This book looks at several African tribes today and their respective cultures, which have evolved over centuries. It presents an intriguing look at the beliefs and practices that have shaped their world from earliest times. This book also addresses the challenges, both historical and current, which have had a serious impact on their lives. Genetic tests suggest that members of the San Tribe, also known as the Bushmen Tribe, are the closest living descendants of the first man on earth. Africas rich legacy was also the subject of research by anthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey. They believed that the skeletal remains they unearthed at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzanias Great Rift Valley in 1959 belonged to ancestors of the earliest human beings. There is a variety and richness in the tribal cultures of Africa. Rarely is a culture able to hold on to the cherished past while dealing with a chaotic modern world. The tribes in this book are motivated by their pure roots and a respect for the ancient ways that define them.

This book proposes new avenues for understanding tribal allegiance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Much research on ethnicity and cultural pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa falsely equates the term "tribe" with "ethnicity" and obscures the differences between Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. It also puts too much emphasis on the role of the colonial state in fostering tribal allegiance. This book challenges these claims and offers an alternate way of understanding tribal allegiance in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Published by the South African colonial administration in the late 1920s, the purpose of this book was to present to the League of Nations a short sketch of each of the principal "tribes" in Namibia. Three of the chapters were written by Heinrich Vedder ("The Herero", "The Namas", "The Berg Damara"), while the chapters on "The Owambos" and "The Bushmen" were written by C.H.L. Hahn and L. Fourie, two South African colonial officials. The articles are mainly concerned with "anthropological zoo-ism",and are quite interesting as a distillation of the prejudices of colonial officials and as a reflection of the knowledge they thought they had on the historical/ethnological background of the peoples in the territory. The interest of the authors lie in magico-religious beliefs and "superstition", physical characteristics, puberty and initiation rites, laws and customs, the holy fire, and marriage and courtship, while there is less information on social conditions, material culture, production and trade.The contributions by Vedder contain some sections on history, based on premises such as that "the history of the Berg Damaras commences with the history of missionary activities amongst them". There are several photos and a brief bibliography at the end of each chapter. (Eriksen/Moorsom 1989).

Over the course of numerous voyages to Africa's Omo Valley, Hans Silvester became fascinated by the beauty of the Surma, Mursi, Hamer and Kurma tribes, who share a taste for body painting and extravagant decorations borrowed from nature. This collection of photographs captures these accoutrements.

More than 60 high resolution photos show the life of different African native tribes in Africa. We have selected the images not only by aestethic aspects, but also by it's documentary and information value. Each image tells a story not only by it's content but also by our comprehensive description and background information.