Africa Its Peoples and Their Culture History

Abstract

This book does not present a distillation of long and intimate familiarity with the African continent. The author has had field experience only among indigenous peoples in North America and Oceania, and his first hand. Knowledge of Africa has been limited to three brief visits- a week in Egypt in 1921, four days in Cape Town in 1945, and a fortnight in Kenya and Tanganyika in 1957. His interest in the area stems primarily from the accident of having undertaken, about eight years ago, to offer a graduate course in African ethnology. Exposure to the descriptive literature raised problems of unusual challenge and engendered a mounting enthusiasm. In contrast to regions which man has occupied for only a few thousand years, Africa offers the fascination of a continent inhabited, in all probability, from the very dawn of culture history history, a continent in which diverse races have interacted in complex ways for millennia and in which survivals of extremely archaic cultural adjustments still emerge here and there only slightly masked by subsequent developments.