Volume 3, Number 2 · September 10, 1964
Understanding Africa
By Roland Oliver
Africa and Africans
by Paul Bohannan
Natural History Press, 259 pp., $4.50
The African Past
by Basil Davidson
Atlantic, Little, Brown, 392 pp., $7.95
One of the menaces in African studies today is the fact that too many publishers are chasing too few qualified authors for the one short book which is to tell the general public all that it needs to know about Africa. The latest victim of this man-hunt is Professor Paul Bohannan, a social anthropologist of great distinction, who in the last hundred pages of Africa and Africans has come near to supplying just that thumb-nail sketch of life in a tribal society which the urban Westerner has always wanted and never yet received. Bohannan describes the problems of the polygynous family with a rare brilliance:
Review, 1452 words
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