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.

In his witty and thought-provoking Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘Et maintenant, Lord Lugard?’ (Africa, xxxiii. 4, 1963), Gouverneur Deschamps has provided us with an excellent general appraisal of the relative achievements and failures of French and British ‘native’ administration in Africa. But he does not do full justice to the fundamental differences between the two systems. Though he hints at these differences on several occasions in his lecture, he contends that, far from what is generally supposed, the two were in practice very similar, since they both reposed on indigenous chiefs. He insists that ‘la seule différence est que nous n'avons pas tenté, comme vous, Lord Lugard, de moderniser ces états anciens, ni de créer des embryons d'états là où il n'en existait point’; or‘…[our administrative practice] ne différait de la vôtre (au moins en Afrique noire) que par une allure plus familière et des buts moins définis’. This seems seriously to underestimate the nature of the differences between the two systems, which were rather those of kind than of degree.

New field material should give an opportunity for reappraising old research. Thus Father de Sousberghe's latest report on the Pende (1963) stimulates a radical revision of assumptions about Central African ethnography. Is there a recognizable type of kinship organization which we can call ‘Central African’? The question was first raised by Gluckman in his introduction to The Lamba Village before any intensive field-work had been reported. At that stage his answer was that the typical Central African social system was characterized by lack of corporate lineages such as are found among the southern Bantu. These were the early days of post-war anthropology, and since he was using a negative criterion, he denned the sense in which he used ‘lineage’ as a genealogical structure whose members shared corporate rights and responsibilities. Before the ink was dry, however, Clyde Mitchell was sending in the first reports on the Yao, who are culturally much akin to the Maravi peoples, Nyanja and Cewa, among whom they live. According to Mitchell, the Yao were organized in distinct corporate matrilineal lineages. Gluckman did not tear up his introduction and write a new one. In an addendum he hoped that the unexpected discovery of corporate descent groups among the Yao would stimulate further inquiry.

In a brilliant analysis of Kalahari religion, Robin Horton has suggested that ‘Kalahari readiness to identify their unitary tamuno with the Christian God, and to give it active worship in such a guise’, may be explained by the fact that ‘Christian evangelism coincided with a growing irruption of the wider world outside into the narrow enclave of village life, and hence with a growing need to come to terms with this wider world’. Mr. Horton may not have meant to draw this conclusion, but this assessment could be read to suggest that among the Kalahari there had been no ‘active worship’ of the Creator God until Christian missionaries arrived with the European trader and consul, that it was this irruption of the outer world that gave the Kalahari villager a reason for seeking actively to worship tamuno, the missionary arriving at the opportune moment to teach him how. The following account of a Creator festival and ritual among the Nembe or Brass people, living adjacent to the Kalahari in the Niger Delta, should serve to confirm that active worship of a supreme being antedated the establishment of Christian missions. As with the Kalahari, there was a later identification of the Nembe God with the Christian, but this did not mark the beginning of active worship. The impact of the new forces has, however, resulted in the giving up of traditional modes of worship for the new Christian procedures which are thought to be more effective, and the idu festival described here has not been performed for over a decade.

For Kalanga of Southern Rhodesia hereditary guardian spirits known as mazenge are a sanction on correct relations among kinsmen and affines. Only women are possessed by these captious guardian spirits; and I shall refer to such spirit-possessed women as mazenge hosts. Kalanga perform a ritual of atonement seasonally and whenever the illness of the host or of any of her kinsfolk, particularly children, is attributed to the affliction of a guardian spirit. Ritual obligations then draw together a congregation typically not of agnates and other cognates alone, but also of affines.

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.

It is greatly to the credit of the editors of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa that they have made generally available ten systematic accounts of witch beliefs in East and Central African societies. All teachers of anthropology must surely be grateful to them on this account alone. Moreover the book is spiced with many insights into sociocultural problems connected with the main theme. A permissive editorial policy has stimulated a rich diversity of viewpoints and presentations. But one is left with the feeling that Monica Wilson's plea for the comparative analysis of these ‘standardized nightmares’—a plea which forms the book's motto—as one of the ‘keys to the understanding of society’ has not met here with a wholly satisfactory response.

In Eastern Nigeria today there is a growing movement of people from very densely populated rural districts to those which are sparsely peopled. The movement involves farmers who, because of the increasing pressure on the already overworked and impoverished soils of their village territories, move to districts favoured with abundant and more fertile farmlands. Migration to the farm during the farming season (February-October) may be distinguished from that in which the migrant stays at his place of work for many years before returning to his own village. The former is generally associated with short-distance movement to farmlands rarely more than twenty miles from the natal village. The latter, on the other hand, often involves movement over long distances. The migrant farmer is engaged not only in growing crops but also in harvesting and processing palm fruits. The various economic, demographic, and environmental factors which give rise to this pattern of farming are discussed in this paper, which also reviews the socio-economic implications of migrant tenant farming in Eastern Nigeria.

Many accounts of African tribal societies lack information concerning the role of women in social control and political organization. Social control is seen largely as the prerogative of males, even in societies where matriliny serves as a basis for establishing rules of succession to positions of authority. Of course, there are exceptional cases where authority and political leadership has been vested in women, e.g. the Lobedu of the Transvaal, but generally speaking, the establishment and maintenance of law and order by legitimate authority, within a specific territory, has been considered by many anthropologists to be almost exclusively the preoccupation and franchise of the male members of a society.

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.

Swahili culture can be roughly defined as the culture of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast whose activities show features of Perso-Arabian origin, features that are foreign to the culture of other Bantu peoples of East Africa. It cannot be described simply as Bantu culture plus Perso-Arabian elements, for some Swahilis have excluded from their way of life anything that can be labelled as Bantu; they may have Bantu blood, but their whole way of life is Muslim-Arabic.

The Fipa of south-western Tanganyika are a Bantu-speaking people numbering 78,000 at the last tribal census in 1948. Most of them live on a high and largely deforested plateau bounded on the west by the southern extremity of Lake Tanganyika and on the east by Lake Rukwa. On the plateau, a corridor of land roughly 140 miles long and varying from 30 to 50 miles in width, the Fipa are agriculturalists and raisers of livestock, particularly cattle, goats, and poultry; their principal crops are millet, maize, and beans. Along the shores of the two lakes the Fipa are also fishermen.

The phenomena variously described as ‘nativistic’, ‘messianic’, or ‘reform movements’ have usually been very dramatic, have brought about important culture change, and have often occasioned some disquiet on the part of the authorities. One has only to think of the Ghost Dance, the Sudanese Mahdi, the Taiping Rebellion, and Mau Mau—among recent examples—to say nothing of the birth of Christianity and Islam. For these dynamic cultural innovations Anthony Wallace (1956) has suggested the term ‘revitalization movements’, of which there are thousands of documented cases throughout the world. Such movements are conscious, deliberate, and organized; they emerge out of acute social and economic dissatisfaction and as an attempt to create a more satisfactory culture.

The songs presented here were collected for me by Wäldä Sänbät Bänti. In my experience of collecting linguistic material in Ethiopia, Wäldä Sänbät deserves special mention. He is about twenty years old, a speaker of Gyeto which is a slight variant of Chaha. When I asked Wäldä Sänbät whether he would be willing to work with me on the Gyeto vocabulary, he readily agreed in terms that I at first considered rather boastful. He told me indeed that he was the most knowledgeable man in the dialect of Gyeto, a statement that I did not hear too often from my Ethiopian informants. The truth of the matter is that Walda Sanbat was the best informant I encountered in my linguistic work in Ethiopia. Not only did he know his language admirably well, but he was also a born field-worker. Without my prompting, he brought me all kinds of plants, cereals, and grasses and gave me their native names. He knew how to illustrate difficult terms with appropriate gestures and stories which explained the difficult word in context. Thus, having noticed his ability as a fieldworker, I asked him to collect Chaha songs dealing with any subject. Here again he showed that he knew the technique of a professional. When he presented me with the bill agreed upon in advance, he had added to it an item for which I gladly paid. Indeed, on several occasions he had found it necessary to offer the singer a bottle of native beer to put him in the mood to recite the song. So it was that he brought back to me at Addis Ababa a considerable collection of Chaha songs.

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.

This essay is based on a review of the documentation on tribal economies in Africa. It attempts (i) to outline reported economic development within and outside the subsistence sector in traditional African societies; (ii) to assess tribal economic attitudes disclosed; (iii) to appraise, in the light of these, probable reactions towards further economic development with reference to the technological, industrial, and commercial dimensions of urbanization.