In the summer of 1969, while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia University, I had the remarkable good fortune to spend two months in Ouagadougou, Upper Volta. Through Lady Barbara Ward Jackson, I had been awarded an Albert Schweitzer Travelling Fellowship in order to study the processes of urbanization there. With all the enthusiasm of a novice, I set out to live with an African family. Through a series of fortuitous circumstances, and with the assistance of Elliot Skinner, then American ambassador, and of Françoise Héritier and Roger and Suzy Platiel at the Centre Voltaique de la Recherche Scientifique (C.V.R.S.), I found a room in the compound of Saïdou Dao. Saïdou, as I soon learned, was a Dyula whose father had emigrated from Ivory Coast. The Dyula are a mobile people; frequently dependent on the hospitality of others, they are masters of the art of offering it themselves. Saïdou and his family were no exception. With hindsight, I can say that my first (and all too brief) trip to the field was thoroughly amateurish. I cannot claim to have learned a great deal about urbanization in Ouagadougou, but my chance encounter with a charming host left me with the determination to return to Africa, this time to study the Dyula in their home territory in northern Ivory Coast.

This book is the fruit of that determination.