In England, if a man wishes to get married, he must do so, in the great majority of cases, under the law of England; in Scotland under the law of Scotland. In either country he is at liberty to get married in a registrar's office or in a Christian church; if he decides upon a church, no legal consequences will follow other than those which follow from marriage in a registrar's office. If subsequently either party to the marriage wishes to raise an action arising therefrom they are at liberty to do so in the appropriate court; the court is the same court, and the law to be applied is the same law, whether they have been married in a church or in a registrar's office, whether they are Christians or not. But the court, and the law to be applied therein, differ according to whether the parties are subject to English or to Scots law. The divorce law of England is applicable to both Christians and non-Christians; neither category is prohibited by law from having recourse to it, though a convinced Christian may be so prevented by his faith and conscience. In other words, the matrimonial affairs of an Englishman or a Scotsman are governed by the civil law to which he is subject, whatever his religious beliefs.

It is a source of great pleasure to me, as it must be to all our friends here, that we are once again able to meet in an International Conference after the long years of war and its aftermath. I need not speak of what the War has meant to national welfare or the private lives of many here. But it was inevitable that it should have gravely affected the progress of the cultural studies to which this Institute is devoted, not merely because it has made so serious an interruption in their pursuit, but because it has for a time severed the international contacts and broken up the intellectual partnerships on which much of the vitality of our work depended. Even to-day, it is not easy to foresee the time when some of these partnerships can be resumed in their old form, much as we might ourselves hope that changes in national relations should not be an obstacle to association in the field of cultural studies.

The broad characteristics of the British West African colonies and their main social and economic problems are already fairly familiar from the relevant sections of Lord Hailey's African Survey (1938), and Professor Hancock's Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (1942). A recent article by Dr. M. Fortes (1945) helps to bring the analysis up to date and makes very clear how great and rapid are the changes taking place in the social and economic structure. In this present contribution, the result of a very brief study, I attempt only to underline some of the salient features as they appear to one new to the West African scene, and to estimate the problems from the point of view of sociological research.

During my travels in Western Ethiopia in 1928 I collected some linguistic and ethnographical information on the peoples locally known (in Sudan Arabic) collected some linguisticas Beni Shangul. They now inhabit the region south of the Blue Nile and east of the former Sudan province of Dar Fung. Their eastern limit in Ethiopian territory is usually indicated as the River Dabus (or Yabus); but some scattered groups of Negro tribes, probably akin to the Beni Shangul, live east of the Dabus as far as the confluence of the River Didessa with the Blue Nile.

In the first part of this article an account was given of the present situation in the British West African Colonies, of some of the problems now existing, or likely to arise, and of the contribution which might be made by sociological research to their solution.

The Mende people occupy an area of something like 10,000 square miles in the central and south-eastern part of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. Comprising nearly 70 chiefdoms, they numbered, at the time of the last official census (1931), some 580,000 persons, including about 10,000 resident in the Colony. Available statistics suggest that their numbers are on the increase, and may be in the neighbour-hood to-day of one-third of the whole population of the Protectorate, which is estimated at some 2 millions.

L'étude complète de ce vaste sujet demanderait un volume. Le but de cet article est plus modeste. Il ne veut donner qu'un aperçu de la situation actuelle de la polygamie; exposer les causes qui la maintiennent et d'autres qui la font évoluer, commenter la position que prend l'Administration à son sujet, et pour finir indiquer l'attitude des Missions à son égard.

A cause de l'usage général, nous employons le mot polygamie au lieu de polygynie. Il est cependant à noter, à l'encontre d'une opinion largement répandue, que la polyandrie existe au Congo Belge. Elle est coutumièrement organisée chez les Bashilele du Territoire des Basongo. De là elle s'est introduite dans quelques villages de leurs voisins, les Badinga.

When discussing the political development of the African it is important to ask whether in his social organization there is a sufficiently strong element of popular participation in government to form a basis for modern democratic institutions. Another question is, to what extent the present system of colonial government (which for the sake of convenience, I shall call Indirect Rule, without analysing the various meanings and application of the term) gives free play to such democratic institutions as may already exist. In this article, an attempt is made to answer these two questions, so far as they apply to Basutoland and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The position in the latter territory has recently been referred to by two writers when dealing with the second question and, as their findings were almost diametrically opposed, a detailed analysis of the position will not be out of place.

In November 1927 bands of professing Christians were found going about the Itu Division of Calabar Province, in the extreme south-east of Nigeria. Members of these bands declared that they were spirits. It was clear that although they professed Christianity, what had become uppermost in their super-excited minds were pagan ideas: of Ekpo, a disembodied spirit which takes many forms according to the belief of the Ibibio, and has many characters most of which are injurious, so much so that in the past in Calabar town a ceremony used to take place every second year to drive all the Ekpo out of the town and into the river; and of Mmeo, who are the spirits of good or evil to whom sacrifice in the form of chickens, yams, eggs, &c. is offered by the Igbo at the appropriate shrine when trouble threatens a person or place. After considerable disorder, lasting about a fortnight, order was restored by the aid of a detachment of police. Those who were arrested were put on to making a road, and this manual labour caused an almost immediate return to sanity.

There can be no single right analysis of social change. The data are so complex and our tools as yet so crude that we must expect to work with various hypotheses and many types of abstractions. Some will be better instruments of analysis than others, and we must hope that we shall be able to subsume several of these in more comprehensive and consistent bodies of ordered knowledge. I immediately distrust such works as this latest polemic of the late Professor Malinowski's which is written in the strident terms of the one-and-only orthodoxy.

It is one of the disadvantages of the division of West Africa between various colonial powers that, in many instances, tribal and language groups are cut across or artificially limited. It is not always realized that the Yoruba-speaking peoples, so numerous in Nigeria, extend beyond the frontiers of that colony. Right across the centre of what is now the French colony of Dahomey is a band of Yoruba-speaking peoples, and even in Togoland this wave continues. These are not isolated groups of traders, such as may be found in many large coastal towns, but continuous towns and villages of people who, whatever their origins, speak dialects of the Yoruba language. These peoples are often denominated ‘Nago’ on French ethnographical maps, and the use of this term has been an additional factor in obscuring their kinship in language, and also probably in race, with their Yoruba neighbours in the adjoining British colony of Nigeria. The word Nago has entered maps and official documents; frenchified as Nagot, it sometimes even takes on the ugly feminine form of Nagote.

Ata Kwasi was a young Ashanti, about twenty-one years old. He had gained the Primary School leaving certificate and shortly after leaving school got a job as a junior clerk. In March 1945 he complained of a persistent cough and was admitted to hospital where pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed. Pressure on the limited accommodation, the impossibility of a cure and his own dislike of a hospital regimen made him leave after a few weeks. The following are the letters and reports of his illness which he wrote in English to a friend during the last four months of his life. They are produced without alterations except for the deletion of place-names.

Pour bien comprendre le problème du mariage chrétien en AOF, il est nécessaire de bien situer la place de l'individu et de la femme, d'une part dans la société païenne, et d'autre part dans la société chrétienne.

La société païenne a comme élément fondamental et comme cadre, tout à la fois, la collectivité familiale patriarcale (ou matriarcale). Cette collectivité familiale n'a pas constitué son organisation en vue du bien direct et immédiat de l'individu, c'est au contraire toute l'activité de l'individu qui se trouve ordonnée en vue du bien supérieur de cette collectivité. L'individu adulte ne fonde pas une famille nouvelle qui aura sa vie propre et son indépendance, car la famille patriarcale qui l'englobe, la seule famille qui compte, existait bien avant l'individu. Elle prend son origine dans un passé lointain, plus ou moins mythologique, et son avenir est sans limite. C'est cette collectivité patriarcale qui possède seule une personnalité complète, au point d'absorber largement celle des individus, aussi peut-on dire que les individus ne sont plus que les organes ou les instruments de cette personnalité complexe. Les intérêts de la collectivité dominent les intérêts de l'individu et en cas de conflit, ce sont toujours-les intérêts de ce dernier qui sont écartés.

Many Portuguese have been brought up to dislike the term ‘policy’, owing to its having been so often misused in the course of the liberal period in our history (1820-1926); yet true it is that many others were led similarly to dislike the term ‘religion’ in consequence of its having been misused, chiefly in the period when intolerant clergy were to the fore (from the reign of Dom Manuel I, in the sixteenth century, to that of Dona Maria I, in the nineteenth century). By degrees, these terms are coming into their own again. The Portuguese politica, derived from the Greek through the Latin, has in English three equivalents— ‘politics’, the science of guiding peoples; ‘polity’, their constitution; and ‘policy’, the resulting activities. It is mainly with this last I wish to deal, viz. with Portuguese activities in the handling of colonial peoples and affairs. However, it appears to me necessary to begin with the constitutional and legal documents which determine such activities at the present day, in order to ascertain the factors which brought into being the legislation in question, the methods of applying it, and what has resulted therefrom.

French West Africa is the largest political grouping in tropical Africa, but the population is comparatively thin. In the area of nearly 1,800,000 square miles, stretching from Senegal to the Niger and Dahomey colonies, there are less than 15 million inhabitants; whereas the British colony of Nigeria has an area of roughly 370,000 square miles, but over 19 million inhabitants. Protestant missionary work is weak in French West Africa, compared with its strength in British territories, partly owing to the historic weakness of the French Reformed Churches, together with the difficulties experienced by English-speaking missionaries, which have given Protestant missions a very inferior place to Roman Catholicism.