Because within the area we indicate by shading on the map the !Kung Bushmen intermarry among themselves, by custom and preference, members of the Harvard Peabody Smithsonian Kalahari Expeditions needed a convenient way of referring to that area as a unit and arbitrarily called it the region of Nyae Nyae.

Nyae Nyae is a corruption of the !Kung name //Nua!ei. The name Nyae Nyae refers strictly to a group of pans in South West Africa (S.W.A.) centred approximately at Gautscha Pan at about 19° 48′ 30″ S, 20° 34′ 36″ E. We extend the application of the name to an area around the pans of about 10,000 square miles, lying for the most part in S.W.A. but reaching some miles over the border of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (B.P.). There are no strictly conceived boundaries around the area. We can only vaguely define it by saying that it does not include Karakuwise to the west or Chadum to the north. It does not, we think, reach eastward much farther than Kai Kai, or southward much beyond Blaubush Pan (40 or 50 miles south of Gam).

While I was doing fieldwork in the Tikar chiefdom of Nsaw in Bamenda (Southern Cameroons) for short periods during 1945–6, 1947–8, and again in 1958, one of the main topics of conversation was the long-standing dispute between the Fon (Chief) of Nsaw and a succession of men who had held the title of Fai wo Ndzendzef. Fai wo Ndzendzef is the most senior of the state councillors (vibai; sing. kibai), and may be described as the Great Councillor. By virtue of his office he is the most senior man in his own patrilineage and acts as lineage head. His title is vested in his lineage which forms part of a clan said to have originated a number of generations ago from Mbot, in what is now the Nkambe Division to the north of Nsaw.

Any associate or employer of Africans is aware of a great diversity of forenames among them; this habit has been discussed by Jackson for Southern Rhodesia, and for Northern Rhodesia in two papers by Munday. It is these last which this note is intended to supplement by giving quantitative examples and drawing attention to one or two further aspects of the subject.

This paper may be taken as an essay in the application of anthropological theory to other fields, in this case history. In it I am concerned to give a detailed account of a marriage arrangement that bound together the royal family of Akwamu and the ruling house of the Otublohum quarter of Accra. Akwamu, now a small state locked in the wooded hills of the Volta Gorge in south-east Ghana, was, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the strongest of all the Akan powers and centre of an empire that extended for about 250 miles along the Gold and Slave Coasts of Guinea. Accra, now the capital of Ghana, was incorporated within that empire by conquest in 1681, but recovered its independence half a century later. Unquestionably a whole series of historical events involving Akwamu and Accra would be quite incomprehensible without reference to the structural implications of the marriage arrangement linking the two. The arrangement persisted through four generations, spanning the greater part of the eighteenth century. Fortunately the period is a well-documented one. The archives of the Dutch West Indies Company are especially useful. In particular, sufficient genealogical detail is recorded in the various sources for the marriage arrangement to be recognized as involving successive patrilateral cross-cousin unions.

Of recent years many mosques have been built in Sierra Leone, while in Freetown itself the number and character of these new buildings is transforming the Eastern Ward into a visibly Islamic city. Several of the new Freetown mosques are alike in their ambitious scale, their architectural style, and in being associated with a particular sponsoring tribe. The older mosques, even the two or three which were built of permanent materials, were small in scale, had but few architectural pretensions, and were communal rather than tribal in character. The new mosques—the Temne, the Mandinka, the Fula, and the Hausa—are all very large and advertise the ecclesiastical architecture of the Near East; a particular tribe was responsible for the building of each, and the tribal vernaculars are—except in the case of the Mandinka—either being used already within them, or about to be introduced. Moreover, the process is obviously continuing. The foundation-stone has been laid of a Limba mosque; land has been acquired and collections are being taken for a Mende mosque, and both are intended to be large buildings in the new style. Finally, a small Susumosque, scarcely finished as yet, is reported to be destined for demolition in order that it may be replaced by a more handsome structure.