Lorsque le Conseil Exécutif de l'Institut International Africain m'a fait l'honneur de me confier cette ‘Lugard Memorial Lecture’, le nom prestigieux de Lugard me frappa comme un éclair et chassa de mon imagination toute possibilité d'autre sujet. Je ne sais si notre Président, lorsqu'il prononça, en 1952, dans cette même ville, son remarquable discours à la mémoire du grand Lord, son prédécesseur, avait été victime d'une crise de possession aussi caractérisée. Quant à moi je découvris brusquement que j'avais depuis longtemps quelque chose à dire à Lord Lugard et que je n'aurais jamais de meilleure occasion. Souffrez done que je lui parle en votre présence.

The difficulties attending the attempt of the new African polities to weld their disparate elements into viable nation-states have been popularly attributed to ‘tribalism’. Certainly, in some cases groups indigenous to a region did come into conflict as new states arose there, but a hard look at tribal relations in modern Africa shows these relations to be of a different order from those of pre-European times. One element in the so-called ‘tribalism’ in modern Africa, and one which has so far escaped systematic treatment, is the conflict which arose between Africans indigenous to an area and African ‘strangers’—those groups which for various reasons had moved out of their homelands and had established relatively long-term residence in the territories of other groups—as political autonomy and independence became a reality. An examination of the factors which made for conflict between ‘locals’ and ‘strangers’ in West African societies would not only give us the opportunity to understand this phenomenon in a time-perspective, but would also enable us to see whether the status and role of the ‘stranger’ in these societies could throw light on the universal problem of the ‘stranger’.

The problem of the nature of the blood covenant (also called blood pact or blood brotherhood) still awaits adequate detailed comparative analysis. This is unfortunate since detailed consideration of such practices would be interesting in itself and might also provide valuable means for understanding some of the notions of physiology, kinship, magic, and alliance in the societies in which this institution exists. A blood covenant establishes a close bond between two persons not linked by kinship but who, nevertheless, desire social relations supported by stronger sanctions (physiological and/or magical) than those afforded by mere communal, tribal, or trading connexions. It is clear that blood covenants do not establish conventional kinship relations and that the term ‘blood brotherhood’ is misleading. However, the physiological basis of these covenants and the terminology sometimes employed by the persons involved in them do suggest that some comparison with kinship may be useful if only to indicate the differences between these two institutions. By examining some of the ways in which a people's blood-covenant relations are similar and dissimilar to certain of their kinship relations, and by considering the significance which the people themselves see in the physiological link of common blood, we may gain a clearer understanding of both these types of relations.

It is well known that villages and small towns in the savanna and derived savanna area of West Africa have, at some time, moved down from hill sites to their present position on the plains. It has been suggested that settled conditions resulting from the penetration of colonial administration provided the stimulus in a number of cases in the Western Region of Nigeria, notably Okeiho which was moved in 1917, and Igbetti in 1905. In the Afenmai district of northern Benin, fortified hill sites were abandoned and villages were moved down to the plains after British administration entered the district in 1904, while New Idanre in Ondo Province was laid out with broad streets on a rectangular plan at the foot of the hill, leaving Old Idanre on the hill-top site. This paper outlines the reasons for the earlier choice of hill-top sites and for later movement of settlements in a small part of the derived savanna in Ibadan and Oyo Provinces, bounded by arbitrary limits to the north and east, by the Dahomey frontier to the west, and by the boundary between Ibadan and Abeokuta Provinces to the south.