From Lake Mweru to Tanganyika is an area which was exposed to European influence at a very early date, when the lakes were the chief entrance to Northern Rhodesia. There was then a comparatively large European community, traders and administrators, settled at Chiengi and Kalungwishi. However, with the coming of the railway, and, later, the development of the copper mines, attention was focused farther South; trade in the Chiengi district became less important, and, recently, the District Commissioner, the last remaining European, was removed owing to Government economies.

Dans un précédent article publié ici même, je me suis efforcé de décrire les cas de possession, l'initiation de l'exorciste et l'exorcisme chez les VaNdau. Dans une autre publication une courte étude démographique de la tribu, de son totémisme et de son histoire permettra de situer comme il convient les VaNdau parmi les autres tribus bantoues. Je me propose ici d'exposer quelques coutumes particulières de ce peuple si intéréssant, qui contribueront peut-être à préciser encore sa physionomie, au point de vue ethnologique.

Activities. War. The one service which the military organization is no longer allowed to perform is the key to its former importance and present impotence. Inter-tribal warfare has been suppressed, and for purposes of war against the European, the weapons of the libutvo are out of date.

The Ibo of Owerri Province form a compact mass living in what are perhaps best termed village-areas, straggling ‘garden cities’ covering a large area of ground, and where huts either stand in little unprotected bunches or in walled compounds with farmlands and forest between. The few towns, in the European sense of the word, that exist are semi-artificial and date from after the British occupation. Schools and churches are multiplying quickly, but the bulk of the dense population is still pagan and illiterate. It is composed almost exclusively of farmers who, in certain districts, are also oil-nut gatherers. These Ibo are intensely democratic, recognizing no central tribal authority and though coming apparently from the same stock and speaking the same language (although with strong dialectical differences) are curiously individualistic. Their compatriots, living in another village-area only a few miles away but unrelated by ties of kinship, are considered as ‘foreigners’', all bearers of the worst possible characters and capable of the darkest crimes. Daily habits, methods of farming, methods of building, taboos, religious conceptions, vary bewilderingly so that the investigator finds, after months of work, that he has still nothing but bits and pieces that form no coherent whole. All he can do is to pick out a few of the pieces which seem to him significant and describe them to the best of his admittedly limited knowledge in the hope that others may find the links between them.

The language phenomena recorded here have been collected from four tribes, the Chaga, Pare (Wasu), Shambala, and Iramba. My informants were students at the Teachers' Training School, Marangu. The script employed is that used by the various missionary societies for literary and educational purposes.