The Tiv, a semi-Bantu people numbering some 800,000 who live in the middle Benue Valley of Northern Nigeria, have not, according to their tradition, always lived in their present location. They account for their entrance into the territory they now occupy and the disposition of the lineages into which they are organized by means of stories which depict events of their migrations.

Tiv from every part of Tivland know bits and pieces of myth, relevant to their own lineages and those nearby, which they consider to be parts of the story of their descent (msen) from the hills. The stories vary from area to area, from individual to individual, and from situation to situation. In spite of the fact that the size of the population and its wide dispersal militate against anyone's knowing all these stories, it is an article of Tiv faith that it would be possible to correlate them all into a narrative.

Full descriptions of the kinship terminology of the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria are rare. One important reason for this is that, although the basic principles of kinship organization are similar over much of the Ibo culture area, terminology reflects, on the one hand, the extreme degree of dialect variation and, on the other hand, local variation in details of the kinship organization itself. Such variations occur sometimes over a very few miles. Certainly there is no single Ibo kinship terminology; there is only in a broad sense one southern Ibo terminology; while the area which can be said to have one terminology in the narrowest sense of an absolute identity of every term is often very restricted. Although this situation may be confusing to the investigator, it is not necessarily so to the Ibo. Every Ibo is conversant with kinship terms within and often far beyond the radius in which he may seek a wife, just as he is aware of dialectal variations in any other field of terminology. Thus it is that terminology in the literature has tended sometimes to be dialectally eclectic as well as incomplete. The growing body of publications in Ibo, both in the Onitsha and the Central dialects, also illustrates this tendency when kinship relationships are mentioned. It would therefore seem to be worth while to record one specific system of terminology in detail, within the social context of its area.

The Lugbara are a Sudanic-speaking people of the Nile-Congo divide and number 242,000, of whom two-thirds live in north-western Uganda and the remainder in the adjoining area of the Belgian Congo. Their political system is a segmentary one, with no form of centralized political authority. There is a system of polysegmentary patrilineages, the largest series of which are the exogamous units. Within the territorial section associated with the agnatic core provided by such a lineage there is, or was, the obligation to settle disputes by discussion between the parties concerned so that feud was avoided, and it was only between these sections that a permanent state of hostility could exist. Each of these territorial sections consists on an average of some 4,000 people living in an area of some twenty-five square miles. They, the largest of the groups called suru by Lugbara, and which I refer to as maximal sections based on maximal lineages, are the largest political units of the system. Like the three levels of segmentation within them, they bear specific names, most of which are found in all parts of Lugbara. I call these names clan-names.

The village-group of Nike occupies an area of some 200 square miles to the immediate north-east of Enugu, capital of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. It comprises 24 villages with a total population of 9,600, a figure which gives the average density of the group as 48 per square mile—one of the lowest in Ibo country.

Traditions in neighbouring groups, as well as in Nike itself, affirm that before the advent of the British Administration the people of Nike were the principal slave-traders in northern Ibo-land. The first mention of the group in the history of colonial Nigeria appears in an account submitted by the Assistant District Officer, Obubra, of some exploratory journeys undertaken amongst the northern Ibo in the year 1905. Remarking, with the true empire-builder's sang-froid, that ‘the whole area seems relatively quiet and well-disposed…cannibalism and human sacrifice are more or less general’, the officer encloses an interesting sketch-map of the north-eastern section of Ibo-land which shows the Nike group to have been the main trading cross-roads of the whole of this area.

In recent years the question of Ghana has acquired new importance for two reasons: firstly, the recent excavations made at Koumbi Saleh in Southern Mauritania, the most probable site of the medieval Western Sudan capital and, secondly, the belief expressed by some Gold Coast authors that the Akan are descended from the ancient Ghana people. This paper is mainly concerned with the first of these.

One of the most obvious social situations in the middle Benue Valley is the expansion in all directions of the Tiv, who number some 800,000 and are the largest pagan tribe in Northern Nigeria. One of the most puzzling aspects of Tiv expansion has been that, although it is obviously connected in many areas with land shortage and accompanying economic factors, it is precisely in those areas in which land shortage is least severe that the rate of migration appears to be most rapid.

Centrifugal expansion is intimately associated with the social and political structure of the Tiv people—is, in fact, a facet of it. In order to analyse this association, and incidentally to explain the paradox of the rate of expansion, it is necessary to divide the movement into two sorts: expansion and disjunction. Expansion refers to that type of movement which leads to the enlargement in area of a lineage's territory. It may eventually lead to a change in geographical location of the lineage territory; it does not affect the over-all juxtaposition of lineage areas. Disjunction, on the other hand, characteristically brings about a separation of groups in space and affects not only the geographical position of a lineage territory, but also the juxtaposition of lineage territories.

The first section of this article will set forth briefly the relationship between movements of lineages, territorial organization, and the structure of political lineages. The second section will examine expansion; the third, disjunction. The fourth will show that the two types of migration are both present in all parts of the country, and that it is the primacy of one or the other which gives rise to an apparent difference in rate of migration.

Les Hamba appartiennent à la grande ethnie mongo du Congo belge. Étroitement apparentés aux Tetela, avec lesquels ils traversèrent le Lomami, ils habitant une zone forestière englobant le nord-ouest du Territoire de Katako-Kombe et la partie centrale du Territoire de Lomela. Les communautés indepéndantes qu'ils ont constituées, sont toutes dépourvues d'autorité centrale. Je séjournai principalement chez les Djumbusanga (Secteur Otitu, Territoire de Katako-Kombe). Cette communauté compte environ 2.600 âmes, réparties en 14 villages. Quatre lignages patrilinéaires, dont la profondeur généalogique varie de 8 à 10 générations, sont issus de l'ancêtre éponyme Djumbusanga; nous les appellerons lignages maximaux. Étudions brièvement le processus de fragmentation de l'un de ceux-ci, le lignage maximal Nanalungu. A l'ancêtre Nanalungu se rattachent quatre lignages secondaires; deux de ceux-ci forment aujourd'hui chacun un village, les deux autres composent une seule agglomeration. Mais le groupe residentiel correspondait jadis a une division plus petite du lignage maximal, placée sous l'autorité théorique de l'aîné investi, c'est à dire du successeur en ligne paternelle de l'ancêtre fondateur. II ne constituait guère plus qu'un hameau. Nous appellerons ces anciennes unités résidentielles ‘lignages minimaux’. Il faut souligner qu'aucune des divisions de la grande ‘famille’ Djumbusanga, que nous isolons pour les besoins de l'analyse, n'est désignée par un nom particulier. Un groupe de descendance patrilinéaire, quel qu'il soit, est un ‘ventre’ (otema). Dans le lignage maximal Nanalungu, les lignages issus du même ancêtre immediat se sont groupés il y a quelques années, à l'instigation de l'Administration, désireuse de traiter avec des groupes humains plus denses. Ces lignages minimaux présentent aujourd'hui une profondeur généalogique variant de cinq à huit générations. Normalement le lignage se développe sans cesse par scissiparité. L'autorité de l'aîné investi (nkum'ekanga) dans le lignage minimal est trés lâche.

The purpose of this study is to present a comparative analysis of men's age-group (or age-set) systems in Africa, and to determine: (a) some of the main structural differences between the various age-set systems; and (b) the conditions (or the types of societies) in which the different systems arise and the functions they fulfil. For reasons of space the material is presented summarily, no full description, nor a complete inventory of age sets, being included.

Si la pénétration europdénne dans un monde organisé à l'échelle du village et de la tribu a modifié profondemént les sociétés africaines, on ne peut dire que les Noirs en soient arrivés à un stade d'évolution où ils sauraient mettre seuls leur pays en valeur selon les techniques modernes: ils ont encore besoin d'un encadrement de Blancs pour exploiter le sol ou le sous-sol. Les centres mécanisés de production minière, forestière, agricole, où divers groupes ethniques vivent et travaillent côte à côte, sont appelés à devenir des facteurs d'unification du pays, d'éducation de ses habitants et d'élévation de leur niveau de vie dans la mesure où les entreprises feront bénéficier leurs salariés, et l'Etat ses ressortissants, d'un équipement adéquat dans tous les domaines.

The Makua, with their neighbours the Mwera and Makonde, form the most north-easterly extension of the great belt of matrilineal peoples stretching eastward from the Congo through Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia to Mozambique and South Tanganyika. They have been little studied, either by anthropologist or linguist, and the scanty literature, none of it later than 1930, reflects the passing impressions of travellers rather than the careful recordings of scientists.

This paper attempts to relate some types of sanctions and some agencies of social control to their structural background. When the analysis has been made the interrelation may appear self-evident. This may simply mean that we recognize that a certain type of social structure is a condition of the operation of a certain type of sanctions. The study of these interrelations may enable us to gain a better understanding of both sanctions and structure.

Le territoire occupé par les Ba-pende forme une bande de largeur variable de la Lutshima au Kasaï entre le 5° et le 6,30° latitude sud, chevauchant le cours d'une série d'affluents du Kasaï dont le Kwilu et la Loange. Comme l'indique la carte ci-jointe, cette bande chevauche même la Lutshima à son confluent avec le Kwilu. Quelques milliers de Ba-pende y forment sur la rive gauche une poussière de petites chefferies.

Much recent research has been concerned with obtaining an acceptable definition of the terms ‘leader ’and ‘leadership’ to provide a basis for a theory of leadership. Some results have been achieved in the study of leadership in the ‘face-to-face’group. It is when large-scale social movements are involved that the techniques of the sociogram and personality tests, which have been the main tools of analysis in the ‘face-to-face’ studies, are not sufficient, and the investigator has to employ the institutional analysis, which places the individual aspect of leadership in a secondary position.

Most people are vaguely aware that the characteristic feature of African music is its rhythms. Some would say with the late Professor Hornbostel of Berlin that ‘it is syncopated past comprehension’; others would claim that any competent Western musician could reproduce African rhythms. Does the truth lie with either of these views or does it lie somewhere between them ? It is time we knew what Africans really do: and it is the purpose of this paper to give some account of the bases of their musical practice.

Three is, so far as I know, no published account of the nominal class system of the Gurma group of languages. This group, which belongs, in Delafosse's classification, to the Voltaic family and, according to Westermann and Bryan, to the Gur languages, was discussed by Bertho but he did not give an outline of the nominal class system. He says, ‘Les Kokombas ou Konkombas se disent originaires de la région située à l'Ouest de l'Oti. Il se donnent à eux-mêmes le nom de Kpakpamba. Leur dialecte à préfixes-suffixes tient le milieu entre le gourma et le bassari-tshamba, dialectes qui possèdent également les préfixes-suffixes.’ Nor does Westermann in his account of Akasele give a class system for that language.

Les Agni, dont nous examinerons ci-dessous l'organisation sociale, peuplent dans l'Est de la Côte d'Ivoire tout le bassin de la Comoë, depuis le 8e degré de latitude Nord jusqu'à la Côte. C'est une zone de la forêt tropicale où la forme primaire, d'ailleurs, a presque disparu, remplacée par la forêt secondaire, tandis que de grandes superficies sont plantées en cacao et café, Ia richesse du pays.