Few would doubt that social science is in serious need of a new conceptual framework for the study of human organizations. For some time now such a framework has been sought in the notion that societies are functional systems, in which the individual sectors-economy, religion, government and so on-can be seen as subsystems dependent on each other and integrated within a whole. But in spite of the major advances in research which modern systems theory has brought about, it is based inevitably on a priori assumptions which are often at variance with the facts, or require the facts to be...

Daughter of a Hausa farmer and Koranic teacher, Baba became Mary Smith's friend in 1949, when M. G. and Mary Smith were engaged in fieldwork in Nigeria. In daily sessions for several weeks Baba dictated her life story, which Mrs. Smith has translated from the Hausa. The old woman's memories reached back to the days of slave raids and interstate warfare before the British occupation, and she has left a fascinating and valuable record of Hausa life in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
Baba describes Hausa male-oriented society from a woman's point of view,...