In my two books on the Nuer I gave some account of the importance of cattle in their economy and social life. I scarcely mentioned their role in religion as I did not wish to stray too far from the topics I was then discussing. I summarize very briefly what was said there before discussing their religious significance.

I am here concerned with social control as it exists in Tonga society, where there are no obvious political institutions concerned in the maintenance of order. As in any society, control rests eventually on the sanction of force, here applied through a resort to vengeance on the part of an organized group if it feels that this is the only way to enforce its rights.

The Konkomba live in Northern Togoland in both French and British Mandated Territory and principally about the banks of the Oti River, a tributary of the Volta. Their country lies between 9° and 9° 50' N. and 0° and 0° 50' E. The total population is about 45,000. Their language is one of the Gurma group of the Voltaic family. The great majority of them live on a grassland plain that lies between the low hills of eastern Dagomba and the Kotokoli hills. The plain is very low-lying and conditions are severe, alternating between considerable desiccation and severe flooding. The compounds are grouped in small hamlets of a dozen or so straggling along low ridges in the plain; in the wet season communication between hamlets is very difficult.

Ashanti customary law, in common with the law of other branches of the Akan people, recognizes a form of oral will, or rather a form of inchoate gift that takes effect on death. This is called saman-nse, saman being an ancestral spirit and nse (or nseε) meaning a formal or solemn declaration; di nse, for example, means to take an oath as a witness does in court. This is the derivation accepted in Ashanti and, with all respect to Rattray's great knowledge, he is in error if he suggests the root is sie, to put, preserve, take care of. His contemptuous rejection of phonetic spelling makes it a little uncertain what sound he meant to record, but on linguistic grounds it is clear the word is not sie. The second a of saman is not modified; the use of a final eε instead of e in certain positions in a sentence is common in Ashanti; and the corresponding Fante forms are saman-nsew, dzi nsew, and sie.

Among the Wambugwe of Tanganyika, when a person dies a member of the same lineage is designated to take his place in the kinship structure. The substitute assumes most of the kinship relations of the dead person and also, in the case of a married person, his affinal relations. This well-integrated institution has the function of restoring to surviving relatives the loss that attends death: parents have a lost child replaced, children a lost parent, and a married person a lost spouse. So far as I know, this institution has not been previously reported in such organized form for an African society or from elsewhere in the world; though most of its features, taken separately, are found in other societies. These include rules for the inheritance of property, for succession to social position, and for preferential marriage of widows; principles of guardianship for orphans; and adoption customs. All of these are organized in the single institution described in this paper.

Those who read in Gulliver's ‘Karamojong Cluster’ that the Iteso are socially and culturally divided from the rest of the Teso Dialect Cluster, may not realize how closely many of their customs resemble those of other members of the Cluster. In fact all the six main social or cultural features which Gulliver enumerates as common to the Karamojong Cluster are common also to the Iteso.