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| ‘I was told I had arrived upon the eve of a great annual ceremony, |
| lasting eight days, and they all promised I should be permitted to go everywhere and see everything’.93 |
| He discovered afterwards that, despite the Chief’s welcome, he had |
| immediately sent a runner to the District Commissioner at Wenchi to inform him that a oboroni okomfo had arrived and was it all right? This was no doubt the origin of the nickname by which Rattray came to be known by Africans and Europeans alike: oboroni okomfo means ‘white witch doctor’. |
| ‘The chief being informed that it was all right, and that the “Witch |
| Doctor” was to be considered as his (the D.C.’s) guest as long as he was in that district, we all settled down, I taking up my abode in the tumble- down old rest-house on the outskirts of the town. Here I was to spend eight delightful days, and to entertain the priests and priestesses of many of the gods in this part of Ashanti who had come in from all over the country to attend the ceremony’.94 |
| The ceremony — festival is perhaps a better word — was the Apo, a |
| form of Saturnalia in which the people’s sunsum is purged by a general licence to insult each other, the chief and even their gods, and to indulge in other generally illicit forms of behaviour (though Rattray was quick to point out that there was no drunkenness and only symbolic sexual freedom: ‘The savage law-makers of old were never fools; they legislated for law and peace and order in the clan, not for promiscuity, chaos and bloodshed’).95 On one day, the gods ‘took the air’: that is, the priests and priestesses, carrying the brass vessels where the god resided on their heads, paraded through the town, going up to each other and inclining slightly forward so that the gods could touch each other in salutation. On the next, |
| 93Ibid. 94Ibid. 95Ibid.. The account of the Apo ceremony is on pp. 151-171. |
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| the people sat outside their houses and the temple of the god Ta Kese, and Rattray talked with the Chief, who said: ‘Wait until Friday when the people really begin to abuse me, and if you will come and do so too it will please me’. In the afternoon women ‘ran up and down the long, wide street, with a curious lolloping, skipping step’, singing Apo songs, which he recorded afterwards by special arrangement in his phonograph. The festival reached a climax on the Friday when in the morning the priests danced — ‘leaping into the air and pirouetting like Russian dancers’ — and in the afternoon a crowd of five to six hundred gathered to salute the Chief (the insults were now over). After another two days’ celebration, the gods who had been brought in from the outlying villages were taken back again; it was done at night, in case the gods enjoyed their ‘outdooring’ so much that they refused to return while day promised more activity. On the Monday, there was a procession to the Tano river and a ritual service there, and Tuesday, a week after it had all begun, was the Tekyeman New Year, celebrated by the sacrifice of a sheep at the alter of Ta Kese. |
| There was a disagreeable sequel to this inspiring week. One of the |
| priests whom Rattray had met during the festival, a young man called Kofi Afona, was brought in a few days later with a spear stuck a foot deep in the side of his buttock. It had happened while he was hunting an iguana. He had followed the animal up a tree, it jumped down and he threw his spear down so that he could jump more easily, but it had stuck in the ground point upwards so that he slid onto it as he came down. The man seemed to know he was dying, and no-one seemed very keen to fetch a hammock to take him to the nearest doctor, thirty six miles away. Rattray lost his temper with a man who did nothing when he was asked to find out what the hammock men were doing, and struck him, but the man still refused to move.96 Eventually Rattray managed to get the priest off in the hammock, but got word two days later that he was dead. Before he died, the priest had said: ‘Bid good-bye to the white okomfo, tell him Tano calls me and thank him’. Rattray went to see the old priest of Ta Kese and told him of the tragedy. ‘Of course he died’, the old priest said, ‘Did you not know that the iguana was a “red taboo” of his god? He should not have tried to kill it’. — ‘Then I understood everything’, Rattray wrote afterwards, ‘the apparent indifference and utter callousness were neither the one nor the other, it was |
| 96'I try never to lose my temper with Africans, but in this case I did so sadly' (Ashanti, |
| p.170). Despite the disclaimer, he earned the nickname 'Amoako' - red pepper, which apparently made the familiar connection between ginger hair and quick temper. |
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| a natural dislike to interfere with the decrees of a god who had passed a just sentence. Once again, ‘tout savoir, tout pardonner’. |
| A less disagreeable sequel to this was when Rattray apologised to the |
| man he had struck, who turned out to be the chief of Nsoko,97 twenty miles to the north, who forgave him and invited him to his village to hunt otromo (bongo). |
| Encouraged by the friendships he had made during the Apo ceremonies, |
| Rattray now prepared the ground for an ambitious and delicate project. He asked the old high-priest of Ta Kese whether it might be possible for the priests to make a shrine for him, and to invest it with the spirit of Ta Kese, creating a new ‘child of Ta Kese’. He was surprised himself when they agreed to do so, although they had doubts, quite naturally, about whether he should be allowed to take it off to Europe with him. In the end, they made the sensible arrangement that the god should be allowed to decide whether or not he would send one of his children into the shrine. Flushed with this success, Rattray then tried to go a step further. Instead of Ta Kese, why not go to the great god himself — Ta Kora (Tano)? So he put plans he had made with the Ta Kese priests into abeyance and decided to go on to Tano Oboase as originally intended. Meanwhile he had recorded a service in honour of the god Asubonten (i.e. river-street or ford), one of the sons of Ta Kora, at Tanosu a few miles south of Tekyeman. |
| He arrived at Tano Oboase on 5th May and was put up in the Queen |
| Mother’s compound. Almost opposite was the temple of Ta Kora, a rather grand building, recently refurbished and decorated inside and out with symbols painted in black and red: stars, suns, moons, leopards, guns, wari boards, rattles, gongs and rainbows. In the evening, Kofi Duro, chief of Tano Oboase and also high-priest of Ta Kora, arrived with his elders — ‘a perfectly charming old gentleman with a benign and intellectual face’.98 They sat in the Queen Mother’s courtyard (she herself was away in Mampong), under a pale new moon in a black cloudless sky, while Rattray broached the object of his visit: |
| ‘I gave them my reasons for making the request, and told them briefly |
| 97Now usually spelt Nsawkaw. 98Rattray (1923) pp. 175,6. |
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| what I had already seen and knew about their country, letting them see that I was already conversant with certain rites and customs that they knew only a privileged few among their own race had ever seen. I talked in Ashanti of course and it was delightful to see, as I had so often seen, the barriers of suspicion and mistrust, that the “bush” African always feels for the European, being broken down as I spoke. . . . My friends Kwaku Abu and Wisirika, men of great standing and repute who had accompanied me from Southern Ashanti, then stood up and spoke with considerable eloquence on my behalf . . . pleading in their own language and in their own way, though they knew it not, the cause of anthropology, which is to lead to the better understanding of the two races’.99 By the time the discussion was finished, and the priest and elders had promised to consider the request carefully, he was sure that whether or not he was successful “we would all be real friends”.’100 |
| In the middle of the night there was a violent storm and a tree just |
| outside the room where Rattray slept was split from top to bottom by lightning — the tree being otherwise unmarked. As he stood looking at it in his pyjamas the next morning, one of the villagers told him that God’s axe had done it. Luckily, it was taken as a good omen because no house had been struck — ‘Had I been killed, I am afraid the cause of anthropology in these parts would have received a set-back from which it would hardly have recovered’. Even so, he was convinced afterwards that it cost him the real object of his expedition. |
| Early the next morning, he was taken into the courtyard of Ta Kora’s |
| temple: it was a ‘sacred’ Friday, and the god was to be worshipped as a matter of course. Ta Kora was addressed through the mediation of a lesser god — gods like chiefs being approached through their akyeame or spokesmen. An old albino priest with red hair and red skin addressed Ati Akosua’s shrine, held on the high priest’s head, in a prayer which Rattray rightly called beautiful even in translation: |
| Creator’s god, who sees even though he be not present, |
| 99Ibid. 100Ibid., pp. 175-6. |
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| Who seizes strong men, God of the King Ame Yao, God of the King of Ashanti, You who slew ‘the three old men’, God who comes from within the rock You who slew Adinkira, King whom we bathe with white eggs, You, the cross-roads leading to whose dwelling is a fearful place, He who would see you to destroy you, with that destruction be not |
| destroyed, |
| God who is truthful, when you speak there is truth in what you say, You whose gong sounds even to Mecca, If you have gone elsewhere, come hither, You, upon whom we call when the waters are in flood, Shooting stars that abide with God, You weave a thread across a path stretching far, Today is holy Friday and we wish to behold your face, So come and listen to what we have to tell you’.101 |
| Afterwards, there was a silence of more than a minute while the old red |
| priest leaned forward towards the shrine, broken only by the click of |
| 101Ibid. p.179. I have taken some slight liberties with Rattray's word-by-word |
| translation, which sacrifices poetry to literal sense in some parts. |
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| Rattray’s camera.102 Then the high-priest carrying the shrine began to twitch and slap the side of the brass pan with his palm. With one voice, the congregation said ‘Nana makye o’ — ‘Grandsire, good morning’: the god had arrived. |
| Rattray was now asked, through the man from Tekyeman who acted as |
| representative, to make his request to the god. When it was made, the priest carrying the god, shivering spasmodically from head to foot, made a speech telling Rattray that he (the god) would have been perfectly willing to help him if he was in trouble, but he was prepared to give him one of his sons to take away with him: |
| ‘The man who loves me comes to me, and when he goes away I shall |
| stand behind him and accompany him on a good path that he may go his way. And this one who has come, grant him permission to go to my rock should he wish to go. Let him go and behold the place where I reside. Should he wish to go to the water (the Tano), allow him to go and sprinkle himself with water. Many of my children say they will go to school, and I do not stand in their path, and say they must not serve the Supreme God. In my own being I am the son of God, and if my grandchildren say that the while man loves me and has drawn nigh to me, I, too, shall stand behind him’.103 |
| After a pause, Rattray stood up and thanked the god for allowing him to |
| visit his cave and his water, adding that he was struck by the god’s tolerance in matters of education and religion, which the English shared, and that the Nyame (God) which the children learned about in school was the same which had been worshipped in Ashanti before the Europeans arrived. The god thanked him, and said ‘Me ko tena ‘se’ — ‘I am going to sit down’. The shrine was quickly removed from the high-priests head: ‘He appeared to sit dazed for a few moments, then he put his hand to his face and passed it over his eyes like a man awakening from sleep or from a |
| 102It is one of his most remarkable pictures, despite its fuzziness. The exposure was |
| more than a minute, which shows how still the priests were sitting, and the expression on the albino priest’s face is caught with an almost ghostly intensity. |
| 103Ibid. p.181. The quotations which follow come from the same chapter. |
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| trance. He told me later he knew nothing of what he had said until informed by others present’. The normal ‘Holy Friday’ celebrations followed, after which they set out for the Rock (Tano Oboasi means ‘Tano under the rock’), shaded by enormous umbrellas and closely attended by the high priest’s mother, who spent the journey stroking the head, face and shoulders of Rattray and her son with a cow-tail fly-whisk. Gradually, over the tops of the trees, a range of sandstone rocks came into sight, looking as if they had been made by man — ‘in turrets, domes, and castles’. To reach Ta Kora’s cave, they had to crawl on their stomachs through a tunnel in the face of one of the cliffs, which opened out into a cave facing the other side of a 60-foot wall of rock. This was where Ta Kora lived up to the time when Bonsu Panyim, the Ashanti King, had come to consult him one hundred years earlier before his fight against Adinkira, and the god had turned his back on him because Bonsu was a ninth child and so ‘hateful’ to the god. A fowl was sacrificed and its entrails consulted before they returned to join the rest of the party. |
| On the next day, he was taken to the source of the Tano. On the way, |
| they passed a rock called Bosomtwe, and near it a large natural depression which he was told was the site of the original Bosomtwe Lake, but in ancient times it had quarrelled with its ‘brother’ Tano and moved eighty miles south to its present site. As they approached the Tano, the high priest shouted to warn the god (or perhaps to make sure that the god did not do anything violent if he was taken unaware). The source was no more than a ‘little trickle of clear water rising from a spring beneath a bank’. It was another instance of the way in which the greatest spiritual powers in Ashanti often take their residence in the most modest dwelling-places. After a gift of eggs and palm-wine, they all rose to go except the old priest. He stayed behind the protect those who went before him: ‘My sunsum is strong”, he said. “If one of you had followed last, he might have met something to endanger him”.’ |
| He was keen to go back to explore the rocks around Ta Kora’s cave. The |
| high-priest agreed, but gave him stern warnings about the danger involved: anyone who climbed to the top of the rocks would surely die. He could not persuade any of the Ashantis to go with him; instead, they all pleaded with him not to go, but he did manage to rope in his Police Orderly, Braima Fulani — ‘a stout and most excellent fellow of the type found in that magnificent body of men, the Gold Coast Regiment, W.A.F.F. (West African Frontier Force)’ Being Fulani, a Moslem from the North and a stranger in Ashantiland, he did not consider himself covered by the curse. |
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| Disregarding the curse, therefore, they went to the rocks and |
| immediately set about climbing them. Braima climbed like a cat. By using a rope made of belts and Braima’s cummerbund, and Rattray taking off his boots and socks, they eventually reached the topmost point: |
| ‘On our arrival there a wonderful sight presented itself, for on our looking down over the edge of the precipitous rocks we saw a great circular arena, about 150 feet below, which was covered with short green grass, shrubs, and flowers. Beside us, on the surrounding rocks and forming a complete semi-circle, sat great dog-faced baboons with their wives and children, very inquisitive but not frightened by our presence’. |
| On their arrival back in the village everyone looked relieved, and |
| greatly surprised to see them. |
| Back in Tekyeman, he witnessed a Wednesday Adae ceremony — ‘an |
| unusually quiet and inconspicuous affair, owing to the fact that almost all the able-bodied members of the community had gone to collect snails’.104 He then decided to take up the invitation from the chief of Nsawkaw — he whom Rattray had struck during the episode of the wounded hunter-priest — to go and hunt bongo from his village. He failed again to get one, but undeterred he borrowed a bicycle from the D.C. at Wenchi and went off up the Kintampo road. Near Kintampo he witnessed the funeral for an elephant which he eventually ‘wrote up’ in Religion and Art in Ashanti.105 Then his triumphant progress was suddenly halted by his old enemy, amoebic dysentery. He managed to get help, and then a hammock to take him to Nsawkaw, where he arrived in the middle of a funeral which, sick as he was, he insisted on photographing and recording.106 But when the old women sang in their odd Brong dialect ‘We are tired of forests and of rivers’ , he must have been tempted to agree with them. He collapsed into the little rest-house and was hardly able to move. He staggered out again a few days later, when a Baya ceremony was held to invoke the ancestors’ |
| 104Ibid, p. 115. 105Rattray (1927) pp.184ff. 106Ibid, 178ff. |
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| blessing on the new rice crop, but he was so ill that he was hardly able to keep up with what was going on. It was a miserable end to such a rewarding expedition. |
| He got himself back to Mampong, and despite his continuing illness set to |
| work on a paper on Land Tenure and Alienation: part of his campaign to show the immediate political usefulness of his work. In the next month Guggisberg came to Mampong to open the new Trade School, and made a point of seeing him and discussing his work. |
| His illness got worse, and by the time he got home it was considered that |
| his life was in danger. He had to undergo the drastic operation of cauterisation of the bowel, which left him out of danger but needing a long convalescence. He heard afterwards that a few days after his operation Braimah Fulani, the police orderly who had climbed Ta Kora’s forbidden rock with him, had died of a cerebral embolism. |
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| Chapter 8. Religion and Art in Ashanti |
| Hospital in Portsmouth was followed by convalescence in London, |
| looked after by his sister Boo and her husband, Sir Henry New, whom Rattray had not met before. He was a good deal older than Boo, ex- headmaster of Downside and Mayor of Marylebone, a delightful, gentle and generous man. Rattray took to him at once. Of course he had to be given a nickname, and being such a lovable character, ‘Dragon’ was chosen for him. |
| As soon as he started coming to after the operation, Rattray with the |
| help of his new ‘personal secretary’ New, set about turning the mass of notes and papers he had collected into a book. In some ways he might have been wiser to postpone it: despite the richness of the material, he was not in a position to write anything like a complete survey of Ashanti culture. But he knew that a book would keep his work in the public eye, and that one book would lead to another. This accounts for the rather arbitrary arrangement of the books on Ashanti which eventually emerged. Until the work for the last volume — Ashanti Law and Constitution — was ready, he was not really in a position to plan the whole series but for tactical reasons he did not want to wait. |
| Ashanti, the volume which he began writing during these months of |
| convalescence, is an apparently almost random collection of reports on subjects which had come to his notice during the previous frantic year: Family Classification, various religious rituals, Land Tenure, Talking |
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