The village of Ulu lies at about latitude 10° N. between the White Nile and the Blue Nile in the southern part of the Fung area of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The surrounding country is mostly thin savannah on black cotton soil but there are occasional outcrops of laterite as at Ulu itself. Water-holes are found and may be made in the larger watercourses after these have dried up at the termination of the rainy season. The dry season is roughly December to May. The inhabitants of Ulu call themselves Fung and are black Moslems of a possibly aboriginal stock. Wandering Araboid nomads of the Mesallamia and other tribes with camels, cattle, sheep, and goats may be encountered visiting traditional grazing areas. The Fung of Ulu cultivate millet, cow-peas and sesame seed as subsistence crops and in normal times surplus is bartered with the nomads for animals and no doubt clarified butter also. A small amount of cash is obtained by the gathering of acacia gum which is disposed of through the local Arab merchant.

The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute is attempting a comparative study of the tribes of British Central Africa and of the processes of change affecting their lives to-day. Social anthropologists have been sent to tribes selected both for the variety of forms in their indigenous social organization and for the different ways in which they have been absorbed in the modern world-system. Though we, of the Institute's staff, are spread over thousands of square miles, and have had very different trainings, we have tried to collect our data on comparable bases and to study similar problems. This short symposium, which opens what we have come to consider a crucial problem, is the first-fruits of our collaboration.

Since the end of the war, the changes undergone by African society in the Belgian Congo have been a recurrent theme in colonial journals published in Belgium and in the Congo. We shall attempt to give here a brief survey of the present situation and of the problems which arise out of it, as they appear in some of these articles.

We have to start with this question: what are the different social or cultural categories into which the eleven million Africans living in the Belgian Congo can be divided? The main cleavage, which presents itself to any observer, is based on the character—tribal or otherwise—of the political institutions to which the individual is subject.

The gani ceremonial, which I propose to discuss in this paper, is not Nupe by origin but was introduced by a small group of immigrants from Bornu, Mohammedans by religion, who, between 1760 and 1770, settled in Nupe country in and around the village of Kutigi. They still call themselves, after their country of origin, Benú—the Nupe version of the name for Bornu, but are in every other respect completely Nupeized. The historical facts are reasonably certain: moreover, according to two ethnographical accounts, the people of Bornu still practise a ceremonial called gani, though from the reports it is impossible to say how far this ceremonial resembles the Nupe variant. In Nupe the gani is only practised in the few villages where the immigrants now live among the original pagan population, though there it is performed by the whole community together—immigrants and original inhabitants alike. All these facts are important and will receive attention later.

The Banyankole, who live in western Uganda, East Africa, are made up of two ethnic groups, the Baku and the Bahima. The Bairu, who number about a quarter of a million, are Bantu agriculturists. The Bahima, on the other hand, are Hamiticized negro cattle people of north African origin. Although numbering only about ten thousand, the Bahima were able, before British control, to dominate the Bairu and rule them as serfs.

We are fortunate in possessing enough good ethnographic material on Dahomey to attempt a reassessment in the light of later theoretical developments of the very interesting types of marriage reported there.

Analysis shows that three criteria are involved in the thirteen ‘types’ of marriage as given by Herskovits's Dahomean informants: (i) the method of arranging the marriage, including courtship and payment of the bride-wealth; (2) the status of the children; and (3) the relationship between man and wife—a constant which is, however, influenced by the distribution of rights and duties in regard to the children. The nature of the social groups concerned in the configuration of rights and duties connected with marriage is a point of great importance which does not appear in connexion with Herskovits's analysis of marriage; he divides these ‘types’ into a matrilineal and a patrilineal class on the basis of the status of the children. The starting-point of the following analysis is the transfer or non-transfer of puissance, or jural authority, through marriage—a criterion emphasized by Le Hérissé.

Where racial antipathies exist there is a tendency on the part of the dominant group to avoid personal contacts with the subordinate race or races. This is perhaps especially the case in the intimate relationship of marriage. The study of inter-racial marriage data may therefore provide useful indices to changes in caste and class relationships in multi-racial communities. In this paper figures are presented for racial intermarriage in the Union of South Africa since 1925, the year in which it became compulsory to state the race of the contracting parties, and suggestions are made as to possible reasons for the trends which can be observed.

The following article deals with magic medicines as used in Sukumaland, an area in Tanganyika Territory stretching from Lake Victoria approximately 120 miles to the south. The inhabitants, called by the collective name of Basukuma, are by far the biggest tribe in the territory. They are related very closely to the Banyamwezi in language and custom, and together these tribal groups comprise more than one-fifth of the territory's whole population of about 5½ millions. Because of their numerical strength alone, these related tribal groups have greatly influenced the medical and magical pseudo-science in many other areas.

The official religion in Ethiopia is Christianity, a part of the Ethiopian population are Moslems, others, called Falasha, are of Jewish faith, still others are pagans. Whatever their religious beliefs, Ethiopians have in common a belief in the spirit called zar. The name is of non-Semitic origin, probably derived from the name of the supreme divinity of the pagan Cushites, the God-Heaven called in Agau ğar, and in Sidamo languages: Kaffa yarō, Buoro darō. This ancient pagan god is regarded in christianized Abyssinia as a malevolent genius. Although the official church, Christian or Moslem, condemns the belief in zar and the practices connected with it, the current opinion is that everyone ‘has a zar’.

Les traditions unanimes des principaux groupements, qui peuplent actuellement le bas-Dahomey et le bas-Togo: Adja, Allada-nu, Ouatchi, Ewé, etc., indiquent clairement que leurs ancêtres sont venus de l'ouest, et elles permettent de localiser quatre étapes successives dans leur marche vers l'Ouest:

1. Le pays Yoruba, à Pouest du fleuve Niger, en Nigéria Anglaise.

2. La région de Kétou, au Dahomey (région située à 100 km de la mer et à 25 km à l'est du fleuve Ouémé).

3. La ville fortifiée de Tadô, au Togo (localité située à environ 100 km de la mer et à 12 km à l'est du fleuve Mono).

4. La ville fortifiée de Nuatja, au Togo (localité située à environ 90 km de la mer, sur le chemin de fer allant de Lomé à Atakpamé).

Professor Griaule's article on ‘L'Alliance cathartique’ in Africa of October 1948 raises a methodological point of considerable importance. If we wish to understand a custom or institution that we find in a particular society there are two ways of dealing with it. One is to examine the part it plays in the system or complex of customs and institutions in which it is found and the meaning that it has within this complex for the people themselves. Professor Griaule deals in this way with the custom by which the Bozo and the Dogon exchange insults with each other. He considers it as an element in a complex of customs, institutions, myths, and ideas to which the Dogon themselves refer by the term mangou. He shows us also what meaning the natives themselves attribute to this exchange of insults (p. 253). As a piece of analysis the article is admirable, and is a most important contribution to our growing knowledge of West African society.

In this short article I present some of my notes on what may broadly be called Nuer religion. It describes two important concepts of the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: biit, a curse, and cien, the vengeance of a ghost.

The curse of certain persons in Nuer society is believed to be effective if they have been wronged. If they utter curses without due cause (cuong) the curses will not harm those against whom they are uttered, but will either be ineffective or harm the speakers of them. A man curses another by uttering an invocation (lam)— which in this context is an imprecation—over, or about, him; and the Nuer distinguish different kinds of curse by reference to the relationship of the persons implicated in it—biit gwan, the curse of a father, biit nara, the curse of a maternal uncle, biit kuaara, the curse of a leopard-skin chief, and so forth. Some of these curses are regarded as weightier than others.

During the last twenty years a new chapter has been opened in the study of the Sudanic languages of West Africa by research into their tonal structure. The presence of semantic or lexical tone had long been recognized in these languages: it was known, that is to say, that words otherwise homonymous were distinguished by differences of tone pattern, and that these differences were significant for meaning. It was, however, the work of Dr. Ida Ward in Nigeria which first made clear the essential part played by tone in the grammar of some of these languages, and subsequent research has confirmed this fact.

Bolobo is situated on the River Congo, some 200 miles farther from the coast than Léopoldville, the capital. At the time of Stanley's exploratory voyage the inhabitants consisted of two main tribes: the Bobangi, who had migrated from the peninsula formed by the confluence of the Mobangi River with the main stream, and the BaMoie, who are an off-shoot of the BaMongo tribe of Coquilhatville Province. The original owners of hunting rights in this place were not residents, and there is every ground for believing that these hunters, the BaTende tribe, mixed freely with the new-comers before their tribal limits were fixed some five miles inland from the river. At present the Bobangi are very few in number and are fast disappearing. The Moie, Tende, and Sengele elements predominate, with smaller numbers of a dozen other tribes, who have come here since that time for purposes of trade or employment, completing the 7,000 residents.

The Abyssinian farming communities of the three highland provinces of Eritrea (Ḥamasên, 'Akele Gûzay, and Serawê) may be said always to have had two agencies of government: on one hand, the institutions of village society, and, on the other hand, the central government of Ethiopia, known in Eritrea as the mengiśti and comprising the military organization of the Solomonid monarch—the Nigûśe Negeśt—and the quasi-feudal establishments of his provincial governors and of the Coptic Church. To the latter of these agencies, in constitutional theory, there succeeded the Italian monarchy when the Eritrean Colony was proclaimed on 1 January 1890. Even before that date the scope of the mengiśti in Eritrean affairs had never been well defined, but had been modified or intensified as political conditions changed in the Empire generally. Thus when highland Eritrea was governed by a Bahre Negȧśê, before the Somali and Turkish invasions of the sixteenth century, the Nigûś and his nomadic Court were probably an appreciable factor in village government. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries scarcely any functions of imperial government can be traced in Eritrea, and the villages, in the words of the contemporary Abyssinologue Job Ludolf, ‘Regi Habessinorum quidem parent, sed sibimet Rectores præficiunt, ac suis legibus in modum alicuius parvæ Reipublicæ utuntur.’ During the nineteenth century political authority—which may be summarized as power to exact tribute (the strict etymological implication of mengiśti), to requisition and re-allocate land, and to beat the war-drum (kitet)–passed into the hands of mesafinti, chiefs of local peasant origin who claimed a dubious imperial sanction for the authority they had won by their arms. This phase culminated in the unsuccessful attempts of John IV (1870-89), himself a mesfin from the Tigray, partially to reorganize Eritrean village society on a feudal basis that would enable him to reassert the lapsing imperial authority. The only code of laws known in Ethiopia was the Fitha Negeśt, or Canons of the Kings, culled from Scripture, from ancient canons of the Church, and from early Byzantine statutes by a Syrian compilator of the fifth century and translated into Ethiopic in the fifteenth. The Fitha Negeśt stood until the twentieth century as the basic law of the Empire beside the Law of Moses, and was no less inept in village affairs for being highly revered by the Abyssinians.

The great mass of Zulu literature is still unwritten. It has been handed down by X word of mouth from generation to generation, and is still preserved by the people —an indestructible possession of story, legend, and song.

There are first of all the great national legends; for instance, the legend of the origin of the race. uMvelingqangi, the first man, came out of the reeds as did Moses, and he had a wife with him. These two were the Father and Mother of the race. It is not unlikely that this tradition originated from the fact that the Bantu came from the north, following the Nile to its source at the great lakes, then down the tributaries of the Zambezi, and finally reached this southern part of Africa. Colour is given to this by the tradition which says, Sehla ngesilulu (‘we came down on rafts’), thus indicating how many crossings they had to make.

Kuczynski has drawn attention to the deplorable incompleteness of censuses of colonial populations. In order to make estimates of population trends among non-literate peoples, therefore, we have to rely on the analysis of samples drawn at random from the population as a whole. The difficulties to be surmounted even for so limited an objective are considerable.