Over two hundred thousand cubic metres of slag and smelting debris, at least two hundred and seventy smelting sites, more than seven hundred recorded kaolin pits for building and lining furnaces, and probably half as many again not visited by us—these are a few figures that establish three villages of the Ndop Plain, in the highlands of Western Cameroon, as a nineteenth-century Ruhr in Central Africa. To this day, this all Sub-Saharan African record leaves Meroe, ‘the Birmingham of Africa’ well behind. Perhaps the record remains unbroken, however, just because scholars interested in African iron industries seem to have been unconcerned with the overall output of these industries.

In choosing small urban centers for study and arguing that they were strategic for development, we did not suggest that small urban centers were at present generally playing a positive role in rural development, nor that it would necessarily be easy to get them to do so without major changes or even radical transformations of society. The argument was, that if effective rural development were achieved, small urban centers would certainly have to play a crucial part in it. They may therefore act as sensitive barometers of the adequacy or inadequacy of rural development efforts. Combing the literature on small urban centers in Africa, and in Asia and Latin America as well, has certainly convinced this writer that the instances in which small urban centers are playing anything like an adequate positive role are distinctly rare, and most situations convey the very strong impression that quite fundamental transformations of society—of political and economic structures—will be necessary if they are to have any serious chance of doing so. To study small urban centers without paying attention to the macroeconomic and political context in which they are set may therefore be futile.

By definition Utopias are closed communities. They are established by people who believe that their basic goals—religious, social or otherwise—cannot be realized in conventional society. In order not to be contaminated by the mundane world, boundary-crossing is kept to a minimum. Members are discouraged from travelling outside the Utopias, and visitors are permitted only on a limited basis; usually, too, new members are unwelcome after a Utopia has been firmly established. Obviously Utopias vary in the extent to which the boundaries are closed (see Kanter 1972), but the above description is generally applicable. It is therefore understandable that a rapid increase in defection, and a concomitant upsurge in recruitment, should be regarded as a threat to the existence of a Utopia. From the point of view of the members, defectors have rejected the exact values that led to the Utopian movement, and thus threaten their raison d'être. From the sociologist's perspective, a sharp increase in both defection and recruitment implies that the Utopia has begun to decline, because it cannot survive unregulated boundary-crossing.

This paper examines some recent developments in family and residential group structure in the village of Amedzofe-Avatime. The village is one of a group of seven which, with their surrounding farmlands, constitute the Avatime traditional area in the Volta Region of Ghana. The study of Amedzofe (and Avatime) family structure is singled out here as of interest for two reasons. In the first place, a study of current (1977) Avatime family structure indicates that new forms are emerging of patterns of child rearing. Esther Goody's work on both traditional and more recent patterns of fostering in Ghana is particularly relevant here (E. N. and J. R. Goody 1967; Goody 1970; 1975). Secondly such a study provides empirical evidence that Goode's (1963) pattern of change in family structure showing the increasing influence of ‘modernisation’, while it may be pertinent in the long term, is not being realised among Avatime. What is happening, rather, is a drift away from a stable conjugal pattern. Here I am concerned mainly with the first point. As it is elucidated, it will become clear that the incidence of Goode's nuclear family based units is not increasing in modern rural Avatime. A detailed examination of the structure and composition of residential groups and their significance for a modern society is forthcoming.

The limited objective in this paper is to call attention to the need to bridge an important gap in scholarly literature on the Aja, which so far has focused on the groups within the borders of the present-day Republics of Bénin (formerly Dahomey) and Togo in much the same way as Yoruba studies were once restricted to the groups within the frontiers of Nigeria, particularly the area of it now covered by the States of Ogun, Oyo and Ondo. By drawing attention to the Aja settlements and communities in Nigeria, the present writer hopes to do for this West African group what Geoffrey Parrinder (1947; 1955), Jacques Bertho (1949), Paul Mercier (1950) and Daryll Forde (1951) did in the 1940s and 1950s for the Yoruba-speaking peoples in Bénin and Togo through a series of published studies. There is no doubt that these studies have helped in widening the research horizon of scholars of Yoruba history and culture and have done much to dispel the myth of separation of the Yoruba, as of similarly partitioned groups all over Africa, created by the intercolonial (now international) boundaries, in this case the Nigeria-Bénin boundary.

Wherever belief in witchcraft permeated an African society, fear prevailed and people demanded protection and control. Even though the degree of African concern about witchcraft was not always appreciated by outsiders, it was possible, at least in centralized societies, for such outsiders to discern the processes that were involved in its control. A king or a priest who failed to control the spread of witchcraft and to alleviate the fear was unlikely to maintain his authority for long. In non-centralized societies, the problem of witchcraft and the means of control were less clear-cut. Solutions were rarely obvious and easy.

Although there is a plethora of works on migratory processes and migrant organizations, few of these deal with the contribution of rural-to-rural migrants to socio-economic development and the emergence of small urban centres. Migration involves permanent or semi-permanent changes in residence and takes account of factors which intervene between the economic opportunities and social conditions of the place of origin and those of the destination (Lee 1966; Otite f.c; Udo 1975). Economic and non-economic calculations of cost are important in all decisions to migrate. Rural-to-rural migration (with which we are concerned here) involves those who because of their low education and incentives decided to move to exploit familiar resources in new rural environments. Perhaps it is through in depth anthropological studies that the best light may be shed on the contributions of such migrants to development in the particular place to which they migrate.

The activities of Igbo metalsmiths caught the eye of foreign observers of southeastern Nigerian cultures well over a hundred years ago, but it was not until the turn of this century that the unorthodox character of Igbo smithing achieved some recognition. G. T. Basden's typical remarks, made after a long missionary sojourn among the Igbo, highlight this striking dimension:

There are some towns which practically monopolise certain specialised professions. For example, Awka, Nkwerre and a few other places manufacture nearly all the metal work produced in the Ibo country .… These men travel widely, not only in the Ibo country, but in the regions beyond its borders as far as Calabar, Bonny, Warri and even farther afield. (Basden 1938: 318; italics mine)

De nombreuses cultures ont matérialisé l'opposition et/ou la complémentarité existant entre l'homme et la femme par des couples basés sur des notions de latéralité (gauche—droite), d'orientation (est—ouest), de couleur (noir—blanc, rouge—blanc, …). Le nombre apparaît aussi comme un moyen privilégié permettant d'exprimer cette idée.

The growth and development of a town are mainly reciprocals of population growth, location of industries and specialization of the inhabitants. Nsukka and Awka represent two points on our developmental scale. Their growth and development while comparable in some ways are functions of different variables.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Koranic courts in asserting and maintaining the boundaries of a social group, the Swahili, in Mombasa, Kenya. It is a basic thesis here that these Muslim tribunals, called Kadhis courts, have played an important role in maintaining the distinctiveness of the Swahili throughout much of their long history. There are other important elements in the boundary processes that separate the Swahili from their neighbors and several of these will be noted here, but primary attention is focused on the workings of the courts. Through controlling these courts the Swahili community is able to have a direct influence on some of the areas of life its members look upon as central to the community's proper functioning. The courts now deal almost exclusively with domestic affairs and, although they are available to all Muslims, their use is optional and anyone who wishes to may use the secular courts instead. Because of the optional status of the courts, their use is itself an assertion of group membership.

In their initial interaction with the Colonial powers, several East African peoples such as the Maasai, the Turkana, the Sebei, the Karamojong, and the Nandi—all organized through some type of age-based institution—united around prophetic leaders, diviners, or ritual experts who mobilized men from several territorial sections to confront the intruders. This ad hoc military unity was necessarily short-lived, usually ending with the defeat of the people by the colonial power and see the imprisonment or death of the prophetic leader involved. (See Fosbrooke 1948: 12-19; Merker 1910: 67-105; Jacobs 1965: 20-108; Dyson-Hudson 1966: 15-16; Gulliver 1950: 229, 240; Meinertzhagen 1956: 222 ff; Weatherby 1962: 200-12; 1967: 133-44; Lamphear 1976: 225-43.) While ethnological studies of various age-organizations often mention that diviners or prophets provided professional services for the members of an age-group at their ceremonies, no one has examined the process by which a prophetic leader or diviner established his legitimacy during periods of peace so that he might lead the people during times of crisis. An examination of the prophetic institution among the Maasai and the relationship between the prophets and the members of the age-sets may provide some insight into the process, especially the manner in which prophets emerged as leaders of the people during two major crises in the history of the Purko-Kisongo Maasai: the Ilaikipiak war and the rinderpest pan-zootic.

The heroic Bacwezi, founders of kingship in Ankole and in other East African interlacustrine states, are said to have ‘disappeared’ because of their subjects' ungrateful insurrection (Oberg 1940: 124). The moral of the legend—that revolts against Ankole's kings, successors of the Bacwezi, are doomed!—has been curiously adhered to.

The Ingessana represent one of the archaic pre-Nilotic cultures on the Sudanese margins of the Western Ethiopian highlands and may be regarded as belonging to that complex of ‘montagnards paléonigritiques’ extending west by way of, among others, the Nuba Mountain peoples, the Hadjeray in Chad and the numerous hill dwelling peoples of northern Nigeria. The customs with which this article is primarily concerned, such as the avunculate, brideservice, mother-in-law avoidance, the construction of a special bridal chamber, are prominent features of this complex but they are neither universally nor exclusively so. Thus, although the principal objective is to contribute to the documentation and comprehension of the marital customs of this ethnological zone, judged to be ‘ancient and probably prior to bridewealth systems’ by Froelich (1968: 202), the analysis necessarily engages with more general and often controversial issues. Perhaps the most pertinent and least distracting approach in these circumstances is that which confines itself to delimiting the set of structural features which the subsequent account draws upon in comprehending the ethnography.

This paper examines the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala, Uganda. The intention is to indicate the relative standards of living of households of various composition and to decide whether the practice of soliciting money from lovers is better viewed as a preferred alternative to employment or as an essential supplementing of inadequate incomes. If lovers are necessary to the maintenance of single women and their children in African cities, analyses of extra-marital sexual behaviour which rely only on arguments about marriage rules and roles and personal values are rendered inadequate. Securing a paying lover may be indispensable to a woman who wishes to live and bring up children in town, and the practice may tell us more about her wish to educate her children, or her dislike of rural life, than it does about her sexual and marital preferences. Love affairs, in short, may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance than as an adjunct to a discussion of marriage. The data which I present here do not reduce a lover's importance to a woman to that of a charitable institution or welfare state: women who are prosperous have love affairs, and sexual pleasure is celebrated. They do indicate, however, the difficulties faced by a woman anxious to remain in town if she is not prepared to take lovers and to select them at least in part according to financial considerations. I hope, too, that the method which I use for working out standards of living available to households may prove useful as a means of establishing comparability between living standards in different cities.

Southern Ghana has for centuries been a region marked by continuous movement of population, both of groups and individuals; by ever-changing forms of social stratification; by urban centres of various kinds and sizes; and by trade with the outside world. Yet tradition and ‘custom’ are of great importance for the people. And despite marked economic and political development, kingship, matrilineal descent, and urbanism have remained central in most of the area in both national and local social systems.