For nearly fifty years the Aladura or ‘prayer’ churches have been a prominent feature of the Nigerian scene. Their drumming and singing can nowadays be heard at almost any time of day or night in most of the larger southern Nigerian towns. Their prophets and pastors exert a guiding influence on the lives of an everlarger proportion of the population. And recently they have even been credited with an important part in bringing rebel resistance to an end in the Nigerian civil war. Similar churches, usually labelled ‘Zionist’, have been described and analysed by sociologists, social anthropologists, and comparative religionists working in many African countries. Hitherto, however, no full-length sociological monograph on the subject has appeared from Nigeria. So John Peel's Aladura, a full-length study of two of these churches in Yorubaland, meets a long-standing need.

Recent rural unrest in Senegal, the malaise paysan and the spreading rejection of commercial agriculture, have focused official and journalistic attention on the predicament of that country's peasantry. This is a predicament in large part defined by nature, which has endowed most of Senegal with soils so poor as to leave little practical alternative to the groundnut as a source of export revenue. Declining world market prices for this staple export have inevitably exacerbated the situation, especially following the final withdrawal of French price subsidies in 1967. Consequent economic difficulties are in turn made no easier by a rapid rise in population (officially estimated at 2·1 per cent per annum): this causes overcrowding on the land, with over-cultivation and soil exhaustion, and thus stimulates migration to towns and cities which can provide few employment outlets.

Je tiens à vous dire mon émotion d'avoir été désignée pour cette conférence, consacrée à la mémoire de Lord Lugard. Car je n'ai pas aujourd'hui l'intention de faire un exposé académique: en effet, je préfère vous apporter les premiers résultats d'une recherche ‘sur le terrain’ qui se situe dans un cadre assez exceptionnel, celui d'une cérémonie soixantenaire itinérante chez les Dogon du Mali. Je vous présenterai cette recherche dans l'état où elle se trouve actuellement, c'est-à-dire encore en cours d'enquête et d'examen; mon propos constitue une introduction aux films que vous allez voir, réalisés par notre collègue Jean Rouch, chaque année, depuis quatre ans, à l'occasion de ces cérémonies.

Explanation, or the identification and assessment of the causes of events and situations, occupies the central place in nearly all historical writing in the present century. It is also the aspect of history which is most keenly debated by philosophers, and is the main issue today in the unending, wearisome, but seemingly inescapable controversy as to whether history belongs, or belongs more, with the sciences or with the humanities. The scientific or positivist school, numbering among its recent exponents Popper and Gardiner, emphasizes the extent to which historical explanation attains a regularity akin to, though not identical with, that found in the physical and other sciences, Hempel adding the contention that such explanation can always, and often should, be reduced to a ‘covering law’, or single universal statement subsuming the whole explanation. The idealists, among whom Croce, Collingwood, and most recently Oakeshott are prominent, stress conversely the uniqueness of history, and Dray has reinforced their position by his attack on the covering law thesis. The debate is one in which historians themselves have taken little part, and African historians none at all, despite its crucial importance for almost every aspect of their profession. Yet it is a debate which needs continuous illustration from the historiographical process, a need which historians are best able to meet. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the debate by examining as a problem in historical explanation the fall of Oyo, the powerful state of the northern Yoruba, in the early nineteenth century.

This collaboration began when Ames and Gregersen met in Zaria, the capital of one of the old Hausa kingdoms in northern Nigeria. Gregersen, an anthropological linguist, was collecting material for a grammar of Hausa language, and Ames was making an anthropological study of the status and role of professional musicians.

The present study embodies some of the results of a survey conducted in July 1966 among a sample of 268 rural wage-earners in the territory of Lukula in central Mayombe, Western Congo. The survey focused on two points: first, the labour market, and second, the social and economic ties persisting between the workers and their village kinsmen. This article deals exclusively with the latter.

Within a historical and comparative context, the following paper describes and analyses the role of masked figures in social control among the Mandinka of the Gambia. A direct relationship will be demonstrated between the problems of rule-application in hierarchical communities, where authority for rule-making and rule-application is dispersed, and the presence and behaviour of masked figures. In such communities secular actions taken in the rule-application process by individuals or groups bear a load of potential conflict. Masked figures in this context provide a mechanism through which the probability of sustained, divisive conflict is decreased by converting secular actions of rule-application into sacred, suprasocial actions. The integration of the hierarchically ordered elements of the community is thus accomplished in two ways: (1) through the capacity of the masked figures to apply rules while remaining above all elements of the community and (2) through the organized actions involved in creating and maintaining the masked figures and the ceremonial context in which they operate. It will be shown that the socio-cultural milieu in which sacred masked figures have functioned has changed, and that with the changes masked figures are becoming secularized and are disappearing.

The Igala-speaking peoples of Nigeria live in the middle belt zone of that country, close to the confluence of the river Niger and the river Benue. Ancestor cults of various kinds are central to their religious system, but there is also an important cult of the earth as well as cults of diverse spirits known collectively as ẹbọ. The latter includes the spirit of smallpox, Iye, spirits associated with water, called Alijenu, and other spirits inhabiting the fringes of cultivated land. Culturally the Igala have many close affinities with the Yoruba from whom they are separated geographically by the intervening Niger and the settlements of other peoples. But the main emphases of Igala religion are slightly different from those of Yoruba religion. Thus the cult of ẹbọ which in a rudimentary way resembles the cult of orisha among the Yoruba occupies a more marginal place in Igala religion than the orisha cults do in the Yoruba system of belief. Ancestors and the earth cults play a more direct and central role in Igala than in Yoruba. One belief which appears to be basic to both systems of thought, however, is the belief in medicine, called ogwu in Igala. Yoruba beliefs about medicine have not been published in enough detail to make systematic comparison possible. But it is hoped that the account given here of the Igala side of the picture may stimulate further work on this potentially interesting comparison.

Ancestor cults and ancestor worship loom large in the anthropological image of sub-Saharan Africa and few would disagree with Fortes that ‘comparatively viewed, African ancestor worship has a remarkably uniform structural framework’ (Fortes, 1965: 122). The general pattern may be quickly summarized. Ancestors are vested with mystical powers and authority. They retain a functional role in the world of the living, specifically in the life of their living kinsmen; indeed, African kin-groups are often described as communities of both the living and the dead. The relation of the ancestors to their living kinsmen has been described as ambivalent, as both punitive and benevolent and sometimes even as capricious, In general, ancestral benevolence is assured through propitiation and sacrifice; neglect is believed to bring about punishment. Ancestors are intimately involved with the welfare of their kin-group but they are not linked in the same way to every member of that group. The linkage is structured through the elders of the kin-group, and the elders' authority is related to their close link to the ancestors. In some sense the elders are the representatives of the ancestors and the mediators between them and the kin-group.

The main subject of this paper is the way in which patterns of settlement and modes of working and holding land are transformed and adapted to diverse political and economic relations. The changes discussed occurred in adjustment, under British Imperial rule, between a large-scale, commercial landlord—initially a mining and trading company—and local rulers and residents in the area of the landlord's monopoly in north-eastern Botswana. Ecological conditions in the middle and high veld of Botswana are of crucial importance for the discussion, since these posed various risks and costs for the landlord, the local rulers, and the residents. I examine primarily a sequence of decisions and the locally crucial constraints that prevailed and set a course for further choices. ‘Tribal ruler’ is the generic term which I use for such political offices as ‘paramount chief’, ‘chieftain’, and also the Protectorate Administration's grade of Sub-Chief. A paramount chief or, simply, chief, is a ruler of the highest rank, having a major territory, whose authority extends over a series of subordinates, including some chieftains. Chieftains, in turn, are petty rulers over lesser territories, and in the grades of the Administration, never higher than Sub-Chief, though they may be independent and not under a chief as an administrative superior.

In one of the few essays on drama in non-literate societies, Melville J. Herskovits pointed out that the subject had been little studied, and what we knew must ‘be gleaned from ethnographic accounts of rituals and dances of various sorts, descriptions whose primary intent is to explain other phenomena’ (Herskovits, 1944, p. 685). To Herskovits, as to most other anthropologists, drama among primitives was manifested only in religious ceremonialism—‘ritual drama’—and the formal recitation of prose narratives—‘secular drama’. It may be admitted that theatre in our sense appears to be rare in the non-literate world, but it is found among the Ibibio-speaking peoples of south-eastern Nigeria, where the ‘arena theatre’ (Brockett, 1969, pp. 470-4), professional actors, plots with memorized dialogues, rehearsals prior to public presentation, and props, costumes, and make-up are present.

This paper examines the distribution of languages in the Nigerian Middle Belt, draws certain historical inferences from the patterns of distribution, and assesses non-linguistic evidence tending to confirm or refute these inferences. The Middle Belt is taken as an area roughly inscribed by the Hausa-speaking area to the north, and the Yoruba, Edo, and Ibo-speaking areas to the south. Geographically it is an area which has a certain climatic coherence, falling between the sahel to the north and the forest to the south (Pullan, 1962; Buchanan, 1953). It is also an area of much more strikingly broken terrain than those to the north or south, with not only the complex relief of the Jos Plateau, but also many ranges of hills, particularly along its northern frontier and in its eastern half. This terrain appears to have militated against the establishment of large coherent political systems in the past and it is only in the plains of the Niger and Benue valleys that there is a record of extensive state systems in recent history, those of the Nupe and Jukun. On the other hand, archaeological evidence indicates that the Nok culture extended over a very large area of the Middle Belt, not by any means confined to the plains (Fagg, 1959, 1969), and there is evidence of a certain measure of cultural unity today (Murdock, 1959).

While the social history of Dakar, Senegal, exhibits many of the characteristics common to most Eurafrican cities on the West coast, the rather abrupt manner in which the policy of residential segregation replaced the earlier pattern of co-existence, if not integration, of the African and European populations merits particular attention. The establishment of the Medina—the ‘native quarter’, to employ the colonial idiom of the day—was the most decisive and significant action taken by the French authorities in the history of the city. Yet this decision resulted from no carefully considered change in administrative policy, which had been somewhat laissez-faire in residential matters, but rather was hastily urged after the outbreak of a severe epidemic of bubonic plague in 1914. What began medically was to become, however, a major social and urban problem.

The holding of land in the Ife Division is governed by a multiplicity of arrangements. Some ‘own’ land in the ordinary sense of the term; some enjoy unrestricted rights over property which in fact belongs to the ebi and not to the individual; and others again hold by leases or grants which permit cultivation under a host of different conditions. A listing based on legal and conventional norms would consequently run to considerable length, and the sheer number of discernible types may well bewilder rather than clarify.

L'une des caractéristiques fondamentales de la société toucouleur traditionnelle est, assurément, la chasteté imposée à l'individu pendant une période prolongée de son existence. Car il apparaît que la sexualité, hormis dans le cadre pour ainsi dire exdusif du mariage, se présente généralement en termes de prohibition formelle. Peut-être convient-il de voir en cela l'effet naturel de la très stricte obédience islamique toucouleur, aux termes de laquelle tout contact sexuel illicite – done extra-conjugal – est une souillure si grave, que son expiation appelle l'Enfer et la carbonisation littérale du pécheur.

More than a generation has passed since the appearance of Professor Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer. The sub-title of this classic work, ‘A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People’ is, I believe, inaccurate. The Nuer is more an interpretation than a description, and it is difficult to isolate the descriptive material, which Evans-Pritchard as a matter of policy (1940a, p. 261) subordinated to theory. Although the theory of the book is an abiding part of anthropological discussion and controversy, having become a model for the study of other societies, we should still return to the facts, asking to what extent the Nuer ‘model’ fits the way of life of the Nuer of the southern Sudan.