Anthropological Report on the Edo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria

Abstract

ENiger Delta, from Yorubaland on the west to the Cross River on the east, is a field of African ethnology which is only very slightly made known to us at the present day, but promises to yield some very interesting and important additions to our knowledge of negro races, when fully worked. Owing to its physical conditions, the area covered by the delta of this river—some 260 miles by 100—is still unexplored in some portions; indeed, down to about fifteen years ago the land everywhere at a distance of one mile from the banks of the navigable creeks had scarcely been seen by a European. Though there are within the delta tracts of undulating, well-drained soil much of the district is excessively swampy or covered with very dense bush, scrub, mangrove thicket, or magnificent but impenetrable forest. Mosquitoes and large Tabanid flies swarm and the former serve to inoculate the blood of the European with the germs of malarial and black-water fever. Yet (I write from old personal experience) where there is no native population at hand to supply from its blood the malarial bacilli, the Niger Delta is not necessarily unhealthy to Europeans, and the stinking mud around the mangrove swamps, though it smells mephitically, is not, so far as we know, the cause of any disease.

Anthropological Report on the Edo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria.

By N. W. Thomas. Part i., Law and Custom. Pp. 163. Part ii., Linguistics. Pp. ix + 251. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1910.)