In much modern West African literature in English and French the authors depict problems concerning the relationship between the socio-cultural background and the particular experiences and behaviour of the characters portrayed. Investigation and analysis of such stories to ascertain the authors' ‘solutions’ of the characters' problems can aid our understanding of values and attitudes among modern Africans and in turn contribute to the growing corpus of knowledge about culture contact. As Cyprian Ekwensi, the Nigerian novelist, has claimed: ‘African writing is writing which reveals the psychology of the African.’ Obviously it reveals the psychology of both the author and the characters whom he portrays, and even though stories are written by individuals who are ‘modern’ Africans, strong opposition to any consideration of African literature as individualistic ‘art for art's sake’ has been manifested by Africans, including the Society of Nigerian Authors in their reply to Martin Tucker's 1962 argument that African novelists are over-communal and insufficiently individualistic in what they portray. In making such a response, the Nigerian authors in effect reasserted a traditional African attitude towards art as socially functional rather than merely aesthetically pleasing. One is thus justified in pursuing the study of modern literary works by Africans as expressions of attitudes and values related to tradition, contact, and change.

The anthropomorphic brass staff of the Yoruba Ogboni Society—the edan Ogboni—holds a position of isolation and aesthetic distinction within the Yoruba plastic. Whereas traditional wood-carving is humanistic in its identification with life, is spontaneous, descriptive, and experimental in idiom, Ogboni art is iconic—archetypal, hieratic, and conservative, a manifestation of eternal principle. Where the formal theme of Yoruba carving is abstract, dynamic, architectonic, Ogboni art is absolute, static, and linear. Frequently the edan Ogboni is little more than high relief—a non-sculptural projection of drawing in wax. Though art associated with Orisha is often religious it is not generally held to contain a spirit, and is never worshipped as a spirit. Orisha art is most typically symbolic of the spirit, where Ogboni art, in contrast, is sacred and worshipped as the actual vessel of the spirit. This difference in function, besides affecting the resulting form, determines the attitude of the artist to the object rendered. Yoruba wood-carving is therefore free to be naturalistic and spontaneous, where Ogboni art is rigidly traditional and conservative.

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.

The structure of the Yoruba cosmos is broadly evident in their creation myth and can be discerned as presupposed behind many other myths, praise songs of the gods, and other symbolic utterances. These formulations help us, too, to construct a more detailed model of this cosmos than is available in any single mythical form. A model worked out from these sources is preferable methodologically to one derived from interrogating informants to get at their personal ideas and formulations, because these myths and liturgical expressions are relatively permanent features of Yoruba culture and are the materials for informants' constructs. Furthermore, it is not on intellectual grounds that myths survive and one must therefore beware of jockeying informants into making untypical intellectual abstractions from them and then using these abstractions as one's main primary source material. However interesting in themselves their own attempts at a generalized statement of the cosmos may be, informants can better be used to clarify over-condensed or allusive passages in myths and to check one's own interpretations, and again, to supply evidence for the details of the analysis through, for instance, their assertions about the locations of the various gods, spirits, and the ancestors.

L'étude d'un système familial postule l'inventaire et l'analyse des termes par lesquels les personnes apparentées s'appellent ou se désignent. Une investigation de cet ordre engage l'ethnographe (et son lecteur) sur des chemins arides, mais elle a chance d'aboutir aux distinctions pertinentes qu'une société donnée met en œuvre dans son mode de vie familiale. Notre propos se limite ici à rechercher de telles distinctions dans le cadre de Boum Kabir, village tchadien habité par 900 Goula Iro.