There are, as far as I know, at least five distinct and separate peoples called 'Tonga' in the Central African region.

Foreword.

In common with many other peoples the Tonga say that 'a chief without people is no chief': a man with a title but without a measure of popular support is in a helpless position.

Preface.

Most of the British anthropological writing of the last twenty or thirty years has been (and much still is) within 'the structural frame of reference . . . which gives us procedures for investigation and analysis by which a social system can be apprehended as a unity made of parts and processes that are linked to one another by a limited number of principles of wide validity in homogeneous and relatively stable societies'.

Note on the situational analysis.

Ever since their first contact with missionaries, administrators and other Europeans, the Tonga have had a reputation with these visitors for being 'intelligent but truculent . . . and difficult of management'; 'quarrelling amongst themselves . . . [and] mutual jealousies and ambitions which kept the country in a fever of unrest'; 'conceited and truculent, undisciplined and fond of intrigue'; 'the most prominent of all the tribes [in Nyasaland] both for intelligence and disputes'; 'a remarkable people, highly intelligent and having a degree of independence seldom encountered elsewhere in Africans'.

Chapter I. Introduction.