ABSTRACT
Stratification by age entails a type of social organisation that was not considered in the classification of African political systems by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940:5). As Frank Stewart (1977:2) has noted, age organisation is a topic that has frequently been omitted from general anthropological textbooks. Even in some influential ethnographic accounts, it has been largely ignored or relegated somewhat anomalously as a separate, self-contained and self-explanatory phenomenon. 1 Despite the fact of ageing in every society, age organisation generally has somehow evaded the attention of social theorists.
