The trade thus encouraged and carried on in various parts of West Africa reached wide areas.  From the Fish River to Kuka, and from Lagos to Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade, the leading implement to civilization.  Permanent markets are found in places like Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought and sold from earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand traders flocked here.

“How like is the market traffic, with all its uproar and sound of human voices, to one of our own markets!  There is the same rivalry in praising the goods, the violent, brisk movements, the expressive gesture, the inquiring, searching glance, the changing looks of depreciation or triumph, of apprehension, delight, approbation.  So says Stanley.  Trade customs are not everywhere alike.  If when negotiating with the Bangalas of Angola you do not quickly give them what they want, they go away and do not come back.  Then perhaps they try to get possession of the coveted object by means of theft.  It is otherwise with the Songos and Kiokos, who let you deal with them in the usual way.  To buy even a small article you must go to the market; people avoid trading anywhere else.  If a man says to another; ‘Sell me this hen’ or ‘that fruit,’ the answer as a rule will be, ‘Come to the market place.’  The crowd gives confidence to individuals, and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the market itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long practice.  Does not this remind us of the old Germanic ’market place’?"[48]

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among all primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase.  Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer:  “The headman, as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a township, or of a family.  His position is important, inasmuch as he has directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the people.

“It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members thereof in the way they should go; and by ‘family’ you must understand the entire lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a convenient phrase.  It is expected of him by the state to bring up his charge in the knowledge of matters political and traditional.  It is his work to train up his wards in the ways of loyalty and obedience to the powers that be.  He is held responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant members of his family, and he is looked to to keep them within bounds and to insist upon conformity of their party with the customs, laws, and traditional observances of the community.  In early times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome relative who would not observe the laws of the community.