Mvet is used, in the A 70 languages, both for a type of musical instrument and for the special genres of oral literature played or delivered to its accompaniment.

As the name for a musical instrument mvet has been variously translated as ‘musical bow’, ‘cithar-harp’, ‘native guitar’, and so forth. It is, technically speaking, a chordophone with resonators. The commonest type consists basically of a dry ‘bamboo’ (Wes Kos name; in fact the stem of a palm frond, nnen zam, Raphia sp.) about four feet in length, an inch and a half in diameter, and slightly curved. The bark is slit, on the convex side, into four thin strips left attached at both ends, then raised on an indented wooden peg, set slightly off centre. These strings (minsam) are adjusted for tuning by bark or leather rings sliding along the stem. Calabashes are tied underneath as resonators, the biggest, central one being considered male, the others female.

A study of the dialects of Fula (the language of the Fulɓe or Fulani) can be of interest both to the linguist and to the sociolinguist: partly because of the sheer scale of the undertaking, with what is essentially the same language being spoken by Fulani from Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea on the Atlantic coast to Nigeria and Cameroon on the east; and partly because of the complexity of the movements that have taken place over the centuries, and of the resulting varied pattern of social, cultural, and economic relationships between different Fulani groups and between Fulani and other peoples. It could also be of interest, not simply as a dialect study as such, but also for the light it might throw on comparable phenomena in multilingual situations.

In a number of Nilotic languages spoken in East Africa it has been shown that there exists formal marking of case based exclusively on tonal differentiation. This has been fully described in Maasai (Tucker and Mpaayei, 1955) and all investigated Kalenjin dialects (Tucker and Bryan, 1962. 1964–5). It also is clearly present in my own data on Teso, though interestingly enough it seems to be lacking in the Luo group generally.

This article is a sequel to some previously published work, during the preparation of which I was fortunate enough to have the benefit of many discussions with Wilfred Whiteley. While one cannot assume that the results as presented here would meet with his approval, it is certain that the subject stirred his interest; I hope therefore it will not be considered too unlikely a candidate for the honour of inclusion in his memorial volume

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

The study of oral literature is among the many areas to which Wilfred Whiteley made an important contribution. He was one of the founder editors of the extensive ‘Oxford Library of African Literature’, and played an essential part in both the development of the study of African oral literature and the maintenance of scholarly standards through generous encouragement and informed advice to colleagues and students working in this area. His primary interest was in Africa but, with his background in Classical studies and his continuing co-operatioii with American folklorists, he also took a wide comparative approach to oral literature. It is appropriate therefore to devote this paper, in a volume in his memory, to some comments on one aspect of oral literature viewed in a comparative context.

0.0. Our knowledge of traditional African literature has been greatly increased of recent years thanks, in part, to the Oxford Library of African Literature. Among the volumes of that series there have been some which have studied, either in breadth or depth, the genre of praise-poetry. The following notes on praise-poetry among the Shona aim at being a contribution to a study which Wilfred Whiteley, as joint editor of the Oxford Library, did much to promote.

One of the purposes of the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in Kenya, which Professor Whiteley directed, was to gather information that might help to clarify the nature of the problems faced by language teachers. One of my concerns in the Survey was to investigate problems that were encountered in the teaching of Swahili at secondary level; and in this paper I would like to outline and discuss some of the information obtained, regarding such problems and the factors to which they can be attributed.

Before he became a professional linguist, Wilfred Whiteley was employed in anthropological research by the then Government of Tanganyika in the Southern Province of that Territory (1948–51). In 1949 he was requested to investigate the customary law on chiefly succession in the Njelu Ngoni chiefdom of Songea District, where dispute had arisen over the appointment of a new chief. In 1952–3 I was asked to continue and to widen those inquiries, both as part of a general anthropological survey and because a succession dispute had developed in the other Ngoni chiefdom in the same District. Whiteley had left a brief memorandum and a few notes which I was able to use as a starting-point. Some of the resulting data have been published elsewhere (Gulliver, 1954, 1955, and 1971). It is fitting, however, to return to those materials in memory of my old friend and colleague, and as a reminder of his sustained interest in social anthropology.

This paper is an attempt to interpret the child's learning of his mother tongue as a sociosemiotic process. What is intended here by ‘sociosemiotic’ will be largely left to emerge from the discussion; but in the most general terms it is meant to imply a synthesis of three modes of interpretation, that of language in the context of the social system, that of language as an aspect of a more general semiotic, and that of the social system itself as a semiotic system—modes of interpretation that are associated with Malinowski and Firth, with Jakobson, and with Lévi-Strauss, among others. The social system, in other words, is a system of meaning relations; and these are realized in many ways of which one, perhaps the principal one as far as the maintenance and transmission of the system is concerned, is through their encoding in language. The meaning potential of a language, its semantic system, is therefore seen as realizing a higher level system of relations, that of the social semiotic, in just the same way as it is itself realized in the lexicogrammatical and phonological systems.

One of the results of the sometime colonization of Africa was the concentration by linguists of various European countries on the languages of those African territories held under their suzerainty, and the neglect of languages spoken in areas ‘belonging to’ other European countries. Fang, spoken in parts of what are now Gabon and Cameroon, has not enjoyed a great deal of attention from English-speaking linguists and/or Africanists, though it holds considerable interest for both in the idiosyncrasies of the phonetic display relating to its phonological categories and configurations.

The following songs are some of those collected by me in Mombasa during the autumn of 1969. I am deeply grateful to the School of Oriental and African Studies for giving me this unique opportunity to study this rich field of Swahili traditional poetry.

In a recent (and as yet unpublished) study of Swahili intonation (John Kelly and Joan Maw) it was pointed out that the neutral situation vis-à-vis grammar is to have one tone-group corresponding to one clause (except under certain predictable conditions), and within the tone-group to have two points of reference, named the ‘salient’ and the ‘tonic’, whose neutral positions (again except in certain predictable cases) are respectively on the first lexical item and on the last item in the clause. Any other arrangement constitutes ‘special’ intonation. Amongst other conclusions, it was tentatively hypothesized that special intonation of the multiple tone-group type seemed to correlate with marked clause structure. Marked clause structure, as defined in Maw, Sentences in Swahili, London, 1969, designated clauses with marked sequence of elements of structure, such as the Subject following the Predicator, the Complement preceding the Predicator, the Subject and Predicator separated by an Adjunct, and so on (the neutral situation being generally the sequence (A)SPC(A)); and also discontinuous clauses. The hypothesis that multiple tone-groups and marked clause structure might show correlation could only be tentative, because in the passages used for the Kelly and Maw study marked clause structure was not particularly frequent. But in the most varied text there were 36 clauses with marked sequence of elements, of which 28 had multiple tone-groups. Moreover there were only 37 clauses with multiple tone-groups in all in that text. This particular point about possible correlation was, of course, only a minor suggestion in a general description, but it seemed worth looking into more closely.

E. W. Stevick's study of Ganda (1969) is an important contribution to our understanding of a complicated tone system, both through the new data on conjugation which it makes available and through the rules which allow of a unified treatment of nominal and verbal units as they appear either alone or in the sentence. The present paper is an attempt to make use of some of the possibilities offered by Stevick's work, especially by reducing the unanalysed types of verb stems to sequences of underlying formatives to which appropriate rules can apply, and by interpreting junctures in phonological terms. Several questions, e.g. rules pertaining to enclitics, had to be left out of account; this is due to the fact that the present author had no possibility of working with an informant for this analysis (no more than for any of his previous work on Ganda).

It is, of course, for his immense contribution to linguistics and the general study of African languages that Wilfred Whiteley is known. It is sometimes forgotten that he was originally trained as an anthropologist and, moreover, retained this disciplinary thrust in his treatment of linguistic problems. In a truly extraordinary manner he was able to keep up to date with much anthropo-logical literature, a fact of considerable significance in his recent move into the field of sociolinguistics. For anthropologists as much as for linguists he is here irreplaceable. The important consolation is the existence of the initial fruits of his labours in this new field of sociolinguistics (Whiteley, 1966, 1969, 1971, in press, and many articles) and the fact that many of us are trying to respond to his great example.

It is possible to distinguish broadly four types of Swahili poetry in East Africa today.

The first type, mashairi (lit.) ‘poems’, is characterized in form by symmetrical verses which have an equal number of lines (usually not exceeding six) in each verse, and an equal number of syllables (usually not more than sixteen) in each line. This type is extremely popular with the people and with the majority of the poets: mashairi appear regularly in Swahili newspapers—Baraza, Kiongozi, Uhuru, etc.—and weekly radio programmes in Tanzania and Kenya are devoted to them. It is thus not surprising that almost every Swahili scholar is familiar with this form, and the bulk of the publications on Swahili poetry both in English and in Kiswahili are on it. Since much has been written on its prosody, I shall not discuss it further here.

The people known to both Africans and Europeans as Mbugu (Wambugu, Vambugu) live in the western Usambara mountains in Tanzania among the Sambaa. Their language, long known as posing a linguistic problem, is usually-described as having a non-Bantu lexicon and a Bantu grammatical structure. However, the actual linguistic situation is somewhat more complicated than this, as our researches (A.N.T. 1965, M.A.B. 1959) now show.

In July 1913 Dejazmatch Tafari (as the Emperor Haile Sellassie I was then styled), governor of the large Harar province of Ethiopia, issued a proclamation which was intended to counteract certain abuses in tax-collecting under which the peasants had been chafing. The text of this proclamation was recently printed in the Emperor's autobiography, but another version of the same proclamation is extant and was published in J. I. Eadie's An Amharic reader, CUP, 1924, 183 ff. Neither His Imperial Majesty nor the late Major Eadie is specific about the provenance of the text in his possession, and the only information vouchsafed by Eadie is a brief reference in the first sentence of the preface to his book that ‘the subject matter of this Reading Book was collected in Addis Abeba in 1913 from literate Amharas’.

At the beginning of this year (1973) members of the Department of African Languages at the University of Cape Town met in a daily seminar to discuss post-radical elements in predicatives [P] occurring in sentences [Ss] of the type:

Ss → [(S) + P]

where the subject [S] precedes a verbal predicate [Pv] … but not a copular predicate [Pc]. The topic of our discussions was in part the subject of Professor Whiteley's work on transitivity in Swahili, though we extended it to consider the relationship between the verbal extensions … which we will consider here … and certain syntactical preferences. In this work we were happily joined by Professor A. N. Tucker and it seemed to us that the subject of our labours was a fitting contribution to the memorial publication planned for Wilfred Whiteley by his colleagues at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Even though my colleagues did not have the pleasure of knowing Wilfred Whiteley they wished to be joined in this tribute to a fellow Bantuist.