Since the end of the war, the changes undergone by African society in the Belgian Congo have been a recurrent theme in colonial journals published in Belgium and in the Congo. We shall attempt to give here a brief survey of the present situation and of the problems which arise out of it, as they appear in some of these articles.

We have to start with this question: what are the different social or cultural categories into which the eleven million Africans living in the Belgian Congo can be divided? The main cleavage, which presents itself to any observer, is based on the character—tribal or otherwise—of the political institutions to which the individual is subject.

We are fortunate in possessing enough good ethnographic material on Dahomey to attempt a reassessment in the light of later theoretical developments of the very interesting types of marriage reported there.

Analysis shows that three criteria are involved in the thirteen ‘types’ of marriage as given by Herskovits's Dahomean informants: (i) the method of arranging the marriage, including courtship and payment of the bride-wealth; (2) the status of the children; and (3) the relationship between man and wife—a constant which is, however, influenced by the distribution of rights and duties in regard to the children. The nature of the social groups concerned in the configuration of rights and duties connected with marriage is a point of great importance which does not appear in connexion with Herskovits's analysis of marriage; he divides these ‘types’ into a matrilineal and a patrilineal class on the basis of the status of the children. The starting-point of the following analysis is the transfer or non-transfer of puissance, or jural authority, through marriage—a criterion emphasized by Le Hérissé.

In this short article I present some of my notes on what may broadly be called Nuer religion. It describes two important concepts of the Nuer of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: biit, a curse, and cien, the vengeance of a ghost.

The curse of certain persons in Nuer society is believed to be effective if they have been wronged. If they utter curses without due cause (cuong) the curses will not harm those against whom they are uttered, but will either be ineffective or harm the speakers of them. A man curses another by uttering an invocation (lam)— which in this context is an imprecation—over, or about, him; and the Nuer distinguish different kinds of curse by reference to the relationship of the persons implicated in it—biit gwan, the curse of a father, biit nara, the curse of a maternal uncle, biit kuaara, the curse of a leopard-skin chief, and so forth. Some of these curses are regarded as weightier than others.

Kuczynski has drawn attention to the deplorable incompleteness of censuses of colonial populations. In order to make estimates of population trends among non-literate peoples, therefore, we have to rely on the analysis of samples drawn at random from the population as a whole. The difficulties to be surmounted even for so limited an objective are considerable.

The Ibo-speaking people of Eastern Nigeria can be regarded as a single culture area which may provisionally be subdivided into five main divisions: Northern or Onitsha, Southern or Owerri, Western or Ika, Eastern or Cross River, and North-eastern or Abakaliki. The first two divisions, whose boundaries correspond very roughly to those of the Administrative Provinces of Onitsha and Owerri, contain the bulk of the population; the Western occupies the Niger riverain region and the forest country beyond, and their culture has been influenced by that of the Edospeaking tribes farther west, and by Benin; the Cross River Ibo are another marginal group whose affinities with the ‘Semi-Bantu’-speaking tribes on the eastern bank of that river have yet to be studied; while the North-eastern Ibo are a specialized group that has developed, in comparative isolation, a culture and a social structure better adapted to the savannah country in which they live. The remarks which follow refer mainly to the Northern, Southern, and Cross River Ibo; the North-eastern Ibo system differs in many important respects; the Western has not been studied. The terms used in defining Ibo social groupings have been explained in Africa, vol. xix, No. 2, p. 151, and in places where this may cause confusion the ‘official’ or alternative term is given in brackets.

The present notes concern the Lwena, Chokwe, and Luchazi immigrants of the north-west of Northern Rhodesia, commonly referred to as the Balovale tribes. Like other Central African Bantu they are animists, and their ancestors through the ancestral cult form an essential element in the community of the living and the dead. The spirits of the ancestors are of communal significance to the kinship group to which they belong, and they are also of individual significance to living individuals within a kinship group.