Book Reviews 385

peoples. However, the author gives the concept “animal disguise” a far wider and more
comprehensive definition, so extensive indeed that in many cases he is found to be
dealing with ordinary dress-with guise, not merely disguise. He treats and tries to
interpret the ceremonial function of animal parts-skins, claws, teeth, also blood and
fat-especially in connection with hunting, and as insignia and badges of rank. He
omits North Africa from this examination, drawing a border which is justified culture-
historically.
The examination consists of two main divisions: the status and significance of wild
as compared with domestic animals in African cult life, taking “cult” in an inclusive
sense. In Part I the author stresses inter alia that there exists a genetic relation between
initiation and secret societies, extending this relation even to include “the kingship.”
In my opinion, the most interesting chapters in this part are “The royal ceremonial
hunts” and “The public ceremonial hunts.” The author also elucidates the meaning
and significance of these ritual or symbolic hunts in different rites de passage in the life
of the Africans. The treatment of these problems would seem to be new in kind.
Part I1 deals with the status and significance of domestic animals in the cult,
especially among the cattle raisers in East and South Africa. The author has been able
to organize this part essentially in parallel with Part I: the significance of domestic ani-
mals, especially cattle, in “the kingship,” in the initiation rites and in the other rites de
passage (sacrifice of domestic animals). H e points out conformities between ceremonial
hunting and ritual slaughter of domestic animals.
Animal disguise, in its strict sense, used in secular hunting and as disguise for
warriors, is dealt with in the final chapter. The author admits that hunting masks and
the like are apt to serve a practical purpose but deems i t probable that here, too, they
have risen out of original cultic hunt disguises.
I can here only inadequately indicate the variegated content of this book. This re-
view was written in the countryside with no access to the literature, so I will endeavour
not to engage in criticism, though i t does seem as if the author a t times goes perhaps
too far in his otherwise most creditable endeavour to show a ritual import in “disguises”
of differentkinds. I should also mention that I miss a couple of good works in the bib-
liography.
I n sum, this work abounds in new viewpoints and would deserve a detailed review
while being made an object of discussion. The book is a new valuable addition to the
series initiated by L. Frobenius and so successfully continued by Ad. E. Jensen, just!y
enjoying international repute.
A History ofthe Beja Tribes ofthe Szcdan. A. PAUL.Cambridge: University Press, 1954.
vii, 164 pp., 6 plates, 5 maps. $3.00.
Reviewed by CARLETON S. Cooh
Mr. Paul is a British colonial administrator who served in the Sudanese Political
Service from 1929 until, presumably, its end in 1955. Of natural interest to anthro-
pologists because of its subject, his book is organized on a strictly historical framework,
leaving the reader to pick up cultural details in transit. Nowhere before Appendix TWO
is one given a listing of the tribes which form the subject of the book, and information
must be assembled piecemeal as to which tribes speak which of the three local languages;
To Bedawie (Hamitic), TigrB, and Arabic. The maps fail to show many of the places
mentioned. Interlarded with the narrative are provocative glimpses of the environ-
ment, material culture, family organization, and tribal structure-glimpses which are
never blown up into whole pictures. It is clear that Mr. Paul is capable of painting such
386 American A lzthroPoZogist [58, 19561
pictures. He knows, understands, and respects his Beja, without glorifying, idealizing,
or vilifying them. He writes easily and with a sense of humor. Now that the historians
have been fed, let us hope that he will write a companion book of Beja ethnography.
While awaiting this work, we may gather from A History of the Beja Tribes that
the Beja are a mixed bag of some 285,000 nomads and ex-nomads, popularly known
as Fussy-Wuzzies, who inhabit some 100,000square miles of territory barren in various
degrees and lying between the frontiers of Egypt and Eritrea, and between the Red Sea
coast and the hills flanking the Nile and its tributary, the Atbara River. Living off
flocks of camels, goats, sheep, and in favorable places cattle, like most nomads they
grow a little grain where and when they are able. Supposedly descended from an old
Hamitic-speaking Caucasoid stock mixed with Arab, TigrC-speaking Yemenite, and
Negro, they have achieved a striking and well-known racial appearance of their own.
Like the Swiss, they speak several languages. Officially they are Muslims.
The book’s theme is the sluggish stream of local history from the time of the shakily
postulated appearance of the Bejas’ ancestors in the Sudan, in the guise of Neolithic
pastoralists from the North, through Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Axumite, Arab,
Turkish, Egyptian, and British periods of influence to the paradoxical present. This
history has seen the Beja shift religions several times, while certain tribes also changed
their speech. It has witnessed the addition of new genes to their chromosomes, without
marked physical change a t variance with the needs of their special and highly selective
environment. It has seen the addition of a new and particularly destructive beast, the
camel. It has failed to record any basic change in Beja cultural attitudes. I n 1955 they
are just as rugged, individualistic, withdrawn, and completely self-centered as ever.
Tell us more, Mr. Paul.
The Dark Child. CAMARA LAYE. Translated by JAMES KIRKUP,et al. New York:
Noonday Press, 1954. 188 pp. $2.75.
Reviewed by ELIZABETH
COLSON
Camara Laye was born in Kaouroussa, a MalinkC town in French Guinea. His auto-
biography covers the period from his first conscious awareness of the world around him,
through his years at the Technical College in Conakry, the capital of French Guinea,
and ends with his departure for France a t about the age of twenty-one. He writes in a
simple and effective prose which makes his book a delight to read. Because the expe-
riences that he writes about have been those of a member of an African society, his
autobiography is of considerable interest to anthropologists.
It would take a specialist in the area to judge how much new information he has
contributed on the subjects of famiiy organization, the wider kinship groups, the or-
ganization of village life, the ritual of the goldsmith’s craft to which his father belonged,
the customs of the boys’ initiation ceremonies, and various other aspects of Malink6
life on which he touches. He has not set out to string an ethnography on the thread of
his life story, and much that we would like to know is passed over casually or ignored
entirely. What is ever present throughout the book, and perhaps is its greatest value
to the anthropologist or to any reader, is the emotional impact of the society upon one
of its members.
The alien perspective of the stranger, to whom all things are new and therefore to
be wondered at, has been accepted as an advantage to the student of societies and cul-
tures. A book like The Dark Child is no substitute for the formal anthropological ac-
count, but it illuminates the life of the people in another fashion. Perhaps it is well to
be reminded once again that our remoteness from the experience of the peoples among
whom we work is a hindrance as well as a gain.