What happens when an African tribal community is suddenly brought within a parliamentary system based on adult suffrage? On the surface, the process is a familiar one: an election date is announced, parties begin to be active, candidates are chosen, a government information van goes round to explain the procedure of voting, polling day arrives, and the member for X constituency is declared returned. The electorate has made its choice and the new member takes his seat in parliament. But, in substance, what happens? What are the issues on which the electorate divides—supposing there is a contest? How does a candidate put himself forward? What should he do, or have in his favour, in order to win? And—the most difficult question of all: how real are such contests in terms of local understanding of what the election is about? The following account is an attempt to answer these questions for one part of West Africa: the Kassena-Nankanni North and Bongo constituencies in northern Ghana during the 1954 and 1956 general elections.

The development of commercial cocoa growing in Ghana is always assumed to be something of a miracle. It evokes the stereotype of the plodding subsistence farmer, eking out a living by a system of shifting cultivation in the forest. This peasant is correctly presumed to have been unfamiliar with the cash economy centred on palm produce for export and deriving mainly from areas south-east of the forest zone, but he is somehow supposed to have desired and contrived to fit a new permanent orchard crop into his ‘traditional system of food farming’, thus creating cocoa farms of from 1 to 3 acres from which were exported 80 lb. of cocoa in 1891, 536 tons in 1900, and 40,000 tons in 1911—since when Ghana has always been the world's largest cocoa producer.

In the study of indigenous African institutions that exercise control while promoting social cohesion and regulating inter-personal and inter-group competition, much attention has been given to the analysis of the governmental functions of kin groups on the one hand and of ritually sanctioned political chiefship on the other. Institutions of these two types, which correspond to the distinction made by Durkheim between segmental and organic solidarity, were the basis of the well-known classification of African Political Systems by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard into two contrasted types labelled lineage or segmentary in one case, and centralized or statelike in the other. In their classification these writers were mainly concerned to distinguish politically centralized chiefdoms from those societies in which the exercise of political authority and social control was confined to recurrent but fluctuating combinations of lineages under their ritual leaders. In this they were led to imply, perhaps as a result of the limited range of societies selected for consideration, that apart from small autonomous bands of kindred, the only alternative to an acephalous and segmentary lineage system was a centralized society in which offices and political powers were hierarchically arranged with definite relations of administrative superiority and subordination holding between offices and councils at different levels. ‘Administrative machinery’ and ‘judicial institutions’ were treated as concomitants of centralized authority.

Many present-day social anthropologists may find Professor Fortes's most recent study the most significant of all his works on the Tallensi. Its main theme is the way in which these people use religious concepts to order and explain certain key aspects of the individual's passage through the social structure, and operate religious cults to facilitate this passage.

In his ethnographic survey of the Masai Huntingford remarks that ‘there is a constant dualism in the structure of Masai groups, largely expressed in terms of cattle colour. It is found not only in an antagonistic setting, as when cattle are divided after a raid, but also in the sections into which a tribe may be divided.’ He gives examples only of major divisions of the Kisongo and Wuasingishu Masai and the Samburu which, at least for the Kisongo, entail the apportionment of all clans to one of two groupings. In many kinds of social groupings and social activities the Arusha conceive of a similar organizational principle by which people can be aligned for particular purposes into two categories which are sociologically determined but not necessarily or perhaps even usually of numerical equality. It is possible that among the Masai this principle has a rather wider application and significance than has so far been reported; but for the Arusha, who derive much of their culture from the Masai, it is of major importance in social contexts concerning the family, lineages, dangroups, the territorial system, and the age-group system.

This paper describes customs, practised by the !Kung Bushmen in the Nyae Nyae region of South Africa, which help them to avoid situations that are likely to arouse ill will and hostility among individuals within the bands and between bands. Two customs which seem to be especially helpful and which I describe in detail are meat-sharing and gift-giving. I mention also the !Kung habits of talking, aspects of their good manners, their borrowing and lending, and their not stealing.

La conoscenza della scultura africana ha avuto una storia paradossale. Nei secoli in cui fioriva in Europa la moda dell'esotismo orientaleggiante, quest'arte esotica per eccellenza fu totalmente ignorata; ma essa divenne celebre nel momento in cui l'esotismo tramontava. I suoi capolavori più genuini furono raccolti a migliaia quando quasi nessuno sospettava il loro intrinseco valore; acquistarono iperbolica fama ad opera di persone che ignoravano tutto a loro riguardo, e furono esaltate proprio per quei pregi che in realtà non possedevano. Nello stesso momento in cui la plastica negra rappresentava un lievito di grande importanza, per quanto male impiegato, nella cultura occidentale, gli Europei ne causavano il completo tracollo. E infine, fenomeno ancora più malinconico, gli Africani acquistano consapevolezza riflessa della loro nobilissima tradizione artistica proprio oggi, in un mondo che, a meno di miracoli, sembra aver posto su quella tradizione una triste pietra tombale.

This paper presents the general features of dualistic symbolic classification among the Kaguru, a Bantu people of east-central Tanganyika, East Africa.

It has been written as a result of my reading Needham's stimulating article, ‘The Left Hand of the Mugwe’, which recently appeared in Africa. Using Bernardi's ethnographic data on the Meru, Needham isolates a dualistic symbolic classification of those people. The result is a very striking illustration of the order and understanding gained by the social anthropologist once this important feature of Meru ideology is shown. Needham then goes on to indicate some of the relations which such a symbolic classification may have to certain structural divisions of a society.

This paper is concerned with the North Eastern Ibo and specifically with its four principal tribes, the Ezza, Ikwo, Izi, and Ngbo. I hope to show by a comparison of the structure of these four tribes with that of more typical Ibo tribes that distinctive features of their social structure are the result of a modification of this typical structure in response to the conditions of a new environment.

Mlanje is an Administrative District in the Southern Province of Nyasaland. It is densely populated compared with other parts of Central Africa, having a population of 209,522 in 1945, which represented a density of 138 per square mile. The population is tribally heterogeneous, and was composed, in 1945, of 71 per cent. Nguru, 21 per cent. Nyanja, and 5 per cent. Yao people. The Nguru are the most recent arrivals, having immigrated into Nyasaland mainly during the present century. The term Nguru is used to refer to the representatives in Nyasaland of a number of tribes inhabiting that part of Portuguese East Africa which Lies to the east of Nyasaland; these immigrants call themselves Lomwe and in Mlanje are mainly Mihavani and Kokola. The Nyanja are the indigenous inhabitants of the area, who were living there before the invasion of the Mangoche Yao during the nineteenth century. Although they are linguistically distinct, the social organization of these three groups is markedly similar, and there has been a great deal of intermarriage between them, particularly between the Nyanja and the Nguru. No one of them is in sole occupation of a continuous stretch of territory, even the smallest residential groups are often tribally heterogeneous, the similarity of the social organization enabling Nyanja to be absorbed into Nguru hamlets and vice versa. For this reason it is impossible to use a tribal unit as a unit of reference in a discussion of the political organization of this area.

Nationalist assertions among the Bakongo have been at the forefront of the active resistance movements which ultimately led the Belgian Government to grant the Congo its independence. These reactions to the Belgian presence, which can be traced back to the early twenties, expressed themselves in highly diversified forms and with varying degrees of intensity. From the early days of the Belgian rule, however, a duality of tendencies has been apparent in the Mukongo cultural heritage. The acceptance of certain Western innovations, on the one hand, combined with a manifest attachment to their cultural background, on the other, accounts for the presence of modernist and traditional strands discernible in present-day attitudes towards authority.

Apart from its aesthetic evaluation, the study of any art object or class of objects should be carried out following three distinct though interrelated lines of analysis. The first is iconographic, i.e. at the same time morphological, technological, and historical, and concerns the nature of the objects per se, their formal characters, the technique of production, their distribution in space and time, and their stylistic affinities to similar productions elsewhere. The second is iconological, and has to do with the meaning of the representation, the nature of the beings it purports to portray, and the underlying system of conceptions and beliefs in which it is integrated—the world of ideas and symbols in a given culture. These first two aspects of the analysis are common also to archaeological research. The third approach, on the other hand, is more distinctly anthropological, as it deals with the impact of those ideas and of their concrete symbols on the everyday life of the society concerned and with their influence on the ritual and social behaviour and thought of individual men and women. Only a combination of these three approaches can give us a true picture of the phenomenon we are called upon to investigate.

Yao is a Bantu language spoken by about 100,000 people in Southern Tanganyika; by nearly a third of a million people in Nyasaland, and by a much larger but unspecified number in Portuguese East Africa. Grammatical studies of the language as spoken in Nyasaland have been made by Sanderson (1922) and Hetherwick (1902), and Sanderson's Dictionary appeared in 1954. Anthropologically the Nyasaland Yao have been intensively studied by Professor J. C. Mitchell, but the Tanganyika section has remained largely unstudied, either by linguists or anthropologists.

A survey of the traditional political organization of a number of chiefdoms in the Bamenda Grassfields of the Southern Cameroons was made by the writers from May to mid-September 1960. Bali-Nyonga (sixteen miles to the west of Bamenda Station) was one of the chiefdoms studied. Our inquiries were directed mainly to situations and events in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within the living memory of a few aged informants and of the parents of present title-holders. A few contemporary accounts of conditions exist for Bali-Nyonga for the last decade of the nineteenth century: those of Zintgraff (who was the first European to reach Bali-Nyonga), Hutter, Esser, and scattered notices in administrative, scientific, and missionary publications. These provide a rough chronological framework for Bali-Nyonga affairs for 1889–1914. British administrative officers in the course of tax assessment, the establishment of native courts and the resolution of land cases, collected oral traditions from the Mfon (Chief) of Bali-Nyonga and his elders, and accounts of earlier judicial and executive institutions from informants who had experienced them before the establishment of the German Imperial Military Station at Bamenda in 1902. We are not directly concerned in this paper with the expansion of the German administrative, trading, labour-recruiting, and missionary frontier, but with Bali interpretations of their own constitution at the period of contact (1889) and a little before and after. We hope to show that this constitution developed in intelligible circumstances which its special characteristics reflect.

The prime part taken by the Christian Church in the foundation and development of Sierra Leone has confronted local Muslims with a challenge to their powers of association and organization to which their response is still a vital social and political force. A recent article in Africa described the tendency of Muslims in the city of Freetown to construct their mosques and order their corporate life within tribal groups, rather than in one tribally undifferentiated Islamic society. This article sets out to document the complementary drive towards Muslim unity. The dramatic, faction-ridden, aspiring character of the East side of Freetown is largely the result of the tension between these two conflicting forces.

During the sitting of the West African Lands Committee in 1912, the witnesses who were called before the Committee from Egba Division emphatically stated that sales of both farm and town lands had been going on in Egbaland for some considerable time and had become accepted as normal. Equally significant was the vigour with which witnesses from all the other Yoruba sub-tribes countered the suggestion that sale of land existed or was permitted by the traditional land law and custom. H. L. Ward Price in his report also pointed out that sales of land had been going on in Egbaland for at least sixty years before he was writing in the 1930's. From the evidence he collected, it would seem that land sales dated back to between 1860 and 1880.