It is important to establish the date and route of the introduction of maize into West Africa for several reasons. It could throw light on early documents about the area, it would help to clarify certain questions of the contact of indigenous cultures with each other as well as with intrusive cultures, and it could introduce an element of absolute dating into the chronology of archaeological deposits in the area. The last point may well be the most important, since most techniques for dating archaeological material in absolute terms cannot be employed in the study of the ethnohistory of West Africa. The cob of the maize plant is widely used in West Africa as a decorative roulette on pottery, usually on the coarser wares. The presence or absence of such decoration is therefore used as a horizon in excavating archaeological sites in West Africa. (Cf. Goodwin, 1953, and Willett, 1959.) Moreover, botanists have studied the genetics of maize in West Africa in great detail so that a statistical study of maize impressions on pottery, although not permitting the identification of particular varieties of maize, could in theory permit the identification and relative location in time of changes in the maize population cultivated at a given site, and thus serve to date the pottery. (Cf. Jones 1959, Stanton and Willett.)

The ethnography of Kenya and Tanganyika presents a problem of great significance to the study of culture history and social organization: why have some Bantu-speaking peoples adopted age-group organization and associated rituals from their non-Bantu neighbours, while other Bantu peoples in the same region have not? That this borrowing has occurred in some cases is suggested by the extant ethnographic literature. Wagner states that the age-group organization of the Vugusu of Nyanza ‘corresponds closely to the age-group organization of the Nilo-Hamitic tribes with which it is obviously historically connected’. In discussing the pairing of Vugusu circumcision groups, he says: ‘We have here a case of a formal feature borrowed from a group of neighbouring but structurally quite different tribes which has not been functionally integrated into the structure of the recipient society.’ The Kikuyu, whose age groups are of great importance in their social structure and may antedate their contact with the Nilo-Hamitic Masai, recognize a division among themselves between members of the ‘Kikuyu guild’, who practise one set of age-grade ceremonies, and members of the ‘Masai guild’, most of whom live in south-west Kikuyuland near Masailand and conduct different ceremonies. Lambert states that the Kikuyu age-regiments alternate between those of the right hand (tatane) and those of the left hand (gitienye).

The Kalabari people live in twenty-two villages and three small towns in the tidal mangrove swamps of the eastern Niger Delta. Linguistically, they are part of the great bloc of Ijo-speaking peoples who fill the Delta; but they form a distinct subgroup both in dialect and in culture. The traditional economy of most of these communities is based on fishing, with surplus fish exported to the hinterland markets and vegetables brought down on the return trip. Over a long period, contact with the hinterland markets seems to have been more frequent than contact between any one village and its Kalabari neighbours; and as a result of this isolation, each village tended to develop certain distinctive variants of fishing technique and of culture generally. Although the general economic pattern was one of fishing, one community with a fortunate geographical position at the mouth of the Rio Real abandoned this occupation about 400 years ago for trade with European merchants, first in slaves and later in palm-oil brought down from the hinterland. Today, however, this trade has collapsed; and the descendants of those who developed it have largely returned to fishing and fish-trading.

For many years British administrators and others concerned with the developing countries of tropical Africa have criticized Western-type schooling introduced there for what they believe to have been its bad effects on the life of rural peoples. They have complained that such schooling is prejudicial to rural life, since it produces a distaste for agriculture and leads to a drift from the land. They say it promotes in schoolchildren a desire to be clerks or white-collar workers and, because of their schooling, they develop a strong dislike for manual work and a reluctance to soil their hands with physical labour. They assert that these values inculcated by Western schooling lead finally to an almost complete rejection of rural life, a contempt for agriculture, and therefore to a decrease in rural productivity. Finally, they maintain that this is particularly serious in view of the fact that, as far as we can see at present, many African countries will have to depend on agriculture and the land for a long time to come, for it is only through such dependence that it seems likely that they will achieve economic viability which will be an important factor in making a success of political independence.

The importance of age as a factor of social grouping amongst East African peoples has long been recognized. Amongst the Kuria, a Bantu-speaking people who have been culturally influenced by Nilo-Hamitic neighbours, two distinct forms of age-grouping exist. In one ‘age-sets’ are recruited at regular provincial ceremonies of initiation, the historical sequence of sets then serving to rank their members by age seniority. In the other ‘generation classes’ are recruited according to a fixed cycle of named classes where the children of the men of one class are automatically ascribed membership of the succeeding class and where norms of coevality apply to each class in sequence. These two forms of age-grouping are institutionally distinct (status in one is in no way ‘tied’ to status in the other) and they operate in different ways within the society. Although both belong to what may empirically be called Kuria age-organization, they can conveniently be described separately. The following paper describes the generation classes.

It has long been recognized that there is a distinctive category of African political systems, which is characterized by centralized authority. The preliminary analysis and classification of African kingdoms proposed in this article are based on comparison of most of the States in Central, South, and East Africa. Only a few data on West African kingdoms have been incorporated, but we feel that the classification will prove generally valid for West Africa as well.

My purpose in this paper is to describe some of the religious beliefs held currently by the !Kung Bushmen of the interior bands of the Nyae Nyae region of South West Africa. I shall limit the paper to a description of their concepts of the gods, the problem of evil, supplication, the spirits of the dead, and the ceremonial curing dance, but leave for another paper a more detailed account of medicine men, how they become medicine men, and more about their practices and beliefs. We gathered the information which I present principally on our expeditions of 1952–3 and 1955.

With the publication of Jahoda's (1959) study of letters addressed to the advice column of a Ghanaian newspaper, my plans for a similar study in Northern Rhodesia crystallized into action. Fortunately at about the same time the country's sole independent newspaper aimed at the indigenous population began publication. The paper, which is weekly and is written in English throughout, has a circulation of some 20,000 copies, and with shared readers may be expected to reach a public of about 70,000 all told. (The total African population is somewhat over 2½ million.) Through the kindness of the editor, I have been allowed access to the complete incoming correspondence dealt with in a feature offering advice to inquirers; letters addressed to the editor have been excluded from this survey.

During my field study of Yoruba art (1955–7) little of the symbolic meaning of the forms and component elements of the ritual sculpture was revealed to me through straightforward answers to straightforward questions. Indeed, it soon became evident that if meaning with any degree of resonance was to be arrived at, such a technique had to be abandoned in favour of an interpretative analysis in relation to myths and praise songs on the one hand, and the observation of the use of sculpture in ritual on the other.

This paper is concerned with the significance of environmental factors for the reconstruction and interpretation of the history of the Mbembe tribes during the period immediately prior to the first arrival of the Europeans in the late 1880's. It seems probable that developments occurring mainly during the nineteenth century led to differences between the tribes, both in the distribution of their populations and in the character of their villages. These in turn resulted in considerable divergences in political organization despite the fact that the tribes remained adjacent and culturally very similar, and that the main principles and assumptions on which their organization was based remained essentially similar. It would be possible to discuss these political differences simply in terms of the present variations in demography and village structure. But an attempt to discover the processes by which they came about will, I think, increase our understanding of the development of these divergent political structures.

Virtually all sub-Saharan Africa is in the throes of rapid social and economic change. The recent fashion for meteorological allegories has merely served to stress the fact that these changes are also causing very considerable problems. The dilemma facing most administrations throughout the continent is that while much of the old way of life must inevitably disappear if the tribal groups involved are to hope to survive as viable populations in the modern world, this same process can, if it occurs too fast, threaten the whole social order and the systems of social control and social organization, which have hitherto bound them together as groups and governed the day-to-day lives of their members.

Ideas and behaviour relating to health and disease among the Tiv of Benue Province, Central Nigeria, have been reported in the literature at different times. Most of these studies have focused on the general principles involved as universal features of the Tiv people. The present study is concerned only with the ideas and social background of disease in one particular locality, namely an area within a certain ‘clan’ called Mbara.

This paper suggests that important economic problems in the Republic of the Sudan (the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan until independence in 1956) arise from attitudes associated with the heritage of slavery. After briefly outlining the nature of indigenous slavery, and the essential interrelatedness of its economic and social characteristics, it uses primarily official documents to analyse the economic effects of slavery abolition in the northern Sudan. Present-day economic ramifications of the slavery heritage are then discussed.

In this paper I shall present some data on the marriage and family organization of an Eastern Ijo town, and shall try to analyse changes in this organization against the background of broader social changes affecting the area.

Okrika is the chief town of the Okrika section of the Ijo-speaking people of Nigeria. The Okrika dialect, with Kalahari and Bonny, falls into the North-Eastern group of dialects which are partially interintelligible with Brass-Nembe but not with the Central-Western dialects. The Ijo occupy the greater part of the Niger Delta. The Okrika section consists of eight towns and dependent villages on the extreme eastern edge of the Delta, where the saltwater creeks and mangrove swamps give place to the extensive dry ground of the mainland. Administratively, Okrika forms part of the Degema Province of the Eastern Region of Nigeria. With three other communities of the section, Okrika itself is sited on an island about half a mile long and a quarter broad.

On a souvent répété des cultures négro-africaines qu'elles étaient imprégnées de spiritualité sinon de religiosité; pourtant, comme le remarquait dans un récent article Madame Calame-Griaule: ‘il serait faux de croire que le facteur religieux y joue un rôle essentiel’; il se situe en réalité sur le même plan que les autres manifestations de la vie sociale; il concourt à la construction de cet ensemble fonctionnel que constitue toute culture. C'est dans cette perspective que nous voudrions tenter d'examiner comment la religion bwa – dont les manifestations les plus élaborées et les plus valorisées s'expriment dans l'organisation et le fonctionnement de la société du do – s'intègre dans un complexe institutionnel précis dont elle n'est pas seulement, à certains égards, le reflet, mais l'un des rouages essentiels.

There is little evidence to show that ethnic differences in Africa result in problems of lesser magnitude at the present day than in the past. In recent years the problems of ‘minorities’ have had to be considered in Nigeria, while in the Republic of Congo (Léopoldville) ethnic conflicts and the reappearance of past tribal enmities have produced numerous tragic situations during the last twelve months. The frontiers of Africa were delimited by the European powers half a century or more ago and their absurdity in relation to ethnic groups has been demonstrated recently in papers by Barbour and Prescott. They were drawn in ignorance of the different groups of people through which they passed and have now been inherited by independent African governments who will have to face the problems which have been created. To solve them these African governments will need to know more of ethnic groups and their distributions than did their European predecessors and the need for more adequate ethnographic maps is likely to increase rather than diminish.