The title of the present article is taken from a Chaha sentence given below that describes the importance of the äsät in the life of the Gurage, whose country is situated in the south-west of Addis Ababa. Indeed the äsät, or the banana-like plant, known as Ensete edulis, provides the staple food of the Gurage diet. The root, the stem of the leaves, and the trunk provide substance for bread; the leaves serve as wrapping material, as base-stands for pots, as load-carriers, and as fuel; the dried leaves are made into small plates for serving chopped meat; and the fibre serves as rope. For some of the Gurage dialects I collected as many as thirty names for the different kinds of äsät, some of these kinds being used as medicines for various forms of illness. The äsät is a frequently recurring theme in the Gurage folklore, folktales, proverbs, and riddles.

The Gambia was the last of the four English-speaking West African colonies to organize a local branch of the National Congress movement. As in Sierra Leone the local committee was dominated by ‘middle class’ Creoles, although active Muslim members included Sheikh Omar Fye, who played a leading role in local politics up to the early 1950s and was a leading spokesman of the Muslim community in Bathurst. Other Muslim members were Njagga Saar, a local carpenter; Omar Jallow, described as a ‘prominent agriculturist’; Amar Gaye Cham, vice-president of the 1923-4 local executive committee and a dealer. Creoles active in the local committee came largely from the mercantile and legal professions. Isaac J. Roberts, who was president of the 1925-6 committee, was a prominent solicitor of Sierra Leone descent. He was a merchant before going to England to read law; he practised in Bathurst and Lagos despite the loss of his eyesight which occurred during his student days in England. He represented the Gambia at the Lagos Session of the NCBWA in 1930. He died in Freetown in April 1933 at the age of eighty-two. M. S. J. Richards, one of the vice-presidents of the 1923-4 local executive committee, was a local trader; J. A. Mahoney (later Sir John Mahoney and Speaker of the Gambia House of Representatives) was formerly a government employee who later worked for the French firm C.F.A.O. as a mercantile clerk; the Hon. S. J. Forster, first president of the local committee, came from a distinguished Creole family and served for several years on the Legislative Council; J. E. Mahoney was the nephew of S. J. Forster and was also a trader. B. J. George, local secretary of the committee from 1921 to 1923, and delegate to the Freetown Session in 1923, was a commission agent; Henry M. Jones was a wealthy trader and was one of the Gambian delegates to the NCBWA London committee in 1920-1; until the 1921 slump and the depression of the 1930s, ‘Pa ’ Jones was influential in both business circles and in local politics. Other prominent Creole traders associated with the local committee were E. F. Small, delegate to the Accra Conference and the London committee; E. A. T. Nicol, E. J. C. Rendall, and E. N. Jones.

The Gurage of south-western Ethiopia possess a form of civilization which is of quite remarkable interest. Their social institutions and modes of livelihood have been well described by Dr. William A. Shack in his work The Gurage (1966). This admirable monograph has received in The Times Literary Supplement a long analytical review (Anon., 1966) couched for the most part in highly laudatory terms with which I readily identify myself. The review concentrates on the principles of Gurage mystical ideology, which is a source of great fascination and the discovery of which stands to Dr. Shack's enduring credit, but it also expresses incidentally certain reservations concerning the ethnographer's analysis of the relationship terminology. The purpose of the present notes is to take up these critical points and to isolate in the terms of social classification a formal feature which makes the Gurage of exceptional sociological interest as well.

Can an anthropologist work with evidence supplied by historical sources? Or rather, can he deal with sources written by foreigners to a culture, data so obviously different from his usual reliance on his own participant observation? The question becomes more relevant each day as more historical data are becoming available about African and Asian societies. In addition trends in theoretical anthropology require more and more diachronic evidence to test or refine existing structural or functional theories.

In June 1968, in Calgary, a small meeting of Canadian Africanists discussed two papers related to the fields of demography, sociology, and anthropology. This brought together persons from a number of fields—history, anthropology, sociology, statistics, politics—forcing those of us who were demographers to review our objectives and to rephrase them in such a way that we could communicate them to our associates from other disciplines. I had this discussion still very much in mind when I was preparing a review of a book which, although fundamental to the entire understanding of African demographic trends, may be passed over as ‘too technical’ by non-demographers. And this is merely one book to appear in 1968, a fruitful year which has seen a number of major publications in African demography. Yet it seemed possible that our enthusiasm for progress had not been shared by our colleagues, either, as had appeared the case in Calgary, because our aims were not readily apparent to other Africanists, or because little is known among these others of advances in our field. Thus, in this review-article I intend to go beyond a discussion of the books themselves, and to outline some of the problems demographers are studying, our progress to date, and some of our research strategies. In a sense this may appear to be a reiteration of the excellent survey of the field by Lorimer, Brass, and van de Walle in Lystads encyclopaedic volume, The African World. However, such has been the development of demographic studies in the last few years that some sections of their essay are now out of date.

The Aŋlo are an Ewe-speaking people who occupy the low-lying coastal area between the Volta river in Ghana and Lome, the capital of Togo. They are among the most mobile of West African peoples, Aŋlo beach seine fishing companies having for many years operated from beaches as far afield as Sierra Leone and Angola. In recent years, however, the governments of certain West African countries have ordered their removal in attempts to protect the interests of indigenous fishermen. This has meant that these companies have tended more and more to return to Ghanaian beaches, but have found that the increasing mechanization of Ghanaian coastal fishing presents a serious threat to their continued operation.