Surprisingly few Africanists are interpreting the oral literature of Africa using the conceptual tools fashioned by Lévi-Strauss. This article attempts to use some of his ideas in analysing eight etiological stories told by the Kimbu of Tanzania. The aim is not to emulate the master in his search for the innate structuring capacity of the human mind, but rather to set the sights lower, and to decide what is the real value of these stories to the Kimbu themselves. This can be done by distinguishing the various codes which the stories represent, following out their transformations, and discovering what message or messages they communicate. In all of this it has to be understood that we are dealing with what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘objectified thought’ and with empirical categories, and that we are not concerned with how men think in myths but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Major P. H. G. Powell-Cotton, an early East African explorer, was the first European to contact a small mountain group calling themselves the So (singular: Sorat) in 1902 on the upper slopes of Mount Kadam and Mount Moroto during his exploratory trip through what is now Karamoja District, Uganda (1904, pp. 305 ff.). From that time until we carried out field-work among them in 1969-70 very little has been written about the So. Today they inhabit three of the four tertiary volcanic mountains in Karamoja: Mounts Kadam, Moroto, and Napak. The approximate distances between these mountains in statute miles are: Moroto-Kadam, 40; Moroto-Napak, 38; and Napak-Kadam, 32. The So are surrounded on all sides by semi-nomadic pastoral groups including the Karamojong, Turkana, and Suk. In our census of the Lia and Naukoi valleys on the western slopes of Moroto Mountain—the area primarily covered by our study—we found approximately 1,700 So. The total population probably does not exceed 4,800 on all three mountains.

In 1936 Godfrey Wilson attempted ‘to introduce the subject of morality for scientific discussion in a new manner’. The new manner owed much to Malinowski's insistence on the importance of inventories in field-work. Wilson showed that Nyakyusa religion fell into three distinct but related categories: ancestor cult, magic, and witchcraft. The ancestor cult was the concern of kin-groups; within the kinship context, the belief that cult failures brought down afflictions upon individuals served to constrain their behaviour in the interests of morality. Magic and witchcraft had similar effects within the political community, of which the kin-groups were constituents. The three possible sources of affliction formed a limited series.

This study of the Ashanti rubber trade with the Gold Coast in the closing years of the last century explores further a theme with which I have for some time now been occupied. The theme is the nineteenth-century background to Ashanti economic development in the present century. In an earlier study of Ashanti trade with Hausa, Mande, and Mossi caravans I suggested that Ashanti experience with the kola trade provided a significant foundation for the successful introduction of cocoa cultivation early in this century, and that an adequate explanation of the latter requires a knowledge of the tools and the social framework of kola production and also of the organization of kola distribution from the areas of production to the kola markets in modern north-central Ghana in the previous century (Arhin, 1970). The rubber trade was complementary to Ashanti trade in the north, and a close look at it should throw more light on the economic outlook and organizational methods developed in the previous century which account for the eagerness with which the Ashanti took to cocoa cultivation and the success they made of its distribution before the era of the lorry. Secondly, there was an interesting link between the rubber trade and the domestic slave trade with Samory which presents the Alymany in the role of a stimulant to the Ashanti economy; one tends to think of him solely in terms of his military-politico activities. Thirdly, the Government of the Gold Coast, which took a keen interest in the rubber trade, sent officials to observe its production and sale in the interior so that written reports may be compared with oral information. After a brief note on changes in the basis of, and the personnel involved in, Ashanti trade with the European establishments on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century, I shall examine the beginning, growth, and importance of the rubber trade; the categories of traders and the different modes of rubber collection; and lastly, the organization by which rubber reached the exporting agencies. The emphasis throughout will be on those features of the rubber trade which are significant for twentieth-century developments.

In an age so overwhelmingly dominated by the planner, statistics and statisticians have come to assume a crucial importance; and so seriously have the latter taken their new responsibility that, in recent times, a veritable flood of data on every conceivable aspect of socio-economic behaviour has engulfed us. In the newly emergent nations this task of collecting and collating information, spurred on no doubt by the knowledge that much remains to be done, has proceeded with a rare enthusiasm, and in all of them the periodic ‘Digest of Statistics’ has become a familiar document.