The Azande are a Central African ethnic complex to which some fifty different peoples, speaking Sudanic, Bantu, Nilotic, and Nilo-Hamitic languages, have contributed. This was brought about by the migrations and conquests of the Ambomu people, under their Vongara ruling family, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the course of them the Mbomu clans, including the Avongara, were scattered far and wide, and everywhere they imposed on the subjugated peoples their language and political institutions, so that these peoples, some more quickly, and some more completely, than others, became, or are in the process of becoming, absorbed in the Zande amalgam. Little by little their languages are forgotten and their distinctive customs fall into desuetude. But, as might be supposed, in the process of assimilation to the dominant Ambomu, the foreign peoples, both the subjugated and those bordering Zandeland, contributed much to Zande culture. This paper is designed to give some indication of the extent to which the Ambomu have taken over foreign usages and of the complexity of the cultural amalgam which these borrowings have brought about.

In this paper I describe the band organization of the !Kung Bushmen. The !Kung word n//a besi was translated by the interpreters as ‘people who live together’. I use the word band for n//a besi, meaning by band, in this connexion, the grouping in !Kung social organization which is above the family grouping. It is a grouping precisely of the people who live together.

The jubilee of the World Missionary Conference, which was held at Edinburgh in June 1910, should be noticed by students of Africa, since it brought into prominence for the first time, as one of its two secretaries, a man who was to have considerable influence on African affairs and was the first Administrative Director of the International African Institute. This was J. H. Oldham who had been briefly a missionary in India and then secretary of the Missionary Study Council of the United Free Church of Scotland. ‘The conspicuous ability’ he showed in the organization and running of the great conference led to his subsequent appointment as full-time secretary of the Continuation Committee, which was set up to maintain the work of the conference and which became in 1921 the International Missionary Council. In this post, and as the first editor of the International Review of Missions, Oldham was in constant and daily touch with mission affairs from the whole world. He was, in fact, beginning a long career as a missionary statesman, with, from the First World War, his headquarters at Edinburgh House in London. In negotiating then with the Government over German missionaries and their property in India and the British African territories, Oldham began to build up a fund of goodwill in the official world.

The Yoruba Ogboni cult has been referred to as a typical ‘secret society’ for over fifty years, yet it has never been described in any detail, or analysed in accurate general terms. Frobenius discovered its controlling importance in Yoruba religious organization in 1910 and promptly became initiated into the Ibadan Ogboni, but only to get information from the priests of other Yoruba cults. He made no attempt to study the beliefs of Ogboni members, whom he dismissed as ‘mystery-mongering greybeards’. Two anthropologists have been initiated into the cult in the course of the last twenty-five years, but have declared themselves bound by its oath of secrecy, and so have published nothing about it.

Labour migration is an outstanding feature in most contemporary African societies. It not only touches on nearly all aspects of the lives of the peoples involved, but is often the cause as well as the result of important social and cultural changes. It therefore holds a special interest for students of such changes. Here they can observe the movements of vast numbers of people, and the concomitant problems which arise with the exposure of these people to new social, political, and economic conditions. Furthermore, working with data from migrants and their home and host communities, social scientists are able to test many theoretical assumptions which are held about the nature of socio-cultural change.