Sampling provided the rationale of my previous account of ‘Dreams in an Independent African Church’ (1973). I took a set of ninety-five dream reports, and a handful of visions, as individual events which could be summed and categorised in a variety of ways. I had been able to garner these over a period of five months' study, from the services of this ‘Independent African Church’ (IAC). Beyond considering in general terms the part played by dream-telling and its accompaniments in the services of the Church and in its life more generally, in that article I worked out patterns, categorising the individual dreams in relation to their tellers, to the way they might implicate other named people, to whether they depicted IAC activities, to their apparent location, and so on. I sought to explain the patterns in terms of leadership and its interests, and of the idea that dream-telling was a kind of ‘bidding’, ‘to contribute valuably to the life of the group, and through this for status within it’ (op. cit.: 256). This article moves on from that analysis.

When David Livingstone, the missionary-explorer, pleaded in the Senate House in Cambridge on 4 December 1857:

I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it with you. [Winspear, 1956: 11]

little did he realise that whereas his compatriots were busily engaged in commercial and evangelical enterprises the local folk artist in Central Africa was also constructing, refashioning or recreating riddles inspired by the white man, his culture and his other activities.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the ‘Slave Coast’ of West Africa suffered increasingly severe problems of disorder, which seem to have been in large part a consequence of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade. These disorders involved not only wars among the major states but also (in at least some cases) the weakening of political authority within states. The most obvious aspect of this dissolution of authority was the decline in the power of the kingdom of Allada, which had earlier exercised some degree of suzerainty over most if not all of the other states in the area. Among the tributaries of Allada which repudiated its authority was the kingdom of Whydah (Hueda), on the coast to the south-west, which was already effectively independent by the 1680s, and which even went to war with Allada in 1691–92 and again in 1714–17. The kingdom of Fon, or Dahomey, in the interior north of Allada, was originally also a dependency of Allada, but is recorded to have revolted and asserted its independence in 1715.

Les sociétés gbaya et mkako de l'Est-Cameroun constituent une frontière entre deux mondes. Les Mkako sont à la limite bantoue du nord-ouest du bassin congolais tandis que les Gbaya représentent le monde oubanguien dans les savanes à galeries forestières. Qualifiées autrefois d'anarchiques, ces sociétés partagent des caractéristiques communes: acéphales, dénuées de pouvoir politique centralisé, de règies de succession relatives au rôle de leader, sans hiérarchie lignagère ni organisation segmentaire, sans toujours de référence au territoire, elles reposent sur une organisation patriclanique caractérisée par la fluidité des unités sociales dans une disposition où le clan ne constitue pas toujours à proprement parler un groupe «corporate». Enfin, l'un de leurs traits marquant réside dans l'antagonisme entre l'idéologie égalitaire sans cesse affirmée et la compétition des homines importants, ou bien l'émergence de leaders, qui se fondent sur des rapports d'inégalité, aussi ténus qu'ils puissent être.

Lamu today is composed of several ethnic groups with an affinity for gold: the Afro-Arab old families who intermarried with the BuSaid ruling class from Oman and Zanzibar; Hadrami newcomers from southern Arabia; and the slaves of these groups, all of whom came from central Africa. In addition, there are Bohra Indians (only a few remain of the two hundred or so earlier in the century), two Parsees, and one remaining Ismaili family whose origins in India dictate a desire for gold. Other people, such as Bajuni, are now living in Lamu; but most are poor and the few who have gold are those who have gone to Mombasa or away to school, and then returned. Some of them have married into the heretofore closed ranks of the old Afro-Arab families precisely because they have made money or can be expected to, and will provide gold. There are numbers of other ethnic groups in Lamu, including Africans from the Kenya mainland across the bay from Lamu island. Land, not gold, is important to them. The people of concern here are mainly the Bohra Indians, Afro-Arabs, and the Hadramis – all of whom covet gold. Marriages in Lamu were arranged along ethnic, class, and family lines at least since the nineteenth century. Gold for brides was a necessity – especially for the upper-class Afro-Arab (mixtures of local Africans, African slaves, and Arab traders) families and among the various Indian groups (historically Hindu, Dauudi Bohra, Ithnasharia, Ismaili, and Goans) then living and trading there.