Hopefully there has been enough contact between humanists and social scientists in recent years and enough attempt at creating a common concern with common problems so that the one no longer entirely distrusts the cold and myopic eye of science peering into the literary intricacies of folklore and the other no longer thinks of folklore as a kind of folk entertainment, “a floating segment of culture,” which is marginal to his main concerns. I cannot speak for the humanist, though I should imagine he has learned to put up with the sometimes heavy hand of the anthropologist or political scientist for the sake of the wealth of contextual crosscultural data he gets from him. But speaking for the anthropologist, I would be surprised if there are any of us left today who would not collect what oral narrative we could, exploiting to the fullest the potentialities of such data in arriving at explanations for the workings of society and culture. We recognize well enough that folklore functions within a social and cultural context whose cultural content and social integration it both reflects and determines; We should therefore find some agreement in regarding folklore as having efficacy in human affairs - as being an agent.

That folklore is an agent of particular vitality and potential in Africa is something that can hardly be denied by those who have been there. We have evidence for this in the many extensive collections of traditional verbal art from the different quarters of that continent, and most recently we have only to mention the Herskovits collection in Dahomean Narrative. But folklore is not to be seen only as a manifestation of tribal tradition now on the wane. It must be seen as an aspect of African culture that will enjoy and suffer the greatest exploitation for the sake of the African future. This should surprise neither humanist nor social scientist for they both know well “how inviting, from its very nature the field of folklore is for those who wish to exalt national character and a national destiny.” (Herskovits, 1959: 219). We have watched it being used to these ends in countries as far removed as Ireland and Argentina, and now we see the same thing in Africa. We see, for example, how the concepts and the circumnambient mythologies of “African personality” and “negritude” depend in their expression upon authentic or reinterpreted African folklore. In the matter of migration legends alone one has only to read the work of one of the early African intellectuals to articulate these notions-Cheik Anta Diop's Nations Negres et Culture (1948)-to realize how crucial to the arguments of these cultural pan-Africanists are the migration legends of the various African peoples.

Traditional African art for the most part was more closely integrated with other aspects of life than those which might be described as purely esthetic. Art for art's sake — as a governing esthetic concept—seems not to have existed in Africa. Indeed, the more closely an art form is related to a major non-esthetic aspect of culture such as religion, the more distant it is from such separatist philosophical concepts.

In fact traditional Africati sculpture might best be described as based on a concept of art-for-life's sake. It was, in most cases, closely allied to those cultural mechanisms dedicated to the maintenance of order and well being. In short, sculpture was oriented to those social values upon which depended the sense of individual and tribal security.

These values were often formalized in exceedingly practical and commonsense terms, as is demonstrated in this Bambara prayer addressed to the ancestors:

I sacrifice this hen to you in the name of my children and myself. Protect us from all evil. Give us rain at the time the rains begin; give us a good harvest, a happy old age, women, children and the health to cultivate our fields. Do not be angry with us. We love you, we honor you. Be happy during your sojourn in Lehara, the realm of the invisible. (Kjersmeier 1935: 15).

It is a time-worn cliché that music is an important constituent element of African culture closely associated and integrated with the daily living of the African—a cliché that would not merit repetition here were it not for the fact that this statement has rarely been applied to political activities in African societies. Ethnographers and ethnomusicologists have reported the music and the music making of various tribes in relation to religion, the “rites de passage,” agriculture, work, and social life, but the use of music as an agent of political expression has received scant attention.

In a pioneer study of African music von Hornbostel wrote: “In the life of so-called primitive man, and especially of the African Negroes, music and dance have quite different and incomparably greater significance than with us. … Music is neither reproduction (of a ‘piece of music’ as an existing object) nor production (of a new object), it is the life of a living spirit working within those who dance and sing” (Hornbostel 1928: 32). The spirit animating all Africans today is one of independence from colonialism, freedom, and nationalism. In a paper pregnant with ideas and suggestions for new approaches in the study of African music, William Bascom has written: “It is my belief that we would better understand change in political beliefs if we knew more about the way in which music, the dance, or any other forms of traditional behavior develop, and of how they are modified by the outside influences with which they are brought in contact.” (Bascom 1959: 7) It is the purpose of this paper to examine and assess the function and role of African music in contemporary political movements with special attention to the repertory of songs.

I am delighted with the manner in which these three papers have dealt with the social and political relevance of sculpture, folklore, and music. This is no startlingly new discovery. It has been recognized before by those interested in the arts, but it has been largely ignored by those who specialize in social and political studies. The contributors to this panel are to be congratulated for their documentation of this function of the arts, and our chairman deserves special recognition for this attempt to bring it to the attention of those who so often overlook it.

The panelists have stressed the lessons to be learned by the social scientists, but I wonder if there is not one for the humanists as well. The fact that artists are often rebels against the status quo is a truism in our society, but the significance of the arts as a medium of social and political action, and of change, is often ignored although similar examples can be found in Africa today as well as in the history of other societies.

Where does this leave our conventional definitions of art as aesthetic expression, as creativity, as “art for art's sake,” as concern with form for its own sake, or as elaboration beyond the point of utility? All these, I fear, underevaluate the socio-political utility of art which these papers have demonstrated in their different fields.

In discussing these three papers as they relate to history, it is an essential starting point to realize that the discipline of history is changing and has changed considerably in the last quarter century. History began as an account of the great deeds of our own ancestors, a record of the past that was essentially a backward extension of our own group personality. It long ago outgrew its concern with our tribal past and came to be concerned with the past of other peoples who share our Western culture. More recently, historians have become increasingly concerned with the past of other cultures as well. Some remnants of the older historical tradition are still around, but broadly speaking history now can be defined as the study of change in human society.

With this shifting focus inside the discipline itself, some of the barriers that used to surround history have also begun to disappear. One of these barriers was a distinction between history and pre-history, made according to the kind of evidence that each used. Historians worked with documentary evidence, leaving the pre-historians to worry with the kind of problem that could be solved only through the combined use of archaeology, oral tradition, linguistic evidence, and the like. In African history no such distinction is possible, and it is now generally abandoned. Documentary evidence about the history of Africa south of the Sahara begins about the ninth century, but it has to be used alongside non-documentary evidence. Documentary evidence, used by itself, only begins to tell the whole story when we come to the twentieth century, and even here it overlaps with the oral evidence of people still alive. African history is thus dominantly a history based on mixed data. The old line between history and pre-history is no longer useful, and the Journal of African History recognized this fact when, for convenience, it set a new division between history and pre-history at the beginning of the Iron Age — a date which will, of course, be somewhat different for different parts of Africa.

The study of Africa has helped to further several healthy trends in the development of the discipline of political science. Confrontation with the rich variety of structural forms and modes of human expression of contemporary Africa has compelled the political analyst to look beyond the narrow “political” realm and conventional “political” structures for a more complete understanding and explanation of political phenomena. This African impact upon the discipline has come at a most propitious time—a time of intensive self-criticism from which at least three new emphases in research are beginning to emerge. One is the holistic approach reflected in efforts to classify and to compare political systems as wholes. A second approach, obviously related to the first but independently pursued by its proponents, is an ever-increasing explicit concern with non-political factors (e. g., the family, voluntary associations, the economic system, the social stratification system, cultural values, and so forth) as they may be related to and effect the political system and political behavior. Here, the impact of other disciplines, and particularly sociology, anthropology and psychology, is clearly manifest not only in the type of data gathered but in such neologisms as “political socialization” and “political acculturation.”

Carving, raffia weaving, and appliqueing are the main art forms of the northern Anang of Calabar Province, Nigeria. A great variety of carved and woven objects is produced by numerous Anang artisans, many of whom exhibit a high order of talent, especially when creating artifacts for traditional (rather than tourist) usage. Unfortunately, the appliqueing of funeral cloths for ritualistic purposes is a rapidly disappearing art, while the painting of funeral murals to serve the same end, which preceded and for a time was practiced concurrently with appliqueing, has disappeared altogether.

Both-carvers and weavers serve the nineteen Anang voluntary associations, of which seven are religious groups, five are social, five are orchestral, and two are dramatic. Four of the associations employ wooden masks, four raffia masks and costumes, and two wooden puppets, and all utilize an assortment of minor carved and woven articles produced by professional artisans. This paper will be concerned with the use of wooden masks, puppets, and figurines by one of the drama associations——in plays which are presented to amuse audiences by ridiculing the motives and actions of well-known individuals and groups. All of the Anang associations have social control functions as regards their membership or the larger community, or both, but , through its system of rules governing the behavior of members and through its plays acted by humans and puppets, exerts the broadest measure of social control of any association-over individuals, kinship and political groups, other associations, and even the missions and, at one time, the colonial government.