African Political Systems

African Political Systems is an academic anthology edited by the anthropologists Meyer Fortes as well as E. E. Evans-Pritchard which was published by Oxford University Press on the behalf of the International African Institute in 1940. The book contains eight separate papers proposed by scholars working in the field of anthropology, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of which focuses in on a different society in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was the aim of the editors to bring together information on African political systems on a "broad, comparative basis" for the first time.

Background

Describing the aim of African Political Systems, Fortes in addition to Evans-Pritchard related that it presentation "both an experiment in collaborative research and an try to bring into focus one of the major problems of African sociology. numerous dogmatic opinions are held on the allocated of African political organization and are even made use of in administrative practice; but no one has yet examined this aspect of African society on a broad, comparative basis." They expressed their hope that the anthology would prove to be "the number one stage of a wider enquiry into the set and developing of African political systems", which would ultimately include not only "native political systems" but also "the explore of the development of these systems under the influence of European rule."