This paper starts with a critique of two recent essays on African religion—Professor Max Gluckman's essay ‘Les Rites de Passage’, and Dr. V. W. Turner's Chihamba: the White Spirit. Though the first is a generalized interpretation of African rituals, and the second a close study of one rite in a particular culture, the two make an interesting comparison. First of all, they are inspired by strongly contrasted theoretical premisses. Secondly, one represents a well-established approach to the study of ritual, while the other includes a powerful objection to this approach. Thirdly, the two essays exhibit a polarity of attitude which I suspect has a wider currency both in Social Anthropology and in Comparative Religion. In what follows, I shall argue that the polarization of thought suggested by these two essays is basically unhelpful to the study of African religions; and I shall go on and suggest an approach which seems to me a fruitful middle way into the subject.

The following text was the last to be recorded by my Nyoro assistant, Mr. Perezi Mpuru, before his sudden and untimely death in July 1953. I present a full translation of it here because I believe that as well as providing an illuminating picture of some aspects of Nyoro village life, it also vividly illustrates some of the ways in which participation in a new and wider social and economic world can affect the everyday lives of members of an African rural community. The story was told to my assistant over a period of two or three days by a middle-aged man, Yowana, who had been a primary school-teacher. As well as bringing up his own son and daughter, Eriya and Mariya, Yowana had also brought up another boy, Yozefu, who was the son of neighbours who had died, although he still had relatives living some miles away.

Many local communities in Igala tell the story of their origin in the form of either a clan or a lineage pedigree going back to a founder who is described as a hunter by profession. Typically in these legends the founder is said to have come to the locality from elsewhere and to have found it so good for hunting that he decided to remain and make a new home. His hunting camp becomes a permanent settlement in whose affairs the hunter's family play a leading role, and after his death his descendants form the dominant clan or lineage in that area. The theme of the actual arrival and settlement of the hunter is often woven into stories telling of his hunting exploits and describing the unusual success that he had in the hunting field.

The Afro-Arab community living along the coastal belt of Kenya and Tanganyika contains persons claiming Arab nationality by either patrilineal or matrilineal descent in whom the biological Arab strain may vary between individuals born to pure Arab parents and speaking Arabic and those in whom the Arab strain is unobservable and who speak Swahili. It is not accepted that the term Swahili covers the social interrelationships between these variations. The Swahili-speaking Afro-Arabs can be adequately described as Swahili but they nevertheless wish to be regarded as Arabs by outsiders and to speak as much Arabic as they can learn. The cultural and social interrelationship is so strong that a term must be used which will include the Arabs at one end of the scale and the Swahili at the other.

The anthropomorphic brass staff of the Yoruba Ogboni Society—the edan Ogboni—holds a position of isolation and aesthetic distinction within the Yoruba plastic. Whereas traditional wood-carving is humanistic in its identification with life, is spontaneous, descriptive, and experimental in idiom, Ogboni art is iconic—archetypal, hieratic, and conservative, a manifestation of eternal principle. Where the formal theme of Yoruba carving is abstract, dynamic, architectonic, Ogboni art is absolute, static, and linear. Frequently the edan Ogboni is little more than high relief—a non-sculptural projection of drawing in wax. Though art associated with Orisha is often religious it is not generally held to contain a spirit, and is never worshipped as a spirit. Orisha art is most typically symbolic of the spirit, where Ogboni art, in contrast, is sacred and worshipped as the actual vessel of the spirit. This difference in function, besides affecting the resulting form, determines the attitude of the artist to the object rendered. Yoruba wood-carving is therefore free to be naturalistic and spontaneous, where Ogboni art is rigidly traditional and conservative.