Across the central area of Ibo country, in the Eastern Region of Nigeria, is a thickly populated belt in which population growth has rarely resulted in the development of compact urban or quasi-urban centres, except under exceptional, generally modern, conditions. Typically, the population is spread so evenly throughout the palm-forest that it is difficult to believe that concentrations of over 1,000 persons per square mile are now quite commonplace. The population of Mba-Ise is 186,300 in only about 167 square miles, with a migrant population elsewhere of about 30,000. This type of settlement has put a special imprint on social organization in the area, and some of the interrelationships between lineage, territorial organization, and other kinds of groupings are indicated in this article.

In this article I present an outline account of the ritual associated with the kingship of the interlacustrine Bantu kingdom of Bunyoro, in western Uganda. At the same time I attempt to analyse this material in terms of the categories both of Nyoro thought and of social anthropology. My information is drawn from the scattered accounts and references in the various writings about Bunyoro, rather than from my own field investigations, which in this department of Nyoro culture were not extensive. My assumption is that an anthropological approach based on some knowledge of Nyoro culture as a whole may make the available data more intelligible and more readily comparable with analogous material from elsewhere than it has been hitherto. This, rather than an exhaustive ethnographical account, is the aim of this article.

In 1894 the military power of one of West Africa's most highly centralized kingdoms was broken. Six years later the last representative of the Fon dynasty which had ruled from Abomey since the early seventeenth century was deposed and exiled. Immediately after the conquest of Abomey by the French, the kingdom, somewhat reduced in area, was administered as a colonial protectorate. Attempts to rule through an indigenous paramountcy were not new in French West Africa: similar experiments were made in Senegal and in the Futa Jallon. But, compared with these better-known examples, Dahomey lacks a detailed account of administrative practice in its protectorates and a treatment of the nature of Abomey kingship at a time when the local authority structure was being reappraised by Europeans. The quick demise of an institution that had flourished for about 300 years and excited the wonder of traders and travellers calls for some explanation. How much of the Fon dynasty's fiscal and religious functions survived its loss of police powers, and by what methods did French administrators take its place?

Part of the answer to these questions lies in the decline of Abomey control of coastal trade in the years immediately preceding the conquest—a factor, indeed, which aroused the dynasty to desperate measures and occasioned French military intervention. The rest of the explanation is to be found in the contradiction between ‘protectorate’, as administrative policy, and the administrative practice of French officials at Abomey.

The Temne of the Northern Province of Sierra Leone are second only to the Mende in the Protectorate, numbering over half a million and inhabiting some 10,500 square miles of land. In general, they are culturally similar to their neighbours, especially in their possession of a number of societies, some secret, some not, which play integral roles in their lives. Of the societies found in this westernmost section of the Guinea Coast area, the Bundu or Sande for women and the Poro for men have been described by various writers for a number of groups. The emphasis placed on these two societies in the literature is justifiable in view of their multi-tribal geographic distribution, their general membership embracing most of the adult population and much of the adolescent segment in the groups where they are found, and the important functions they serve. In addition, however, there are a number of societies in this general area which, although they have a more restricted area distribution and less general membership, nevertheless also serve important functions for one or more groups. Such a society is the Ragbenle, also known as Maneke, which is centred in the eastern section of Temne country, where it is closely connected with the chiefs, particularly in conducting the ceremonies associated with their death, burial, selection, instruction, and installation, and, in addition, purifies violators of incest prohibitions, heals the chief and anyone else seeking help, divines witches, and provides other supernatural services. The purpose of this paper is to consider the membership of the society in terms of both supernatural and human members, and its functions in various aspects of Temne life.

There are two methods by which facts concerning the unrecorded past of a language may be recovered. The first may be labelled the external method. By confrontation with comparable facts of other languages to which it is related, we may reconstruct in some measure the past of a particular language. This is the familiar comparative method. Sometimes, however, another procedure, that of internal reconstruction, may be applied, independently or as a supplement to the comparative method. The facts of the language as described at a given time suggest certain hypotheses regarding its own past. The present study involves a combination of these two methods. An interpretation strongly suggested by the Masai language in its present form receives further confirmation and elucidation by the subsequent application of the comparative method.

The effects of major changes in the social system on the mental state of individuals have been the subject of a recent controversy. Miss Ward (1956), in a paper discussing the significance of an alleged increase in the number of witch-finding cults in Ashanti, argued that this can be taken as evidence of a widespread rise in the general level of anxiety resulting from rapid structural changes. In a subsequent rejoinder Goody (1957) challenged not only the view that such cults have in fact become more numerous, but also the underlying assumption, shared by many social scientists, that rapid social change produces an emotional malaise in the people caught up in it.