Valuable African archival materials are known to have been ‘rediscovered’ accidentally after having been ‘lost’ to scholarship for a time. Perhaps the foremost example of this in Lower Congo research is the eighteenth-century bibliography located by Jadin in the Vatican Library some time ago. A similar case which I shall discuss here is that of the KiKongo sources of Karl Laman's four volume ethnography The Kongo, a 775-page work detailing traditions, customs, lore, and legend from the BaKongo north of the Congo River at the turn of the century. These sources were ‘lost’ too, but in a different way. Through an obfuscating editorial policy and several translations from KiKongo to Swedish, and again from Swedish to English, their central role in the final work became completely obscured. A reconstruction of how Laman's posthumous ethnography in fact reached the stage of publication should be of help to those who find it difficult to work with as it is—although I must make clear that the work is, as it stands, already of outstanding value. An explanation of the editorial policy in terms of its premises should reveal the impact of tacit ethnological theory upon something as seemingly cut-and-dried as the posthumous works of an established scholar, already well known in his field.

In an age so overwhelmingly dominated by the planner, statistics and statisticians have come to assume a crucial importance; and so seriously have the latter taken their new responsibility that, in recent times, a veritable flood of data on every conceivable aspect of socio-economic behaviour has engulfed us. In the newly emergent nations this task of collecting and collating information, spurred on no doubt by the knowledge that much remains to be done, has proceeded with a rare enthusiasm, and in all of them the periodic ‘Digest of Statistics’ has become a familiar document.