Age has represented in various ways a significant principle of social organization for the Mbeere of Kenya, one of the peoples of the North-eastern Bantu cluster, just as it has among numerous other peoples of East Africa. Traditionally a formal age organization comprised two groups: age-sets universally recruited from circumcised youth, and generation classes with constituent generation-sets. Informants' explanations of the age organization together with census and genealogical data clearly suggest that the recruitment principles and social processes within age-sets were independent of the recruitment principles and social processes characterizing generation classes and their generation-sets. The distinction between these two subsystems of the age organization is therefore more than an heuristic device.

In this paper I discuss the mythological and ritual sequences honouring dead elders amongst two descent segments of the Sadama of Southwest Ethiopia. Myth and ritual will be described and an explanation offered regarding the persistence of both under changing conditions.

The participants in these rites are the men of the Holo-Garbičo clans, two of the most esteemed descent groups of the Cushitic speaking Sadama. The Sadama, located approximately 170 miles south of Addis Ababa, are estimated by a 1969 sample survey to number over 600,000 persons (Central Statistical Office 1972: 11). The institutions and culture of the Sadama have been described elsewhere. They have a mixed economy based on the cultivation of such staples as ensete-edulus and maize, cattle herding, and recently the production of coffee as a cash crop. There are a number of clans which are subdivided into patrilineages cross-cut by several generational classes (Hamer 1970).

African Zionist ritual is for the patient. The ambiguity is intended. Not only is Zionist ritual a healing rite but it makes demands on the patience of the participant. In the South African township of Kwa Mashu where African Zionists meet in small groups of from six to thirty people called Ibandla, i.e. a band, the meeting which takes place in one small room normally lasts for four or five of the hottest hours of the day. This is usually a Sunday. An occasional variant is to begin the meeting the previous midnight and continue into daylight. In either case, the most palpable feature of the meeting is its lack of urgency. It seems to meander indulgently from one unmanaged moment to the next and its atmosphere of unplanned relaxation leaves one with no expectation that it will ever end. The whole tenor of the meeting is therefore alien to the imposition of an organizational framework based on the division of activities into strict time intervals. Nevertheless time does intrude. In the course of the meeting the minister will more than once consult a watch ostentatiously placed before him on the table or he will interrupt activities publicly to enquire the time. Despite the general trend, therefore, some attempt is being made to measure and control the use of time. This is one way of stating the basic paradox of a Zionist meeting; despite an absence of overall control there are visible signs that control is somehow being exercised.

In the 19th century, there were Chagga chiefdoms which initiated their young men into adulthood by putting them through an elaborate series of rituals and ordeals. The first was circumcision. No sooner had the young men fully recovered from their circumcision wounds than they had another trial to undergo. They were sent to the forest for a period of seclusion and instruction. Children and young women were told that during this time in the Kilimanjaro forests the newly circumcized youths were subjected to another operation, this one to plug and stitch closed their anuses (Gutmann, Recht: 321–338; HRAF trans.: 289–304).

The aim of the essay is to highlight gaps in existing knowledge of African women and bring to light new queries. The argument being presented is that African women assert their individuality by exploring the options available within their respective societies. While it is unsafe to generalize about Africa, the dominance of men in the public, especially the political and ritual spheres, is well illustrated by ethnographies on Africa. Women are on the whole invisible or shadowy figures except in a handful of ethnographies that take a woman's perspective (for example, Leith-Ross, 1939; Kaberry, 1952; and Paulme (ed.), 1963). The ideology of male dominance is taken for granted as representative of the true state of affairs between men and women in Africa. Whereas every researcher probably knows that ideologies are not realities, somehow that knowledge becomes insignificant when dealing with African societies.

The demographic transition which occurred in the West before 1900 has been attributed to the practice of delayed marriage and a significant degree of celibacy (Hajnal, 1953; 1965). In Eastern Europe where this transition occurred much later, the nuptiality patterns have been associated with historical differences in control over the nuclear family by the extended family unit (Sklar, 1974). Sklar has noted that in the late marrying Czech, Baltic, and Polish provinces, nuclear families had long been residentially and economically separate from the wider kingroup, while in the early marrying Balkans, nuclear families were intertwined with ramified kin networks.

One problem that besets students of society is how best to combine a study of change through time, with emphasis on the flow of time, and the detailed analysis of relationships; how to write a social history with sufficient detail on all the aspects of relationships—economic, legal, ritual, ideological—to satisfy the anthropologist. Static models are too far from reality to be useful, but how can one create a model that moves? The difficulty consists first, in discovering the relevant facts and second, in integrating them into an intelligible account.