After an initial discussion about the nature of Sisala society and the segmentary lineage system of shrine types, I will show that fission of domestic groups in Sisala-land takes place in three successive stages: economic, residential and, much later, ritual. This paper deals with two related problems, (a) Given a collective value of kinship amity and unity (Fortes 1969: 219ff), how are groups able to break the ritual bonds which serve to unite them into one body of ancestor-venerators? (b) How are the Sisala able to maintain the ideology of kinship and unity in the face of continual fission of family units?

The Abutia Ewe form one of what the British colonial administrators dubbed the ‘traditional areas’, over one hundred of which are said to compose the Ewe people or Eweland. These Ewe traditional areas lie in the southern half of the Volta Region (in Ghana) and in southern Togo. Although much has been written about the Ewe, little is known about the political organisation of the inland areas, north of the coastal savanna. In fact, most authors have treated the Ewe as if they were thoroughly homogeneous and could be analysed as one ethnic group or one society, only acknowledging variations between the north and south, not considered significant enough to make them completely different groups (Spieth 1906; 1911; Westermann 1935; Ward 1949; Manoukian 1952; Nukunya 1969; Friedländer 1962; Asamoa 1971 amongst many others). And yet I contend that the northern areas are as distinct from the southern ones as they are from the Akan populations. As a result, none of the present available literature is particularly useful as a paradigmatic model of the northern areas' political organisation.

Most descriptions of social life in rural communities in Central Africa contain some references to hunters or hunting practices. Despite the decimation of some wildlife species by rinderpest at the turn of the last century, wildlife continued plentiful in many regions and hunting and trapping were part of the subsistence routines of males in rural areas during the first three decades of this century. During this period in Zambia, European administrators (Gouldsbury and Sheane 1911; Melland 1923; Hughes 1933), missionaries (Smith and Dale 1920), and itinerants (Lyell 1910; Letcher 1911) often interspersed their exploitative accounts of ‘sport hunting’ with descriptions of chants, rituals, magic and other hunting lore of their African associates. These accounts of local traditions, often colored with the latent assumptions of the time, apparently intrigued and fascinated their European readership then mentally riding the crest of colonial expansion and technological superiority. In subsequent decades, large wild mammals declined in numbers and in importance as a subsistence base in most rural areas. Yet information on hunting customs, gleaned incidentally in the pursuit of the researchers' major interests, has been a continuous feature of ethnographies written subsequently by social scientists (Richards 1939; White 1956; Turner 1957; Scudder 1962; Stefaniszyn 1964; Reynolds 1968) suggesting a widespread enthusiasm for hunting even where wildlife is no longer of consequence. These fortuitous bits of information on the subsistence hunter's world still leave many unresolved questions as to the function and frequency of these customs, the numbers and types of hunters in each community, and the nature of subsequent changes.

‘As theories of development, dualist interpretations have difficulty in accounting for the origin and the dynamic of a system which is, on the surface, dichotomous’. Our acceptance of a dividing line between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ sectorsin African societies and the sectoral approach to issues of development allows for the continuing dominance of dualist assumptions in all fields.With the introduction of a differentiation in scale between ‘urban centres’, ‘small urban centres’ and rural areas it appears that we are in a position where the introduction of the idea of continuity between rural and urban sectors may be accepted:

Societies in transition are often a source of controversy, as they characteristically abound in ambiguities of both form and content. Historically they represent a dramatic juxtaposition of continuity and change.

The Nharo (also known as Naron or //Aikwe) are a Khoe- (or ‘Hottentot-’) speaking people who live in the western Ghanzi district of Botswana, in the central-western Kalahari. They number about 5000 and live in small bands of eight to 40 people each. Traditionally they were hunter-gatherers, and among their closest linguistic relatives are the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe Bushmen (or San) of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, who speak dialects mutually intelligible with Nharo. The Nharo are not linguistically related to the !Kung, who live to the immediate north, but a great many aspects of their medico-religious belief system resemble those of the !Kung, and the ‘superiority’ of !Kung medicine is recognised by the Nharo and indeed by other Bushman peoples as well. The Nharo come second, with a greater spiritual and medical knowledge that the G/wikhwe and G//anakhwe, or the !Kõ, who live to the south (cf. Heinz 1975: 28-9).

In the middle of writing a paper on the ‘roots’ of the Krio of Sierra Leone my attention was drawn by a colleague to an article in a recent issue of Africa, written by David Skinner and Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, two scholars who have been doing some work on Sierra Leone (Skinner and Harrell-Bond 1977). Aware of my interest in this area my colleagues suggested that I might want to react to the article. My own views on the Krio (Wyse forthcoming) can be read when published, but I considered that a reply to this article was needed for two reasons. Firstly, the article queried the validity of the term ‘Creole’ as used in the literature to refer to a cohesive group. And since Sierra Leonean scholars have begun to favour the use of the term Krio as the more acceptable one, it is eminently desirable to bring this development to the knowledge of non-Sierra Leoneans concerned with the study of the Krio. Second and more importantly, the authors have raised certain controversial questions as to the chronological evolution of Krio society. It is suggested that there was no Krio society even before the 1940s and 1950s, and that the popular notion of a Krio society was a figment of the imagination of articulate ‘Creoles’ who felt compelled to erect an ideological framework as justification for retaining their privileged status in Freetown during the pre-Independence period. The evolution of a group of people as an identifiable social entity is inevitably open to interpretation; and we in Sierra Leone are always grateful to outsiders who point out aspects of our history that need looking into. In this particular case I do not entirely agree with the submission made by the authors, and I shall be replying to them in the course of this article.

In her lucid and persuasive Henry Myers Lecture on ‘The power of rights’ (Man, 1977), Professor La Fontaine argues that since the Gisu themselves cite transition from one status to another as the purpose of their initiation rites, this transformation cannot logically explain them. Taking up Maurice Bloch's idea that religion is concerned with inequality and hierarchy (1974; 1977), La Fontaine argues convincingly that the explanation of Gisu initiation rites lies in their functions of validating traditional knowledge and of maintaining traditional authority. The relationship between religion and political power had been noticed before but it had not previously been applied to the field of rites of passage nor had the mechanism of the supportive role of traditional knowledge been so clearly analysed.

In a large area stretching north and west from Mombasa and inland from Kenya's coast, into Kilifi District, a number of small tradin centres have come to express recent changes in the relationship of Muslims to non-Muslims. The area is generally divisible into three ecological zones, identified as fishing, farming, and cattle-herding. Until Kenya's independence in 1963 the coastal strip up to about ten miles inland fell under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Zanzibar and so was dominated by Muslims. In this coastal zone fishing was, and to a large extent still is, carried out by Muslims, and farmland was held in freehold tenure by Muslims, many of whom employed non-Muslims from the hinterland to work for them, often in exchange for the use ofsome fertile coastal land. Behind the ten-mile coastal strip, non-Muslims farmed and herded cattle on land held in customary tenure. The coastal zone was thus a Muslim stronghold, yet with many non-Muslims later identified as ‘squatters’, while the hinterland wasa non-Muslim area. Since 1963 many non-Muslim ‘squatters’have been given legal rights to the land they occupy in the coastal zone, in the form of settlement scheme plots. Non-Muslims have also, since the coastal strip ceased to fall under Muslim political control, moved into trade or house-letting in the small urban centres which have expanded or sprung up in the zone.

In a poor and densely populated country like Egypt, where most of the people are engaged in agriculture and where cultivable land is limited, first priority in any development policy is usually given to agricultural projects for the reclamation of semi-fertile lands and the construction of settlements near the newly opened up areas. A large number of such projects have been executed in Egypt in the last twenty years or so: the cultivation of large areas in the oases of Kharga and Dakhla using subterranean water and the emergence of what is presumptuously called ‘the New Valley’; the reclamation of semi-desert lands in the coastal zone in the Western Desert and the digging of a long canal to carry the much needed water for irrigation from the Nile. The inhabitants of new settlements are usually drawn from the thickly populated provinces and are selected according to age, marital status and number of children. The construction of these settlements is thought of as an effective means for relieving the overcrowded provinces of their excess population as well as developing neglected regions.

Most independent nations in Africa believe that the state is ‘the indispensable agency’ for creating the necessary conditions for rapid socio-economic transformation which will bring about a more equitable distribution of the benefits of development, especially in rural areas. But few countries are agreed on the institutional and organizational structures for bringing this about.

Urban planning cannot be conceived in isolation: rural development is also essential for solving urban problems (Trabelsi 1978). Nor can rural development be achieved without an accompanying urban development policy and both must be integrated into a framework of regional development planning, itself part of the national social development plan (Trabelsi 1979). The modern conception is of a region evolving in an organised space around at least a second order town as a pole of development.