Lorsque le Conseil Exécutif de l'Institut International Africain m'a fait l'honneur de me confier cette ‘Lugard Memorial Lecture’, le nom prestigieux de Lugard me frappa comme un éclair et chassa de mon imagination toute possibilité d'autre sujet. Je ne sais si notre Président, lorsqu'il prononça, en 1952, dans cette même ville, son remarquable discours à la mémoire du grand Lord, son prédécesseur, avait été victime d'une crise de possession aussi caractérisée. Quant à moi je découvris brusquement que j'avais depuis longtemps quelque chose à dire à Lord Lugard et que je n'aurais jamais de meilleure occasion. Souffrez done que je lui parle en votre présence.

Africa as a major culture area has been characterized by many writers as being -marked by a high development of law and legal procedures. In the past few years research on African law has produced a series of highly competent monographs such as those on law among the Tiv, the Barotse, and the Nuer. These and related shorter studies have focused primarily on formal processes for the settlement of disputes, such as those which take place in a courtroom, or those which are, in some other way, set apart from simpler measures of social control. However, many African societies have informal, quasi-legal, dispute-settlement procedures, supplemental to formal ones, which have not been as well studied, or—in most cases—adequately analysed.

One of the pillars of traditional Kalahari culture is the Ekine Men's Society, otherwise known as Sekiapu—‘The Dancing People’. But although many Kalahari talk of Ekine as ‘one of our highest things’, it is an institution remarkably difficult to pin down and define.

On the face of it, Ekine serves many disparate ends. At a superficial glance, it appears as a religious institution, designed to solicit the help of the water spirits1 through invocations and dramatic representations of them by masquerades. A second glance suggests that these masquerades are recreational as much as religious in their intent. Yet again, many of the masquerades seem to be important status-symbols. And finally, Ekine often appears as a significant organ of government. A day-to-day description of the society's activities in any one community would reveal these aspects as tightly woven or tangled together. In this paper, however, it will be our task not only to unravel them, but to attempt a distinction between those which are essential features of the institution, and those which are incidental.

In a recent number of Africa (October i960) I showed that a number of Zande cultivated plants must have been borrowed from other peoples and that others were probably borrowed too. The points there emphasized were: firstly, that the agricultural economy of the Azande is derived from many different sources; secondly, that the Azande themselves see it that way; and thirdly, that in the past it must have been much simpler than in recent times, leading us to suppose that there has probably been a connexion between bionomic development and political development. I now turn to a consideration of certain arts and crafts to show further that it is not only in the cultivation of plants that Zande culture is a complex of borrowed elements, as the people themselves are a complex of peoples of different ethnic origins, but also in their material culture generally. I do not attempt to cover all of their material culture, only some parts of it for illustration and as an indication of the extent to which it has been taken over from peoples absorbed into the original Mbomu stock or from neighbouring peoples.

The difficulties attending the attempt of the new African polities to weld their disparate elements into viable nation-states have been popularly attributed to ‘tribalism’. Certainly, in some cases groups indigenous to a region did come into conflict as new states arose there, but a hard look at tribal relations in modern Africa shows these relations to be of a different order from those of pre-European times. One element in the so-called ‘tribalism’ in modern Africa, and one which has so far escaped systematic treatment, is the conflict which arose between Africans indigenous to an area and African ‘strangers’—those groups which for various reasons had moved out of their homelands and had established relatively long-term residence in the territories of other groups—as political autonomy and independence became a reality. An examination of the factors which made for conflict between ‘locals’ and ‘strangers’ in West African societies would not only give us the opportunity to understand this phenomenon in a time-perspective, but would also enable us to see whether the status and role of the ‘stranger’ in these societies could throw light on the universal problem of the ‘stranger’.

The G/wi Bushmen referred to in this article live in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Although the census of the Reserve is not yet complete, its permanent Bushman population is estimated as being 3,000, plus another 2,000 summer migrants. The Reserve is 20,115 square miles in extent and its Bushman inhabitants enjoy exclusive hunting rights, unrestricted except for a prohibition on the use of firearms and certain types of steel traps. The puberty ceremony described here was performed in the central portion of the Reserve. Although I have not had the fortune of a field-trip coinciding with another ceremony I had previously been told by members of three bands what would happen. This agreed in detail with what I saw. Later descriptions from all five bands of the vicinity do not differ, so this version is presumably representative of the ‘wild’ G/wi of the region. These Bushmen have had almost no contact with Europeans other than the personnel of the Bechuanaland Government Bushman Survey.

My article on Zaburro was written in the expectation that it would stimulate discussion over the antiquity of maize in West Africa, and the matter has been taken up by Professor Portères (1959), on whose publication Mr. Willett has relied for certain inferences in his article in Africa for January 1962. Among the interesting points brought forward by Professor Portères (1959, vi) are the groups of African vernacular names which indicate that maize was introduced by foreigners, strangers, whitemen. A similar observation had been made more than a hundred years ago by Koelle (a. 1854, v), a missionary in Sierra Leone, who wrote: ‘…the names for onion, rice, maize, &c. show that in many countries [in Africa] these articles have been introduced by foreigners.…’ Who these foreigners were Koelle, with his long list of vernacular words for whiteman to choose from, leaves indeterminate. On the other hand, underlying Professor Portères's view that it was the Portuguese or the Dutch who brought maize to the Guynee coast, lies the assumption that the foreigners, the strangers, the whitemen indicated by these vernacular names were the Portuguese and the Dutch.

The problem of the nature of the blood covenant (also called blood pact or blood brotherhood) still awaits adequate detailed comparative analysis. This is unfortunate since detailed consideration of such practices would be interesting in itself and might also provide valuable means for understanding some of the notions of physiology, kinship, magic, and alliance in the societies in which this institution exists. A blood covenant establishes a close bond between two persons not linked by kinship but who, nevertheless, desire social relations supported by stronger sanctions (physiological and/or magical) than those afforded by mere communal, tribal, or trading connexions. It is clear that blood covenants do not establish conventional kinship relations and that the term ‘blood brotherhood’ is misleading. However, the physiological basis of these covenants and the terminology sometimes employed by the persons involved in them do suggest that some comparison with kinship may be useful if only to indicate the differences between these two institutions. By examining some of the ways in which a people's blood-covenant relations are similar and dissimilar to certain of their kinship relations, and by considering the significance which the people themselves see in the physiological link of common blood, we may gain a clearer understanding of both these types of relations.

Institutions of bond-friendship as a form of voluntary association exist in many societies and, when viewed cross-tribally, they show considerable variation both in form and function.1 Even so, variations in the order of bond-friendship associations seem related to a common theme: namely, that there is an exchange of goods and/or services between parties to a ritual covenant that is reinforced by supernatural sanctions; and that protestations of mutual goodwill, together with calling for imprecations of evil to befall the individual who breaks the agreement, are elements which bind the covenant.

Hausa is probably the most widely spoken language in Negro Africa. Besides being generally spoken throughout Northern Nigeria, its motherland, Hausa is, as Westermann and Bryan note, widely understood in other West African countries. They cite colonies of Hausa-speakers in Dahomey, Togo, Ghana, Cameroons, Chad, and ‘many of the greater centres in North Africa’. They could also usefully have mentioned the Sudan, where pilgrims from Northern Nigeria have settled in their tens of thousands. Indeed, it is often said that you will find Hausa-speakers from Dakar to Port Sudan, from Leopoldville to Fez. The explorer Heinrich Barth in the 1840's had his first Hausa lesson in Tunis, and fifty years later it was to Tripoli that Bishop Tugwell of the Church Missionary Society and his pioneer team of five went to study Hausa before undertaking their bold missionary thrust into the emirates. Westermann and Bryan point out that the total number of Hausa-speakers cannot be estimated in view of the enormous distribution of the Hausa and the great number of those who speak Hausa as their second language. Few of us would disagree with Cust's judgement that Hausa ‘has obtained the rank of a lingua franca and is the general vehicle of communication between the peoples speaking different languages’. Counting those who have recourse to Hausa as their second or vehicular language, it would be no exaggeration to claim that some 20 million persons ‘hear’ Hausa, as the West African languages so picturesquely express it.

Frank Willett, in scrutiny of the evidence cited by M. D. W. Jeffreys to support the hypothesis of pre-Columbian maize in Africa, has helpfully reopened the controversy concerning the introduction of maize to tropical Africa, but on three points he curiously comes dangerously close to committing the major error he shows Jeffreys to be guilty of, viz., drawing ‘…on all manner of evidence, with more industry than discretion…’.

It is well known that villages and small towns in the savanna and derived savanna area of West Africa have, at some time, moved down from hill sites to their present position on the plains. It has been suggested that settled conditions resulting from the penetration of colonial administration provided the stimulus in a number of cases in the Western Region of Nigeria, notably Okeiho which was moved in 1917, and Igbetti in 1905. In the Afenmai district of northern Benin, fortified hill sites were abandoned and villages were moved down to the plains after British administration entered the district in 1904, while New Idanre in Ondo Province was laid out with broad streets on a rectangular plan at the foot of the hill, leaving Old Idanre on the hill-top site. This paper outlines the reasons for the earlier choice of hill-top sites and for later movement of settlements in a small part of the derived savanna in Ibadan and Oyo Provinces, bounded by arbitrary limits to the north and east, by the Dahomey frontier to the west, and by the boundary between Ibadan and Abeokuta Provinces to the south.

Lunsar is a town of some 10,000 people which has grown up since 1930 beside an open-cast iron-ore mine worked by the Sierra Leone Development Corporation (Delco) in the Marampa Chiefdom of the Northern Province, about sixty miles from Freetown. In the early days large numbers of unskilled workers were employed, but now the mine is highly mechanized. The ore is excavated and removed by mechanical scrapers and transported on a conveyor belt to a mill where most of the waste material is separated. It is then taken by conveyor belt to stockpiles and from there is mechanically loaded on to wagons.

Les villages guerzé (kpèllè), et ceux des groupes ethniques apparentés de la région forestière de la Guinée, sont généralement bâtis sur une hauteur, à proximité d'un point d'eau, mais jamais dans un bas-fond auprès d'un ruisseau. Us sont situés à l'orée d'une forêt ou au milieu d'une clairière. Le village est souvent entouré par une ceinture d'éléments de forêt secondaire. Cette zone est respectée pour protéger les habitations des tornades violentes. Elle est indispensable pour la pratique des coutumes d'initiation et des sacrifices, et, très probablement, dans le passé, elle était utilisée à des fins défensives, ce rideau de forêt dense étant favorable aux guérillas. Souvent l'endroit choisi est l'emplacement d'anciens champs de culture abandonnés. Ainsi, les habitants ont l'avantage d'occuper un terrain épuisé et en même temps défriché.