In recent centuries indigenous West African society has experienced the impact of two external cultural forces, the one personified by Moslem invaders and migrants from the north, the other by European colonists from the West. With the spread of Islam, the way of life of whole peoples has been largely transformed, but the main changes which have occurred in the structure of African society are the result of Western and Westernizing influences. It is the purpose of this article to examine a particular aspect of these structural changes which is exemplified by the appearance of a new class of ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ individuals and their relationship with traditional society in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. The Protectorate, with which this article is exclusively concerned, comprises the hinterland of the Sierra Leone Colony, and is under a Native Authority system of government. In the Colony, political and legal institutions are modelled mainly on the English system. As explained later, the terms ‘educated’ and ‘literate’ are used throughout to denote relative degrees of Westernization due to education.

The Yoruba, a people numbering over 5½ million, living in south-west Nigeria, need little introduction. They are almost unique among African peoples in that they live in large settlements, many of which were capitals of chiefdoms; 42 per cent, of them live in towns of over 20,000 people and there are nine towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Ibadan, now the capital of the Western Region of Nigeria, has a population of nearly half a million. Those towns which were capitals were, in the past, governed by kings (ɔba) and councils of chiefs (oloye or ijoye) who exercised sovereign powers throughout the town and its territory; the titles of these kings and chiefs were usually vested in lineages, so that a chief held a dual position as an elected representative of his lineage and as a member of the council of chiefs in the town. Other towns were governed in a similar manner, their rulers being subordinate to a king. The largest towns, especially those in Ibadan Province, owe their size to the influx of refugees from the crumbling Oyo kingdom in the early and mid-19th century; but it would appear that long before this the capitals of important rulers were towns of 10,000 or more inhabitants. The origin of Yoruba kingship is obscure; the first rulers may have come as conquerers, but their arrival cannot be less than seven centuries ago and may have been much earlier.

In this paper I consider some Lugbara notions about witches, ghosts, and other agents who bring sickness to human beings. I do not discuss the relationship of these notions, and the behaviour associated with them, to the social structure. The two aspects, ideological and structural, are intimately connected, but it is possible to discuss them separately: on the one hand, to present the ideology as a system consistent within itself and, on the other, to show the way in which it is part of the total social system. Here I attempt only the former.

The material for this study was collected during the first two months of 1954, while camping in a Cokwe village about 50 miles north-east of Vila Luso in the administrative area of Camanongue, County and District of Moxico, Province of Bié, Angola. My chief informant was Sr. Francisco Casueka, aged 44, a Cokwe- and Portuguese-speaking African from the printing press at Boma Mission near Vila Luso. He was the ablest assistant I had among many good informants during my stay in Angola.

It is proposed to describe two specialized aspects of the practice of magicians in the northern part of Sukumaland, Tanganyika Territory, in curing patients who are assumed to be ill because of the malevolence of the spirits of their ancestors. Both the curative powers of these specialists and the diseases they treat are closely connected with the cult of the ancestors, which remains the basic spiritual force in the lives of the majority of the Sukuma people. This cult rests on the belief that the spirits of ancestors may take control of their descendants either partially or completely, and also that to establish contact with the ancestors requires the offices of a magician. It is alleged that these magicians become at times temporary and passive mediums through which their ancestors assist them to diagnose the ills of the people who have paid to consult them; this usually takes the form of self-induced hysteria. Certain other specialized magicians are able to induce hysteria in others as a means of curing them of sickness.