While doing field-work among the Fipa of south-west Tanzania between December 1962 and June 1964 I collected evidence about an anti-sorcery cult or movement called Kamcape which was then active in the area. The present article describes this evidence and seeks to assess its sociological significance.

Some years ago Madame Dieterlen astonished the anthropology students in London University with the wealth of detail about Dogon culture which was at her command. They were not less impressed when she explained that the first twenty years of field research among the Dogon had been the most arduous and that subsequent work was more and more rewarding. Now the already considerable ethnography of the Dogon is enriched by two major documentations, Le Renardpale by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, and Ethnologie et langage by Geneviève Calame-Griaule.

This paper had its genesis in an attempt to understand certain aspects of the ancestor cult of the Mpondomise, a Cape Nguni people of the Transkei, South Africa. Like all Southern Bantu, the Mpondomise have only a vague idea of a supreme being and effective ritual behaviour is directed towards the shades of deceased agnatic forebears, the izinyanya. It was immediately obvious that any understanding, particularly of the structural aspects of the cult, depended on a clear picture of the lineage, of what is, in effect, its ‘congregation’ (in the Durkheimian sense). It is an anthropological truism that ancestor cults exhibit to a high degree that congruence between ritual behaviour and social structure emphasized by Durkheim. In strong contrast to the universalistic world religions, recruitment to the cult group is in terms of a kinship idiom, either through birth, marriage, or adoption, the beings to whom worship is directed are highly differentiated and structurally defined, and their sphere of influence is similarly bounded. There is evidence that the ancestor cult is inversely correlated with a highly developed cult of a supreme being and that sacrifice to the manes tends to symbolize commensalism (as one would expect with erstwhile kinsmen) rather than the explicit identification of the worshipper with the offering found, for example, both among the Nuer, with their conceptualization of an omnipotent High God, and, in some of its symbolism at least, in the Christian Eucharist. Be this as it may, ancestor cults have been particularly congenial to the structural interests of modern social anthropologists and the growing number of detailed studies has greatly increased our knowledge of this religious form. It was thus essential, as a preliminary exercise, to define the congregation of the cult, the locus of ritual authority within it, and the relationship of the living members of the group to the dead.

One of the most interesting features of the cultural landscape of Sierra Leone is the very large number of settlements which still bear the marks of the long period of anarchy which preceded the colonial era. This is reflected both in the choice of sites and in the internal structures of settlements. Such influences are still to be found despite the impermanence of mud and wattle buildings and the sixty years which have elapsed since pacification. These settlements are interesting not only by the fact of their survival, but also for their wide distribution and their small size. There are probably more than a thousand defensive villages in the country, an average of one for every twenty-eight square miles, and reaching a maximum density of one for every four square miles in parts of Mendeland in the south. Most of them have populations of between two hundred and a thousand inhabitants. It is the aim of this paper to reconstruct the original character of these ‘war-towns’ as they were described by nineteenth- century explorers; to attempt an explanation of their wide distribution; and finally to show how social and economic changes are gradually causing a breakdown of this nucleic and defensive rural settlement pattern.

This paper rests on the belief that traditional oral poetry from many parts of Africa exhibits a number of common themes in the imagery with which it handles the fact of death. Further, it argues that these themes are often to be found in the work of contemporary African poets, writing in English or in French. Their treatment in such work may be the sort of sophisticated examination of inherited beliefs that we find in a writer like Euripides, but there can be no doubting the strength of this movement, among younger writers, to come to grips with Africa's traditional systems of thought and make them part of a living intellectual and emotional heritage. The old missionary-inspired dichotomy between ‘modern’ and ‘backward’, as that between ‘Christian’ and ‘heathen’, is gradually breaking down and giving place to the reunified culture that is painfully emerging. As this new cultural unity establishes itself, Africans will no longer be required to amputate a large part of themselves, and almost the whole of their ancestry, in order to qualify for civilization. Hence the importance of the role which African poets are playing in this whole process of restatement and reassessment. In their work the concern for bringing these things to the surface of the mind, for integrating them consciously with the personality, is more explicit and more personal that it can be with the novelist or the dramatist.

The has been considerable concern in recent years with the large number of young people in various developing countries who receive a few years of primary education and then prove a drain on the economy because they cannot or will not find employment. The usual complaint has been that they all want clerical jobs for which they are marginally, if at all, qualified, and the usual remedy suggested has been a return to the farm.