In this paper we shall be concerned with the Yoruba systems of terminology towards kin and affinal relations, as exemplified in the community of Oshogbo. Our main interest will be the extent of the correspondence between the kinship system and the nomenclature and we shall attempt to show that while terminology and behaviour are never incompatible, in certain situations the correspondences are more detailed and precise than in others.

No one who has visited East Africa has come away without seeing the wood-carvings made and sold by the Kamba. Sets of salad-servers crowned by Masai or Nandi heads, figurines of warriors bearing spear and shield, and models of elephants and leopards—these are their stock-in-trade which they carry to every part of East and Central Africa, to the Rhodesias and the Sudan, the Congo, and, exceptionally, to England. Their carvings are spread on the pavement outside hotels and at the most frequented corners of the main streets or they are hawked in baskets from door to I door. Like the jewellery sold at Port Said, their carvings have an exotic but suspiciously uniform look about them and at the back of everyone's mind there lurks the suspicion that really they are all mass-produced by machines—in Birmingham, or ‘by the Indians’ or at some remote Mission station.‘We have been unable so far to come into contact with the managing body of this organized and doubtlessly machinery-using industry’, wrote an American firm anxious to buy their carvings direct from the manufacturer. The truth is that there is no managing body and no machinery. The carvings are made by hand with tools that were in common use before this century and they are sold in the first instance either by the men who carved them or, more commonly, by Kamba ‘dealers’, who may have started as carvers but who eventually have found trade more profitable than manufacture. Some of the dealers have built up a trade which yields them incomes earned by few other Africans in Kenya, and in general there has come into being, almost entirely as a consequence of Kamba enterprise, a thriving industry which provides men from one of the most barren parts of Kenya with incomes comparable to those earned in the most prosperous agricultural regions.

The Africanists were stirred up recently by Joseph Greenberg's Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven, 1955). Not being an Africanist myself I do not intend to express here my opinion on the validity of Greenberg's classification. Since, however, Cushitic and Semitic comparisons were injected into the discussion I wish to sound a note of caution against certain etymologies and comparisons proposed in the various studies. The Semitist will tend to be rather conservative when dealing with etymologies and comparisons. The reasons for his cautious attitude are easily understandable. He deals with languages for which he has written documents going back as far as the third millenium B.C. (as is the case of Akkadian); the investigation of some of these started hundreds of years ago. This is not so in African linguistics. The African languages came to our attention only recently and for many of them we have only scanty vocabularies at our disposal. We do not know much about the phonetic development of most of the African languages and, as a result of this situation, the Africanist finds himself sometimes comparing roots representing different stages of the language without being able to reduce them to the original form. The Semitist is in a more favourable position. Because of his knowledge of the missing links within the various linguistic groups he is able to bring back, for instance, Ennemor (Gurage) roots such as äč ‘boy’ to Semitic wld, e'ä ‘crunch’ to ḥqā, ny'ä ‘be far’ to rḥq and others, even though these derivations would seem a tour de force at first consideration. In some studies dealing with African linguistics one occasionally finds comparisons and etymologies of the above-mentioned kind, but the Africanist is often unable, through no fault of his own, to justify his comparisons because of his inadequate knowledge of the linguistic history of these languages. There is also a simple human factor. In dealing with languages stretching from the north to the south of Africa it is not always possible to be adequately acquainted with the phonetic history of the various language groups even if sufficient documentation were available. Consequently occasional inexact comparisons and etymologies are established. I am hopeful that the Africanist will not refuse the co-operation of a Semitist and an amateur Cushitist. The purpose of the present note is to rectify some comparisons of Semitic and Cushitic brought into the discussion of African linguistic classification.

From 1953 to mid-1955 a team from the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research was investigating various problems caused by the employment of a large labour force in the plantations of the Southern Cameroons. The whole survey, which it is hoped soon to publish, covered a fairly wide field of social and economic studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine only one small aspect, somewhat outside the main field of the investigations.

In a preceding article I discussed the organization and aims of modern Somali political movements in the light of the traditional political structure. Three types of political organization were distinguished: clan, regional (or tribal), and nationalist. These three types reflect traditional variations in the social structure and culture of different regions of Somaliland and also varying degrees of political evolution. I drew attention to the extent to which all parties—especially those with nationalist aims—have adopted a religious ideology and pointed out that Islam, through the traditional organization and aims of the Sufi Dervish Orders (ṭariiqas), has provided a precedent for pan-Somali solidarity. I now attempt to assess the extent of nationalist feeling in the different Somali territories, and examine the degree to which recent constitutional changes in government and administration have recognized the growth of nationalist aspirations and promoted their extension. I discuss first the present position in the five Somali territories: French and British Somaliland; Harar Province of Ethiopia; Somalia; and the Northern Province of Kenya. Finally, I consider the importance of Islam in furthering nationalism and in helping to overcome the cleavages of clan and Dia-paying group affiliation which oppose the formation of a unified Somali nation.