The author explicitly defines and provides code for male and female age organizations and secret societies in Africa, as well as their significant sociopolitical roles within society. The author conducts preliminary analysis using the codes to explore characteristics and regional patterns of such organizations and societies. The analysis is compared to existing studies in order to assess the code and better understand cross-cultural patterns and variances. The author identifies the usefulness of the code beyond Africa, and discusses avenues for future research. No explicit hypotheses were tested, but Ericksen includes some descriptive generalizations.