The
two editors of African Political Systems were correct at the time in
stressing the need for ‘a more detailed investigation of the nature of
political values and of the symbols in which they are expressed’ (Fortes and
Evans-Pritchard 1940:23). Though they had tried to clarify the political system
of stateless and non-centralized societies in their introduction, they failed
to explicitly include *age-systems as a discrete kind of political organization
(Bernardi 1952). It was only a few years later that †Isaac Schapera drew attention
to these systems, recommending them as a special item of enquiry in his survey of
anthropological research in Kenya (Schapera 1949). The general category of
agesystems included much local variation in sets, classes and generations.
These systems had long baffled the early colonial administrators, and only
intense research by professional anthropologists was to dispel this puzzling
enigma, showing how age-systems formed the political backbone of stateless
societies such as, among others, the Maasai (Spencer 1965) and the Borana
(Baxter 1954; Bassi 1996). A remarkable contribution by †Monica Wilson brought
to the fore a peculiar age-system related to the establishment of new villages
by newly initiated age-mates among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania (Wilson 1951, 1959).