In respect of its social organization and settlement pattern, Nangodi State is typical of extensive areas of northern Ghana. Three forms of authority are recognized: politico-military, kinship (or family) and spiritual. Politico-military authority is exercised through ten chiefdoms which are in turn divided into 28 sections. Kinship authority is represented by 64 agnatic lineages 57 of which are hierarchically grouped into seven major clans. Clan and lineage areas are complexly intermingled. Spiritual authority is wielded by 11 Nangodi earth priests and two outsiders over a total of 43 areas. Each of these three forms of authority in Nangodi State operates within separate and distinct geographical areas which are superposed but not co-terminous.

Like other African peoples, Banyoro have a rich and complex symbolism, and there are numerous references to aspects of this in both older and more recent writings about Nyoro traditional culture. But until the publication in a recent issue of this journal of a paper on the significance of right and left in Nyoro symbolic classification by my colleague Dr. Rodney Needham (Needham, 1967), no systematic analysis of Nyoro symbolic categories, or even of the more important of them, had yet been attempted. I hope myself to take up this theme in a forthcoming monograph on Nyoro ritual, though I believe that to do it justice will require some further detailed inquiry through the Runyoro language in Bunyoro itself. In the meantime Needham's interesting essay, based on most of the available written sources, is a significant contribution to the subject. There is certainly much research to be done on the symbolism of right and left and of other complementary oppositions in African cultures, and it is to be hoped that his pioneering efforts will stimulate further researches in these fields.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Niumi, a small Mandingo kingdom at the mouth of the Gambia river in West Africa, was on the verge of profound social changes. Until almost the end of the century it was swept by secular and religious warfare, important segments of its population were displaced, many members of its ruling clans were killed or driven into exile, and the state itself was divided to be later reconstituted under European colonial rule. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the social-political organization of Niumi in the 1850s before the traditional political system which had existed for over two centuries was destroyed. Niumi was one of fourteen small river kingdoms, ruled by Mandingo, some more clearly defined and centralized than others, together comprising one of the major areas of Mandingo settlement in West Africa. Although Niumi enjoyed a favoured economic position among these Mandingo states of the Senegambia its institutions were typical of Mandingo organization in the area and its history has proceeded along lines similar to the rest.

In An Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Professor Gluckman argued that in situations of conflict, pre-existing groups do not divide neatly into opposing halves, but that groups realign themselves according to the values, motives, and interests governing them at a given time; and that groups who are opposed when facing one situation may find themselves aligned when the nature of the situation differs. Similar studies of social change in Africa and elsewhere have further advanced Gluckman's contention. In all these studies the analytical procedure adopted was to interpret the situational behaviour of the actors in terms of the influence of the wider social system of which they were a part. However, a great deal of the ethnographic data anthropologists gather in the course of field research are derived from chance observations of social phenomena occurring in relatively unstructured situations within which the individuals involved have a wide range of choice in determining the way they interact with others. This paper is based upon just these sorts of ‘imponderable’ facts of Gurage life which, when first recorded in the field, appeared less clearly a part of what Malinowski once called ‘the real substance of the social fabric’ of a changing tribal society than they do now in retrospect. I attempt here to interpret the spontaneous and contradictory behaviour of individual Gurage and groups in the setting of an Ethiopian Christian religious ceremony known as Mäsqal. This analysis of situational behaviour is made in terms of selected aspects of historical or ‘processive’ social change in Gurageland, a tribal district in south-west Ethiopia.