In this paper we shall be concerned with the Yoruba systems of terminology towards kin and affinal relations, as exemplified in the community of Oshogbo. Our main interest will be the extent of the correspondence between the kinship system and the nomenclature and we shall attempt to show that while terminology and behaviour are never incompatible, in certain situations the correspondences are more detailed and precise than in others.

In a previous article I described the terminology of Nyoro kinship and the associated values and patterns of behaviour. In the present paper I give a brief preliminary account of Nyoro marriage, and of the terminology, social relations and values associated with and deriving from it. I discuss also what is usually called the mother's brother-sister's son relationship, the complexities of which in Bunyoro at least can only be fully understood in an affinal context. Here, as before, I seek understanding in terms of Nyoro concepts rather than our own.

No one who has visited East Africa has come away without seeing the wood-carvings made and sold by the Kamba. Sets of salad-servers crowned by Masai or Nandi heads, figurines of warriors bearing spear and shield, and models of elephants and leopards—these are their stock-in-trade which they carry to every part of East and Central Africa, to the Rhodesias and the Sudan, the Congo, and, exceptionally, to England. Their carvings are spread on the pavement outside hotels and at the most frequented corners of the main streets or they are hawked in baskets from door to I door. Like the jewellery sold at Port Said, their carvings have an exotic but suspiciously uniform look about them and at the back of everyone's mind there lurks the suspicion that really they are all mass-produced by machines—in Birmingham, or ‘by the Indians’ or at some remote Mission station.‘We have been unable so far to come into contact with the managing body of this organized and doubtlessly machinery-using industry’, wrote an American firm anxious to buy their carvings direct from the manufacturer. The truth is that there is no managing body and no machinery. The carvings are made by hand with tools that were in common use before this century and they are sold in the first instance either by the men who carved them or, more commonly, by Kamba ‘dealers’, who may have started as carvers but who eventually have found trade more profitable than manufacture. Some of the dealers have built up a trade which yields them incomes earned by few other Africans in Kenya, and in general there has come into being, almost entirely as a consequence of Kamba enterprise, a thriving industry which provides men from one of the most barren parts of Kenya with incomes comparable to those earned in the most prosperous agricultural regions.

The specific form and function of many Anuak customs connected with competition and prestige, some of which I briefly described in the first part of this study, are to be interpreted in relation to the political structure of Anuak villages; and this I now describe, first in general outline, and later in more detail with reference to a particular village

It is a familiar fact that European rule in Africa has set in motion a radical change in African society. In some fields this has not been the result of any deliberate intention. In that of economic development, interest has generally been centred in the immediate problems of production, and the effects upon African institutions of the solutions that have been found for these have been neither planned nor even foreseen. But in the field of politics, European governments have been obliged to define their intentions towards the authorities whom they found already in existence, and here, in theory, there was a clear-cut choice from the start. Either the holders of power in the indigenous societies should be recognized, and utilized as part of an administrative structure of larger scale, or they should be disregarded–their authority be perhaps deliberately destroyed–and replaced by what M. Albert Sarraut once called ‘new and rectilinear architectures’. The British chose the first course, and this policy has now become inseparably associated with the name of Lugard. I believe that the forthcoming work by Miss Margery Perham will show that what has been called ‘Lugardism’ in the derogatory sense–I mean the insistence on maintaining traditional authority almost for its own sake–was not Lugard's own philosophy, but that of the successors who were in command during the period when he was away from Nigeria.

By the courtesy of the author and of the editor of Africa I was able to see the proofs of the above-mentioned article in order that I might prepare a reply. As Greenberg deals mainly with the subject-matter of my article ‘Comparative Masai Word List’ (Africa, xxvi. 3, pp. 281-7), I feel that I should make some brief comments on his argument and his criticisms. I shall first examine the specific points of his criticism, and shall then discuss the more important questions and facts concerning the relations of Masai (and Nilo-Hamitic) to Hamito-Semitic.

The Africanists were stirred up recently by Joseph Greenberg's Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven, 1955). Not being an Africanist myself I do not intend to express here my opinion on the validity of Greenberg's classification. Since, however, Cushitic and Semitic comparisons were injected into the discussion I wish to sound a note of caution against certain etymologies and comparisons proposed in the various studies. The Semitist will tend to be rather conservative when dealing with etymologies and comparisons. The reasons for his cautious attitude are easily understandable. He deals with languages for which he has written documents going back as far as the third millenium B.C. (as is the case of Akkadian); the investigation of some of these started hundreds of years ago. This is not so in African linguistics. The African languages came to our attention only recently and for many of them we have only scanty vocabularies at our disposal. We do not know much about the phonetic development of most of the African languages and, as a result of this situation, the Africanist finds himself sometimes comparing roots representing different stages of the language without being able to reduce them to the original form. The Semitist is in a more favourable position. Because of his knowledge of the missing links within the various linguistic groups he is able to bring back, for instance, Ennemor (Gurage) roots such as äč ‘boy’ to Semitic wld, e'ä ‘crunch’ to ḥqā, ny'ä ‘be far’ to rḥq and others, even though these derivations would seem a tour de force at first consideration. In some studies dealing with African linguistics one occasionally finds comparisons and etymologies of the above-mentioned kind, but the Africanist is often unable, through no fault of his own, to justify his comparisons because of his inadequate knowledge of the linguistic history of these languages. There is also a simple human factor. In dealing with languages stretching from the north to the south of Africa it is not always possible to be adequately acquainted with the phonetic history of the various language groups even if sufficient documentation were available. Consequently occasional inexact comparisons and etymologies are established. I am hopeful that the Africanist will not refuse the co-operation of a Semitist and an amateur Cushitist. The purpose of the present note is to rectify some comparisons of Semitic and Cushitic brought into the discussion of African linguistic classification.

Dans la société bushoong existent quatre institutions fondées sur la parenté: le clan matrilinéaire, la section de clan, la famille étendue mixte et la famille nucléaire. Cette dernière est la plus importante du point de vue des fonctions qu'elle remplit et de l'intensité des rôles sociaux qu'elle impose à ses membres. Nous décrivons ici ses caractéristiques, ses fonctions, le réseau des rôles sociaux qu'elle régit et enfin ses rapports avec les trois autres institutions citées.

The distribution of raffia cloth among the Lele raises two questions. One, mainly ethnographic, is that of the various functions served in the course of its circulation from hand to hand. In answering this, the second question arises. In some aspects raffia cloth seems to perform monetary roles. Is it to be classed as a type of primitive money? In the widest sense it seems to be an imperfect type of money, performing in a restricted manner some of the main functions of money: it acts as a store and a standard of value; it is given as payment for services and sometimes used as a medium of exchange. It is not, however, the principal, or usual, means of distribution in the economy. I hope that a discussion of the short-comings of Lele raffia as a form of money may be interesting to others working in societies which are similarly on the verge of a market economy.

The Kunda, a matrilineal Bantu people numbering about 20,000, occupy part of the Luangwa valley in the Eastern Province of Northern Rhodesia. Their country, located within the administrative district of Fort Jameson, stretches along the east bank of the Luangwa between the Lusangazi in the south and the Lukuzi in the north. Its western boundary is the Luangwa river proper; across the river a game reserve, stretching up from the Muchinga range, forms an uninhabited barrier between them and the tribes beyond the mountains. The eastern boundary is less clearly demarcated, but marches with the territory of the adjacent Cewa. To the south and north live the Nsenga and Bisa respectively. All these adjacent tribes are matrilineal.

In this paper an attempt is made to combine contemporary field work with historical data in the study of certain early currency systems of Southern Nigeria with special reference to the Rivers Province.

My historical sources for the period up to the eighteenth century are Pacheco Pereira, Dapper, and John and James Barbot, mainly the last three; for the early nineteenth century mainly Captains Adams and Bold, together with the other sources detailed in the bibliography. For ethnographical data I have had to rely on Talbot supplemented by my own work during the period 1927 to 1946; and during a period of more recent field work in the Rivers Province and Old Calabar in 1956 I was able to make a specific study of the traditional political and economic systems of the Oil Rivers Ports.

From 1953 to mid-1955 a team from the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research was investigating various problems caused by the employment of a large labour force in the plantations of the Southern Cameroons. The whole survey, which it is hoped soon to publish, covered a fairly wide field of social and economic studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine only one small aspect, somewhat outside the main field of the investigations.

The Sukuma, like many other African peoples, believe that the living and the dead are a continuous line, in which death is not an end but only a transformation within the history of the family. The lack of children means physical and spiritual extinction, since the ancestor spirits depend for their survival on remembrance in the minds of their descendants. The unity of the living and the dead is expressed in their ceremonies when ancestors are referred to by kinship terms more appropriate to the living, whereas the word for ancestor spirit (isamva; pl. masamva) is rarely used in propitiation although quite common in everyday conversation.

Some years ago the Rev. Fr. Nicolas discussed the problem of the term ‘Gurunsi’ in this journal. He argued that it should be abolished on the grounds that it was inadequate and furthermore derogatory to the tribes in question. He wrote (pp.170-1): ‘Tout un groupe de populations de la Volta Noire est désigné par un ethnique pluriel: Gourounsi, ou son singulier: Gourounga. . . . Et ce qui est le comble de l'anomalie, ces appellations . . . sont unanimement répudiées par toutes les confédérations de ce groupement, parce que toujours perçues par elles comme denigrantes sinon comme injurieuses.) A year later he again discussed the question in the Introduction to his Glossaire L'élé-Français (p. 136) : ‘. . . ce sous-groupe ne devrait pas être dit “gourounsi” car cet ethnique pluriel ne convient qu'à une seule tribu du groupe Moaya qui seule le reconnaît comme sien et le porte donc volontiers . . .’ The tribe referred to is the Nankanse, and the source of his information is Rattray. It may therefore be of some interest to discuss once more the question of the term ‘Gurunsi’ or ‘Grusi’