As one walks by a great river on a windy day, the surface of the water is tossed about in all directions and it is impossible to discern the flow of the current. Yet undisturbed by this superficial agitation the mighty stream rolls on. So, underlying the storm-tossed surface of present discontents there is a surge of the human spirit towards a new conception of the State as an instrument for giving practical effect to the collective will of the people.

Ozuitem is an Ibo community of approximately 7,400 individuals situated in Bende Division, Owerri Province, Southern Nigeria. This, like similar communities, is generally referred to as a ‘clan’ by government officials and this term has been crystallized in Talbot's volumes. Meek, as a result of his researches into Ibo social organization, refers to these as ‘communes’ or ‘village groups’. Throughout this study the term ‘community’ will be used to refer to Ozuitem and other similar politically autonomous and descent groups.

Although the war forced plans for nutrition field research to go into cold storage, it has at the same time focused attention as never before on food production and distribution and the application of nutritional knowledge to these problems, together with greatly increased attention to the proper feeding of large bodies of people, whether our own troops of many races, labour forces, camps of refugees, internees and prisoners of war, or hospitals and other institutions. It has, however, been a period in which doing things has been much more important than writing about them, and for this reason factual detail with which to fill out this picture is not at present available. The following very incomplete notes indicate a little of what has been happening in regard to nutrition work in the British African dependencies apart from the multifarious activities indicated above.