Over two hundred thousand cubic metres of slag and smelting debris, at least two hundred and seventy smelting sites, more than seven hundred recorded kaolin pits for building and lining furnaces, and probably half as many again not visited by us—these are a few figures that establish three villages of the Ndop Plain, in the highlands of Western Cameroon, as a nineteenth-century Ruhr in Central Africa. To this day, this all Sub-Saharan African record leaves Meroe, ‘the Birmingham of Africa’ well behind. Perhaps the record remains unbroken, however, just because scholars interested in African iron industries seem to have been unconcerned with the overall output of these industries.

The activities of Igbo metalsmiths caught the eye of foreign observers of southeastern Nigerian cultures well over a hundred years ago, but it was not until the turn of this century that the unorthodox character of Igbo smithing achieved some recognition. G. T. Basden's typical remarks, made after a long missionary sojourn among the Igbo, highlight this striking dimension:

There are some towns which practically monopolise certain specialised professions. For example, Awka, Nkwerre and a few other places manufacture nearly all the metal work produced in the Ibo country .… These men travel widely, not only in the Ibo country, but in the regions beyond its borders as far as Calabar, Bonny, Warri and even farther afield. (Basden 1938: 318; italics mine)

De nombreuses cultures ont matérialisé l'opposition et/ou la complémentarité existant entre l'homme et la femme par des couples basés sur des notions de latéralité (gauche—droite), d'orientation (est—ouest), de couleur (noir—blanc, rouge—blanc, …). Le nombre apparaît aussi comme un moyen privilégié permettant d'exprimer cette idée.

The Ingessana represent one of the archaic pre-Nilotic cultures on the Sudanese margins of the Western Ethiopian highlands and may be regarded as belonging to that complex of ‘montagnards paléonigritiques’ extending west by way of, among others, the Nuba Mountain peoples, the Hadjeray in Chad and the numerous hill dwelling peoples of northern Nigeria. The customs with which this article is primarily concerned, such as the avunculate, brideservice, mother-in-law avoidance, the construction of a special bridal chamber, are prominent features of this complex but they are neither universally nor exclusively so. Thus, although the principal objective is to contribute to the documentation and comprehension of the marital customs of this ethnological zone, judged to be ‘ancient and probably prior to bridewealth systems’ by Froelich (1968: 202), the analysis necessarily engages with more general and often controversial issues. Perhaps the most pertinent and least distracting approach in these circumstances is that which confines itself to delimiting the set of structural features which the subsequent account draws upon in comprehending the ethnography.

After an initial discussion about the nature of Sisala society and the segmentary lineage system of shrine types, I will show that fission of domestic groups in Sisala-land takes place in three successive stages: economic, residential and, much later, ritual. This paper deals with two related problems, (a) Given a collective value of kinship amity and unity (Fortes 1969: 219ff), how are groups able to break the ritual bonds which serve to unite them into one body of ancestor-venerators? (b) How are the Sisala able to maintain the ideology of kinship and unity in the face of continual fission of family units?

In the middle of writing a paper on the ‘roots’ of the Krio of Sierra Leone my attention was drawn by a colleague to an article in a recent issue of Africa, written by David Skinner and Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, two scholars who have been doing some work on Sierra Leone (Skinner and Harrell-Bond 1977). Aware of my interest in this area my colleagues suggested that I might want to react to the article. My own views on the Krio (Wyse forthcoming) can be read when published, but I considered that a reply to this article was needed for two reasons. Firstly, the article queried the validity of the term ‘Creole’ as used in the literature to refer to a cohesive group. And since Sierra Leonean scholars have begun to favour the use of the term Krio as the more acceptable one, it is eminently desirable to bring this development to the knowledge of non-Sierra Leoneans concerned with the study of the Krio. Second and more importantly, the authors have raised certain controversial questions as to the chronological evolution of Krio society. It is suggested that there was no Krio society even before the 1940s and 1950s, and that the popular notion of a Krio society was a figment of the imagination of articulate ‘Creoles’ who felt compelled to erect an ideological framework as justification for retaining their privileged status in Freetown during the pre-Independence period. The evolution of a group of people as an identifiable social entity is inevitably open to interpretation; and we in Sierra Leone are always grateful to outsiders who point out aspects of our history that need looking into. In this particular case I do not entirely agree with the submission made by the authors, and I shall be replying to them in the course of this article.