Nigeria is widely known as the African state where interethnic conflicts led to civil war. A great deal has been written to explain the ‘crisis’, as Nigerians prefer to call it, but there has been little study of the less newsworthy peace—the fact that large numbers of Nigerians in mixed communities get on fairly well together and have done so over a long period of time. In the Nigerian situation, a case can be made that intercommunal conflicts are really about economic and political power; ethnicity is only used to categorize people met in impersonal situations, or not met at all. Since the real game is power, it can also be shown that conflict is stronger at the top than at the bottom of the social system; the élites have more to gain than the masses by forwarding their ethnic group in relation to others. Of course, the élites have, on occasion, convinced the masses that benefits would be shared by all. Ethnic violence would not have been so well supported if this were not the case. The ordinary people have participated in riots, supported a civil war (on both sides), and most can be shown to harbour some prejudice toward members of other groups. But large numbers of them who migrate to the towns live peacefully with members of other groups, often find friends among them and, sometimes, wives or husbands.

Comme tout groupe humain, les Komo éprouvent le besoin d'harmoniser leuts expériences ou l'ensemble des phénomènes qu'ils vivent, quel que soit le niveau où ceux-ci se situent ou le domaine dont ils relèvent. Or, ces expériences ont toutes lieu dans un cadre spatial, qui en fait toujours implicitement partie, mais qui, à certains moments, constitue l'objet privilégié de l'expérience. Le besoin d'harmonisation implique done que ce cadre soit structuré en fonction de cet ensemble. Cette harmonisation se fait dans un mouvement dialectique qui comporte autant de pôles qu'il y a de domaines à unifier et respecte la priorité ontologique de chacun de ceux-ci à son propre niveau. Ainsi, le cadre spatial possède sa priorité topologique dont cette recherche d'harmonisation ne pourra pas ne pas tenir compte. Ce sera le décalage entre ces données topologiques premières et leur relecture dans cet effort d'harmonisation qui fera de celle-ci un processus de symbolisation.

In the first part of this paper I discussed the Tswana, Southern Sotho, and Kgalagadi, and showed that among all these peoples a set of intertwined variables produces a consistent pattern of marriage choices and residential alignments. These peoples are organized in tribes, under chiefs who are linked in competition and through marriage with other close agnates. The chiefdom is divided into wards, ruled often by brothers, brothers' sons, or sons of the chief, and within each ward the dominance of the central core of competing and intermarrying agnates is duplicated. Men with patrilateral ties to those in power at each level are brought into alliance or competition with them, and their relationships may be transformed or reinforced by intermarriage. Outsiders are attached to these ruling agnatic cores at each level, and develop or reinforce matrilateral ties to them by contracting suitable marriages.

The Apostolic Church of John Maranke (Vapostori or Bapostolo), an indigenous Christian church founded in Umtali, Rhodesia, now has congregations across Central Africa. For the Church's central ritual event, the Sabbath kerek, and other occasions of worship, singing constitutes the core of ritual practice and is used to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit. These songs combine traditional Bantu rhythmic patterns with a unique Apostolic form. Often drawn from biblical themes, the songs are composed by members as spiritually inspired pieces.

This paper attempts to comment on the various techniques by which Kano Hausa traders and businessmen raise capital and invest it for diverse economic and social returns. Rather than proposing anything new, I will seek mainly to point to areas of needed future research among the Hausa traders. Moreover, although the paper is primarily concerned with the economic behaviour of a particular people, no clear effort is made at quantification, since very little statistics for Kano trade exist at the time of writing.

This paper deals with certain metaphorical uses of animals in the folklore of the Kaguru, a Bantu language speaking people of east-central Tanzania, East Africa. I have published elsewhere on Kaguru social structure (Beidelman, 1971b) and discuss this here only as it bears directly on the problems at hand. I have published many Kaguru folk-tales as well as various legends, riddles, and other texts (cf. bibliographies, Beidelman, 1967a, 1969, 1974c); it is difficult to publish textual material so that much of my data is still unavailable. In this paper I use published and unpublished texts.