ABSTRACT
Social anthropologists frequently emphasise the immense diversity of language, culture and social organisation in Sub-Saharan Africa, and criticise the over-simplified stereotypes of European residents and visitors: e.g. that the African is naturally indolent because of the hot climate, that he is too inferior in brain power to be capable of more than elementary education, or that he thinks ‘concretely’ and cannot cope with ‘abstractions’, and so on (cf. Ombredane). And yet one cannot but be struck by the number of similarities in reports by psychologists and others who are well aware of the dangers of ethnocentric frames of reference, and who have worked in many different parts of the continent: to name but a few — Biesheuvel and Hudson in S. Africa, Jahoda in Ghana, Doob in Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere, Ombredane and Faverge in the Congo, Dawson and Berry in Sierra Leone. * Particularly among the partly acculturated there are similarities in patterns of test scores, in problems of education, in modal personality characteristics, even in many child-rearing practices and values. Thus although the writer's sample of 50 Ugandan boys is obviously not typical, even of Ugandans, it adds something to the picture.
