Culture, History, and Grass‐Roots Politics in a Northern Cameroons Kingdom
PREDICTIONS of the results of two plebiscites which took place in Northern Cameroons in 1959 and 1961 were almost wholly wrong, and postballoting analyses proved equally erroneous. They failed because relevant cultural data were not considered. Political events take place in a cultural and historical matrix, and if this fact is ignored, prediction or even general understanding of political developments is impossible. This paper attempts to relate such political episodes to their matrix in an important kingdom of the area. Though many of the details of analysis are peculiar to this particular kingdom, the dominant currents of history and culture in much of Northern Cameroons are similar enough that this example possibly affords broader understanding of contemporary political development in that area.
Selected Articles and Documents on: Comparative Government and Cross-National Research
ing been a professor at Santiago de Cuba in 1956, just prior to the Castro Revolt, and also at Santiago de los Caballeros early in 1965, I feel qualified to make a prediction, even though I am now jobless. In the next ten years five other Cuban-Dominican-type revolts will occur in hungry, desperate, hopeless Latin American countries. In 1964 there was a dearth of unbiased, well-rounded, in depth books, monographs, and other studies on the Dominican Republic. I expect the same can be said in 1967 by which time a dozen new ones will have been published. BYRON WHITE, Universidad C&tolica Madre y Maeslra, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic.
Spondarthritis in the Triassic
Background The evidence of several forms of arthritis has been well documented in the fossil record. However, for pre-Cenozoic vertebrates, especially regarding reptiles, this record is rather scarce. In this work we present a case report of spondarthritis found in a vertebral series that belonged to a carnivorous archosaurian reptile from the Lower Triassic (∼245 million years old) of the South African Karoo. Methodology/Principal Findings Neutron tomography confirmed macroscopic data, revealing the ossification of the entire intervertebral disc space (both annulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus), which supports the diagnosis of spondarthritis. Conclusions/Significance The presence of spondarthritis in the new specimen represents by far the earliest evidence of any form of arthritis in the fossil record. The present find is nearly 100 million years older than the previous oldest report of this pathology, based on a Late Jurassic dinosaur. Spondarthritis may have indirectly contributed to the death of the animal under study.