The relationship between the living and the dead looms large in Africa, but the study of such interactions is notoriously fraught with pitfalls and perhaps only now are we equipped with a valid conceptual framework to enable us to deal adequately with the problems posed by ancestor worship and by the various spirits of the dead in Africa. Fortes (1965: 16—20; 122—142) first gave us a comparative framework of ancestor worship in Africa but part of his conceptualization has been recently questioned by Kopytoff (1971) who argues that the distinction between elders and ancestors is not as clear cut as our own implicit dichotomy would seem to imply. However, his argument, stressing a continuity between the living and the dead, leaves out the fact that elders, when they die, very often become ancestor spirits and, even if they do not become such, take on new qualities and new powers that are different in nature from those they held when alive (Brain 1973; Sangree 1974).

The aim of the essay is to highlight gaps in existing knowledge of African women and bring to light new queries. The argument being presented is that African women assert their individuality by exploring the options available within their respective societies. While it is unsafe to generalize about Africa, the dominance of men in the public, especially the political and ritual spheres, is well illustrated by ethnographies on Africa. Women are on the whole invisible or shadowy figures except in a handful of ethnographies that take a woman's perspective (for example, Leith-Ross, 1939; Kaberry, 1952; and Paulme (ed.), 1963). The ideology of male dominance is taken for granted as representative of the true state of affairs between men and women in Africa. Whereas every researcher probably knows that ideologies are not realities, somehow that knowledge becomes insignificant when dealing with African societies.

Towns and cities throughout modern Africa have witnessed the emergence of prestige and status groups, principally as consequence of newly developing wage earning opportunities for educated Africans. Like African townsmen almost everywhere, urban Ethiopians now engage in, or aspire to occupations as skilled specialists which carry altogether new social prestige. Old values associated with traditional labour undertakings have undergone adjustment and modification. Because changing patterns of urban social relationships develop in large measure from the diverse ways Ethiopians, or other Africans, make a living, studies of the ranking of occupations by their social prestige value have been suggested as a useful approach to understanding the nature of the urban system of social stratification, on the one hand, and to providing a baseline for determining indices of social change, on the other.

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.

This paper is an examination of the dynamics of the kanyalangkafo, a cross-cultural fertility association. It first examines the changing economic and social environment of the Mandinka to clarify the factors relevant to the spread and acceptance of the fertility association.

The second part of the paper describes the history and organization of the association.

In the last part of the paper, the activities of the association and the ritually inverted sexual behaviour of its members are analyzed. Social integration is shown to be brought about in the presence of and partly because of the association and its activities. The integrative results include the manner in which the association organizes women and the social environment within which associational behaviour occurs. Models stemming from analyses of ritually inverted sexual behaviour are found to be generally supported by data from the Mandinka case.

Among the traditional patrilineal Zulu of South Africa, women are more often associated with mystical experiences than men. While on the one hand, as daughters or sisters, women may be associated with the positive mystical forces as diviners, on the other hand, as mothers or wives, women are often related to the negative polluting mystical forces. It is the logic behind these notions that I want to examine in this article.

The demographic transition which occurred in the West before 1900 has been attributed to the practice of delayed marriage and a significant degree of celibacy (Hajnal, 1953; 1965). In Eastern Europe where this transition occurred much later, the nuptiality patterns have been associated with historical differences in control over the nuclear family by the extended family unit (Sklar, 1974). Sklar has noted that in the late marrying Czech, Baltic, and Polish provinces, nuclear families had long been residentially and economically separate from the wider kingroup, while in the early marrying Balkans, nuclear families were intertwined with ramified kin networks.

There are two ways of approaching the data on African ancestor worship. They can be dealt with as a system of beliefs viz., as a body of thought, or they may be handled as a reflection of social relations. African ancestor worship has most commonly been dealt with in the latter fashion, e.g. Fortes (1959: 30) says:

the ancestor cult is the transportation to the religious plane of the relationships of parents and children; and that is what I mean by describing it as the ritualisation of filial piety.

One problem that besets students of society is how best to combine a study of change through time, with emphasis on the flow of time, and the detailed analysis of relationships; how to write a social history with sufficient detail on all the aspects of relationships—economic, legal, ritual, ideological—to satisfy the anthropologist. Static models are too far from reality to be useful, but how can one create a model that moves? The difficulty consists first, in discovering the relevant facts and second, in integrating them into an intelligible account.

Spatial mobility is one of the most striking characteristics of Hausa history and society. The Hausa provide us with an opportunity for exploring a number of emic categories of spatial mobility, including migration, and the cultural content and values which they attach to these categories. As Spradley has recently suggested, in order to achieve an integration of the anthropological study of migration, we need ‘systematic ethnography which seeks to describe the emics of spatial mobility and … discussion of native categories for spatial movement (as well as) a systematic attempt to discover their definitions of migration’ (Spradley 1973 : 546). To achieve a cultural analysis of a category of migration in this spirit, this paper will concentrate on what the Hausa call yawon Dandi, ‘the walk of Dandi’ ,yawon duniya, ‘the walk of the world’, or yawon bariki, ‘the walk to the barracks’, terms used interchangeably by my informants. This category most typically comes into play when a migrant seeks liberation from social constraints, and it has played a significant part in the formation of the Hausa diaspora.

In a recent paper Beidelman (1974: 235—249) has argued cogently for a more systematic study of missions on the part of students of colonial societies and has indicated, in a preliminary fashion, several analytical themes which might provide a general theoretical framework for such a study. The present paper is not offered as a comment on Beidelman's overall scheme but has a somewhat narrower focus, addressing itself to two aspects of missionary study mentioned by that author: the contradictions in missionizing and the nature of colonial society. Given the preliminary nature and schematic intent of Beidelman's paper it is understandable that the connections between these aspects are not made explicit. One of our tasks, therefore, will be to show how the contradictions revealed in the practice of missionizing relate to the kind of society in which missions typically operate. Like Beidelman, we illustrate our argument with references to the work of an African mission, in this case the Wesleyan Methodist mission in southern Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast).

Islam did not originate the idea or the practice of slavery, but it does admit, and in certain specific instances it enacts, the institution of slavery and establishes it upon firm legal and social foundations. The Sharī'ah, i.e. Islamic Law, takes a panoramic view of slavery in human societies and arrives at a cogent statement of slavery as a state endorsed by Divine Law. According to the legal authorities, the original condition of the race of Adam is freedom, but for their security one of two things is necessary: the religion of Islam, or the protection of the Muslim territory. This protection can be obtained by non-Muslims only on the condition of submission and since it is the duty of all men to embrace Islam this submission is incumbent on all non-Muslims. It is implied by this that non-Muslims (but not necessarily the ‘people of the book’, ahl al-kitāb) may have a state of war declared upon them by Muslims, and in the ensuing conflict captives may be taken. In the eyes of the Law unsubmitting non-Muslims are regarded as enemies (ḥurūb) living in dār al-ḥarb, i.e. the abode of warfare. They are judged to have refused the necessary conditions of freedom, i.e. submission to Islam or protection of the Muslim territory (dār al-Islām), and consequently they have forfeited the protection which would have secured for them the original freedom of the race of Adam.