The present number of Africa is devoted to linguistic questions and deals with a number of tasks with which the Institute is concerned. The notes on the results achieved by the publication of the Short Guide to the Recording of African Languages bear on the survey and classification of African languages, and are related to the general report published in the January number of Africa, and at the same time to Dr. Lukas's article on the situation in the area lying between the Nile and Lake Chad. Dr. Lukas's contribution is the first of a series of articles in which it is intended to cover the whole of Negro Africa and to show in detail the present condition of linguistic research of the area dealt with in each article, the existing gaps in our knowledge, and the work to be undertaken in the near future; the articles will also help to classify the languages spoken in each area.

The Louedu of the NE. Transvaal are patrilineal and marriage, which is patrilocal, involves (as it does among other S. Bantu tribes) the transfer of munywalo. This,institution has been variously interpreted as the legalization of the marriage, as a guarantee of a wife's status or good behaviour, and in terms of compensation, economic or ritual. But these interpretations are rather like parodies in which the emphasis on the features mentioned is not so much wrong as a caricature. We have, often complacently, projected our own values and motivations as universally valid. Much might be said in favour of such a caricature, if it is infused with the life of a character in Dickens, especially when the purpose has been to ennoble an institution which many regard as degrading. The kindly cartoon is better than the derogatory stereotype. It would, however, be better still if we could accommodate ourselves to a system in which the social arrangements are incommensurable with our own. More specifically, and that is the purpose of this article, we might try to discover the real place of munywalo in the social system. The manner in which we phrase the subject, that is, as the relation of the cattle exchanges to the social structure, is not meant to disguise our approach. It is intended to focus attention on the facts that cattle constitute the essence of munywalo, and that the exchanges of cattle involved are both the basis of important social arrangements and by far the most important use to which cattle are put in the society.

L'ÉTUDE DES LANGUES AFRICAINES: RÉSULTATS ACTUELS ET CEUX QUE L'ON ESPÈRE DANS L'AVENIR

It is only the span of one man's lifetime since the veil which had shrouded the heart of Africa from the knowledge of the outer world was torn aside by the great explorers. Between 1858 and 1872 the dominant physical features of Central Africa were discovered. Little more than ten years later, all this vast new-found area had been ‘partitioned’, together with the previously known and partly occupied country on the seaboard, between the colonial Powers of Europe. Since that time a variety of governments have been grappling according to their lights with the wide range of problems, physical and social, political and economic, involved in the administration of African peoples. They have had little to guide them. In South Africa, it is true, a great body of Africans, racially akin to those of Tropical Africa, had long been under European government; but the fact that the climate of South Africa had permitted Europeans to make it the homeland of a new European nation meant that the lessons of South African experience were largely inapplicable to that greater part of Tropical Africa which is unsuited for European settlement.

The policy of adapting ‘for the purposes of local government the tribal institutions which the native people have evolved themselves, so that the latter may develop in a constitutional manner from their own past’ depends for success on more than a general grasp of the outlines of native social organisation. Native standards of value as expressed in individual and collective behaviour, the operation of balances and checks in the social system, current trends which are tending to cause some institutions and customs to lose strength at the expense of others, and the economic forces that have been or are in the future likely to be operative in the society, must all be analysed and assessed in their mutual relations as interrelated elements in a complex process.

Governmental intervention in the sphere of marketing has become a feature of increasing frequency in the post-war economic policy of many countries, particularly during and since the economic depression of 1930 to 1932. In general, raw materials and foodstuffs have been made the object of regulations by authorities and statutory bodies more than manufactured articles, since the producers of the latter are usually able to come to voluntary agreements in relation to prices, limitation of production, &c., without the help of the Government. The general factors and ideologies which have brought about this considerable public intervention into a sphere which was left predominantly to private enterprise in pre-war days, are more or less common to all countries, but the particular difficulties and problems which have prompted statutory measures differ from country to country.

The custom of shutting young girls up at puberty is not uncommon among Bantu tribes, the period varying from the duration of the first menstruation to a matter of months and even years. In the first case she is merely removed from normal social contacts during a short period of crisis, when certain rites must be performed for her own safety and fertility, and possibly the well-being of society generally, and certain lessons regarding personal conduct, not necessarily heard then for the first time, must be finally driven home in a manner and in an emotional atmosphere calculated to impress them deeply in her consciousness. In the latter cases the idea is that, in addition to undergoing the safeguarding ritual, the girl should afterwards remain in absolute seclusion until the negotiations regarding her marriage are complete and a substantial part of the bride-wealth has been handed over. I am here concerned with the latter.

L'auteur a récemment terminé une mission linguistique (avril-nov. 1937) chez les Uálúvà du Katanga et chez les Bálúbà et Bέ·ná Lúlúvà du Kasai (Congo Belge). Le but de cette mission était avant tout de rechercher l'existence des tons musicaux dans la langue luba, d'en déterminer la valeur sémantique et grammaticale, de définir l'influence réciproque des tons syllabiques, pour reconstruire tout le système tonologique du luba.

In the closing phrases of the Introduction to his book, The Modern Languages of Africa, R. N. Cust says: ‘The actual out-turn of Languages admitted on my Schedule represent a very small portion of the Great Unknown.’ That was in 1883. To-day, more than half a century later, Africa has, linguistically as well as in other ways, ceased to be the ‘Great Unknown’, and yet we are far from possessing an exhaustive knowledge of the languages of Africa and their interrelations. It is impossible in this article to show in detail what has since been achieved; its main purport is rather to point to what is lacking and to direct attention to those spheres of study which appear to be of particular importance in the near future.

Plusieurs auteurs ont signalé l'existence d'une curieuse forme d'alliance, chez les Manding ainsi que chez d'autres peuples du Soudan français. Cette alliance joue entre représentants de groupes déterminés — familles, villages, régions, peuples — porteurs de noms différents. Elle donne lieu à diverses manifestations, dont certaines fort étranges.

Anthropology is an aggressive science. It has infected the study of contemporary social conditions with its outlook and methods. Witness the work done in Middletown, on the Irish countryman, and at Newburyport; the gradual pervasion of European folk-lore research with the methods of exotic field-work; and such a movement as Mass-Observation in England. Anthropology is now turning to the full sociological study of the great oriental cultures in China, India, and Japan. Nor is the reason for its effective aggressiveness difficult to find. The anthropologist among all other students of humanism was forced to obtain his material at first-hand through the direct observation of primitive races. For in his subjectmatter, there is no relying on written documents. Thus the strongest asset and the most inspiring force of the anthropological point of view is its thorough-going empiricism. Ethnography is the laboratory of social science.

All Europeans who have lived among the Nuer have, I suppose, found difficulty in discussing with them any matter involving an estimate of time. I do not refer to such a simple arrangement as meeting a Nuer at a certain hour on a certain day. The idiomatic technique necessary to effect a meeting is soon learnt, after a few disasters have taught one not to translate European time-reckoning too literally. I refer to conceptual differences more fundamental than those that give rise to such minor misunderstandings, for the Nuer have a different sense of time to ours.

The anthropologist is in general mainly concerned with peoples who have no means of writing. He has therefore paid little if any attention to an extensive field for research which may be said to lie between folk-lore and literature. It is a field which provides him with written material in poetry and prose existing among peoples who, although they are commonly regarded as illiterate, include in their society a group or social class which has acquired some means of writing. In postulating the existence of a field between folk-lore and literature we have to consider what is commonly understood by those terms and try to determine what are the essential differences between the cultural elements which they describe.

The future of the Bantu languages in South Africa is a question often discussed both by Europeans interested in them and by thinking Natives who use them. The ideas and views expressed on this question are extremely varied, for the subject has its economic and political aspects as well as its natural and cultural aspects, and to-day there is a tendency, particularly among the educated and semi-educated Natives, to stress the economic and political at the expense of the other aspects.

Das Problem der sogenannten klassifikatorischen Verwandtschaft ist, seitdem Lewis H. Morgan 1871 zum ersten Mal auf die vergleichsweise sehr umfänglichen Verwandtschaftssysteme der Naturvölker aufmerksam machte, immer wieder von den Ethnologen der Alten und der Neuen Welt angegangen worden. Vor allem durch die Forschungen von Rivers und Thurnwald und durch die Untersuchungen von Kroeber und Malinowski erwies sich die Beantwortung der Frage nach Entstehung, Bedeutung und Funktion des klassifikatorischen Systems als ungemein schwieriges Problem. Nicht nur eine Fülle von Sonderfragen tauchte infolge der scharfsinnigen Betrachtung einer grossen Anzahl von primitiven Verwandtschaftsordnungen seitens der zuständigen Fachkenner auf, sondern mehrfach wurde auch direkte Kritik an der von Morgan aufgewiesenen und dann besonders von Rivers weiter entwickelten Problemstellung über die Erscheinung des klassifikatorischen Systems überhaupt geübt.

Concerning trading in the countryside of North-West Morocco, Michaux-Bellaire and Salmon writing in 1906 about the Ḫloṭ and Tlīq tribes, state:

‘Toute la vie commerciale de la tribu s'écoule cependant sur le marché hebdomadaire. Si on trouve en effet quelques industries, d'ailleurs assez peu développées, dans les douars, le commerce y est totalement inconnu. On n'y rencontre même pas, comme dans quelques dchour djebaliens, de rares baqqâl (épiciers), ou des établissements publics où les paysans, la journée accomplie, viennent boire quelques tasses de thé à la menthe, en fumant le kif’;

and Michaux-Bellaire, writing a few years later about the Jbâla tribes, states that the imported goods, tea, sugar, candles, spices, matches, cotton fabrics, and imported fine-wool fabrics,

‘se trouvent également dans les villages d'une certaine importance’

Existing accounts of the Masai may be broadly grouped under three heads: (1) The popular impressionist accounts of the tribe by travellers in East Africa; the numerous travel works on this part of Africa nearly all contain some mention of the tribe, but in the main, these descriptions are calculated for their dramatic effect, and thus become largely inaccurate and valueless for the serious student. (2) Studies of the tribe such as those contained in the works of N. Leys and W. M. Ross. These authors approach the subject rather from the political angle, and make a study of the tribe largely for the purpose of criticizing Kenya's native policy. (3) The works dealing with the tribe from the ethnographic and anthropological standpoint; of the older works, the most important are those by A. C. Hollis and M. Merker. Among the more recent contributions the most outstanding are those by L. S. B. Leakey and S. Storrs-Fox. Daryll Forde has also given an account of the tribe from the point of view of the social geographer.

Readers of the accounts by the great naturalist explorers of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are often impressed by the acuteness of observation displayed, and even more often by the variety of the phenomena described. Since the day of these pioneers every one of the aspects of Nature and of Man about which they wrote has become the field of a separate branch of science, and each decade sees new shoots emerge with the accelerated specialization of science and its researches. With the rapidly increasing means of publication all these extensions of knowledge contribute to a literature so vast that no individual can follow it over the domain of even one of the major divisions, whether of Earth lore or the social sciences. The appearance, then, of any form of authoritative book which provides a conspectus of existing knowledge in a given field is welcome. When the field is a continent, or any geographical unit, we are generally better off than usual in this respect, since the function of geography is both analytic and synthetic and above all is correlative; for Africa, indeed, excellent general geographical treatises exist in at least three languages.

This short sketch of Wolof (or Jolof) is based upon an examination of the speech of John C. Faye and Elliman Bah, both of Bathurst, Gambia, and on work with four or five Wolof speakers from French territories at the Paris Exhibition in 1937. A comparison of the two types from a phonetic point of view is interesting.