In the study of indigenous African institutions that exercise control while promoting social cohesion and regulating inter-personal and inter-group competition, much attention has been given to the analysis of the governmental functions of kin groups on the one hand and of ritually sanctioned political chiefship on the other. Institutions of these two types, which correspond to the distinction made by Durkheim between segmental and organic solidarity, were the basis of the well-known classification of African Political Systems by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard into two contrasted types labelled lineage or segmentary in one case, and centralized or statelike in the other. In their classification these writers were mainly concerned to distinguish politically centralized chiefdoms from those societies in which the exercise of political authority and social control was confined to recurrent but fluctuating combinations of lineages under their ritual leaders. In this they were led to imply, perhaps as a result of the limited range of societies selected for consideration, that apart from small autonomous bands of kindred, the only alternative to an acephalous and segmentary lineage system was a centralized society in which offices and political powers were hierarchically arranged with definite relations of administrative superiority and subordination holding between offices and councils at different levels. ‘Administrative machinery’ and ‘judicial institutions’ were treated as concomitants of centralized authority.

La conoscenza della scultura africana ha avuto una storia paradossale. Nei secoli in cui fioriva in Europa la moda dell'esotismo orientaleggiante, quest'arte esotica per eccellenza fu totalmente ignorata; ma essa divenne celebre nel momento in cui l'esotismo tramontava. I suoi capolavori più genuini furono raccolti a migliaia quando quasi nessuno sospettava il loro intrinseco valore; acquistarono iperbolica fama ad opera di persone che ignoravano tutto a loro riguardo, e furono esaltate proprio per quei pregi che in realtà non possedevano. Nello stesso momento in cui la plastica negra rappresentava un lievito di grande importanza, per quanto male impiegato, nella cultura occidentale, gli Europei ne causavano il completo tracollo. E infine, fenomeno ancora più malinconico, gli Africani acquistano consapevolezza riflessa della loro nobilissima tradizione artistica proprio oggi, in un mondo che, a meno di miracoli, sembra aver posto su quella tradizione una triste pietra tombale.

Nationalist assertions among the Bakongo have been at the forefront of the active resistance movements which ultimately led the Belgian Government to grant the Congo its independence. These reactions to the Belgian presence, which can be traced back to the early twenties, expressed themselves in highly diversified forms and with varying degrees of intensity. From the early days of the Belgian rule, however, a duality of tendencies has been apparent in the Mukongo cultural heritage. The acceptance of certain Western innovations, on the one hand, combined with a manifest attachment to their cultural background, on the other, accounts for the presence of modernist and traditional strands discernible in present-day attitudes towards authority.

A survey of the traditional political organization of a number of chiefdoms in the Bamenda Grassfields of the Southern Cameroons was made by the writers from May to mid-September 1960. Bali-Nyonga (sixteen miles to the west of Bamenda Station) was one of the chiefdoms studied. Our inquiries were directed mainly to situations and events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within the living memory of a few aged informants and of the parents of present title-holders. A few contemporary accounts of conditions exist for Bali-Nyonga for the last decade of the nineteenth century: those of Zintgraff (who was the first European to reach Bali-Nyonga), Hutter, Esser, and scattered notices in administrative, scientific, and missionary publications. These provide a rough chronological framework for Bali-Nyonga affairs for 1889–1914. British administrative officers in the course of tax assessment, the establishment of native courts and the resolution of land cases, collected oral traditions from the Mfon (Chief) of Bali-Nyonga and his elders, and accounts of earlier judicial and executive institutions from informants who had experienced them before the establishment of the German Imperial Military Station at Bamenda in 1902. We are not directly concerned in this paper with the expansion of the German administrative, trading, labour-recruiting, and missionary frontier, but with Bali interpretations of their own constitution at the period of contact (1889) and a little before and after. We hope to show that this constitution developed in intelligible circumstances which its special characteristics reflect.

During a recent survey of the non-Mande languages of Guiné (Portuguese Guinea), the writer took notes on the systems of numeration, and observed some of the ways of counting and indicating totals on the fingers and hands. It was found that a comparison of the numeral stems gives a fair index of the degree of lexical affinity between any of the languages.