A Further Contribution to the Study of Zande Culture

Abstract

Opening Paragraph: In a recent number of Africa (October i960) I showed that a number of Zande cultivated plants must have been borrowed from other peoples and that others were probably borrowed too. The points there emphasized were: firstly, that the agricultural economy of the Azande is derived from many different sources; secondly, that the Azande themselves see it that way; and thirdly, that in the past it must have been much simpler than in recent times, leading us to suppose that there has probably been a connexion between bionomic development and political development. I now turn to a consideration of certain arts and crafts to show further that it is not only in the cultivation of plants that Zande culture is a complex of borrowed elements, as the people themselves are a complex of peoples of different ethnic origins, but also in their material culture generally. I do not attempt to cover all of their material culture, only some parts of it for illustration and as an indication of the extent to which it has been taken over from peoples absorbed into the original Mbomu stock or from neighbouring peoples.