Basutoland is administered by a unified and centralized hierarchical chieftainship (borena). At the head of the hierarchy stands the Paramount Chief, whose jurisdiction extends over the whole nation. Under him there are twenty-two Principal and Ward Chiefs, each having jurisdiction over the whole of his ward. In each principality there are a varying number of subordinate chiefs with their own (minor) wards, there being a total of about 460 such chiefs in the territory. The general effect is one of loose-fitting Chinese boxes, the loose fit being due to the fact that a chief (at any level of the hierarchy) does not grant the whole of his ward to subordinate chiefs but retains a part in his own hands, so that the sum of all the subordinate wards in any chiefdom is not as great as the totality of the superior ward of which they are parts.

The following text was recorded in 1953, in Lunyoro, by my assistant at that time, Mr. Edward Byaruhanga, a young man who had just finished secondary school. It is about a man called Matiyo (I have altered all the personal names) who decided, against his father's advice, to take a second wife, and it tells how this decision led to misfortune for Matiyo and his family. Traditionally in Bunyoro men liked to have two wives, or even more if they could afford to pay the bridewealth for them, and many still do. But it is well known that such joint households are not always happy ones, for two women who are competing for the favours of one man sometimes become jealous of each other, and this may lead to accusations of sorcery, even to violence, between them. Things are more difficult now than they were in traditional times, for many modern women, even in remote areas, have been to school for a year or two, and have learned to expect a more equal relationship with their husbands than their mothers enjoyed. Such a woman, after she is married, does not always look kindly on the arrival in her home of a second wife, especially if she is younger and prettier than she is. Also, more than half a century of Christian missionary activity has led, if not to the abandonment of polygyny, at least to the recognition that monogamy is the European ideal, and so—at least from the woman's standpoint—a status of rather higher prestige by modern standards. Many women leave their husbands, even after years of marriage, when they take second wives.

This paper is the result of a study of all the known rock painting copies and photographs, undertaken during 1963 and early 1964—in the first instance to plot the occurrence of patterned giraffe paintings against those only in silhouette. The list has grown, however, and all animals and humans have been indexed and plotted on distribution maps, all information being finally synthesized. An analysis is presented of the human types and domesticated animals recorded in the art of Southern Africa. These items have been plotted on distribution maps, the significance of which is discussed in the following sections. The importance of the Mopani belt and of linguistics are also examined and a possible way from the east of Southern Rhodesia to the Cape of Good Hope indicated. The distribution of animal types is the subject of another paper (Cooke, 1964).

The savanna-forest boundary in West Africa is one of its most remarkable geographical features. The clarity with which the boundary is defined, whether seen from the air or from ground level, is, throughout most of its length, most striking. Moreover, the most casual observer will discover that many other features, particularly of settlement and of agriculture, reach the limit of their distributions at about the same location. Not the least significant feature, in sharp contrast with many other zones of vegetation change, is that the boundary is not an ecotone, or zone of gradual change in floristic composition and community structure in response to equally gradual changes in habitat character, but ‘a mosaic of communities representative of each region’. The zone of change consists of islands, salients, and enclaves of forest and savanna, sharply separated from one another. Only one community, the ‘transition woodland’, may in any sense be considered an ecotone. Even this, in some instances at least, may be a more or less transient sub-seral community, in view of the fact that forest trees within it are generally young, whereas the savanna trees are old.

This paper attempts to answer two broad questions. Firstly, what is Kuria religion about? and secondly, what is the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life and what is the place of ritual in this relationship? Neither of these are questions which Kuria would themselves ask—certainly in this form—but they are perhaps the two leading questions which an anthropologist must ask in examining the religious beliefs and ritual practice of another people. Much depends upon the answer to the first, for it is in terms of the answer that one is likely to establish the particular coherence of ‘integrity’ of a people's beliefs, held existentially in the context of their own social life. The answer is relevant too to an issue which has concerned those writing on related peoples of the same area as the Kuria—the problem of the relation between magic and religious beliefs. Thus Wagner, writing on the Bantu Kavirondo, uses the undifferentiated category of ‘magico-religious’ belief. But what exactly is meant by this umbrella term, and does it not itself obfuscate what it seeks to define? The second question considered—the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life—is a continuation of the first in relation to their very elaborate and, in one sense, autonomous system of ritual based in particular on a complex sequence of rites of passage. These rites are a very striking feature of Kuria culture. It is, I think, by considering them in this double context—as expressing religious values on the one hand while controlling social behaviour on the other—that these rites are most fully understood.