The observation that migrants in most of Africa's towns maintain close ties with their home communities, initially made with respect to labour migrants, has been extended to include all kinds of migrants—seasonal, semi-permanent, and permanent (Van Velsen, 1960: 265–78; Gugler, 1971: 405; Caldwell, 1969: 140; Mitchell, 1959: 12–47).

It has been stated that a migrant who spends most of his working life in the town still regards his community of origin as his real home, owes social allegiance to it, ‘and reduces rural-urban migration to a mechanical process involving forward and backward movement between the town and country’ (Imoagene, 1972: 4).

This paper investigates the nature and the role of such links between urban migrants and their various places of origin–both rural and urban–in Nigeria. The study is approached from a micro-level by examining the pattern of socio-economic relationships between individual migrants and their families at their various places of origin rather than using aggregate data.

This essay examines anthropology and the work of anthropologists in Nigeria during the colonial period, which, for the sake of convenience, can be taken from 1884 and the establishment of the Colony of Lagos and of the Oil Rivers Protectorate to the end of the Second World War and the introduction of Regional self-government in the 1950s. During the latter part of this period I was a colonial administrator in this colony, and therefore absorbed the administrative bias in regard to anthropology and anthropologists. After the colonial period I became a professional anthropologist and acquired some of the bias of the professional anthropologist towards the colonial bureaucracy and its Nigerian successor. In what follows I am attempting to recapture my original attitudes.

A recent paper by Igor Kopytoff (Kopytoff, 1971) argues that Africanists have been led by their Western conceptual ethnocentrism into creating a false dichotomy between ‘elders’ and ‘ancestors’ in their descriptions and analyses of African societies. He asserts that this has obscured the fact that ‘elders’ and ‘ancestors’ are conceptually as well as terminologically united in many African cultural and social traditions. There are flaws in his assertion, perhaps the most serious of which has been ably countered by James Brain in a recent article (Brain, 1973) where he demonstrates that many, if not most, African societies make explicit and clear-cut distinctions both linguistically and conceptually between ‘elders’ (both living and dead) and ‘ancestral spirits’. Nevertheless Kopytof's article effectively argues that Western scholars have had a tendency to overlook indigenous conceptual continuities between living and dead elders, and this prompted me to re-examine my data on the Tiriki of Kenya and the Irigwe of Nigeria which deal with the traditional relations of the living and the dead (including the not yet born). I found that these relationships, though strikingly different in the two societies, are nevertheless in each case patterned in ways that are congruent with relationships between both adjacent and alternate generations.

Recently renewed interest in the history and social structures of the Mande-speaking peoples of the West Sudan has brought to attention a problem of both ethnographical and theoretical importance. It is the problem of understanding the structure and functions of clanship in Mande societies, while at the same time interpreting the meanings of clan names, rituals, myths, totemic usages, and inter-clan relationships. In approaching the first aspect of the problem one is faced with questions of definition which have not been satisfactorily resolved; for example, are the nyamakala groups properly defined as ‘castes’, and are the dyamu (or diamu) to be described as ‘clans’ or as ‘patronymic groups’.

The Yalunka of north-eastern Sierra Leone are predominantly Muslim. Their religion seems to be a straightforward variant of contemporary West African Islam. They have been exposed to Islam for several centuries and although they had powerful Muslim neighbours during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for most of this period they resisted conversion and remained pagan (Laing, 1825; Donald, 1968) until 1882, when they were conquered by one of the armies of Samory and forcibly converted. After the establishment of British and French control over their area in the 1890s many Yalunka reverted to paganism, but Islam remained viable and the number of adherents increased steadily. By the 1950s nearly all Yalunka in Sierra Leone were at least nominal Muslims.