In his recent review of Ivan Karp's Fields of Change among the Iteso of Kenya, (Africa 2, 1980,214-216) Paul Spencer questions Dr. Karp's historical account of the emergence of neighbourhoods among the Iteso during the colonial era and presents an alternative hypothesis for this development. Since Dr. Spencer devotes most of his review to this point and because the transformation of social forms during the colonial period is a topic of some interest for both historians and anthropologists, I would like to examine the historical facts related to this issue and use them to evaluate the merits and deficiencies of both positions.

In the one hundred and forty years that the Nuer have been known to small audiences outside the Sudan they have almost invariably been presented as truculent and aggressive warriors. They appeared in the nineteenth century exploration literature as archetypical ‘savages’: naked, stubborn and warlike men who were compared to monkeys, to the monkeys' advantage (Baker 1867:60). In the early twentieth century they were thought to be an intractable problem that impeded the peaceful establishment and efficient running of a new colonial administration. In Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard's monographs Nuer feuds and raiding are described as central to the structural relations between Nuer sections and between the Nuer and their neighbours.

Contemporary texts on West African crops usually note that rice is grown in areas west of the Tano: southern Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Liberia grow a considerable quantity of rice and in recent years there has been much attention given to improving both crop type and cultivation techniques. Northern Ghana has also seen the introduction of wet rice cultivation on a large scale. But there are areas in eastern Ghana, to the east of the Volta, where rice is grown. The rice is the indigenous glaberrima type; cultivation techniques owe nothing to the developers and rice-growing has a nodal place in local culture.

The area occupied by the Igbo-speaking people of eastern Nigeria ranks high among West Africa's yam producing zones. Whereas the yam is the Igbo food crop par excellence there is nevertheless considerable local variation in local farming practice and land-use systems. This paper describes three farm units in different parts of Igbo country, indicating the role of yam in the cropping system. The material is derived from surveys undertaken in 1977, but in two of the three cases it has been possible to compare the information with similar surveys undertaken by the author in 1964, prior to the Nigerian civil war. Three case-study farms cannot constitute a sample in any statistical sense and no generalization is possible. The material is presented because the profound changes experienced in the last fifteen years ensure that any time series data, however patchy, are of great intrinsic interest, and because it serves to indicate the extent to which land use systems at the micro-level may differ, even though the basic set of crops may be broadly similar. The three farms studied are representative of their ecological zone: the first reflecting conditions in the zone of highest population density and greatest land shortage; the second, in the more open land on the Nsukka plateau, conditions in an area where land shortage is not yet so great as to have obliterated the distinction between intensively farmed compound land and more extensively ‘bush-fallowed’ land; and the third, conditions of relative land-plenty in southern Igboland, where farming systems show marked continuity with conditions before the civil war. The paper stresses the role of yam in the fanning systems concerned, and the subtle interplay of social, economic and ecological factors involved in its continued cultivation.

The subject of this paper is the ceremonies which the Ohafia of south-eastern Nigeria perform in connexion with their major farm crop, yams (Dioscorea spp.). These relate both to the annual agricultural cycle and to the taking of yam-related titles which express status in Ohafia society at large. The special place yams occupy in Ohafia culture as the prestige crop, associated particularly with men, cannot be explained simply as an effect of the material importance of yam and its cultivation in the Ohafia economy. For whatever may explain the origin of yam's ritual importance, the Ohafia economy in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has depended on other important bases too, and Ohafia men have combined farming with other activities: warfare and trade. Indeed, the agricultural economy itself has been more dependent on female labour. Nonetheless, ‘yam-values’ remain of central symbolic importance to the ideals of individual and communal success promoted by Ohafia culture.