This article is intended primarily as a contribution to the study of the village headman in British Central Africa. While most reports from the area have paid attention to the headmanl's structural position, this has been specifically considered by Gluckman, Barnes, and Mitchell in ‘The Village Headman in British Central Africa’ (Africa, xix, no. 2, 1949) and, more recently, by Mitchell in his forthcoming analysis of The Yao Village. The closely related question of the values attached to village life has received attention notably from Prof. M. Wilson in Good Company.

The fact that most of the studies recently carried out on the Ibo have been initiated in response to an urgent political situation, has resulted in an emphasis on those aspects of the culture of most immediate interest to administrators; and although a considerable body of data on religion has been included in the results, this sphere of activity has perhaps received rather less attention than others.

In this article an attempt is made to sketch some salient features of religious belief in a single Ibo village-group, which, it is hoped, may illuminate some facets of the problem not emphasized in previous work. My investigations were carried out in the Northern Ibo Nike group which lies to the immediate north-east of Enugu, capital of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. Rich land and low population density (48 per sq. mile) have here mitigated the usual economic pressures towards education for a life of migrant labour, commerce or clerkship in the towns, with the result that, despite their proximity to a very highly developed urban area, the Nike people tend to take little interest in mission activity. Ibagwa, the senior village of the group, contains some 260 adult males, of whom only a bare half-dozen practise a loose form of Roman Catholicism, so that mission influence is not at all developed. This of course is a distinct advantage for the present study.

1. The material on which the present findings are based was collected during the period January 1950 to June 1951 near Kasama (Central Bemba) and the period July 1951 to June 1952 from Central Bemba informants in Lusaka, N. Rhodesia.

2. If we disregard all subject and object prefixes, locative suffixes, and the existence of high- and low-toned radicals (all of which affect tense signs, but only at a phonological and tonological level), we find that formally speaking the Bemba verb has at least 48 positive and 31 negative single-word main-sentence tenses. (Object and subject relative sentence and sub-relative sentence tenses also exist, but are essentially mainsentence tenses with regular tonal modifications.) In order to study and evaluate a verb of such complexity, it is necessary first to find some method of tabulation. There are two possible points of departure: form, and meaning. If we use the latter, we arrive at a matrix involving at least the categories of order (positive or negative), time, aspect, mood, and emphasis. But then we find that certain ‘pigeon-holes’ in the total table are filled by tense forms that also occur elsewhere, given the right context and the right radical. (‘Radical’ we may define as that element in a Bemba verb carrying that meaning which is independent of tense signs and prefixes and infixes.) It is convenient for demonstration and other purposes to construct our tables showing these dual- and triple-function forms occupying their complete range of pigeon-holes, even though this may mean a sacrifice of formal clarity. (It should be remembered, however, that even such compromise tables—in a ‘mere’ order-time-aspectemphasis-mood matrix—can only expose basic meanings; the precise applications of some of the tenses are so subtle as to defy even five-dimensional tabulation.)

Recent happenings in the Gold Coast, and particularly in Ashanti, have tended to focus interest upon the structure of the constitution and the struggle for political power. Ten years ago two other movements were attracting at least as much attention. In a preliminary report on the work of the Ashanti Social Survey, published in 1948, Fortes described these as first, an apparently insatiable demand for schools, and, second, an almost equally if not more powerful development of what he called ‘new witch-finding cults’. That the demand for education of all kinds continues and is gradually being met is well known; it would be interesting, and perhaps, in the light of occurrences in other parts of Africa, significant to learn what has happened to the new cults.

Dans le pays dogon qui se situe au coeur du Soudan français, dans la boucle du Niger vit une population dl'environ 220.000 individus, race vigoureuse et homogène qui a conservé intacte une civilisation millénaire, peut-être héritée de célèbres civilisations méditerranéennes aujourdl'hui disparues. Au cours des dernières années, les travaux d'une équipe ethnographique française ont fait des Dogon une des populations les mieux étudiées de l'Afrique Occidentale sur le plan des institutions et des croyances. Il n'en est pas de même de leur langue, qui n'a encore fait l'objet d'aucune étude d'ensemble, et dont la situation parmi les autres groupes de langues africaines reste mal définie. Delafosse, après avoir hésité entre le groupe voltaïque et le groupe mandé, penche pour ce dernier dans la dernière édition des Langues du Monde, où il classe le dogon dans le groupe nigéro-sénégalais (sousgroupe de l'Est, avec le samogho et le sia). Par contre, le R. P. Bertho, dans une récente étude, rapproche le dogon des langues voltaïques. M. de Lavergne de Tressan, dans son Inventaire Linguistique de l' A.O.F. et du Togo, juge préférable ‘d’opter pour la prudence, tant que les catégories grammaticales n'auront pas été étudiées’ (p. 211). Cette attitude de prudence sera aussi la nôtre; il ne semble pas que l'on puisse aboutir à des conclusions valables dans le domaine du comparatisme avant qu'une description aussi complète que possible ait été donnée, sinon de la langue dogon, du moins d'un de ses nombreux dialectes.

I recently had the pleasure of reviewing for Africa (vol. xxv, no. 2, April 1955) Il Cannibalismo degli Asande by Renzo Carmignani. Since writing that review I have found among my Zande texts one written by my Zande clerk, Reuben Rikita, on the subject of cannibalism. The information was given by Kuagbiaru, a man who was completely honest and was also old enough to have had a reliable memory of what happened before the death of King Gbudwe (1905) and the taking over of Sudan Zandeland by the Anglo-Egyptian Administration. As it is unlikely that accounts of cannibalism by Azande who witnessed it can be collected any more it is useful to have so definite a statement on record. I give a fairly free translation of the text. I am not sure of the correct translation of the three Zande words I have placed in brackets. As the sense of the text is clear there is no need for a commentary.