The foundation and the broad policies of our Institute emerged from what proved a fortunate conjunction of diverse interests and opportunities that developed after the First World War. The initial phase of modern economic advance in tropical Africa, following the introduction of the telegraph, railways, all-weather roads, was by the twenties making apparent a wide range of needs and opportunities for further progress in Africa—progress in which both the interests of, and contribution by, its peoples would be closely concerned. Within African territories the demand for literacy and training in new skills both more extensive and at higher levels was becoming more and more obvious and pressing. The significance of the increasing and inevitable association of Africans and their communities with a world economy was beginning to be more widely appreciated. With this growing recognition of the need for a more positive and constructive response many questions arose concerning not only the means of fostering such developments, but also their effects on the attitudes, beliefs, and institutions that had hitherto sustained the cultures and the social life of largely autonomous tribes and chiefdoms.

This article describes and attempts to analyse the nature and content of marital relationships in the ‘modern’ West African family. To an increasing extent educated young people apparently want a companionate marriage on Western lines (Marris, 1961). Evidence comes from interviewing and from studies made of the attitudes of students and of secondary school boys and girls in a number of countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Omari, for example, collected data from 293 students in a sample of eight Secondary and Teacher Training Institutions throughout Ghana. About three-quarters of these subjects said they would like to be married either in church or before a magistrate (1960, pp. 197–210). A statutory marriage of this kind, unlike traditional marriage, makes bigamy a crime, and so we may assume that the young people concerned had monogamy in mind. A group of Nigerian secondary school girls also declared, with a single exception, that monogamy was the ideal form of marriage; they insisted that they wanted to choose their own husbands (Baker, 1957).

The aims of this analysis are: (1) to investigate a puzzle in Nyoro ethnography; (2) to support the theme of a forthcoming handbook on the symbolism of right and left; (3) to make a further contribution to the understanding of secular-mystical diarchy or complementary governance; and (4) to carry out a routine exercise in the structural analysis of symbolism, in a continuing attempt to isolate its general principles.

To an outsider the most striking feature of the Konzo circumcision ritual is the songs which can be heard almost constantly from the circumcision lodges. The teaching of songs is an important part of the instruction which takes place during the ritual and in many of them a special language is used which is, to a large extent, unintelligible to a person who has not undergone the rites. In this paper I shall analyse one of the Konzo circumcision songs and try to show how, by its special language, the song conveys to the initiands certain aspects of the circumcision ritual and suggest some of their wider implications on both the social and the individual levels.

The Berti, numbering about 25,000, inhabit the part of the Northern Darfur district round their traditional centre, Melit, which lies about thirty-five miles north-east of El Fasher, the capital of the Sudanese province of Darfur. Their original language belonged to the Middle Sahara group and was closest to the Zaghawa language, but for several generations now they have been arabized. They form the sedentary population of the dry steppe of Northern Darfur and depend on agriculture with pennisetum as the staple, on animal husbandry and on collecting gum from the Acacia verek, which they sell at the local markets. Another, probably larger, part of the Berti now live in Eastern Darfur, where they migrated during the last century under pressure from the expansion of the neighbouring Meidob into their original territory in Northern Darfur.