In this article and in a succeeding one I give a preliminary account of Nyoro kinship and affinal terms, together with some description of the expected and actual behaviour associated with the categories they denote. I hope at a later date to publish a very much fuller account, but it may in the meantime be useful to put on record a broad outline of the Nyoro system, so far undescribed except for the few pages devoted to it in Roscoe's work. In the present article I discuss Nyoro categories of kin; in the one which follows I shall consider affinal relationships and Nyoro notions about them.

The Anuak are a Nilotic people of the south-east of the Sudan and adjacent Ethiopia. They may number between 30,000 and 40,000 people, of whom at least two thirds live in Ethiopia, where a number of difficulties prevented me from visiting them. As described in Professor Evans-Pritchard's writings, two somewhat different political systems and forms of rule and leadership are found in the villages of Anuakland. In the south-east, several ecological and other circumstances have favoured the spread of the influence of a noble clan, members of which reign in villages which, according to tradition, were at one time politically isolated from each other and autonomous under local headmen. These villages of the noble clan are drawn, through the nobles associated with them, into competition for the acquisition of a single set of royal emblems, of which the most important are several ancient bead-necklaces. It seems that the influence of this noble clan has spread and is even now spreading farther among the villages of Anuakland, though in the land as a whole most villages are still under the sway of headmen chosen from lineages which traditionally provided them. It is with the organization of these villages, and the way in which their members change their headmen, that this paper deals.

Miss Ward, in her paper on Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti, maintains that the spread of ‘new witch-finding cults’ in Ashanti results from an emotional malaise deriving from structural changes in the society. The hypothesis is one which has been put forward on other occasions to account for the reported increase in such activities. The basic propositions appear to be four: firstly, that major changes in the social system increase the overall malaise in a society: secondly, that such increased malaise will be reflected in an increase in witchcraft: thirdly, that an increase in witchcraft will be reflected in an increase in witch-finding cults: fourthly, that there has been such an increase in Ashanti.

In my general classification of African languages, the so-called ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ languages of East Africa were placed in the same subdivision as the Nilotic languages within a much larger linguistic stock called Macro-Sudanic. In a recent review of this work Welmers has suggested the geographic designation Chari-Nile as more appropriate, an emendation in terminology which is herewith accepted. In the same work, the traditional Hamito-Semitic family was accepted with some modifications, not relevant to the present discussion, as another major African linguistic stock, distinct from the Chari-Nile family although perhaps distantly related to it. On this view, the term ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ is inappropriate for this group of languages and the name ‘Great Lakes’ was suggested in its place. In his recent work on the Nilotic languages, Oswin Köhler takes a position very similar to my own in regard to the ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ languages. Moreover he suggests that the Bari-Masai group of languages forming the bulk of ‘Nilo-Hamitic’ is as distant from Nandi-Suk, hitherto always included under the same designation, as it is from the Nilotic languages proper. He therefore proposes a threefold division into Western Nilotic (Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, &c), Eastern Nilotic (Bari, Masai, Lotuko, &c), and Southern Nilotic (Nandi-Suk). I am inclined to agree with him and this view is borne out by the material assembled in the later part of this article.

The wit and wisdom of the Fulani, as of other African peoples, are expressed most characteristically in their proverbs and riddles. Their proverbs are amply illustrated by the collections of H. Gaden and C. E. J. Whitting, and a selection of riddles appeared in a recent article in Africa by M. Dupire and the Marquis de Tressan. But there are other types of oral literature—both light and serious—which various writers have mentioned, without quoting examples. So Mlle Dupire refers to formes litteraires alambiquées and ritournelles des enfants bororo, and G. Pfeffer, in his article on ‘Prose and Poetry of the Fulbe,’ speaks of jokes and tongue-twisters. The aim of this article is to present some examples of these types of proverbial lore and word-play—epigrams, tongue-twisters, and chain-rhymes—which were recorded, along with many more riddles and proverbs, in the course of linguistic research during a recent tour of the Fula-speaking areas of West Africa, and to consider their relation to proverbs and riddles. These types of oral literature are of course by no means peculiar to the Fulani, and a number of the examples here quoted may well have parallels in other languages of West Africa or farther afield. But an examination of such pieces in one language may perhaps contribute something to the general study of this kind of lore.

Filiberto Giorgetti ha pubblicato in questa rivista (vol. xxvii, no. 2, April 1957, pp. 178-86) un articolo su ‘II cannibalismo dei Niam-Niam’. Quel che ci riguarda di questo scritto è sopratutto la premessa, in quanto il Giorgetti prende spunto, per il suo assunto, da un nostro libro su Il Cannibalismo degli Asandè (o Niam-Niam), edito a Roma, nella Collana di Studi Etnografici, nel 1954.