Excerpt from Ethnology of a-Kamba and Other East African Tribes In the face of the monumental monographs of Haddon, Rivers and others, it is with great reluctance that the observations contained in this work are being published, and I am only persuaded to do so by the assurance of various scientific advisers who are of opinion that any first-hand observations of this kind should be made accessible to those who are working at these subjects. Part I is an attempt at a systematic survey of the A-Kamba tribe of British East Africa. Although one of the first up-country tribes to be administered, I believe that very little has up to now been known about their customs and beliefs. Dr Krapf travelled among them over 40 years ago and their country has been traversed by many travellers, who hurriedly passed through, anxious to push on to the great lakes, to Kenya or some other place which possessed a fascination for the explorer. A certain amount of information about them is buried away in blue books and official reports, but, as far as I know, no effort has been made to carry out a systematic study of the tribe. Being for the last year and a half responsible for their administration I thought it desirable that some such attempt should be made, and this work is the result of several short journeys in their country; my only regret is that I have not been able to personally witness many of their important ceremonies, but the descriptions have been obtained at first-hand from some of the more important chiefs and checked as far as possible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.