The concept of the mythical charter, validating claims to ritual or political authority, is a familiar one to social anthropologists, although, due to a better understanding of the interaction of myth and history, there has been a tendency in recent years to speak of the ‘historical’ rather than the ‘mythical’ charter. Those who use such terms are not primarily interested in the charter as evidence of a system of ideas, worth studying for its own sake. Their emphasis is on the function of the charter, rather than on its meaning. However, a brilliant lead has been given in the exploration of myths as systems of ideas by Claude Lévi-Strauss who places a given text within the whole corpus of oral literature proper to a society. Going, perhaps, further than this, Victor Turner corrects the predominantly literary approach of Lévi-Strauss by his examination of the ‘positional meaning’ of the symbols employed by such texts—a meaning derived from a totality of elements, rites, and institutions within a whole culture.

In the Bampanasi Stool House of the Oyoko royals of Ashanti, now at Breman on the outskirts of Kumasi, ten black stools are preserved, arranged as shown in Fig. 1. There is also a bell representing the famous Golden Stool of Ashanti, which is regarded as the black stool of its first king, Nana Osei Tutu. I am grateful to the Asantehene, Nana Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II for permitting photographs of these stools to be taken, and for the invaluable information he has provided about them. The black stools are of historical importance, in that they commemorate the reigns of several of the Ashanti kings. They are also of great social significance, enshrining the patriotic sentiments of the people and serving as a bond between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. This bond is the very essence of Akan culture.

This study is based on data collected as part of a series of demographic surveys conducted in 1961–2 in different parts of the Sudan. The primary aim of the surveys was to study fertility differentials in the country.

The study of marriage patterns, however, is a prerequisite for any serious investigation of fertility especially in a country like the Sudan where birth control, as understood in countries of the West European type, is almost unknown.

In his classic study of African Independent Churches in South Africa, Sundkler distinguishes two main groups. To the first belong the Ethiopian Churches, that is, Independent African Churches which have split off from European Mission Churches because they resented being administered by Europeans, yet did not want to alter church organization and religious teaching. In the second group belong the Zionist Churches which, as Sundkler writes, are theologically ‘a syncretistic Bantu movement with healing, speaking with tongues, purification rites and taboos as the main expression of their faith’. Sundkler states, however, that these categories are not exclusive, because ‘some Zionist Churches are gradually becoming more and more “Ethiopian” in ideology and behaviour.’

It is not uncommon in West Africa for lineage heads and chiefs in patrilineally organized societies to retain important bridewealth rights in their daughters or marriage wards and their descendants. My own field-work, on which this paper is based, was done among the Bangwa, a Bamileke group of the Cameroons. The Bamileke have been described as practising a special form of marriage, known as ngkap marriage. The principle is simple: a girl is given in marriage without transfer of bridewealth from her husband; as a result, the marriages of the daughters of this union are arranged by their maternal grandfather, who becomes known as their tangkap (ta ngkap = father [of bride] wealth). In ‘ngkap marriage’, unlike marriage with normal bridewealth transfers between a husband and his wife's kin, husbands only obtain rights in uxorem (in the woman as a wife) and not rights in genetricem (in the woman as a mother). If the tangkap continues to give his wards in marriage without receiving bridewealth from their suitors, he continually increases his capital stock of marriage wards. Chiefs among the Bamileke, heads of large polygynous compounds, give daughters and wards to their impecunious subjects, sons, and servants who cannot afford the marriage payments. Hurault estimated that in one chief-dom with a population of approximately 20,000, the chief had 1,500 female wards and was linked, through ngkap marriage, to the majority of his subjects. On a lower level lineage heads are able to increase the size of patrilineages through ngkap marriage, since wards and their children are incorporated into the group of their tangkap, not that of their father.

The !Kung Bushmen whose medicine dance is described in this paper live in the interior of the Nyae Nyae region in South West Africa. The observations were made in the years 1951–61, in the course of five expeditions. The bands with which expedition members had the closest and most prolonged contact were those that the author numbered 1-7, 9, 10, and 12 on the map (Fig. 1). The present study is concerned principally with the people in those bands, who numbered, in all, 225 persons. The information gathered from informants was obtained for the most part in 1952–3, when twelve consecutive months were spent in the Nyae Nyae region.

Les Nyende, population agricole au nord-ouest du Dahomey, appartiennent au groupe des langues voltaïques. Leur nombre est d'environ 12.000. Ils sont divisés en dix-neuf clans dont les traditions orales et les coutumes actuelles révèlent des origines assez diverses. Pour des raisons historiques, géographiques ou rituelles certains d'entre eux se sont alliés, de sorte qu'ils se regardent mutuellement comme frères, ce qui, dans l'une ou l'autre de ces alliances, va jusqu'à la reconnaissance de la loi de l'exogamie. Avant le regroupement imposé par le régime Maga (1960), la répartition territoriale correspondait en majeure partie à la division clanique. A côté du chef de terre (uteŋ-yenɔ ou ussɔ-hadɔ) dont l'autorité est pratiquement limitée aujourd'hui au domaine rituel, et du vieux du lignage (ukwiεmɔ), il y a, depuis le temps des Français, le chef de village (ukwatɔ) qui, sous l'autorité du chef d'arrondissement, s'occupe des taxes et d'autres affaires d'administration locale.

Dakar en 1965 offre l'image d'une grande ville, impression que corroborent les données chiffrées: 500.000 habitants, ensemble industriel qui groupe une centaine d'entreprises et 20.000 salariés, trafic portuaire de 2.000.000 de tonnes, administration ne comptant pas moins de 30.000 fonctionnaires. L'urbanisation y est relativement ancienne puisque la création de la ville date du milieu du siècle dernier; de surcroît une longue tradition de relations et d'échanges ont mis en contact de longue date les populations de la Presqu'île avec l'Europe par l'intermédiaire de Gorée et du trafic négrier et avec les anciens royaumes intérieurs du Sine et du Cayor.

The Sandawe of central Tanzania speak a click language which shows no relationship with the languages of their Bantu-speaking neighbours, nor with any of the other non-Bantu languages in the neighbourhood; rather, it may be remotely related to the Khoisan languages of South Africa, in particular to Nama Hottentot. Physically the Sandawe differ to a degree from their neighbours, and their closest affinities may again be with Hottentot peoples. Sandawe material culture also differs to a degree from the cultures of their neighbours; like them, the Sandawe have an economy which largely depends on cattle-keeping and horticulture, but it is less sophisticated and their reliance on food-gathering and hunting is still considerably greater. Considering this difference in background it would be not at all surprising if their system of beliefs also showed differences. Comparisons cannot yet be profitably made, however, because little has so far been published about Sandawe religion, except a paper by van de Kimmenade and some details which can be found in the writings of Dempwolff and Bagshawe. In his ethnographic survey Huntingford draws our attention to the lack of knowledge of Sandawe religious beliefs, pointing out that these have been imperfectly recorded; yet he recognizes that the moon (láb′so or !áoso) and the sun (//′akásu) occupy a central position in Sandawe religion, which he summarizes as follows:

It appears that the sun and the moon are regarded as supreme beings, and that propitiatory sacrifices are made to the ancestral spirits who can do both good and evil to mankind.

It is generally understood that Swahili is the official national language of the Republic of Tanzania. Perhaps because the concept of a national language has never been clearly defined within the Tanzanian context, there is some misunderstanding in the minds of many Tanzanian citizens as to the factual linguistic situation in their country. Certainly at the time when the country became independent and Swahili was first proclaimed a national language, it was proclaimed as such in opposition to English. The original intention was eventually to replace the language of the former colonial rulers, English, with Swahili. Comments by responsible African writers support this original intention. For example, Professor Ali Mazrui in an article published as recently as 1967 commented on the comparatively mild and smooth conclusion of British colonial rule and contrasted this with the anti-British language policy in Tanganyika after independence. ‘While Kenya had a violent anti-British insurrection and Uganda had its moments of rioting and boycotting against this or that aspect of British rule, the nationalist movement in colonial Tanganyika sometimes seemed to be almost Anglophile. Yet that old Anglophile Tanganyika has now become, in the area of language policy, anti-English’.

Given that one is attempting to collect information as an academic observer among a people other than one's own, the data on many aspects of that society presented in standard ethnographic analyses must inevitably be thin and inadequate by the current standards of the social sciences. This situation tends to make for a one-sided approach. With a paucity of material at one's disposal, there is an overwhelming tendency to stress the analysis of ‘norms’ (and the more abstract ‘structures’ based upon them) since verbal statements of ‘expected behaviour’ are often more easily gathered than observations of ‘actual’ transactions. On this level, too, the limited number of one's respondents can be bolstered up by resort to linguistic parallels (‘from one informant you can analyse a language’) or by the comforting assumption, nourished by much sociological theory, that simpler societies are more ‘homogeneous’.