The Kinship System. In West African societies, ancient and contemporary, kinship serves as the basis of the legal system, production, jurisprudence, politics, and rituals—as well as the basis for obligations among family members. As John S. Mbiti has observed, kinship is central to African life:

Kinship is reckoned through blood and betrothal (engagement and marriage). It is kinship, which controls social relationship between people in a given community: it governs marital customs and regulations, it determines the behavior of individuals towards another. Indeed this sense of kinship binds together the entire life of the "tribe" and is even extended to cover animals, plants and non-living objects through the "totemic" system. Almost all the concepts connected to human relationship can be understood and interpreted through the kinship system. This is it, which largely governs the behavior...