à 100 km de la mer et à 25 km à l'est du fleuve Ouémé).

3. La ville fortifiée de Tadô, au Togo (localité située à environ 100 km de la mer et à 12 km à l'est du fleuve Mono).

4. La ville fortifiée de Nuatja, au Togo (localité située à environ 90 km de la mer, sur le chemin de fer allant de Lomé à Atakpamé).

Professor Griaule's article on ‘L'Alliance cathartique’ in Africa of October 1948 raises a methodological point of considerable importance. If we wish to understand a custom or institution that we find in a particular society there are two ways of dealing with it. One is to examine the part it plays in the system or complex of customs and institutions in which it is found and the meaning that it has within this complex for the people themselves. Professor Griaule deals in this way with the custom by which the Bozo and the Dogon exchange insults with each other. He considers it as an element in a complex of customs, institutions, myths, and ideas to which the Dogon themselves refer by the term mangou. He shows us also what meaning the natives themselves attribute to this exchange of insults (p. 253). As a piece of analysis the article is admirable, and is a most important contribution to our growing knowledge of West African society.

The Abyssinian farming communities of the three highland provinces of Eritrea (Ḥamasên, 'Akele Gûzay, and Serawê) may be said always to have had two agencies of government: on one hand, the institutions of village society, and, on the other hand, the central government of Ethiopia, known in Eritrea as the mengiśti and comprising the military organization of the Solomonid monarch—the Nigûśe Negeśt—and the quasi-feudal establishments of his provincial governors and of the Coptic Church. To the latter of these agencies, in constitutional theory, there succeeded the Italian monarchy when the Eritrean Colony was proclaimed on 1 January 1890. Even before that date the scope of the mengiśti in Eritrean affairs had never been well defined, but had been modified or intensified as political conditions changed in the Empire generally. Thus when highland Eritrea was governed by a Bahre Negȧśê, before the Somali and Turkish invasions of the sixteenth century, the Nigûś and his nomadic Court were probably an appreciable factor in village government. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scarcely any functions of imperial government can be traced in Eritrea, and the villages, in the words of the contemporary Abyssinologue Job Ludolf, ‘Regi Habessinorum quidem parent, sed sibimet Rectores præficiunt, ac suis legibus in modum alicuius parvæ Reipublicæ utuntur.’ During the nineteenth century political authority—which may be summarized as power to exact tribute (the strict etymological implication of mengiśti), to requisition and re-allocate land, and to beat the war-drum (kitet)–passed into the hands of mesafinti, chiefs of local peasant origin who claimed a dubious imperial sanction for the authority they had won by their arms. This phase culminated in the unsuccessful attempts of John IV (1870-89), himself a mesfin from the Tigray, partially to reorganize Eritrean village society on a feudal basis that would enable him to reassert the lapsing imperial authority. The only code of laws known in Ethiopia was the Fitha Negeśt, or Canons of the Kings, culled from Scripture, from ancient canons of the Church, and from early Byzantine statutes by a Syrian compilator of the fifth century and translated into Ethiopic in the fifteenth. The Fitha Negeśt stood until the twentieth century as the basic law of the Empire beside the Law of Moses, and was no less inept in village affairs for being highly revered by the Abyssinians.

There are many Abajas in the Ibo country; there were, until recently, two village groups of this name attached to a single Native Treasury. Its Native Authority officials were wont to distinguish them as Abaja-Isu and Abaja-Green. The former has now been transferred to Isu Native Authority, the latter is the subject of a recently published study by M. M. Green. It forms the third-ranking village group of the Ehime ‘clan’ (tribe) which belongs to the eastern section of the Isuama division of the Southern Ibo. This section was classified by Talbot as the Abaja ‘sub-tribe’ after its most important ‘clan’ (tribe), and within this ‘sub-tribe’ he distinguishes as the Abaja-Osu ‘clan’ (tribe) the two related ‘clans’ of Ehime and Ugboma. With so many Abajas to confuse the local issue the reviewer proposes to follow the Mbano Native Authority procedure and to refer to the community with whose affairs Miss Green is concerned as Abaja-Green.