David Zeitlyn
21 July 1994
The document that follows is a digital version of 34 pages from Chapter IX of C.K. Meek's "Tribal Studies in Northern
Nigeria Volume 1" 1931 London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. It is the first major documentary source on
the Mambila with whom my own field research has been conducted. Apart from the challenge of producing an
electronic version the purpose of doing this was to present and preserve the marginal notes made by Professor Farnham
Rehfisch during his fieldwork in 1953.
In addition to the marginal notes I have also included the sections of Rehfisch's fieldnotes in which he mentions Meek.
These fieldnotes have been archived in Rhodes House Library Oxford, and the School of Oriental and African Studies,
London with the kind permission of Mrs Rehfisch and with the help of a grant from the Nuffield Foundation for which I
am very grateful. Digitisation of the photographs from Meek has been conducted as part of a pilot project with
pump-priming funding from the University of Oxford. Routledge kindly gave copyright permission for digitisation and
circulation of this chapter to interested parties.
There are a variety of ways in which annotations can be included. For the present they are included in two different
ways since I have yet to be persuaded about the best way of doing it, and would be most grateful for comments from
readers.
The text of each annotation has been typed up and is included as a footnote (different from the original footnotes which
have been included in the main text) at the end of the document. As an alternative the annotations have been
transformed into graphics (using an apporpriate handwriting-like font) and these have been included in the text. These
graphics also serve as HTML links which will take the reader from Meek's text to the note, but without, please be
warned, an easy way of retuning to the original place in the main text. Since the document with the graphics has become
quite big each page has been made into a separate file. This has the advantage of replicating the individual pages of the
book, and a WAIS index will allow searching of the whole document. In addition a link has been made between one of
the plates (on p. 552) and some of the photographs I took in Nigeria in April 1993 (there are more to come).
It is hoped that this will be but the first of a variety of background documents pertaining to the Mambila connected into a hypertextual web that will illuminate rather than befuddle the interested reader.
Read Meek's annotated chapter on the Mambila
For more information on the Mambila see VIMS - the Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies - online
David Zeitlyn