ABSTRACT
The published literature relating to the peoples treated here, like that for Northern Nigeria as a whole, gives no adequate picture of the ethnography of a complex area. The usually fragmentary accounts of Temple, some of which have been amplified by Meek in various works and by a number of Administrative Officers in the Provincial Gazetteers and other publications, and the reports of travellers who have penetrated the area since Denham, Clapperton, the Landers, Laird, and Oldfield, while they afford valuable details on particular aspects of the life of the peoples that are dealt with in this volume, are rarely explicit outside a limited number of topics, and cut across “ tribal ” boundaries, with the result that no single community emerges in the round. Fortunately, it has been possible in this study to consult a considerable quantity of locally available unpublished material, and, although this too is often of a fragmentary character, it has served to fill many gaps and to make possible an approach to a systematic survey and classification on which future and more intensive ethnographic and sociological study can be firmly based.
