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.

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 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.

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.

1. Eima kiandeni emanyifwa ni mofi.

Lit. He who digs in the hollow is known (i.e. betrayed) by the smoke, i.e. A man may dig quietly for a month without any one knowing much about it, but sooner or later he will have to burn his weeds, then the smoke will rise and fill the valley, and the secret be out. ‘Things done in secret shall be revealed openly.’