206 AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
derive their reality only from the fact that they are actually lived by human beings. The fact that individuals grow old, die, and are replaced by others involves the need for the transmission of law and custom, for the constant re-knitting of institutionalized relationships in view of the changing personnel.
In advanced and especially in literate communities the continuity of law and custom in the face of these two disruptive factors is attained by a complex system of legal, scientific, and educational institutions. In a primitive and illiterate community there are no such distinct institutions. There is no codification of law and very little education in the sense of an organized imparting of knowledge and moral values. We have to examine, therefore, by what other means the need for a continuity of law and custom is satisfied and how these means are embodied in tribal life.
(a) The Perpetuation of Relationships over Periods during which They are Inoperative. An analysis of the various cultural institutions and the behaviour of the individuals who partake in them reveals a number of devices which serve to maintain the effectiveness of relationships, rights, and obligations over periods during which they do not come into play. These devices take, as we shall see, mutatis mutandis, the place of codification of the law in more differentiated cultures.
The most general way of keeping a relationship alive consists in the exchange of gifts and visits between the persons concerned and in the participation in common feasts by all persons who form a social group for some purpose or other. The same motives, it* might be said, underlie hospitality and gift-making in any society. This is true, but the much greater formality and regularity of such observances in a society like that of Kavirondo than, e.g. in a modern European community, indicates that they serve this purpose of keeping relationships effective far more definitely and exclusively. Formal visits are clearly distinguished from mere sociability. The visitor announces his intended visit beforehand, and the host instructs his wife to prepare a proper meal while he himself looks for an appropriate gift which his visitor can take home. A person exchanges such formal visits at more or less regular intervals with members of his maternal kin (especially his maternal uncle), with his wife's brothers and sisters' husbands, and with those members, of his paternal kin which belong to the same 'gate' or lineage. These are precisely those persons to whom