It is a familiar fact that European rule in Africa has set in motion a radical change in African society. In some fields this has not been the result of any deliberate intention. In that of economic development, interest has generally been centred in the immediate problems of production, and the effects upon African institutions of the solutions that have been found for these have been neither planned nor even foreseen. But in the field of politics, European governments have been obliged to define their intentions towards the authorities whom they found already in existence, and here, in theory, there was a clear-cut choice from the start. Either the holders of power in the indigenous societies should be recognized, and utilized as part of an administrative structure of larger scale, or they should be disregarded–their authority be perhaps deliberately destroyed–and replaced by what M. Albert Sarraut once called ‘new and rectilinear architectures’. The British chose the first course, and this policy has now become inseparably associated with the name of Lugard. I believe that the forthcoming work by Miss Margery Perham will show that what has been called ‘Lugardism’ in the derogatory sense–I mean the insistence on maintaining traditional authority almost for its own sake–was not Lugard's own philosophy, but that of the successors who were in command during the period when he was away from Nigeria.

The Kunda, a matrilineal Bantu people numbering about 20,000, occupy part of the Luangwa valley in the Eastern Province of Northern Rhodesia. Their country, located within the administrative district of Fort Jameson, stretches along the east bank of the Luangwa between the Lusangazi in the south and the Lukuzi in the north. Its western boundary is the Luangwa river proper; across the river a game reserve, stretching up from the Muchinga range, forms an uninhabited barrier between them and the tribes beyond the mountains. The eastern boundary is less clearly demarcated, but marches with the territory of the adjacent Cewa. To the south and north live the Nsenga and Bisa respectively. All these adjacent tribes are matrilineal.

The Sukuma, like many other African peoples, believe that the living and the dead are a continuous line, in which death is not an end but only a transformation within the history of the family. The lack of children means physical and spiritual extinction, since the ancestor spirits depend for their survival on remembrance in the minds of their descendants. The unity of the living and the dead is expressed in their ceremonies when ancestors are referred to by kinship terms more appropriate to the living, whereas the word for ancestor spirit (isamva; pl. masamva) is rarely used in propitiation although quite common in everyday conversation.

A Knowledge of what has been traditionally termed ‘folklore’, and more recently ‘verbal art’, has long been considered essential for any well-rounded ethnography. Among many non-literate peoples this art form sanctions and validates other aspects of culture such as religious, economic, social, and political institutions. This paper will discuss the role of one of its elements, the proverb, in a West African culture.

In this article I give a brief outline of Somali social organization and describe the constitution and aims of the main political parties as they existed in 1957. It is hoped in a second article to examine the activities of the parties in individual Somali territories in the light of particular events in these territories and in relation to recent constitutional changes already effected or proposed.