The Tallensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast furnish data of special interest for the study of comparative social structure among the peoples of West Africa. Large as the ethnographic literature on West Africa is, it is singularly lacking in analytical data concerning social structure. Some of the most useful collections of ethnographic information on West African peoples thus lack the foundation without which a coherent picture of a society is impossible. Tables of kinship terms, enumerations of kinship usages, catalogues of marriage and inheritance customs, and such-like information are no more than the raw materials for the construction of a systematic representation of social structure. And very often the raw materials are not sufficient. There are plenty of bricks but no mortar. The reasons for such lacunae are obvibys. A sympathetic amateur ethnographer can bring together material of inestimable value; but without a good theoretical grounding in modern social anthropology the field worker will not look for, and even if he stumbles across it, will not recognise the kind of material necessary for an understanding of social structure. He must; first of all, have the concept of a total social structure clearly in his mind; and he must look for the connexions, which are very often implicit, by which ostensibly discrete processes and institutions are related to one another in a meaningful pattern.

The note on ‘Joking relationship in East Africa’ in Africa, vol. xiii, pp. 170-3, 1940, brought to my notice a custom of which I had never heard. It led me to make inquiries about utani among the Africans on my station, whom I found without exception to be ready to discuss the matter. What follows is based on the information given me in Swahili by thirty-two men belonging to the following seventeen tribes:

Yao, Ngoni, Wemba, Ngindo, Nyakyusa, Kinga, Mbunga, Ha, Sumbwa, Nyamwezi, Zaramu, Zigua, Nyiramba, Chagga, Sambaa, Bondei, and Digo.

Broadly speaking it is true to say that the Colonial Empire woke up all of a sudden, some eight years ago, to the fact that it was faced with nutritional problems of considerable magnitude. In 1936, as part of the outcome of a debate on world nutrition at Geneva in the previous September, the British Colonial Secretary asked for a report from each colony on the state of nutrition within its borders. The chorus of woe evoked by this was startling in its unanimity and showed that the little heeded scientific voices of the preceding years had after all been saying something of the greatest importance.