A Previous article (Lux, 1971) dealing with the network of visits between rural wage-earners and their kinsfolk in Western Congo, presented a first set of findings collected during field-work conducted in July 1966 among a stratified random sample of 268 workers in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe. One-third of them are employed in the plantations, and two-thirds in the industrial, mainly wood-processing, sector of seven generally big enterprises. Some of these workers live in Lukula, a small town of 10,000 people, others in rural company camps. They are thus to a large extent rural industrial wage-earners. Many of them are fully committed to the modern wage economy, so that I have been forced in the previous article to question Southall's assertion that rural wage-earners are ‘still firmly embedded in the fuller kinship system of rural tribal communities’ (1961: 34). The degree of their commitment has been measured by their various occupational profiles, to which I shall turn later. Suffice it here to say that half of them are already second- or even third-generation workers.

May I say first how much I appreciate the compliment which you paid me when you invited me to address the International African Institute on this, the occasion of the twelfth Lugard Memorial Lecture. I am proud to be one of those to whom Dame Margery Perham referred in the first Lugard Memorial Lecture, one of those who knew Lord Lugard in his later years. As a young civil servant I was the administrative secretary of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, of which Lord Lugard was a member. As a kind of extension of my duties, I went to Africa as the secretary of Lord De La Warr's commission on higher education in East Africa. That commission's terms of reference charged it to work out a scheme for setting up a university college in Uganda, and of course Lord Lugard was interested because he had played such a leading part in bringing Uganda into the empire—first in commanding the military expedition and thereafter in conducting the campaign in Britain which persuaded Mr. Gladstone's government to proclaim the protectorate. Shortly after I returned from Uganda to London, I was walking in Whitehall when I saw Lord Lugard coming towards me—walking the length of Whitehall from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square although at that time he was 79 years of age. I wore a hat in those days, and in accordance with the civilized manners which young people then endeavoured to preserve, I raised it. To my surprise Lord Lugard recognized me, stopped me, and asked me to tell him about the commission and what it was likely to recommend. The conversation left me with a lively appreciation of Lord Lugard's great personal interest in education in Africa. If we could evoke, as Hubert Deschamps evoked when he pronounced the eighth Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘cette ombre auguste qui nous est chère’, I think that the august shade would be very willing that this memorial hour should be devoted to a discussion of educational problems.

During the period of British colonial control of the former mandated territory of Tanganyika, political activity among the Matengo of the extreme south-western part of the country was characterized by opposition and conflict between two chiefly dynasties of the tribe. The issue on which the contending parties focused was that of the legitimacy of conflicting claims to the office of paramount chief. Both dynasties made use of versions of traditional history to support their claims to rulership. In this paper I propose to discuss the major features of these contrasting traditional histories and examine their significance for the understanding of aspects of political conflict and change in Umatengo during the colonial regime.

In Myth in Primitive Psychology Malinowski saw in myth an active force which safeguarded and enforced morality and contained precedent, law, and practical rules for the guidance of man (1948, 101). It expressed, enhanced, and codified belief. For Malinowski myth was dominant and he thought that it still ruled Trobriand social life (1948, 126). Myth was an important integrating force and one of its social functions in Trobriand society was to convey, express, and strengthen the unity of the local group and that of the group of people descended from a common ancestress (1948, 116). In a Durkheimian sense, it was a social fact, external to the individual, generalized in society, and imposing constraints on human behaviour (Durkheim, 1958, 3).

In this paper I shall attempt to show how, in the fifteen years after the partial restoration of local authority in 1935, the structure of the reconstituted Ashanti government was modified, in certain significant directions, within the framework of indirect (British) over-rule.

Surprisingly few Africanists are interpreting the oral literature of Africa using the conceptual tools fashioned by Lévi-Strauss. This article attempts to use some of his ideas in analysing eight etiological stories told by the Kimbu of Tanzania. The aim is not to emulate the master in his search for the innate structuring capacity of the human mind, but rather to set the sights lower, and to decide what is the real value of these stories to the Kimbu themselves. This can be done by distinguishing the various codes which the stories represent, following out their transformations, and discovering what message or messages they communicate. In all of this it has to be understood that we are dealing with what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘objectified thought’ and with empirical categories, and that we are not concerned with how men think in myths but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Recent publications on the rock art of Africa have again focused attention on the tremendous wealth of painted and engraved sites in that continent (Brentjes, 1969; Cooke, 1969; Lee and Woodhouse, 1970; Rudner, 1970). At the same time, however, it is made all too clear that the collection of data is largely unsystematic and subjective and, because of the incomplete nature of the evidence, valid analysis or comparison is difficult. Small wonder, then, that there is such a diversity of often conflicting views on the significance of the art (Vinnicombe, 1972).

The notion that rural political life is essentially traditional tribal in Africa and therefore scarcely relevant to modern decision-making at higher echelons of government has had a commanding influence in African studies. Associated with this viewpoint has been a tacit division of labour in the social sciences which emphasizes the pre-eminence of anthropology in the tribal domain and the pre-occupation of political science with macropolitics especially in the urban sphere. Happily, a younger generation of political scientists has emerged in recent years to challenge an essentially artificial arrangement.

Major P. H. G. Powell-Cotton, an early East African explorer, was the first European to contact a small mountain group calling themselves the So (singular: Sorat) in 1902 on the upper slopes of Mount Kadam and Mount Moroto during his exploratory trip through what is now Karamoja District, Uganda (1904, pp. 305 ff.). From that time until we carried out field-work among them in 1969-70 very little has been written about the So. Today they inhabit three of the four tertiary volcanic mountains in Karamoja: Mounts Kadam, Moroto, and Napak. The approximate distances between these mountains in statute miles are: Moroto-Kadam, 40; Moroto-Napak, 38; and Napak-Kadam, 32. The So are surrounded on all sides by semi-nomadic pastoral groups including the Karamojong, Turkana, and Suk. In our census of the Lia and Naukoi valleys on the western slopes of Moroto Mountain—the area primarily covered by our study—we found approximately 1,700 So. The total population probably does not exceed 4,800 on all three mountains.

In this paper we consider how a functional study can help us to understand the manipulation of myths. This is not to return to the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown (1935) which sought to explain every social institution by showing how it helps to maintain the social structure. Rather we consider what the myth-maker is trying to do in recounting his stories, or the function these stories serve for the narrator. We are concerned with the logical processes behind myth. This is not the ‘logic’ that Lévi-Strauss (1964, 9-22) tries to elucidate when he unfolds the structural patterns followed by the myths of a particular culture. We do not so much consider myth as an object to be analysed, but myth-making or the narration of myths as an activity of the people concerned. We are concerned with logic in the sense of the mental processes by means of which myth is used to express the intentions of the narrator. For this it is necessary to study myths in the particular contexts in which they are used.

In 1936 Godfrey Wilson attempted ‘to introduce the subject of morality for scientific discussion in a new manner’. The new manner owed much to Malinowski's insistence on the importance of inventories in field-work. Wilson showed that Nyakyusa religion fell into three distinct but related categories: ancestor cult, magic, and witchcraft. The ancestor cult was the concern of kin-groups; within the kinship context, the belief that cult failures brought down afflictions upon individuals served to constrain their behaviour in the interests of morality. Magic and witchcraft had similar effects within the political community, of which the kin-groups were constituents. The three possible sources of affliction formed a limited series.

Sociological interest, like economic growth, is subject to uneven development. While Asante society has been studied in detail by Rattray (1923, 1927, and 1929), Busia (1949), and Lystad (1958), there has been relatively little research on the Fante of southern Ghana, and even less on the Fante asafo (the traditional military companies to which one belongs through the father's line). Looking back at De Graft Johnson's article on the Fante asafo, published in Africa in 1932, one realizes that even after three decades it remains, with the possible exception of Chapter VI of Christensen's monograph (1954), the only significant study devoted to the asafo. Yet, although valuable, these accounts are unfortunately open to criticism, in terms of both factual description and interpretation. De Graft Johnson's article is not adequate because it omitted some important features of the asafo, not likely to have been incorporated into the system after the author had collected his material. It also lacked balance through over-reliance on information collected from Cape Coast which, according to the author, provided a good model of the asafo (De Graft Johnson, op. cit., p. 307). While it failed to take note of several notable features of the asafo in inland states, it also neglected to underline some important details of the asafo which are observable even in Cape Coast. Christensen, on the other hand, collected his material from three Fante states, Abura, Anomabu, and Esiam, and his treatment of the asafo is, therefore, much more thorough. But he, as will be made clear presently, did not touch upon some salient aspects of the Fante asafo.

‘Lutte’, ‘mobilisation’ pour le développement: les termes et le thème sont familiers, de cette familiarité des objets qui ont tellement servi qu'on ne sait plus à quoi ils servent.

Ikom, on the Cross River and with a total population of just over 7,000 in 1953, lies near the boundary between Nigeria and southern Cameroons. It has been commercially important in recent years, as was indicated, for example, by the presence there in 1953 (the date of the last fairly reliable census) of over 1,500 Ibo. But the Ibo are newcomers, and this paper is concerned with examining earlier patterns of trade as they had developed down to the nineteen-twenties. More recently the people of Ikom have derived their prosperity from the exploitation of their soil, which is eminently suitable for producing cocoa. According to a visiting soil scientist in the 1960s, there are in the locality 140 square miles of suitable cocoa land, which in fact is so plentiful that although two-thirds of it was still held in a forest reserve there was in 1966 no public pressure to have any portion released for agriculture. The affluence based on cocoa is, however, recent; the traditional path to prosperity and influence was through participation in trade, especially trade with Mamfe to the east and with Calabar on the coast, principally along the Cross River.

Dr. Ruth Finnegan's study Oral Literature in Africa (The Oxford Library of African Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. xix+558, £5) is likely to become an influential book. It surveys and summarizes much of our knowledge regarding the basic forms of African oral literature. Although there have been a number of essays published discussing some of the issues involved in recording, analysing, and appreciating such literature, as well as on the use of oral tradition for historical studies, this is the first modern attempt to take stock of our general knowledge in this field and to suggest how and along what paths future research should proceed.

During the decade from 1958 to 1968 when Mali was ruled by a socialistically inclined, modernization-oriented party, the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, the Malian theatre was one of the principal ways in which the ideas and programmes of the government were put forward. The purpose of this article is to explore the relations between the theatre as an art form and as a channel for ideas in Mali, and to evaluate the consequences for action of the ideas contained in the theatre. My data are based on my observations of the theatre in a provincial town; my theme is that the Malian theatre was consciously didactic, reflecting the propaganda ends of the government, but that the tradition of stagecraft on which the theatre was based emphasized satire. The gap between the didactic language sought by exponents of the government and the satirical language favoured by the people in the audience was frequently covered by combining the two, often to the detriment of the theatre itself. To understand this we have to look at the content of the plays, as well as at the social context in which they occurred, and at the form of the vehicle. The processes of combining form and content into a cultural entity that would unify rather than divide are what makes the study of the theatre rewarding for the anthropology of aesthetics and creativity.

This study of the Ashanti rubber trade with the Gold Coast in the closing years of the last century explores further a theme with which I have for some time now been occupied. The theme is the nineteenth-century background to Ashanti economic development in the present century. In an earlier study of Ashanti trade with Hausa, Mande, and Mossi caravans I suggested that Ashanti experience with the kola trade provided a significant foundation for the successful introduction of cocoa cultivation early in this century, and that an adequate explanation of the latter requires a knowledge of the tools and the social framework of kola production and also of the organization of kola distribution from the areas of production to the kola markets in modern north-central Ghana in the previous century (Arhin, 1970). The rubber trade was complementary to Ashanti trade in the north, and a close look at it should throw more light on the economic outlook and organizational methods developed in the previous century which account for the eagerness with which the Ashanti took to cocoa cultivation and the success they made of its distribution before the era of the lorry. Secondly, there was an interesting link between the rubber trade and the domestic slave trade with Samory which presents the Alymany in the role of a stimulant to the Ashanti economy; one tends to think of him solely in terms of his military-politico activities. Thirdly, the Government of the Gold Coast, which took a keen interest in the rubber trade, sent officials to observe its production and sale in the interior so that written reports may be compared with oral information. After a brief note on changes in the basis of, and the personnel involved in, Ashanti trade with the European establishments on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century, I shall examine the beginning, growth, and importance of the rubber trade; the categories of traders and the different modes of rubber collection; and lastly, the organization by which rubber reached the exporting agencies. The emphasis throughout will be on those features of the rubber trade which are significant for twentieth-century developments.