William R. Bascom

Urbanization Among the Yoruba

The Yoruba of Western Nigeria have large, dense, permanent settlements, based upon farming rather than upon industrialization, the pattern of which is traditional rather than an outgrowth of acculturation. They are undoubtedly the most urban of all African peoples, the percentage living in large communities being comparable to that in European nations. In terms of these communities, Wirths final criterion of the city, social heterogeneity, may be critically examined and perhaps redefined in terms of economic specialization and interdependence or replaced by formalized government which incorporates primary groups into a political community.

Ponapean Prestige Economy

modities produced for export and sold to obtain money with which to purchase clothing, hardware, and a variety of imported goods for which Ponape has become dependent upon the outside world since contact. The prestige economy involves the goods through which social approval and social status are gained; as in the case of subsistence goods, these are consumed locally, but they are shared with other households within the Section.2 Although, as might be expected, there is some overlapping, most goods fall clearly within one or another of these three categories as far as their primary function is concerned.3 The

The Focus of Cuban Santeria

T HE WORSHIP of African deities, as it is practised in Cuba today, is known as santeria. The deities and the men and women who work with them are known by the Spanish words santos, santeros, and santeras, or by the Yoruba words orisha, babalorisha, and iyalorisha. Santeria is a vital, growing institution, practised throughout the entire length of the island, in both rural and urban areas; in the latter, in fact, it is probably the strongest. In recent years it seems to have been expanding, recruiting additional members from the Negro, the mixed, and even the white population. The African elements of santeria are predominantly Yoruba, or Lucumi, as the Yoruba of Nigeria are called in Cuba. In the town of Jovellanos, Matanzas province, where most of the material on which this paper is based was gathered,2 the importance of Yoruba religion in santeria is clearly apparent. The Yoruba influence is also recognizable throughout Cuba, despite regional variations, in the names of the Yoruba deities, in similarities to Yoruba ritual, in the Yoruba cities named by Cuban Negroes as homes of their ancestors, and in individuals who can still speak the Yoruba language. On a quick trip in the summer of 1948, more than eighty years after slavery, it was possible to find Cuban Negroes in towns from one end of the island to the other, and in Havana itself, with whom I could talk in Yoruba. Certain features of santeria have become well known through the work of Herskovits and other scholars in the field of New World Negro studies. In Cuba they have been discussed in the valuable contributions of Ortiz and of Lachatanere, Castellanos, and Martin. These features include the syncretism of African deities with Catholic saints, commonly represented by chromolithographs; the African pattern of possession which has attracted interest as a psychological phenomenon; and the retention of animal sacrifices and African drumming, singing, and dancing in the New World Negro rituals. All of these are important elements in Cuban santeria, but in the mind of the cult members in Jovellanos,

Urbanism as a Traditional African Pattern

U rbanism as a part of traditional African ways of life has received less attention than urbanization as a process. The growth of new cides in Africa as the result of economic development and accultxiration has indeed been a striking phenomenon, involving profound social and cultural changes and rapid adaptation to urban ways of life. Large parts of Africa, to be sure, had no cities until recent times. Patterns of shifting agriculture or of establishing new capitals with each new ruler prevented the development of urban life in areas where other circumstances might have been favourable. In most of South East and Central Africa cities of any size and duration were lacking in pre-European times. One may conclude from this that a prerequisite for urban life is a sedentary existence, based either on the rotation of crops or of land through fallowing. Evidence from West Africa suggests that though this may be a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one.

Yoruba Food 1

The subsistence economy of the Yoruba of West Africa, like that of their neighbours, on the Guinea Coast, is based on sedentary hoe agriculture. Hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, and the gathering of wild foods are practised, but the basis of the Yoruba diet consists of starchy tubers, grains, and fruits grown on their farms, supplemented by vegetable oils, wild and cultivated fruits and vegetables, and meat and fish. The commercial economy of the Yoruba is based on cocoa ( koko , from English) Theobroma cacao , originally native to Central America, which has become the principal cash crop of the Yoruba during the present century. Today Nigerias major export, cocoa, is produced almost entirely by the Yoruba. More than 99 per cent, of the total tonnage of Nigerian cocoa graded in 1940-1 was produced in Yoruba territory, only 741 out of 97,862 tons coming from Benin and Warri provinces. First exported in the last decade of the nineteenth century, cocoa has increased in importance until in 1947 it ranked first among Nigerias exports in terms of value. It is the principal cash crop in Ǫyǫ, Ondo, Ijebu-Ode and Abeokuta provinces and part of the Colony, all of which are inhabited by the Yoruba.

Folklore Research in Africa

S OF FOLKLORE STUDIES THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY announces the publication of its new quarterly, ABSTRACTS OF FOLKLORE STUDIES. This journal is designed to provide scholars with brief, factual summaries of articles relevant to the folklore discipline. The scope of AFS is wide; it will deal with folklore in its broadest sense-tale, song, proverb, arts and crafts, ethnology, literature. It is edited by Donald M. Winkelman and Ray B. Browne, both of the English Department of Purdue University. The editors welcome both subscriptions and contributions to the quarterly. They would especially like to have contributors with a background in folklore and in Japanese or other Oriental languages, in Arabic, in Russian or other Slavic tongues, or in any of the several Scandinavian languages. The subscription rate is

Two Studies of Ifa Divination

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Ponape: the Tradition of Retaliation

To the Yoruba, divination is of great concern, as the means by which they discover and hope to influence the changes in their relationships with the gods and ancestors and other spirits in their complex cosmos, and so to gain their aid in their pursuit of health and good fortune. They employ a number of divinatory techniques. The one that yields the fullest information is the system of geomancy known as Ifa, for which there are three procedures of varying complexity, the two most complex being used by professional diviners ( babalawo ). The Ifa oracle is animated by a deity named Orunmila, but also often called Ifa.

AFRICAN MATERIAL CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ECOLOGICAL ADAPTATION

During the first century of contact with the outside world, the history of Ponape has been marked by a series of violent outbreaks against Americans, Spaniards, and Germans. The causes and implications of these surprisingly effective uprisings, in which two governors of the island were killed, have become the direct concern of the American people. Ponape has been governed by the U. S. Navy since 1945, and was assigned to the United States by the United Nations in 1947 as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Tribalism, Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism:

Despite the great increase in African studies in the past decade, our knowledge of African material culture, technology, and ecological adaptation has advanced little since the first quarter of this century. We have learned a great deal about African lineages and social structure, chiefs and government, law, marriage, ancestor worship, ritual, and witchcraft, and about how these and other aspects of African life have been affected by colonial administration, urbanization, and other acculturative factors. Recently we have become excited by the effects of nationalism and independence. Nevertheless there is little new to report on the topics I have been assigned to discuss. In the remarks that I make today, I do not wish to be misunderstood as belittling the importance of the other topics that currently hold the attention of anthropologists, although they sometimes prove to be fads or passing fashions, nor to decry the opportunism of grant applications phrased in terms of t.he most recent research problems. This has been encouraged by the granting agencies themselves; field research in Africa is not inexpensive; and a t least until very recently anthropology was a young and struggling discipline. There is an increasing tendency among anthropologists to pursue over-eagerly the most recent topic, idea, or approach that they happen to have read about, and I shall pass over the question of what and where they read, while they fail to complete the unfinished business of earlier scholars. Africa’s material culture, technology, and economic adaptation were regarded as important by earlier anthropologists and Africanists, and often these topics stirred heated arguments. The debates may have been decided, but the study of these subjects remain uncompleted and the questions they raise are unanswered. With the many anthropological field studies that have been made in Africa in the past 30 years, we are in a position to plot the distribution of features of material culture and technology far more accurately and completely than was possible when H. Ling Roth studied “African Looms” (JKAI, 1917), or when Leo Frobenius published his Atlas Ajricanus (1921-1931). A series of studies of the distribution of hammocks, stilts, spiked wheel traps, string figures, and other cultural elements have been continued by Gerhard Lindblom (1925-1949), and by Sture Lagercrantz in his Confributioit to the Elhnography u j Africa (1950), but we can certainly select more significant features of material culture and technology for study, and improve on the theoretical orientation of Frobenius. However, distributions are also out of fashion today. One result is that in these years when Africa is winning its independence, its newly emerging nations are repeatedly described in the press as facing a transition from the stone age to the industrial