First Published in 1969

Building upon the author's previous work, Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, this title's findings are intended to produce for policy-makers a picture of the forces producing changes in family relationships and the instability of marriage to which legislators, civil or religious, could refer when deciding what practices to treat as permissible and what to forbid.

For this reason it has laid more emphasis than is usual in works of theoretical anthropology on specific aspects of African marriage where it has been assumed that the divergence was most marked.