The study of the social problems of Africa demands primarily a definite knowledge of the actual state of affairs, of the facts which to-day represent the fundamental conditions determining the direction in which the life of the natives is developing. It is not a question of one single manifestation or another, since whatever we may find anywhere as custom or practice is only part of an entire system, intimately connected also with the intellectual life of the people.

It is possible to live years m Africa before making the discovery that direct and simple phrases, apparently referable to everyday, material objects with the ordinary surface meanings of the individual words employed, may have totally unexpected values. Indeed, one may live many years in Africa and never make this discovery. Witness the view accepted by so many as to the ‘poverty’ of the African's vocabulary and its ‘incapacity to express abstract thought’. We are too much at the mercy of uninformed opinion crystallized into conventional small talk; uninformed opinion that has accepted and then transmitted through books, or through lectures, or simply through conversation, views that are false, until a body of conventional belief has formed across the surface of the true situation so smotheringly as almost to defeat every effort of the facts to get to the surface. It is like the situation produced by oil on the surface of a pool that so deprives the life within the pool of air that it dwindles and dies beneath the oily curtain. In the home and roadside talk of Africa there lies an unguessed world of meaning, just beneath the surface, waiting to be released.

Under the influence of two important developments of the past few years, studies in Nigerian history may be expected in the future to take on a new focus, using for the first time four categories of material which have been either unavailable or neglected in the past. The establishment of the University College Library at Ibadan, with a policy of making as complete as possible its collections of the indigenous publications of the country, and the appointment in 1951, by the Nigerian Government, of a Supervisor of Public Records for the purpose of surveying and preserving the archives of the country, whether official or unofficial, have already brought to light materials which will challenge the historian for many years to come.

The orthography used here is that recommended by the International Institute of African Languages in conjunction with the Board of Education, Lagos.

The Pygmy mimic is an extremely persistent colonial trope that continues to inform contemporary anthropological understandings of Africa's Pygmy populations. Mimicry is now understood as being a key component of the social reproduction of a distinct Pygmy way of being. In this paper I examine the historical accounts of mimicry and try to bring a historical perspective to bear on contemporary ethnographic accounts of its practice. I also set my own research among the Sua Pygmies of Uganda against these other examples. The intention behind this is to acknowledge the common humanity of Africa's Pygmies and to create new grounds of comparison – such as a shared history of oppression – that are not dependent on a unique foraging mode of thought.