The Ovimbundu of Angola: their language, work, religion and social life, 1952

The Ovimbundu are one of the principal peoples of central Angola, and in 1952 Merran McCulloch set down an account of them for a much larger project: the International African Institute’s Ethnographic Survey of Africa, edited by Daryll Forde. This volume is West Central Africa, Part II.

Her chapters move from the land the Ovimbundu lived in and where they came from, to how they were governed, how families and kinship were arranged, the rituals they kept, and how they made a living from day to day. It reads now as a mid-century anthropologist’s view, written in the colonial period and in the terms of its time, and it remains a source for specialists in the ethnography of Angola.

This copy was once United States government property, and its stamps say so. It is in green paper boards with a dark cloth spine, rubbed, with adhesive residue from a label and spots throughout. The folding map of the Ovimbundu region is present, with brown staining along its north-western coast, near a fold. The rest has not been fully collated.