Ashanti customary law, in common with the law of other branches of the Akan people, recognizes a form of oral will, or rather a form of inchoate gift that takes effect on death. This is called saman-nse, saman being an ancestral spirit and nse (or nseε) meaning a formal or solemn declaration; di nse, for example, means to take an oath as a witness does in court. This is the derivation accepted in Ashanti and, with all respect to Rattray's great knowledge, he is in error if he suggests the root is sie, to put, preserve, take care of. His contemptuous rejection of phonetic spelling makes it a little uncertain what sound he meant to record, but on linguistic grounds it is clear the word is not sie. The second a of saman is not modified; the use of a final eε instead of e in certain positions in a sentence is common in Ashanti; and the corresponding Fante forms are saman-nsew, dzi nsew, and sie.

The report of the Commission of Enquiry set up to investigate the protection of secondary industries in Southern Rhodesia, published in 1946, produced statistical evidence to show that output per head was considerably lower than in any other Commonwealth country. The figures quoted refer to 1938, but there is little evidence of any marked advance in African productivity since that date. Only in isolated instances is native labour today working to the full satisfaction of its European management and, as a general rule, Government officials and industrial or commercial employers are unanimous in their condemnation of African inefficiency. Many of these opinions are founded upon race prejudice or ignorance of industrial history, but there is, nevertheless, ample evidence in the form of high absentee rates, rapid labour turnover and an almost complete failure of normal incentives to produce increased productivity, to indicate that something is radically wrong in the industrial field.

East London is a rapidly growing port with a population of about 85,000 persons of all races, situated on the south-east coast of Africa. It is the city nearest to the largest Native Reserve in the Union, the Transkei, and hence uniquely situated in respect of its Native labour supply. It was a centre for the urban sociological studies of Professor Monica Wilson in her 1936 acculturation research, and more recently for a series of socio-economic studies by the author as an employee of the Municipality in 1949-50. An historical study of African settlement in the City, and of the relationship of Africans to the European controlled municipal council is presented here.

Everywhere in West Africa contact with Western economy has brought changes in the technology of the indigenous people; today, side by side with the old man chipping away at a block of wood, making an image or a mask, and the weaver with his horizontal loom producing yard upon yard of narrow cloth strips to be sewn together into huge, flowing robes, sit the tailor making khaki shorts on his treadle sewing-machine and the carpenter nailing together planks for doors and window frames. In the traditional craft industries a father hands on his knowledge and skill to his sons; thus some crafts become the preserve of certain lineages. The sudden impact of the new technology did not give the craftsmen an opportunity to adapt their work to the new machines and tools; new men were recruited who had never been craftsmen and thus today the numerous tailors, carpenters, builders, and their like are not related to their fellow workers by blood ties; but, independent as these workers may appear, they are usually united to their fellow craftsmen by bonds of economic agreement whereby their work is strictly regulated. This study will attempt to describe the organization of the traditional crafts in some Yoruba towns and to show how the new crafts have formed guild organizations which preserve many of the functions of the older craft organization, but have a structure based not upon the lineage but upon the territorial divisions of society.

Among the Wambugwe of Tanganyika, when a person dies a member of the same lineage is designated to take his place in the kinship structure. The substitute assumes most of the kinship relations of the dead person and also, in the case of a married person, his affinal relations. This well-integrated institution has the function of restoring to surviving relatives the loss that attends death: parents have a lost child replaced, children a lost parent, and a married person a lost spouse. So far as I know, this institution has not been previously reported in such organized form for an African society or from elsewhere in the world; though most of its features, taken separately, are found in other societies. These include rules for the inheritance of property, for succession to social position, and for preferential marriage of widows; principles of guardianship for orphans; and adoption customs. All of these are organized in the single institution described in this paper.

Bien que la description suivante soit basée sur un cas précis, observé en 1952 dans un campement des immigrés guerzé installés depuis des années dans le pays kono, aux environs du village de Bakoré (canton de Lola), son schéma correspond en grandes lignes au mécanisme coutumier local général.

Lord Lugard, in a good deal of his action as well as in his speaking and writing around the turn of our present century and later, gave prominence and helped to give progressive formulation to an idea which had not then been nearly so clearly seen, accepted, or practised as it has been in certain quarters since.

This idea may be paraphrased by saying that a balance should be maintained in colonial relationships between the good resulting for the colonial peoples and that accruing to the governing peoples.

Those who read in Gulliver's ‘Karamojong Cluster’ that the Iteso are socially and culturally divided from the rest of the Teso Dialect Cluster, may not realize how closely many of their customs resemble those of other members of the Cluster. In fact all the six main social or cultural features which Gulliver enumerates as common to the Karamojong Cluster are common also to the Iteso.

There are no such people, any more than there were such people as the Philistines.

In ‘L'origine du nom Fulani’, I showed that the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Fulani’ come from a common root F-L which in the Indo-European languages means ‘foreigner, stranger, alien’ and, by a secondary meaning, ‘inferior’. Consequently there is no single group of people represented by the word ‘Philistine’ any more than there can be any special group represented by the word ‘Foreigner’. Such names are coined on the well-known principles of ethnocentrism, whereby one calls one's own group ‘The Men’ and all others ‘Outsiders’. Thus Meek writes that the Bachama tribe, Northern Nigeria ‘. . . call themselves the Gboare or Men, a term which is doubtless the same as Gbari (the name of a large tribe in the Niger and Zaria provinces), Bari (in Eastern Sudan) and Ka-Bwari (Tanganyika). The root gba = man is also found in the Upper Ituri regions of Central Africa under the form mu-gba or ba-gba.’

This study of a specific instance of culture contact, that provided by the situation of West African students in Britain, is limited to a discussion and analysis of their association in the West African Students' Union. The fact of common geographical origin partly explains the formation of such a Union, for the same reason as United States, Canadian, South African, and other large groups of students living in Britain have become so organized. But this would ignore the situation of colour prejudice facing coloured students in Britain, and also their colonial status in relation to Britain. Because of this determining characteristic of being an association of coloured colonial students, the West African Students' Union has developed, throughout its history, certain features not normally found among students' unions, and which are reminiscent of ‘protest movements’. The analysis which is presented here seeks to determine the reasons why West African students organized themselves into the West African Students' Union from 1926 onwards. It is unfortunately not possible to do more here than touch briefly upon the major changes which took place during that time, but as most of the data here presented have not hitherto been published, enough details have been included to give an idea of the manner in which members of the West African Students' Union responded to the situation of culture contact. The paper is divided into two parts: first, an historical account of the type of ideas held by the members of the Union; and, secondly, a discussion of the reasons why West African students join the Union.