This historical reconnaissance is not concerned with the economic consequences of direct taxation or its relation to the dogma of colonial self-sufficiency but rather with what McPhee calls its ‘political, moral and social nature’. A revenue system reflects not only the circumstances in which the authority of governments is exercised, but some of its ideal premisses—a truism which can be illustrated from the tax history of British West Africa in general and by the comparison of the Northern and Southern Nigerian systems before the post-Amalgamation reforms of Lugard and his successors. Since direct taxation is an aspect of colonial administration which affects members of a tribal society regularly and generally and demands a voluntary or enforced accommodation, its study in a particular tribal area may provide some useful insights to students of social change. Where the tribal society already has a system of tribute or provisioning, the introduction of a different system presents the colonial Government's native agents with problems of reinterpretation as well as procedure.

In his admirable study of the Mugwe, a religious dignitary among the Meru of Kenya, Bernardi reports a singular fact which raises a problem of comparative and theoretical interest: viz. that the left hand of the Mugwe possesses and symbolizes his ritual power. The issue is best seen, to begin with, in the following passage:

Among the Imenti [a sub-tribe] an unusual aspect of the people's conception of the Mugwe concerns his left hand. It is this hand…that should always hold the kiragu [insignia] and be used only to bless. It is a most sacred member of the Mugwe's body and no one is allowed to see it. During the day, the Mugwe spends his time playing kiothi, the Meru draughts, but even while he plays, he must always keep his left hand covered and no one must see it. Sudden death would overtake anyone who dared to look at the left hand of the Mugwe.

The certainty of the individual's extinction as a human being contradicts so outrageously the value and effort of living that most cultures minimize the confrontation with this certainty, or cushion it with assurances of some form of immortality. I am going to describe some of the ways in which the Yoruba express their fear of death, and the response they make to it, especially through their traditional religion, which is still the religion of a good proportion of the five million Yoruba in South-West Nigeria and Southern Dahomey. These examples show the wide range of their attempts to cope with this recurrent fear.

I do not know if anyone has ever tried to see if classical Greek poetry can be translated into any African language, but I had always felt that such an experiment would be worth trying. Some years ago, therefore, I made my first attempt by translating the Antigone of Sophocles into Twi, one of the principal languages in Ghana. It was then that I discovered the possibilities of the Twi language as a medium for translating a classical Greek poet. I accordingly decided to embark on a more ambitious enterprise by translating the whole of the Odyssey into Twi prose, with a view to publishing either the whole or part of the translation. I chose for this purpose the story of the wanderings of Odysseus from Book VIII, line 461, to the end of the twelfth book. This was published in 1957, and the rest of the work was completed in 1958.

Many different examples of African art were made available to me while I was collecting material for a book on the subject, but my main interest was to observe systematically the way Africans work as creative artists. In order to do this, I decided to play the role of instigator and teacher while, at the same time, introducing them to a technique and art form unknown to them. I thought it would be interesting to teach them the art of etching and to see them at work as etchers.

According to the last census (1952) the population of Bida, capital of the Emirate of the same name in Niger Province, Nigeria, is about 26,000, of which some 2,000 are listed as craftsmen. But many Bida men described in the census as having other occupations, most women, and many children are to some extent craft-workers, either part-time or spasmodic, often skilled in several crafts.

The aim of this article is to give a brief account of certain inflexional features in Borana Nouns, which may throw light on similar characteristics in other dialects of Galla.

The inflexional features under discussion are those set out in the lists in Section II of this article. These features are not described in formal terms, as I have found that, in this case, a formal approach leads to a confused and unsatisfactory statement. Instead, I have endeavoured to correlate the given inflexional features with notional categories which have been established through direct observation of the speakers' behaviour rather than simply on the basis of translation. These categories were obtained by analysing the situations in which the forms listed in Section II were used, a process which was based on personal observation of these situations, together with my knowledge of the events which preceded them.