Towards the end of every year Swazi from the Swaziland Protectorate and from beyond its borders come to the capital, the home of the Indlovukati (Queen-Mother), to take part in the dominant national ceremony, the Incwala. I will analyse this in some detail from the angle of social stratification. Cook, Schoeman, and Marwick have described the Incwala, but their accounts are very incomplete, nor can I accept their interpretations.

The Incwala can be abstracted from Swazi culture, in the same way as any other situation—a marriage, a court case, a business agreement, the building of a hut, &c., but it has a wider and more representative personnel, and Swazi recognize it as the most important of all national ceremonies, and the most essential event of the year. Personal joys and tragedies, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one affect individual men and women, but the Incwala ‘is the heavy play of all the people’.

In no other part of West Africa has the art of wood-carving flourished to such an extent as in the Yoruba country in south-western Nigeria. Even to this day, this part of Africa is still the richest field for traditional wood-carving of all descriptions, although there are signs that this art is rapidly dying out. Nevertheless, orders can still be given to carvers in some districts for the richly carved posts, the beautifully carved doors, stools, masks, and all the different items connected with the various rituals. There are, for instance, little figures or heads, trays, casks, and wooden staves for the Ifa worship, statuettes called Ibeji used in the cult of the God of the Twins, wooden stands, dancing-clubs, double axes, and other symbols used in the Shango cult, quite apart from figures depicting Shango or more frequently his priests and worshippers decorated with his emblems.

As one walks by a great river on a windy day, the surface of the water is tossed about in all directions and it is impossible to discern the flow of the current. Yet undisturbed by this superficial agitation the mighty stream rolls on. So, underlying the storm-tossed surface of present discontents there is a surge of the human spirit towards a new conception of the State as an instrument for giving practical effect to the collective will of the people.

The note on ‘Joking relationship in East Africa’ in Africa, vol. xiii, pp. 170-3, 1940, brought to my notice a custom of which I had never heard. It led me to make inquiries about utani among the Africans on my station, whom I found without exception to be ready to discuss the matter. What follows is based on the information given me in Swahili by thirty-two men belonging to the following seventeen tribes:

Yao, Ngoni, Wemba, Ngindo, Nyakyusa, Kinga, Mbunga, Ha, Sumbwa, Nyamwezi, Zaramu, Zigua, Nyiramba, Chagga, Sambaa, Bondei, and Digo.

Broadly speaking it is true to say that the Colonial Empire woke up all of a sudden, some eight years ago, to the fact that it was faced with nutritional problems of considerable magnitude. In 1936, as part of the outcome of a debate on world nutrition at Geneva in the previous September, the British Colonial Secretary asked for a report from each colony on the state of nutrition within its borders. The chorus of woe evoked by this was startling in its unanimity and showed that the little heeded scientific voices of the preceding years had after all been saying something of the greatest importance.

There is a tendency in some quarters to regard secondary industries as a panacea for all the economic ills of tropical Africa. It would be well at this initial stage to sound a note of warning. In the past, the industrialization of agricultural countries has had two results: one good, one bad. On the one hand, the establishment in a country of labour-saving machinery and large-scale production in place of the old laborious method of making things by hand has led to a rise in the general standard of living within the country in terms of real incomes. On the other hand, the drift of workers to the towns and the herding together of large numbers of people in factories resulted in the sum of social evils associated with the ‘dark satanic mills’: overcrowding, sweated labour, destitution, unemployment, and many more. The problem for tropical Africa to-day is to combine the maximum of the first and good effect with a minimum of the second evil.

For many years now Native courts have been a feature of colonial administration in British Africa. They are to be found in almost every district and they hear thousands of cases. Yet such is the confusion of thought that exists about their aims and functions that these courts have not yet made anything like the contribution to our knowledge of Native law that might have been expected.

Ozuitem is an Ibo community of approximately 7,400 individuals situated in Bende Division, Owerri Province, Southern Nigeria. This, like similar communities, is generally referred to as a ‘clan’ by government officials and this term has been crystallized in Talbot's volumes. Meek, as a result of his researches into Ibo social organization, refers to these as ‘communes’ or ‘village groups’. Throughout this study the term ‘community’ will be used to refer to Ozuitem and other similar politically autonomous and descent groups.

The Literature Bureau was originally started, in 1930, by the Education Department of Northern Nigeria, as a Translation Bureau. Its main function at first was to produce Hausa text-books for use in schools, but in the years before the war it was trying to lay the foundation of a more general literature for the Hausa-speaking people. In January 1939 a Hausa paper was started with the title Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, and an Assistant District Officer was attached to the Bureau to supervise its publication and business side. But in 1940, owing to reduction in staff, such a man could no longer be spared, and the paper had to be run without him.

With some previous knowledge of these people I had expected to ascertain on inquiry that they had a set if simple form of government and something more or less regular in their group and tribal organization, whereas I find that there is no cohesion or co-operation between groups or collections of groups, chieftainship hardly exists, and there is little or nothing in the way of a judicial system. What may have been custom seems to have been replaced to a great extent by habit and impulse, the interest of the individual is paramount to the exclusion of the good of the community—in short their mode of life, in spite of what may be said cf co-operative food quest, is the most complete expression of individualism, and any man who in astuteness and cunning, bravery and endurance, or in other similar qualities shows himself to be ahead of his fellows becomes their unacknowledged leader.

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.

Before the war local crafts and industries were already established and a certain measure of organization had, at least in the Jewish community, been started. Handwork of many varieties had been modernized, both in processes of manufacture and in design. The Bezalel school of applied arts had been remodelled, and design for metal-work, posters, and weaving was based on a thorough course of drawing from nature and a study of processes. The general tendency was towards simplicity and fine form rather than to over-decoration, and good examples of table silverware had been produced. Home industries were being encouraged both by a committee working in Tel-Aviv and by the Association of Palestine Arts and Crafts, under the direct control of the Jewish Agency.

Although the war forced plans for nutrition field research to go into cold storage, it has at the same time focused attention as never before on food production and distribution and the application of nutritional knowledge to these problems, together with greatly increased attention to the proper feeding of large bodies of people, whether our own troops of many races, labour forces, camps of refugees, internees and prisoners of war, or hospitals and other institutions. It has, however, been a period in which doing things has been much more important than writing about them, and for this reason factual detail with which to fill out this picture is not at present available. The following very incomplete notes indicate a little of what has been happening in regard to nutrition work in the British African dependencies apart from the multifarious activities indicated above.

Les documents dignes de foi que nous possédons sur le milieu humain en Afrique Équatoriale Française ont fait l'objet de travaux scientifiques, pour la plupart restreints et s'adressant souvent à des agglomérations limitées. Or, l'évolution des autochtones, les mouvements qui s'opèrent, de plus en plus amples avec le développement des moyens de transport, estompent peu à peu les traits fondamentaux des tribus. Elles formaient, il y à 50 ans à peine, des groupements distincts dont les membres, répartis sur un espace généralement bien circonscrit du territoire, étaient individualisés par des caractères secondaires spéciaux, parlaient un dialecte qui leur était propre, restant attachés à des coutumes que pratiquaient leurs ancêtres. Les notes qui suivent ne sont qu'une contribution fragmentaire à cette étude des tribus installées sur les terres de l'Afrique Équatoriale Française, elles feront peut-être ressortir certains traits bien moins connus qui pourront intéresser ceux qu'attirent l'anthropologie et la sociologie de la race noire en Afrique.

Les principes qui ont réglé et règlent encore l'enseignement que nous délivrons aux indigènes de nos colonies, ont été parfaitement définis par M. Charton, Inspecteur Général de l'Enseignement en Afrique Occidentale Française, dans plusieurs études. Je ne les reproduis donc pas si ce n'est à l'occasion de leur application. Préférant faire œuvre plus originale, je vais essayer de vous esquisser comment est distribué cet enseignement. En prenant l'exemple d'une de nos colonies, en comparant ce qui s'y fait avec ce qui se fait en d'autres territoires, puis en exposant pourquoi et en vertu de quels principes, vous aurez une vue d'ensemble de la question. Nous choisirons donc l'Afrique Équatoriale Française, dont je peux vous parler plus particulièrement puisque je viens d'y passer treize ans – et puisque M. Charton dans ses études traite de l'Afrique Occidentale Française.

Quelques mots d'abord sur la structure administrative et territoriale de l'Afrique Équatoriale Française, puisque l'organisation scolaire a dû nécessairement en tenir compte. L'Afrique Équatoriale Française se compose de quatre territoires: le Gabon, chef-lieu Libreville, le Moyen Congo, chef-lieu Brazzaville, l'Oubangui-Chari, cheflieu Bangui, et le Tchad, chef-lieu Fort-Lamy.