Towards the end of every year Swazi from the Swaziland Protectorate and from beyond its borders come to the capital, the home of the Indlovukati (Queen-Mother), to take part in the dominant national ceremony, the Incwala. I will analyse this in some detail from the angle of social stratification. Cook, Schoeman, and Marwick have described the Incwala, but their accounts are very incomplete, nor can I accept their interpretations.

The Incwala can be abstracted from Swazi culture, in the same way as any other situation—a marriage, a court case, a business agreement, the building of a hut, &c., but it has a wider and more representative personnel, and Swazi recognize it as the most important of all national ceremonies, and the most essential event of the year. Personal joys and tragedies, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one affect individual men and women, but the Incwala ‘is the heavy play of all the people’.

In this paper I propose to describe in some detail how the particular mechanism in which I am interested in the United States is working inside the food situation, and then to go on from that to a consideration of the more general problems involved.

The United States began a nutrition campaign just before the war. It is, perhaps, an interesting example of the different effects of timing in the two countries that so many of the measures which we took in connexion with nutrition among our own people were associated with the period of the depression, and with measures of recovery from the depression. In Britain the same kind of measures have been associated with the war, and have been subsequent to the height of the British war effort; they are therefore associated with the crest of a successful war effort, whereas we associate them with the less uplifting feeling of coping with the depression.

Before the war local crafts and industries were already established and a certain measure of organization had, at least in the Jewish community, been started. Handwork of many varieties had been modernized, both in processes of manufacture and in design. The Bezalel school of applied arts had been remodelled, and design for metal-work, posters, and weaving was based on a thorough course of drawing from nature and a study of processes. The general tendency was towards simplicity and fine form rather than to over-decoration, and good examples of table silverware had been produced. Home industries were being encouraged both by a committee working in Tel-Aviv and by the Association of Palestine Arts and Crafts, under the direct control of the Jewish Agency.