The Yakö of the Middle Cross River area of Obubra Division in SE. Nigeria live in five compact villages a few miles apart, each of which was formerly autonomous in its political as well as its ritual organization. They have a common tradition that their forebears all came from Okuni, a settlement some 50 miles away up the Cross River, from which they came overland, for they were not river people, in several parties and over some years. Among the Yakö settlements distinction is made between those in which the original migrants settled—that is, Idomi, where stopped a section of the main group which founded Umor, Umor itself, and the separately settled community of Nko—and the remaining villages of Ekuri and Nkpani which are held to have been founded a generation or two later by local migrations, following dissensions, from Umor.

The basis of the funeral friendship

Among the Ambo there exists a joking relationship based on the interrelations of clan objects, but to call it simply a joking relationship would hardly be appropriate, since the joking relationship is only accessory. The institution is first and foremost a real and close friendship which has for its aim assistance in the funeral of the friend, and this aim is never lost sight of, but is always alluded to even in joking. This social institution of the Ambo people may therefore aptly be termed ‘funeral friendship’ (bunungwe)

The Nsaw are a section of the Tikar people who are believed to have come originally from the region of Bornu and to have established themselves near Tibati in what is now the French Cameroons. About 300 years ago small bands, some under the leadership of sons of the King, broke away and eventually reached Bamenda. The sequence of the various migrations is confused, but among the last was probably that of the Nsaw under their Paramount Chief, the Fɔn. They are a negroid people who speak a semi-Bantu language, and they now number approximately 32,000. Their territory, some 700 square miles in area, is bounded on the east by the frontier of the French Cameroons, on the south by the Ndop Plain, on the west by Oku (an independent sub-tribe of Nsaw), and on the north-west and north by Bum and Nsungli. Most of it is high rolling grassland at an average height of 5,000 feet above sea-level, but the landscape, nevertheless, presents an appearance of alternating woodland and meadow, for in the villages, which are anything from one to five miles apart, compounds are overshadowed by tall dark groves of kola trees, while along the numerous streams are plantations of raffia palm.

Alexander Mayunge's father was, before he died, headman of Mayunge Village in the Lala area of Northern Rhodesia—that is, some 100 miles east of Broken Hill. He was a professional Kalimba maker, and Alexander his son, to whom I am indebted for the facts in this essay, used to help him. Mayunge used to make all kinds of Tulimba—the Kankoŵela, the Ndande, and the Tulimba-twa-masaŵu: he also made Malimba which, among the Lala, means single-note xylophones.

The existence of the country and people of the Gurage in Ethiopia has long been known in Europe from the writings of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. A few references to the Gurage may also be found in Ludolf's Historia Aethiopica (1681), and Bruce's Travels (vol. iv, pp. 147 et seq.) contain some amusing accounts of Gurage activities. Bruce thought they were ‘troglodytes and all robbers; their constant occupation is attending the Abyssinian camps, and stealing horses, mules, or whatever they can get, which they do in a very singular manner’. He then describes such a Gurage robbery in some detail and remarks that when the culprit was finally apprehended, he was found to speak ‘the Amharic language as well as his own, contrary to what the villain had all along pretended’.