The imposition of British colonial rule brought rural societies in Zambia to the crossroads of traditional and bureaucratic administration. Indigenous forms of government mediated central government institutions and regulated administrative changes. The majority of rural Africans were governed by composite structures. They were under a bureaucratic system but not part of it. The colonial form of local government, the Native Administration, was not a bureaucracy, though it may be considered a formal organization, in that ‘collective efforts were explicitly organized for specific ends’ (Blau and Scott, 1962: 223). Under colonial rule the principal ends were to maintain law and order and to collect taxes from the African majority. The indigenous political systems were left largely intact, and thus, politics was an intimate part of local government. This paper looks at one of these local systems of government and deals with its development and transformation through a number of phases, focusing primarily on the transitional period at the end of colonial rule (the late 1950s and the early 1960s) and the beginning of Zambian independence and on the persistence of traditional chieftainship as the basis of local government through the process of political change.

Western scientific culture finds itself in a singular position with respect to the magico-religious system embodied in medieval culture from which, after strenuous resistence from the contemporary ecclesiastical authorities, it originally broke free. That is to say, it has still not succeeded in forming a theory concerning that very class of phenomena with which it was sometimes obliged violently to struggle in order to constitute itself as an autonomous discipline. And we, despite the proliferation of ethnographic and historical studies of extremely high quality, are hardly more advanced than in 1902, when Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert (1950: 138) wrote: ‘Until now the history of religions has relied on a rag-bag of vague ideas … the science of religions does not yet possess a scientific nomenclature’.

In the first part of this paper I began by dealing with those of Fisher's objections to the Intellectualist Theory which seemed to me to require short, sharp, and destructive answers. I then went on to consider an objection which seemed to require a longer and more constructive answer. This was the objection that the Theory did not account adequately for variation in the concept and cult of the supreme being in settings uninfluenced by Islam and Christianity. I suggested that, although the evidence was probably insufficient for a decisive verdict, the Theory appeared to give a rather good account of religious dynamics in such settings. A demonstration of its plausibility in this context was, as I pointed out, an important preliminary to my main argument. For it was crucial to the credibility of the thesis that Islam and Christianity were more than anything else catalysts for changes that were ‘in the air’ anyway.

The point of departure for this paper is Rodney Needham's article, ‘The left Hand of the Mugwe: an analytical Note on the Structure of Meru-symbolism’ (Needham, 1960: 20–33). I will not try here to give further evidence for the system of dual classification which he presents in that article in order to prove or disprove it, but will dwell on his suggestion that it might be possible to draw conclusions about the origin of the Meru of Kenya by examining their symbolic structure (ibid: 27). My argument will lead not so much to conclusions about the origin of the Meru, but to conclusions concerning the ‘making’ of a society, particularly that of Tigania, a subtribe of the Meru people. My conclusions are based on a discussion of the theoretical and historical implications of the allocation of distinctive rights and duties to different divisions within Tigania.

An interesting problem emerging from recent studies in complex societies is that of the relationship between ethnic identity and the interaction between various ethnic groups in a pluralistic society. In much of the sociological and anthropological literature, writers have treated ethnic groups as isolates and ‘givens’. Such categorization dismisses the potential investigation of factors responsible for permanence and change in ethnic groups. This paper will focus on a specific example of ethnic identity change, that of the Gungawa of Yauri Emirate, North-Western State, Nigeria, who have long had a pattern of ‘becoming’ Hausa. The paper will suggest some ways in which the possibility and mechanism for ethnic identity change functions to structure interethnic relationships and ease tensions resulting from such contact.

Definitional questions, such as ‘Who are the Waswahili’, posed by Eastman (1971) in this journal, appear to have been of little interest in the past, as many social anthropologists either ignored the problem or assumed that the answers were self-evident. However, those who have confronted this task have shown that simplicity and self-evidence is rarely a characteristic feature of the inquiry. Even classic ethnographic cases of supposed culturally homogeneous and distinct tribal groups are at present being re-examined in light of the renewed interest in this topic (cf. Helm, 1968). Whether or not the Nuer are the Dinka, or vice versa, it has been minimally established that such questions are legitimate and even fruitful in sharpening our analytical approach to subject populations.