This study sets out to explain the relatively high incidence of Islamic affiliation among traditionally non-Islamic Sisala migrants living in the migrant community of Mamobi in Accra, Ghana. In the course of the presentation, I intend to demonstrate that the migrants' relationship to Islam and the urban Islamic community is directly related to insecurities resulting from leaving one's native area and confronting an alien and often dangerous, urban environment, and that Islam provides the migrant with the instrumental means by which to facilitate his adjustment to urban life.

I have sometimes felt that my book on Zande witchcraft beliefs and practices did not finish the story—what happens at death and afterwards. I hope to be able to complete this last chapter in the near future—a chapter to which Fr. Giorgetti (F. Gero) has contributed in his Death among the Azande of the Sudan (1968), a translation from the Italian Morte e religione della morte tragli Azande del Sudan. In the meantime, and because I wish the Azande to speak for themselves, I submit for publication in vernacular and translation a few texts on what I think is a topic of interest.

Towards the end of my 1968–9 period of study in Ghana an audience was arranged for me with the late Asantehene, Otumfuo Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II. He was ailing at the time and his readiness to see me was largely attributable to his acute interest in the political affairs of Ahafo, the district in which I was working. One of the first questions he asked me was whether I had been told in Ahafo about a certain ‘Asibi Entwi’. I replied that I had heard a great deal about this person. Otumfuo then assured me emphatically: ‘Asibi Entwi is a lie. No such man ever lived.’

Dreams and visions have an important place in the life of many of the more colourful African churches of Zionist or Pentecostal type. This has often been noted (Sundkler, 1961; Pauw, 1960; Sangree, 1966; Welbourn, 1966; Peel, 1968) but has rarely received any detailed consideration. Any definitely sociological, rather than psychological, treatment of the topic is particularly rare. My object in this paper is therefore to attempt an explicitly sociological examination of the phenomenon in one particular church which I have studied. I shall consider the telling of dreams and the extent to which it is controlled and patterned by beliefs and expectations, i.e. dream-telling as an institution; and I shall go on to examine the part it plays in the life of the group and the ways in which it is further patterned by this.

This article attempts to carry further the discussion of some aspects of the issues of the analysis of relations between African traditional thought and Western concepts of causation presented by Robin Horton (1967) in earlier articles in this journal. It will also be clear to some readers that its title has been inspired by the theme of Sir Karl Popper's two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which first appeared in 1945. In this work Popper makes a systematic attack on modern totalitarians and their predecessors, and in so doing contrasts two types of societies, ‘the open society’, which is the ideal aspired to by liberal democrats, and ‘the closed society’, which he equates with tribalism; and it is to a form of this tribalism, he contends, that the totalitarians would have us return. Popper belongs to a long line of thinkers, including philosophers, lawyers, economists, and sociologists, who have used tribal or so-called primitive man—or rather their conceptions of him—as a means of illuminating their analysis of the problems of society in general and of modern society in particular, and in so doing have often raised the hackles of social anthropologists, who, by virtue of having lived in non-literate societies, tend to consider themselves the profession most likely to know something about the people whom their social-science colleagues cite with deceptive facility. It so happens, I believe, that Popper's conception of tribal or primitive man implied in his picture of ‘the closed society’ is much nearer the mark than, say, Hobbes's picture of man in ‘the state of nature’ or of Rousseau's idea of ‘the noble savage’.