The emergence of one-party political systems among the new nations of Africa, now an unmistakable trend, has been disconcerting to social scientists for at least two reasons: first, this trend was not clearly foreseen during the period leading to independence; and, second, now that it is clearly discernible students of Africa are uncertain as to how the trend should be interpreted and evaluated. This question was discussed in a recent article by D. E. Apter from the viewpoint of political science. The present paper deals with the same problem, but from an anthropological viewpoint. It considers only the new nations in Africa south of the Sahara; these were also Apter's main concern, though he includes in his discussion some of the new nations in other parts of the world as well.

The accepted tripartite divisions of the formal study both of mankind's past and present are to a considerable extent based on man's development first of language and later of writing. Looked at in the perspective of time, man's biological evolution shades into prehistory when he becomes a language-using animal; add writing, and history proper begins. Looked at in a temporal perspective, man as animal is studied primarily by the zoologist, man as talking animal primarily by the anthropologist, and man as talking and writing animal primarily by the sociologist.

Mr. Gray's argument, if I have understood it correctly, is that two-party political systems, which he equates with the register of a vote for any purpose, are culturally linked with a philosophy which sees true and false, right and wrong, as polar opposites and which springs from the claims of the Christian church to final authority in matters of truth and morals. He argues that we are moving away from such a philosophy in the light of recent discoveries in physics, notably Einstein's theory of relativity and presumably (though he does not mention this) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He draws support from Dr. Apter's statement of a generalization familiar to the student of politics, that in a successful two-party system both sides must court the “floating voter”, and this leads them to moderate their opposition rather than carry it to extremes. Mr. Gray does not accept this as a general proposition, but takes it as a description of a recent change in the attitudes of political parties, to be correlated with new trends in philosophy. Hence, he argues, the two-party system is not an essential element of democracy and there is no need to be distressed if it is not adopted in African states. African culture, he argues, is not based on our philosophical premises, and the evidence he advances is that Africans are free in some societies to choose between the cults of different deities.