ABSTRACT
Originally published by the University of California Press; reprinted by permission of The Regents of the University of California. From African Law: Adaptation and Development edited by Hilda Kuper and Leo Kuper, pp. 97-119. Jan Vansina was born in 1929. He studied anthropology at University College, London, and received the Ph.D. in history at the University of Louvain, Belgium, in 1952. He spent the next eight years in Africa studying the Kuba, Rwanda, and Burundi, and in 1963-1964 studied the Tio of the Republic of the Congo-Brazzaville. Since 1960, he has taught in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, where he is Wisconsin African Research Professor.
