The camel-herding peoples described in our last article differ considerably from the cattle-breeding tribes now to be discussed. Not only do the pastoralists mentioned in Section V accord to the camel the leading position as their standard of value, the ass, sheep, and goat being only of secondary importance, but they are also different in race. Like all herdsmen they have a strong pride of ancestry, which has led to internal gradations of rank, crossed by considerations of wealth. The North African Berber tribes are, however, Mohammedans, and therefore the whole structure of their civilization is different from that of the mainly ‘heathen’ cattle-breeders to be considered below. Their great natural gifts and their connexion with Islam set them apart from most of the remaining inhabitants of Africa ; on the other hand conditions of existence in desert and steppe, combined with specialization in pastoral life, have prevented their uniting to form large states or similar organizations.

In countries where conditions favour the preservation of manuscripts and books, the survival value of much of the literature may not be directly related to its popularity. Unpopular works may remain neglected for long periods and then regain favour; but in the conditions which have prevailed in East Africa, only those literary works receiving the continued favour of the people have had any chance of survival at all. There have been no library stacks, no dry cupboards or shelves for storing manuscripts, but only the white ant and the damp. The love of the Swahili people for a good poem has been the means of retaining much valuable work that would otherwise have been lost. Even so, much more has been lost to posterity than has been preserved.

Under this title Mr. A. W. Cardinall has prepared a review of conditions in the Gold Coast in 1931 as compared with those of 1921, using figures and facts collected by him as Chief Census Officer, and adding an historical, ethnographical, and sociological survey of the people of that country. Accompanying the review is a volume of appendices containing comparative returns and general statistics of the 1931 census. Both books are printed by the Government Printer, Accra, and are obtainable through the Crown Agents for the Colonies.

This contribution examines the truck stop on the desert track known as the Forty Days Road that connects the Sudanese capital with Darfur and the regions beyond. The truck stop is represented as the main roadside institution to regulate roadside sociality, channel the relationships between travelling and roadside folk, and generally mediate between residents and strangers. On the one hand, it serves as a gateway to small-town Sudan and the hinterland, providing the social infrastructure for the commercial flow of trucks, commodities and passengers as well as for the flow of news and fashions. On the other hand, by catering for the needs of passing truck drivers and other travellers, it operates as a safe haven. It provides shelter in the most comprehensive sense of the word and thus constitutes a protected place for recovering from the pains of travelling. At the same time, however, these roadside practices of brokerage and hospitality also serve the resident society of small-town Sudan as a means to keep the travelling strangers safely apart in a circumscribed domain and, thus, keep the influences from the road in quarantine.

In this article I give an account of some features and forms of sacrifices among the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It is intended to fill a gap in a series of articles designed to cover various aspects of the religion of this people. The central act of Nuer religious ritual is sacrifice, and all their sacrifices have this in common, that they are a means of making contact with spiritual beings. Those of which I speak more particularly in this article have further in common that they are made when a misfortune has happened or threatens and with the purpose of propitiating whatever spiritual being is responsible for it, though the sense of propitiation may be more marked in some sacrifices than in others and may combine with other elements in various configurations of meaning.

The Ashanti Nation was a federation of Akan tribes united in 1697 under the Golden Stool. This federation, while functioning effectively in war, was loose with regard to internal administration. The chiefs of the constituent tribes had very wide autonomy, and a tendency to assert their independence from the Asantehene at Kumasi.

The British occupied neighbouring territory on the Gold Coast and were primarily interested in trade. For trade to prosper it was necessary to have order in the area. There were two policies which would have made this possible: the British could have supported the power of the Asantehene, who would then have been sufficiently strong to keep his constituent tribes in order, or it could have taken the entire region under its protection and enforced peace among the tribes.

Among the Edo tribes which inhabit the Benin Province of Southern Nigeria are found in each village men corresponding to the old medieval troubadours, the repositories of the stories and legends of the past. They are not, of course, peculiar to the Edo tribes, but are found in most African societies. Sometimes these persons are the elders of the village, sometimes the telling of the tales is left to the young men, who amuse themselves and their friends by relating fables of the Aesop variety, or by describing with a wealth of pantomime and gesture some event round which a mass of legendary detail has arisen. The narration holds the audience enthralled, though most of the tales will be familiar, and the eloquence of the teller receives instant appreciation. The various actions described are imitated, and onomatopoeic sounds are freely used. Any misfortune to the characters of the story, particularly if caused by the tricks of the ‘villain’, draws forth roars of laughter, and any magical or mysterious happening elicits a chorus of grunts and exclamations of surprise.

For Kalanga of Southern Rhodesia hereditary guardian spirits known as mazenge are a sanction on correct relations among kinsmen and affines. Only women are possessed by these captious guardian spirits; and I shall refer to such spirit-possessed women as mazenge hosts. Kalanga perform a ritual of atonement seasonally and whenever the illness of the host or of any of her kinsfolk, particularly children, is attributed to the affliction of a guardian spirit. Ritual obligations then draw together a congregation typically not of agnates and other cognates alone, but also of affines.

Much recent research has been concerned with obtaining an acceptable definition of the terms ‘leader ’and ‘leadership’ to provide a basis for a theory of leadership. Some results have been achieved in the study of leadership in the ‘face-to-face’group. It is when large-scale social movements are involved that the techniques of the sociogram and personality tests, which have been the main tools of analysis in the ‘face-to-face’ studies, are not sufficient, and the investigator has to employ the institutional analysis, which places the individual aspect of leadership in a secondary position.

L'aurès, le massif montagneux le plus élevé de l'Algérie, est situé à l'est de la grande trouée de Biskra, au nord du chott Melghir, à l'ouest de la grande dorsale tunisienne et au sud des plateaux de Constantine. C'est une région naturelle très nette, où un groupe berbère important est resté peu arabisé et encore moins européanisé.

Five years ago I happened to be passing through the Wurkun district of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria and used the opportunity to make some ethnographical inquiries. The people of the district, who are located on the north bank of the Benue River opposite Lau, had been described by Mrs. Temple (in her Notes on the Tribes of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, compiled from official records) under the generic term of ‘Wurkum’, as though they constituted a homogeneous tribal unit. But from my inquiries it appeared that the term Wurkun (not Wurkum) merely meant ‘the people of the hills’, and included seven distinct groups of diverse origin, some speaking Bantu languages and some Sudanic. Notes and vocabularies were obtained for each group, but in this paper a short description of one of the groups only, viz. the (Ba-) Kulũ, can be given.

The Ewe-speaking people live in the southern part of the Volta Region (Ghana) and Togo. They dwell in nucleated settlements (villages) of substantial sizes (varying from a few hundred to 16,000 inhabitants in Keta, their largest town). A group of such villages (from as few as one—hardly a group!—to as many as 116 in Anlo) form a larger entity dubbed ‘traditional area’ or ‘Division’ by the British colonial administrators. These Divisions were defined as ‘the groups of villages acknowledging a common fiaga or otherwise-titled Paramount Chief', and there are over one hundred of them in the whole of Eweland. The prevailing ethnographic and administrative opinion has been to equate these Divisions or ‘traditional areas’ with the precolonial Ewe sovereign political groups.

In a previous article on the Shilluk I discussed the laws of homicide and the legal and ritual functions of the reth or King. An interpretation of Shilluk law and authority is not easy because, apart from early contacts with the peoples of the northern Sudan, they have been subjected to external influences and some kind of Government since the early years of the last century. These contacts began with cursory and not altogether happy encounters with the Turco-Egyptian Government which were followed by the establishment of a provincial headquarters at Kodok in 1867 under the authority of a mudir; later came the turbulent and dismal years of the Mahdia and finally the occupation by the present Government in 1898. It would be idle to suppose that the political system of the Shilluk has remained unaffected by these influences. The Shilluk are by reputation an exceptionally conservative people and certainly the effects of their relations with outsiders are, to the casual observer, hard to detect. Profound changes have taken place none the less, especially in the sphere of customary law, and these changes are undoubtedly gathering momentum.

Ashanti customary law, in common with the law of other branches of the Akan people, recognizes a form of oral will, or rather a form of inchoate gift that takes effect on death. This is called saman-nse, saman being an ancestral spirit and nse (or nseε) meaning a formal or solemn declaration; di nse, for example, means to take an oath as a witness does in court. This is the derivation accepted in Ashanti and, with all respect to Rattray's great knowledge, he is in error if he suggests the root is sie, to put, preserve, take care of. His contemptuous rejection of phonetic spelling makes it a little uncertain what sound he meant to record, but on linguistic grounds it is clear the word is not sie. The second a of saman is not modified; the use of a final eε instead of e in certain positions in a sentence is common in Ashanti; and the corresponding Fante forms are saman-nsew, dzi nsew, and sie.

Over a period of some fifteen years I carried out ethnographic studies in north-eastern Uganda, firstly of the Kalenjin peoples on and around Mount Elgon, and subsequently of the Sor, a small mountain community of Karamoja.

The earlier study formed the basis of a thesis on the Sebei of Mount Elgon and lasted for ten years, during which time I was based near Kampala and made intermittent journeys to spend two to three weeks at a time in different parts of the Mount Elgon and western Kenya region.

Depuis 1948 la population du village côdier de Mumford a doublé, et endix anssa flotille de peche est passée du canëoe à la voile aux bateaux à moteur hors–bord suivis de bateaux de pêche même. Cet article examine quatre questions: premièrement, les changements de la technologie de la pêche; deuxièmement, une analyse des changementset des continuités des structures de production et dela possession des moyens de production. Troisièmement il fourni une discussion sur la maniere dont I'économie locale a été incorporee dans l'économie capitaliste à titre officiel du Ghana, et il considère quelques unes des réactions a cette incorporation. Finalement, il examine certainesimplications socio–economiques cles pour la societe deMumford, tels que l'endettement, l'organisation sociale, une baisse du niveau d'alphabetisation et une conscience sociale en changement.

The basic features of the political processes among the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria are well documented. The most striking element of the system is its decentralization. Margery Perham wrote thirty years ago that ‘it is almost impossible to imagine a wider diffusion of authority’ than one finds in Ibo society (Perham, 1937, p. 234). When a decision affecting an Ibo community is to be made, several groups and organizations concern themselves with the issue and within each organization near unanimity must be reached before discussion can be closed. Participation is on such a broad scale that most traditional meetings have no chairman or central direction, take no votes, permit more than one person to speak at a time, have no agenda, and continue for long periods. A decision reached by one organization within a community that is not acceptable to another organization can usually not be implemented. Margaret Green writes: ‘Ibo democracy works through a number of juxtaposed groups and a system of checks and balances rather than on a unitary or hierarchical principle’ (Green, 1947, p. 145).