The aim of this article is to show how a ‘traditional’ society may produce a household system in which the structural tensions are no less intense than in the Western world. Muslim Hausa society (in northern Nigeria) has one of the highest rates of divorce (and remarriage) in the world. An explanation is sought here in terms of the economic and organisational requirements of a subsistence farming system that is always potentially short of labour. Divorce is a solution to otherwise unacceptable pressures, particularly on young women, in a society that requires them to be subordinate and marginal within the extended family. The data presented here were collected between 1979 and 1989 in the Niger valley of Sokoto State in northern Nigeria.

Le rituel du partage de nourriture par les anciens est présenté ici comme servant de métaphore pour le code culturel des Sadāma d'Éthiopie. Ceci est une façon de démontrer que le rituel autour de la consommation de nourriture change tout aussi bien que les événements socio-politiques, et que ce rituel doit être continuellement l'object de discussion et de débat afin d'arriver à un consensus sur la question d'exatitude “commensale”. Ce processus de rituels élaborés constitue une comparaison entre la manière consensuelle par laquelle les anciens doivent faire la politique et celle par laquelle ils doivent apaiser les disputes. Cet article montre qu'il y a des limites bien déterminées à ce système et aux valeurs du code culturel au-delà des frontières de “Sidāmoland”. Ceci sert à mettre au point le dilemme actuel entre le gouvernement et les relations ethniques en Afrique.

A school of thought sees the African communal system of land ownership as an inherently conservative arrangement which does not adapt or adapts only slowly to economic opportunity and, therefore, acts as a constraint on development. However, this view, which partly underlies the call for radical land reform measures such as nationalisation, is, generally, not borne out by the performance of the Ghanaian system as assessed on the basis of historical evidence and the findings of a recent survey of peasant oil palm farming. In the nineteenth century, when there was a substantial increase in demand for land for the oil palm against a background of relative land abundance in Ghana, the system responded with land sales, tenancy and other temporary transfers which allowed enterprising migrant farmers, notably Krobo farmers, access to land, while sufficient parcels were retained for use by the communal owners, including the Akyem people, the major vendors of land for oil palm and cocoa farming in the forest zone. This response pattern was repeated in subsequent periods characterised by greater demand for land for the cultivation of cocoa, which supplanted the oil palm as the premier export early in the present century. Further evidence of the adaptability of the communal system is provided by its response to the renewed demand for land in respect of the remarkable post-1970 oil palm boom. A recent sample study of oil palm farming in the Kade, Twifo Praso and Pretsea - Adum Banso areas in the heart of the oil palm belt found that the communal system had been responding to the renewed demand for land associated with the crop's growing profitability, mainly by temporary transfer arrangements to the almost total exclusion of outright sale, apparently to protect the sovereign interest of the community of owners and to secure land for their own use in the wake of rapidly expanding population, urbanisation and attendant increasing land scarcity. But the communal system as traditionally organised continues to be characterised by the insecurity of the tenure granted, especially to stranger farmers, while there are signs that the number of inequitable tenancies is on the increase. These problems might be minimised and land development enhanced by greater enforcement of the new land title registration law, and byflexibletenancy and other land-holding regulatory measures within the general framework of a free market system.

This brief historical survey of music education in Ghana and Nigeria encompasses three periods—the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras. Its main aim is to search for explanations of an apparent dichotomy between African and Western musics in the curricula of schools in both countries. It shows that, during the pre-colonial and colonial eras, some missionaries, colonial administrators and teachers encouraged the use of indigenous musics in the formal, Western, education systems, whilst, in the post-colonial period, initiatives to include more indigenous African musics have put some pressure at lower levels of the curriculum. Consequently, it may be necessary to reassess the content, methods and resources of music education in both countries.

The publication of Professor Robert L. Tignor's article ‘W. R. Bascom and the Ife bronzes' in Africa a few years ago (1990) aroused my interest, as a former student of this anthropologist, as to whether there was any further correspondence beyond what Tignor employed which would illuminate the controversy, as I felt dissatisfied with some of his interpretations. I was fortunate to have had access to Bascom's personal papers, now on file at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology (formerly the Robert Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley), through the kind assistance of Bascom's widow, Berta Bascom, and of Frank A. Norick at the museum. The letters in the file present a somewhat different view of the role of Bascom in the matter than Tignor does. His article relies largely on US State Department archives (which do include some Bascom correspondence) and upon some published articles by Bascom, by E. H. Duckworth, then editor of Nigeria Magazine and also Nigerian Inspector of Education, and by others. The whole business of the two Ife heads which Bascom acquired throws light on the history of the gradually evolving Nigerian colonial government policy toward antiquities.