After giving some general information about children working on the streets of Harare, the article discusses the way children live on the streets when the streets become their home. It gives some reasons for their being on the streets, describes how they organise themselves and how they earn a living, and comments on their values. The article goes on to point out that there are a variety of perspectives on where the problem of street children lies, and to outline possible lines of intervention.

In her lucid and persuasive Henry Myers Lecture on ‘The power of rights’ (Man, 1977), Professor La Fontaine argues that since the Gisu themselves cite transition from one status to another as the purpose of their initiation rites, this transformation cannot logically explain them. Taking up Maurice Bloch's idea that religion is concerned with inequality and hierarchy (1974; 1977), La Fontaine argues convincingly that the explanation of Gisu initiation rites lies in their functions of validating traditional knowledge and of maintaining traditional authority. The relationship between religion and political power had been noticed before but it had not previously been applied to the field of rites of passage nor had the mechanism of the supportive role of traditional knowledge been so clearly analysed.

In this paper we consider how a functional study can help us to understand the manipulation of myths. This is not to return to the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown (1935) which sought to explain every social institution by showing how it helps to maintain the social structure. Rather we consider what the myth-maker is trying to do in recounting his stories, or the function these stories serve for the narrator. We are concerned with the logical processes behind myth. This is not the ‘logic’ that Lévi-Strauss (1964, 9-22) tries to elucidate when he unfolds the structural patterns followed by the myths of a particular culture. We do not so much consider myth as an object to be analysed, but myth-making or the narration of myths as an activity of the people concerned. We are concerned with logic in the sense of the mental processes by means of which myth is used to express the intentions of the narrator. For this it is necessary to study myths in the particular contexts in which they are used.