The Village Headman in British Central Africa

Abstract

The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute is attempting a comparative study of the tribes of British Central Africa and of the processes of change affecting their lives to-day. Social anthropologists have been sent to tribes selected both for the variety of forms in their indigenous social organization and for the different ways in which they have been absorbed in the modern world-system. Most of the inhabitants of any village in any tribe are related to the headman and to one another. The corporate-kinship and territorial systems tend to coincide, and village headmen hold office by genealogical position in a segmentary system. All the tribes of the region attach very high value to ‘the big village’, and the village is identified with the headman. The hypothesis on which people are basing their future work is that the delicacy of the headman’s position arises from conflicting principles. The difficulties of the headman’s position are enormously aggravated in the modern political system.