The constitutional tug-of-war between Great Britain and Rhodesia has been tentatively settled, primarily on Rhodesian terms. When Rhodesia unilaterally declared its independence in November 1965, the British initially assumed that Ian Smith's regime would collapse within a few weeks from internal pressure. This has proved to be incorrect. The British imposed stiffer economic sanctions to raise the costs of secession and thus encourage white dissatisfaction with government policy. These penalties evoked very little electoral dissatisfaction and may have strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Smith. After six years of sanctions, it was Great Britain that made the concessions.

The ability of Rhodesia to survive economic sanctions and get Britain to accept constitutional terms virtually guaranteeing permanent white rule was due mainly to the overwhelming support of the Smith regime by white Rhodesians. The government's ability to get around many sanctions moderated some discontent, but this circumvention could not have been accomplished without the active cooperation of major segments of the population, particularly the business community, a group which traditionally had aligned itself with the opposition party. If there had been disaffection toward the government, then the British sanctions could have created serious public morale and support problems.

To the casual observer, social communication across linguistic boundaries in Nigeria appears impossible as an indisputable consequence of the country's linguistic diversity. But this bird's-eye view of the language situation could be misleading. A more realistic picture emerges when this multilingual situation is studied in relation to the interaction among people within and across linguistic or administrative boundaries. As William Mackey has adequately put it,

In view of the importance of historical and administrative factors in the Nigerian social situation, language function will be discussed in terms of interaction within and across administrative units. Consequently, the problem of linguistic diversity and language function will be dealt with at the following levels of social interaction: (1) the district level, (2) the divisional level, (3) the provincial level, (4) the state level, (5) the regional level, and (6) the national level.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to delineate the correlates of the interregional shifts of population in Nigeria between 1952 and 1963. The population of Nigeria, according to the census of 1963, was placed at 55 million people. While the annual growth rate for Nigeria as a whole is placed at 2.7 per cent, the rate of urban growth has been slightly over 6.0 per cent per year (U.N. 1970, p. 57). Of this 6 per cent growth rate in the urban population, only 2 per cent can be attributed to natural growth processes (that is, to the excess of births over deaths). The observation made by the Conference on National Reconstruction and Development in Nigeria (1969) seems instructive.

The Holy Ghost Fathers have been in Kastern Nigeria for about eighty-five years. Not until after the recent Nigeria-Biafra War has their influence been somewhat minimized. Arriving originally from France in 1885, the Roman Catholic missionaries, as we shall see later in this essay, exerted a considerable influence far out of proportion to their number. But despite that they had become a factor to be reckoned with ever since, their missionary activity has scarcely been studied systematically. One principal reason for this has been the reluctance of the Roman Catholic authorities to permit scholars to use their private archives in Paris.

In the last few years, however, the Roman Catholic authorities seem to have relaxed their one-hundred-year rule which has often been invoked to deny bone fide researchers access to the archival source materials. I am not sure, however, that this is yet an official policy, but I was permitted in 1968 and again in 1970 to use the archives. It is perhaps important to point out that the archival materials are still jealously guarded. During my research, for example, I was not permitted to examine certain dossiers perceived by the Archivist as “sensitive” and “not proper for public use.” The study that follows is partly based on the materials collected from the archives and partly from other sources, especially from the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in London.

In Africa, as in other parts of the world, most people have traditionally acquired their skills, knowledge, and attitudes from institutions other than formal schools. Even where formal school systems have been established (a relatively recent phenomenon), it is still difficult to separate the impact of schooling from that of one's family, community, cultural and social institutions, and training on the job. But it has increasingly become apparent in all countries that learning acquired in a. life-long process, both before and after school, is of far greater importance than the more specific knowledge transmitted in schools.

The modernization process, however, has continued to place a heavy emphasis on formal school systems, by defining for them a set of demanding tasks. These educational systems are expected to create useful citizens, to teach literacy, and to prepare young people for the lives they must lead in adult societies by providing them with basic minimum skills. Demands by parents for publicly-supported schooling as the principal means of escape from poverty have led to dramatic increases in the provision of educational opportunity throughout the world. These demands are reinforced, and the growth of schooling accelerated, by the recognition on the part of governments and private industry of a pressing need for higher levels of trained manpower. Economists often disagree as to whether education is a prerequisite for development, or vice-versa. Yet the close relationship between education and human resource development leaves little doubt that one cannot proceed very far without the other. (For a useful treatment of these issues, see Anderson and Bowman 1965. See also Harbison and Myers 1964.)

At least three articles concerning anthropological and other research interests in Africa have appeared in recent years in the African Studies Bulletin: McCall's (1967) on the history of anthropological concerns and McKay's and Kopytoff's (both 1968) on “the research climate” in Eastern and francophone West Africa, respectively. In this paper I shall discuss some specific problems which the field anthropologist may face during the course of his research-problems the nature of which may not be foreseen in the preparatory stages, which may have few or no precedents in previous field-work situations, and which, in any case, receive little discussion in the literature on anthropological field methods. The problems to be discussed were encountered, or felt, by me in a specific location, and with specific research goals, but I think they reflect more than possible inadequacies in my own research methods and have potentially far wider application than merely to my particular field situation. Indeed, they could have important implications for the future of anthropological and other field research, both in Africa and elsewhere.

Research was conducted in Numan Division, Adamawa Province, North-East State, Nigeria, from September 1969 to April 1971. I had debated whether to mention specific names in this paper, but I have decided to do so, since “Village A” and “Chief B” and other such substitutions would be confusing, and especially since the situations to which I will refer are readily acknowledged and openly discussed by the people of the area. I will, however, avoid referring to particular persons by their given names.

At the present time, Accra--eighty years the seat of Gold Coast administration, and fifteen years the capital of an independent Ghana--stands atop an urban system that is relatively well developed by Black African standards. In several years the municipal population will reach the million mark, notwithstanding the fact that less than 5 per cent of the labor force is employed in modern manufacturing industries. Unlike most large cities in the West which expanded in response to the needs of industry, Accra grew despite a dearth of secondary industries. Foremost among its competitive advantages during the colonial period were its traditional role as a port, its administrative importance as a political capital, and its fortuitous location vis-à-vis the earliest cocoa-producing districts. It is proposed that this latter advantage was the primary determinant of the urban growth and spatial organization of Accra during the second decade of the present century, a seminal phase in its commercial development.

In this paper I would like to discuss the impact of the early years of the cocoa trade, first, on Accra in relation to the emerging urban system and, second, on the changing pattern of commercial land use within the town. Most of the discussion refers to those years between 1908, when the first significant cocoa exports occurred, and 1921, by which time the townscape of Accra clearly displayed the impress of the cocoa trade. During this brief but eventful period the economic shock waves released by the revolutionary new crop set up a condition of disequilibrium within the colonial space-economy. Centers, such as Accra, which serviced the cocoa trade flourished, while many other languished. The paper focuses, then, on cocoa as a primary influence on the economic geography of Accra, at a time when its leadership in the urban hierarchy was being consolidated.

The passing of the colonial order from much of Africa left a complex geopolitical environment within which to confront the problems of modernization. Since 1960 African states have had to cope with a confused mosaic of competing sovereignties bequeathed by the colonial scramble and the breakup of the colonial federations. In spite of the appeal of pan-Africanism to many African intellectuals, diversity and differentiation rather than unity have been the rule in the post-colonial era, both within most African states and in their international relations. Despite similar legacies and many common problems, African governments have found it difficult to transcend their colonial boundaries either in the name of political ideology or apolitical efficiency.

A number of African leaders have devoted considerable effort to changing this situation. Seme, of whom Kwame Nkrumah is perhaps the most familiar example, have stressed the achievement of continental political unity as the most effective approach to reorganizing the inter-African system. Others, of whom Leopold Senghor is a prime example, have emphasized regional projects based on cooperation in economic and technical domains without regard to political unity. Senghor's approach reflects the functionalist notion that there are relatively noncontroversial matters which provide a foundation for the gradual development of international institutions. Senegal's inter-African diplomacy under Senghor, therefore, provides a framework within which to evaluate functionalism as a strategy of international organization in the context of contemporary Africa.

Welcoming the English translation of Bernard Dadié's Climbié-- some fifteen years after its publication in French--Ezekiel Mphahlele commented:

It is a fact that the artificial barriers erected throughout Africa by the colonial structure in the course of the nineteenth century are still in existence and the many works dealing with African literature published in the last ten years or so--ever since the emergence to independence--still reflect a situation which, one hopefully assumed, was to end with colonialism. The French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish “cultural” empires carved in Africa seem to have maintained their autonomy, and there does not seem to be much interpénétration between the various components of the African continent.