Between 1900 and 1940 the establishment of French colonial administration and the introduction of cash crop agriculture led to far-reaching social and economic changes among the Diola of Boulouf, in southwestern Senegal. Also during this period, the Muslim religion began to attract converts in Boulouf. The growth of urban migration and trade, together with the sale of peanuts as a cash crop, brought a degree of financial autonomy to the young men who participated in these activities. Many of these individuals converted to Islam to achieve status not accessible to them in the traditional social structure.

During the 1930s a series of natural calamities afflicted Diola society. The cumulative effect of these disasters and of continuing social and economic change, was to promote a sense of loss of power over their world among the Diola. This led, in turn, to a great acceleration in the rate of religious conversion. By the beginning of World War II, a majority of the Diola of Boulouf had become Muslim.

The 220 thousand Diola are the largest ethnic group in the Lower Casamance region of southwestern Senegal. Sedentary rice farmers, they have a social organization comprising shallow patrilineages three or four generations deep. The 40 thousand people of Boulouf, the region north of the Casamance River, west of the administrative center of Bignona, and south of the Diouloulou marigot, are a subgroup with distinctive dialect and cultural traits. They inhabit twenty-one villages numbering from six hundred to six thousand persons; each community in turn contains two or more semi-autonomous wards. In southern Boulouf there is a sizeable Catholic population; northern Boulouf is, however, 95 percent Muslim. The Islamic area constitutes the subject of this study.

The inability of most African states to find a political norm compatible with the exigencies of independence is by now a truism. The inherent lack of political order on the continent and the common recourse to political violence have been the subject of much debate among scholars and observers of African political events. Within the general framework of instability, it is apparent that there are many differences in political occurrences in seemingly colonial-inherited and weak frameworks, and a proliferation of internal variations within each state which derive from the differential impact of values and norms nurtured on the sub-national or the traditional level. These phenomena have pointed forcefully to the need to approach the study of African political processes in African terms. Indeed, the Africanization of the study of politics on the continent may perhaps be a vital precondition for the understanding of the contemporary African political scene.

The quest for African explanations for political events has, unlike parallel efforts in other disciplines, been far from smooth. Justifiably, attention was first focused on the examination of continuities and discontinuities in the political history of given areas. Such essentially micro-research efforts, while exciting in that they have uncovered new empirical data and provided important insights into the complexity of traditional African political life, are nevertheless problematic because the patterns of political thought and organization that they trace are not easily transferred to the macro level. The purpose of this paper is to isolate basic political culture constructs prevalent in the pre-colonial period in an attempt to conceptualize, in African terms, some contemporary political occurrences on the macro as well as the micro level. Two basic assumptions lie at the core of this undertaking: first, that traditional political culture models (herein defined as those general political orientations and specific political values that dictate patterns of political behavior and institutional growth) provide paradigms for political organization and action in Africa today; and second, that by examining the interaction of the concrete articulators of the various political culture models, it is possible to determine some of the main factors underlying the dynamics of political behavior in independent Africa.

Primary among the criticisms that third-world scholars and “radical” social scientists have directed against applied social sciences in general and social anthropology in particular has been their alleged failures to study the colonial context in which much of its field work has been carried out (Cf. Asad, 1975; Lewis, 1973, for examples.) Although these critics usually exaggerate their arguments and typically do not prove that early scholars were either overt or covert racists, it is true, nonetheless, that social scientists have paid relatively little attention to the colonial milieu, Condominas's (1973) preterrain.

A number of scholars, including Pitt (1976) and Stavenhagen (1971), have urged that social scientists “study upwards” in order to discover the social and cultural foundations of the colonizing agency in the contact situation which determine its motivations and constrain its actions. Failure to do so entails serious theoretical and methodological consequences because it both narrows the range of societies among which we are able to make comparisons and masks a course of systematic bias. Although I have been deeply concerned with the problem of systematic bias (Salamone, 1976a, b), in this paper I address the issue of describing and analyzing a colonial society, of “studying up.” The reason is quite simple. It is necessary to know the nature of a systematic source of bias before deciding on whether and how to control it.

This article focuses upon the history of the Lambya kingdom, a small polity in Chitipa District, which forms the northernmost tip of the modern Republic of Malawi. It was a small political unit but nevertheless historically important because its inhabitants belong to a larger cluster of peoples hereafter referred to as the Ngulube group, which comprises Safwa, Bena, Kinga, Nyakyusa and Ndali of southern Tanzania and the Sukwa and Ngonde of Malawi. Ideally the traditions of all these peoples should be correlated for a fuller understanding of what constitutes one historical area. The article discusses four main themes: the problem of sources, the establishment of the Lambya state, its relations with its neighbors and its early territorial expansion.

Ulambya, as the country of the Lambya is called, covers an area of 367 square miles and has a population of roughly 20 thousand people with an average density of 36 persons per square mile, the largest concentration being in the more fertile valleys of Kaseye, and the Songwe (Stobbs and Young, 1972: 40; Young and Brown, 1972: 30). The Lambya share a border to the north with the Ndali of Tanzania and the Nyiha on the west with the Namwanga of Zambia, on the south with the Fungwe, Tambo and the Tumbuka-speaking peoples of Mwenewenya, and on the east with the Sukwa. The Lambya are worthy of attention for a number of reasons. Ulambya is one of the oldest states in the area and the dating of its regnal list should assist in the problem of working out a chronology of the Ngulube group. A study of the Lambya should also contribute to an understanding of the problems that attended the early development of small polities and give the Lambya a proper place in the early history of the wider zone.

Although philosophers do not accept that education has intrinsic values or that it serves instrumental ends (Dewey, 1966; Peters, 1967; Gribble, 1969), most people would readily agree that it can be put to several uses and that it fulfills diverse functions. If by education we mean the aggregate of skills, values, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for the self-perpetuation of a society, it is easy to see its instrumental extensions, philosophers notwithstanding. Hence in every society that we know of today—under whatever form of government—much faith is placed on education as a panacea of all social evils. One of the tasks that education has been assigned in Africa is to forge national consciousness out of a myriad of ethnic particularities. From all indications, it has not been a success.

Statistical studies of the relationship between formal education and political integration in Africa have generally painted a grim picture. In their study of six nations—involving university students from Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Zaire (then the Congo)—Klineberg and Zavalloni (1965) found that national consciousness was very low, particularly in Nigeria. To the question “What are you?” 56 percent of the Igbos and 60 percent of the Yorubas replied in terms of ethnic references. The Yorubas disliked the Igbos more than the Igbos disliked them (74 percent Yorubas as opposed to 59 percent Igbos), and a Yoruba in Nigeria felt closer to a Yoruba in Benin (then Dahomey) than to a non-Yoruba in Nigeria.

One of the most consequential recent developments in Africa is its rapid rate of urbanization. Over much of the continent, there is a movement from rural areas to urban centers and towns (Hanna and Hanna, 1971). There has been some social science research on this process (Caldwell, 1969; Mabogunje, 1968; Ross, 1975). Additional case studies reflecting original empirical research are essential to social scientists attempting to interpret the nature of the concomitant social and political change. Data generated by such empirical research are also needed by policy makers struggling to fashion policy strategies responsive to the changing urban needs.

On this most rapidly urbanizing continent, one of the countries with the highest rates of rural to urban migration is Botswana. Between 1971 and 1975, its capital, Gaborone, experienced an annual population growth rate of almost 15 percent. In December 1975, the Department of Statistics of the University College of Botswana conducted a major survey of migrants in Gaborone. In this article, we will report and discuss significant survey findings concerning the demographic and social characteristics of migrants, their motives for migrating, places of origin, the disposition of new arrivals in town, and the continuing pattern of rural urban linkages.

In 1966, at the time of independence, Botswana, about the size of France or Kenya, had only three “modern” towns with a combined population of around twenty thousand people. Gaborone, a small tribal village and colonial administrative center, was selected in 1964 as the site for the new capital which previously had been Mafeking, South Africa. Nearly all of the present population are migrants to the new town.

As Zambia's Second National Development Plan gradually comes to an end and the country prepares to embark on its Third National Development Plan (hereafter TNDP), in January 1979 both the regime members and policy planners will more than ever before be confronted with the ominous task of matching intentions with performance. A major impetus for this rethinking of development strategy has been the product of a single fact: the strikingly poor performance of the rural sector during the period of the First (1966-1971) and Second National Development Plans (1972-76) (hereafter FNDP and SNDP). Despite the impressive record of economic growth rate achieved since independence in 1964 and despite the ostensible concern of the national leadership for rural development, the rural masses continue to be socially and economically the most relatively deprived social group in Zambian society.

Aside from the issue of relative deprivation, other aspects of the poor performance of the rural sector are also discernible. For instance, not only did the anticipated integration or linkages between agricultural production and modern industry envisaged in the FNDP and SNDP (Republic of Zambia, 1966: 1971a) fail to materialize, but also the attraction of the high urban wage structure and mobility opportunities induced large-scale migration of relatively well educated and enterprising individuals to the urban centers. Thus, while 80 percent of the Zambian population lived in the rural areas in 1963, in 1969 it was 71 percent, and in 1974 it was further reduced to 65.5 percent. In direct proportion to the decline in rural population, the urban population has grown from 20 percent in 1963 to 29 percent in 1969 and 34.5 in 1974. Whereas the average annual population growth rate of Zambia's urban centers was 8.9 percent between 1963 and 1974, the average annual growth rate of the rural population was barely 0.5 percent. In 1977 the population of the urban centers stood at 38.5 percent (Central Statistical Office 1975; 1977). Aside from the issue of chronic under-utilization of migrant labor, massive unemployment has also been one of the most serious developmental problems posed to the Zambian regime.