In recent years a new type of association, the improvement union or ‘meeting’, has become common in Southern Nigeria. Associations of this kind may be formed on a lineage, clan, village, village-group, divisional, or tribal basis, and may carry out various economic, educational, political, social, and general improvement activities directly related to changing cultural conditions. The present report is concerned with the development of this kind of association in the Afikpo villagegroup of the Ibo-speaking people. Its growth in this section of Ibo country has been more recent than in the more central Ibo areas, where European contact has been of longer duration, a circumstance that has made it possible to study its initial development in detail.

This paper offers an interpretation of some details of the myth and custom of two Nilotic tribes, the Shilluk and the Anuak of the Southern Sudan. Each of these tribes has a noble or royal clan in a centrally important position in its political system, and the royal myths of both tell of the founding of kingship. In both also we find represented in myth a conflict between the first kings and their maternal uncles and grandfathers. It is this representation of conflict which we attempt to explain, by reference to the political structures of the tribes.

One of the Lecturers at the University College of Ibadan recently declared that a vital and often neglected source of information for the would-be anthropologist was the tribal court records. Here, written down with the ingenuous casualness of banality, is a treasure-trove of tribal lore and law, superstitions and suppositions, which can provide the anthropologically minded student with hours of absorbing, and sometimes original, research work. How often do we pause to consider what is entailed in the typical verdict entered in the tribal court book ?

En 1936, feu Édouard De Jonghe publiait dans Africa une revue des sociétés secrètes du Congo Beige qui est demeurée l'étude classique sur le sujet. Après tant d'années cependant, une mise au point paraît justifiée.

In a memorandum on education published in 1952, the Government of the Gold Coast declared that its policy was ‘to provide as soon as possible a six-year basic primary course for all children at public expense’. This policy has naturally led, not only to a rapid multiplication of the number of existing primary schools, but also to a widening of the individual classes, in order to make room for the increased number of children now entering school.

East African Bantuists and others farther south have noticed the -e stem cropping up sporadically and unexpectedly in verbal forms and this exposition is an attempt to explain them.

One has realized the dominant importance of ‘state’ in Bantu and seen that, during the development of the languages, time tenses have been formed by inflexion, and in the endeavour to fit these tenses into the framework of the indicative mood one has tended to lose sight of the principles of state. The chaotic diversity of inflexions used to express future or past time in different language groups suggests the comparatively modern development of these tenses.

In the first half of the nineteenth century European knowledge of the course of the Niger was vague. Sir Taubman Goldie summed up the position when he said: ‘In 1819, only those interested in geographical research were familiar with the name of the Niger, or knew that its upper waters, down to Bussa, had been traced fourteen years before by a Scotchman, Mungo Park, the father of African exploration in modern times. It was only in 1831 that the lower waters of the Niger and their path from Bussa to the ocean were discovered by an equally great Englishman, Richard Lander.’ Up to 1831 it was thought that the great river of the Western Sudan, known to flow from west to east, continued across Africa to enter the Nile as a tributary in the region of the Sudd. Alternatively it was popularly supposed to be a tributary of the Congo. To such an extent had this popular idea been accepted that in 1816 the following instructions were issued to Captain Tuckey who, in 1818, led an expedition to explore the River Zaire or Congo. ‘Although the expedition, about to be undertaken for exploring the course of the river Zaire, which flows through the kingdom of Congo . . . was originally grounded on a suggestion of its being identical with the Niger, it is not to be understood, that the attempt to ascertain this point is by any means the exclusive object of the expedition.’