The holding of land in the Ife Division is governed by a multiplicity of arrangements. Some ‘own’ land in the ordinary sense of the term; some enjoy unrestricted rights over property which in fact belongs to the ebi and not to the individual; and others again hold by leases or grants which permit cultivation under a host of different conditions. A listing based on legal and conventional norms would consequently run to considerable length, and the sheer number of discernible types may well bewilder rather than clarify.

Although there is a plethora of works on migratory processes and migrant organizations, few of these deal with the contribution of rural-to-rural migrants to socio-economic development and the emergence of small urban centres. Migration involves permanent or semi-permanent changes in residence and takes account of factors which intervene between the economic opportunities and social conditions of the place of origin and those of the destination (Lee 1966; Otite f.c; Udo 1975). Economic and non-economic calculations of cost are important in all decisions to migrate. Rural-to-rural migration (with which we are concerned here) involves those who because of their low education and incentives decided to move to exploit familiar resources in new rural environments. Perhaps it is through in depth anthropological studies that the best light may be shed on the contributions of such migrants to development in the particular place to which they migrate.

Indigenous significances of nineteenth-century |Xam San folktales are hard to determine from narrative structure alone. When verbatim, original-language records are available, meaning can be elicited by probing beneath the narrative and exploring the connotations of highly significant words and phrases that imply meanings and associations that narrators take for granted but that nonetheless contextualize the tales. Analyses of this kind show that three selected |Xam tales deal with a form of spiritual conflict that has social implications. Like numerous |Xam myths, these tales concern conflict between people and living or dead malevolent shamans. Using their supernatural potency, benign shamans transcend the levels of the San cosmos in order to deal with social conflict and to protect material resources. As a result, benign shamans enjoy a measure of respect that sets them apart from ordinary people.

Monica Hunter Wilson died on 26 October 1982. Born of missionary parents at Lovedale, Eastern Cape Province, she studied history and anthropology at Girton College, Cambridge. She had early connections with the International African Institute, being one of the distinguished group of scholars whose African fieldwork was sponsored by the Institute in the 1930s (others included Meyer Fortes, Hilda Kuper, S. F. Nadel, Margaret Read and Godfrey Wilson). Her first fieldwork, among the Pondo of South Africa, took place 1931 to 1933; the other major fieldwork, among the Nyakyusa of south-west Tanzania, was done 1935 to 1938, with a re-visit in 1955. In 1935 she married Godfrey Wilson, with whom she collaborated on field studies and publications, until his death while serving in the army, in 1944

This article examines the occult powers used to obtain protection or to gain an advantage in modern competitive arenas. In Burkina Faso, these powers are widely known as wak. The discussion focuses on sporting events, an area largely neglected in the recent literature on sorcery and modernity. Unlike what is often assumed or claimed about beliefs in occult powers, it is suggested that wak acts a complement and not as the condition of an individual's talent or success.

Readers of Africa cannot fail to be interested in the reason for the proposal by the recent Committee of Experts on Slavery, which was accepted by the League Assembly last autumn, that a small permanent Slavery Commission and Bureau should be created, the more so that the subject is likely to be prominent next year when we celebrate the Centenary of the Abolition of Slavery throughout all British possessions. That great achievement was the crowning triumph of long years of untiring effort by Wilberforce, Clarkson, Fowell-Buxton, and the group of Abolitionists whom they led; the story is admirably told by Professor Coupland in his Life of Wilberforce.

In this paper I propose to describe in some detail how the particular mechanism in which I am interested in the United States is working inside the food situation, and then to go on from that to a consideration of the more general problems involved.

The United States began a nutrition campaign just before the war. It is, perhaps, an interesting example of the different effects of timing in the two countries that so many of the measures which we took in connexion with nutrition among our own people were associated with the period of the depression, and with measures of recovery from the depression. In Britain the same kind of measures have been associated with the war, and have been subsequent to the height of the British war effort; they are therefore associated with the crest of a successful war effort, whereas we associate them with the less uplifting feeling of coping with the depression.

An elaborate and exceedingly beautiful pattern of scarification is found on the stomachs of Tiv women (see Figs. 1–8). These scars are applied around the time of puberty, and the same basic pattern is placed on the stomach of each girl. Occasionally these scars are referred to as ‘the circumcision of women’, but for the most part they are said to be meaningless, having only an aesthetic significance. Such statements need not necessarily be accepted at face value, though, as deeper meanings may be forgotten, deliberately concealed, or so commonly known as to be thought unworthy of mention. It is the purpose of this paper, written by a historian of religions, rather than an anthropologist or Africanist, to explore the possibility that these patterns carry some greater importance than is commonly recognized.

Western scientific culture finds itself in a singular position with respect to the magico-religious system embodied in medieval culture from which, after strenuous resistence from the contemporary ecclesiastical authorities, it originally broke free. That is to say, it has still not succeeded in forming a theory concerning that very class of phenomena with which it was sometimes obliged violently to struggle in order to constitute itself as an autonomous discipline. And we, despite the proliferation of ethnographic and historical studies of extremely high quality, are hardly more advanced than in 1902, when Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert (1950: 138) wrote: ‘Until now the history of religions has relied on a rag-bag of vague ideas … the science of religions does not yet possess a scientific nomenclature’.

In his introductory notes to Bargery's dictionary, Westermann summarizes the early historical records of the Hausa-speaking peoples and, in particular, discusses the name ‘Hausa’ itself, without forming any theory as to its provenance. He points out that, apart from a reference to Ḥauṣiyin by Ibn Sa‘id, an Andalusian Arab writer who died in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the first reference to the word is four centuries later, in the Tarikh-es-Sudan. Ibn Sa‘id incidentally—if we are to believe Ibn Khallikan—got no nearer to the Western Sudan than Tunis, so it seems that his information was as secondhand as that of most of our other Arab authorities for the area. In the interim four centuries, though Ibn Batuta uses such names of individual Hausa chiefdoms as Kūbar (Gobir), the only generic name used was by Al Maqrizi, an Egyptian, whom Hiskett suggests got the name from some Bornu source, without knowing much about the people it referred to. This was Afnū, which is still the name used for the Hausa by the Kanuri and other related peoples of the Chad area. While making no suggestion himself as to a possible source of origin, at the end of the first section of his notes, Westermann makes reference to the conquest of Hausaland by Muhammadu Askia of Songhai, and to his ultimate repulse by Muhammadu Kanta, chief of Kebbi, in 1513.

There is a general belief among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo that when a person dies the soul of the deceased goes to live in a nether world which is beyond a river, a common belief along the Guinea Coast of West Africa. This spirit-world, known as Tsiefe to the Ewe, is believed to be divided into two units, one for those who have led exemplary lives and the other for ‘criminals’ such as witches, sorcerers and murderers. Some Ewe believe that even the ‘bad part’ of the underworld will not accept the spirit of a criminal unless a special type of ritual has been performed following death. In this case the spirit of the deceased criminal lingers on in this world, plaguing and punishing members of his family or lineage until the appropriate ceremony is performed.

The main subject of this paper is the way in which patterns of settlement and modes of working and holding land are transformed and adapted to diverse political and economic relations. The changes discussed occurred in adjustment, under British Imperial rule, between a large-scale, commercial landlord—initially a mining and trading company—and local rulers and residents in the area of the landlord's monopoly in north-eastern Botswana. Ecological conditions in the middle and high veld of Botswana are of crucial importance for the discussion, since these posed various risks and costs for the landlord, the local rulers, and the residents. I examine primarily a sequence of decisions and the locally crucial constraints that prevailed and set a course for further choices. ‘Tribal ruler’ is the generic term which I use for such political offices as ‘paramount chief’, ‘chieftain’, and also the Protectorate Administration's grade of Sub-Chief. A paramount chief or, simply, chief, is a ruler of the highest rank, having a major territory, whose authority extends over a series of subordinates, including some chieftains. Chieftains, in turn, are petty rulers over lesser territories, and in the grades of the Administration, never higher than Sub-Chief, though they may be independent and not under a chief as an administrative superior.

Though the Tsimihety tribe is the subject of three monographs by Molet (1953, 1956, 1959) and a number of papers by various authors (e.g. Mattei, 1938; Magnes, 1953), its social structure has not yet been adequately described. Indeed, there is no adequate account of the social structure of any Malagasy group, although Ottino's (1963) analysis of aspects of Vezo social structure is very illuminating. The primary aim of this paper therefore is to describe two of the major features of Tsimihety social structure—kinship and descent. As there are facets of Tsimihety kinship and descent that have some bearing on recent discussion of these topics, a secondary aim is to contribute, in a minor way, to that discussion.

In 1962 LeVine and Sangree attempted to answer the question of why some Bantu-speaking peoples in Kenya and Tanzania had adopted the age-group organization and associated rituals of their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region had not. They examined the Tiriki, who adopted the age-set system of the Kalenjin-speaking Terik, and the Gusii, who are also Bantu and who were also in close contact with the Kalenjin-speaking Kipsigis, but who did not borrow their age-group organization . The authors suppose that the age-group organization of the Kalenjin and Maasai had military functions and that their Bantu neighbours whom they attacked and defeated may have decided to copy this institution, because they would have attributed Kalenjin and Maasai success in warfare to it (LeVine and Sangree 1962:97-8).

La difficulté à appliquer le concept de diversité à la recherche empirique pourrait être atténuée par une spécificité empirique. En l'appliquant à la question particulière de savoir comment les modèles de cultures agricoles, dans une communauté au sein de l'arrière-pays de l'Ibadan, une région qui procure des vivres, ont changé dans les vingt années qui ont connues une plus grande orientation vers le marché, on peut à la fois illuminer les dynamiques agricoles et aussi exposer le concept de diversité à une critique.

Cette étude de cas au Nigéria indique que les agriculteurs individuels ont développé des modèles de production spécialisés plus balancés, mais tout en étant différent des uns des autres, si bien que la communauté entière a retenu un profile de diversité similaire à celui du passé. Les concepts et pratiques des Yoruba en ce qui concerne les individus et la diversité sociale devraient être au coeur d'une compréhension de ces modèles de changements.

La lecture est un événement social qui a lieu dans le contexte de suppositions à propos du language et du sens qui conditionnent les interprétations d'un individuel. Avant de tourner la première page d'un roman populaire, ou de regarder la première scène d'une représentation théâtrale, le ‘lecteur’ occupe toujours une position receptive qui est spécifique culturellement, et il est vraisemblable que chaque occasion d'interprétation soit inspiré par des préconceptions au sujet de la fonction de la littérature.

Le rôle des lecteurs est essentiel à la discussion des narratives populaires en Afrique de l'ouest. Les auteurs reconnaissent la participation des lecteurs à la jointe création des romans, à tel point que les histoires elles-mêmes peuvent être tansformées ou prolongées en réponse aux lettres des lecteurs. En prenant parti pour le type de personnage dont la position sociale ressemble le plus à la leur, les lecteurs sélectionnent des figures à qui ils peuvent assigner du blâme et des éloges et à travers lesquelles ils peuvent confirmer leur opinions sur les rôles domestiques des hommes et des femmes. Les lecteurs adoptent des positions interprétatives qui dépendent de la façon dont ils peuvent rattacher les personnages fictifs à leurs réserves d'opinions sur es conjoints, les ‘filles de bon-temps’, les belles-mères, les ‘vieux protecteurs’ et les prostituées.

Une perspective qui se base sur le lecteur est done essentielle pour compléter lʼanalyse littéraire ‘directe’ des narratives populaires. En effet, on pourrait dire que sans la contribution interprétative des lecteurs de l'Afrique de l'ouest la fiction populaire n'est rien. Les lecteurs ne peuvent pas être homogénéisé en une seule catégorie: pendant la lecture, des communautés distinctes et pré-constituées de ecteurs apparaissent, s'identifiant à l'histoire en tant que sujets sociaux et xtrapolant des opinions à partir du texte. Dans cet environnement réceptif, les narratives populaires prennent l'apparence de radeaux plutôt que d'épaves, évoquant et soutenant les reconstructions actives et intéressées que les lecteurs font d'euxnêmes.

Ikom, on the Cross River and with a total population of just over 7,000 in 1953, lies near the boundary between Nigeria and southern Cameroons. It has been commercially important in recent years, as was indicated, for example, by the presence there in 1953 (the date of the last fairly reliable census) of over 1,500 Ibo. But the Ibo are newcomers, and this paper is concerned with examining earlier patterns of trade as they had developed down to the nineteen-twenties. More recently the people of Ikom have derived their prosperity from the exploitation of their soil, which is eminently suitable for producing cocoa. According to a visiting soil scientist in the 1960s, there are in the locality 140 square miles of suitable cocoa land, which in fact is so plentiful that although two-thirds of it was still held in a forest reserve there was in 1966 no public pressure to have any portion released for agriculture. The affluence based on cocoa is, however, recent; the traditional path to prosperity and influence was through participation in trade, especially trade with Mamfe to the east and with Calabar on the coast, principally along the Cross River.

Les traditions unanimes des principaux groupements, qui peuplent actuellement le bas-Dahomey et le bas-Togo: Adja, Allada-nu, Ouatchi, Ewé, etc., indiquent clairement que leurs ancêtres sont venus de l'ouest, et elles permettent de localiser quatre étapes successives dans leur marche vers l'Ouest:

1. Le pays Yoruba, à Pouest du fleuve Niger, en Nigéria Anglaise.

2. La région de Kétou, au Dahomey (région située à 100 km de la mer et à 25 km à l'est du fleuve Ouémé).

3. La ville fortifiée de Tadô, au Togo (localité située à environ 100 km de la mer et à 12 km à l'est du fleuve Mono).

4. La ville fortifiée de Nuatja, au Togo (localité située à environ 90 km de la mer, sur le chemin de fer allant de Lomé à Atakpamé).

Of all the verbal art forms employed by the Tiv, such as singing, story-telling, and proverbs, the last are the most consistently used in everyday situations. Elders today often converse by means of proverbs to prevent young listeners from understanding what they are talking about, for many youngsters have not learned the use of proverbs because they have been to school or away from home for extended periods and have thus lost touch with ‘archaic’ usages.

Proverbs are employed in a variety of situations: to control activities without the use of force, as devices for shaming, for getting out of difficult situations without losing face, as a means of praise, in prophetic utterances, and as general explanations for that sphere of Tiv environment which is beyond comprehension, especially illness or ‘acts of God’.