East London is a rapidly growing port with a population of about 85,000 persons of all races, situated on the south-east coast of Africa. It is the city nearest to the largest Native Reserve in the Union, the Transkei, and hence uniquely situated in respect of its Native labour supply. It was a centre for the urban sociological studies of Professor Monica Wilson in her 1936 acculturation research, and more recently for a series of socio-economic studies by the author as an employee of the Municipality in 1949-50. An historical study of African settlement in the City, and of the relationship of Africans to the European controlled municipal council is presented here.

In the study of indigenous African institutions that exercise control while promoting social cohesion and regulating inter-personal and inter-group competition, much attention has been given to the analysis of the governmental functions of kin groups on the one hand and of ritually sanctioned political chiefship on the other. Institutions of these two types, which correspond to the distinction made by Durkheim between segmental and organic solidarity, were the basis of the well-known classification of African Political Systems by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard into two contrasted types labelled lineage or segmentary in one case, and centralized or statelike in the other. In their classification these writers were mainly concerned to distinguish politically centralized chiefdoms from those societies in which the exercise of political authority and social control was confined to recurrent but fluctuating combinations of lineages under their ritual leaders. In this they were led to imply, perhaps as a result of the limited range of societies selected for consideration, that apart from small autonomous bands of kindred, the only alternative to an acephalous and segmentary lineage system was a centralized society in which offices and political powers were hierarchically arranged with definite relations of administrative superiority and subordination holding between offices and councils at different levels. ‘Administrative machinery’ and ‘judicial institutions’ were treated as concomitants of centralized authority.

Surprisingly few Africanists are interpreting the oral literature of Africa using the conceptual tools fashioned by Lévi-Strauss. This article attempts to use some of his ideas in analysing eight etiological stories told by the Kimbu of Tanzania. The aim is not to emulate the master in his search for the innate structuring capacity of the human mind, but rather to set the sights lower, and to decide what is the real value of these stories to the Kimbu themselves. This can be done by distinguishing the various codes which the stories represent, following out their transformations, and discovering what message or messages they communicate. In all of this it has to be understood that we are dealing with what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘objectified thought’ and with empirical categories, and that we are not concerned with how men think in myths but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

GADA, or generation-grading, systems are found only in a few Cushitic-speaking societies of Ethiopia. Unlike a true age-grading system a gada system is distinguished by the rule that all sons follow their fathers in the sequence of grades at a single fixed interval, irrespective of their actual age. In order to maintain the constancy of this interval, the length of time which a man spends in each grade is fixed at a specific number of years, as is the number of grades separating him from his father. It is evident, therefore, that in such systems the various grades will include at the more senior levels young boys and adolescents together with mature men, a confusion that will not arise in true age-grading systems.

Those who read in Gulliver's ‘Karamojong Cluster’ that the Iteso are socially and culturally divided from the rest of the Teso Dialect Cluster, may not realize how closely many of their customs resemble those of other members of the Cluster. In fact all the six main social or cultural features which Gulliver enumerates as common to the Karamojong Cluster are common also to the Iteso.

In June 1931, Daniel Odindo, chief of Asembo, resigned after seventeen years in office. Asembo was one of over twenty locations or chiefdoms through which the Luo were ruled by the colonial administration of Kenya; its population was no more than 20,000; it was over thirty miles from the Central Nyanza district headquarters at Kisumu; there was no mission station in the location. It possessed several bush schools, some small trading centres, a few acres of cotton, and a fishing harbour on Lake Victoria. Asembo was a backwater. But there were many parties to the dispute over the succession to Odindo. One of these was Archdeacon Owen, the local head of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) who lived at Maseno, thirty-five miles away in the Maragoli Hills which overlook Kisumu. Owen was a churchman who saw his vocation in bringing political and social as much as spiritual welfare, and was deeply conscious of the missionary's dependence upon the confidence of his African flock. His white supporters in his many political campaigns were more often to be found in England than in Kenya. One of these was Norman Leys, now retired from the Colonial medical service, the first well-informed critic of the Kenya situation and with access to the Labour Party. Leys thought that the Asembo case—then being pursued through the Colony's courts—might ‘prove to be the turning point in Kenya history and [might] become one of the famous trials of the world’. It was ‘perfectly terrific’. He believed he ‘could make a damned good book out of it’ but was thankful that Owen did not want him to take up the issue in England. ‘As well might an unknown medical practitioner in some French village have tried to get his country to undo the wrong done Dreyfus.’ But there was perhaps some hope that the Home Committee of the CMS might come to Owen's aid, for ‘the wizard-chief [Odindo's appointed successor] is obviously out to persecute the church’.

In 1825, António Candido Pedroso Gamitto, a cadet aged nineteen in one of the Lisbon regiments, was sent to Africa as an ensign. He himself was well aware of how this course of events interfered with his education:

At a period of life when a youth who is his own master and not lacking in means dedicates himself to studies, that is what happened to me. As I grew older I realised that I had lost the best time and opportunity for study; and when I wanted to remedy this it was already too late for in Africa there are no teachers, nor even libraries, and it was difficult to have enough books sent from Europe.

Lamenting my lost time, I was obliged to content myself with what instruction I could obtain through reading, and this was done at an advanced age in a life which seventeen years in the African climate had ruined.

In saying these things I am speaking on my own behalf and I do so with the sole object of procuring the indulgence of my readers (vol. i, p. 22).

Statements such as this reveal immediately that Gamitto, even if he lacked formal education, had an ingenuous insight into his own limitations, and it may have been this quality that made him a successful ethnographer.