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| Drums, the Golden Stool, the Silver Stool, Gold-Weights and Neolithic Implements. At the same time, there is a dominant theme, Religion, which takes up the central mass of the book. When he came, six years later, to write the introduction to Ashanti Law and Constitution, he explained that he had originally intended to concentrate on the Law, which was the most useful aspect of research for the Administration, but ‘I soon found myself, in pursuance of my earlier intentions, constantly confronted with words in the Ashanti language, which, although primarily associated with religion, were nevertheless, continuously found in connection with Legal and Constitutional procedure,’107 and that is why he diverted his attention to religion. But this is a rationalisation after the event. At the time, as we have seen, he showed very few sings of having a coherent plan. It was more like following his nose. At first his nose led him in many different directions, but as he went on, it led him more insistently towards religion and towards origins. It is true enough that traditional law and religion were inseparable but he showed no signs of being especially interested in the legal aspects of religion, and many signs of being interested in religion and origins for their own sake. |
| As I see it, this is no defect but a mark of his particular talent. If you are |
| approaching a foreign culture, it is surely reasonable to pay most attention to those aspects of it to which the members of the culture attach most importance. Important enough as law is in Ashanti, religion is more important. Rattray had some hard things to say about anthropologists who have ‘something to prove’, and he kept himself free of that reproach by using the Ashantis as his guide rather than using any theoretical system. It means that his books accurately reflect his own process of discovery, and if there is any distortion in them, it is the distortion of the Ashantis’ own view of their society rather than his own view of it, even if this does make his books a little hard to find one’s way around. |
| In writing up his reports for publication, his main additions took the |
| form of what might be called propaganda. it is necessary to remember that there were plenty of Europeans in West Africa, and even more outside; who still believed that the Africans were (in the words of the old slave trader) ‘stupid and unenlightened hordes; immersed in the most gross and impenetrable gloom of barbarism, dark in mind as in body, prodigiously populous, impatient of all control, unteachably lazy, ferocious as their own congenial tigers, nor in any respect superior to these rapacious beasts in |
| 107Rattray (1929) p.v. |
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| intellectual advancement but distinguished only by a rude and imperfect organ of speech, which is abusively employed in the utterance of dissonant and inarticulate jargon.’108 N.B. Favell, one of Rattray’s contemporaries, wrote after he retired: ‘In those days it was very noticeable that while the “labour” type of man lived in England away from contact with natives he was then, as now, full of humanitarian idealism for the poor ill-treated natives; but directly he came out to one of the Colonies he became a strong adherent of the “dammed nigger” school of thought.’ Favell once came across Rattray in a remote village and wrote of the meeting: ‘I do not think I hit it off very well with him as he has left the impression on my mind that close contact with primitive Africans had caused a deterioration in his character. I have also noticed this deterioration in missionaries of a certain type.’109 Men like Guggisberg and Fraser (headmaster of Achimota) were full of missionary zeal to prove that the African was worthy to take his place in the family of mankind (as they might have put it). There were also a number of ordinary Government officers with the humility and imagination to see that if Africans behaved differently it did not mean that they were stupid. But the famous English tolerance is not so much a question of understanding foreigners as keeping out of their way. Most British on the Gold Coast managed to last out their time without even trying to ‘understand the natives’, simply swearing at them cheerfully or bitterly according to mood, and retiring to their rest-house or club-house as soon as the day finished.110 |
| Rattray was determined to prove to the world at large that the Ashanti |
| were great people with a culture which was fully worthy of the name. It was not a sudden conversion: as we have seen, there are signs of it in his Ashanti Proverbs six years before. But whereas before it had been a developing intellectual conviction, in 1921 it became a faith and mission. The change had a lot to do with his personal circumstances and his personal character. Accra had brought out the worst in him: his egotism, his |
| 108Anon.: Slavery No Oppression, 19C pamphlet cited in R. Coupland: Wilberforce |
| (1923), p.115. It is still sometimes necessary to point out that there have never been any tigers in Africa. |
| 109N.B. Favell: Reminiscences of Colonial Service in the Surve Departments of Ceylon |
| and Gold Coast, Rhodes House MSS Brit. Emp |
| 110When asked about their relations with the British under the colonial regime, |
| Ghanaians most often told me that they were not so much either friendly or unfriendly as non-existent. |
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| ambition, his insecurity and — most humiliating for him — his inability to cope with the job. He had been given the chance to ‘show them what he could do’, and had failed. Of course, he saw it as a betrayal. He knew he was better than the boring pen-pushers at Government House. It is not too far-fetched, I think, to say that the dismissal of the wife who had betrayed him (as he saw it) was part of his dismissal of the official world which had betrayed him: in any case, they happened at the same time and he diverted his allegiance to Ashanti. Ashanti offered him an alternative world, a colony which he could govern in his imagination like the ideal Indirect Ruler, bringing out all that was best in it and mitigating all that was bad. (Judgement is a faculty which is — or should be — shared by both anthropologists and governors). And, of course, Ashanti really was a power to set against the Government. By becoming a spokesman for them, he could to some extent get his own back. It was an ideally ambiguous position: Government representative (for many of the Africans he dealt with he was the Government), but also champion of this great nation, which had been defeated in war but whose spirit nonetheless was intact and still uncontaminated by the comparatively squalid Europeanised world.111 |
| Fortunately, it was a worthy mission. Instead of becoming an example of |
| that typical Gold Coast character, the D.C. who, as promotion passes him by, is increasingly sour about the country, the climate and the natives, Rattray fulfilled himself in his job. The Ashanti brought out the best in him,. |
| The first part of his mission was to show that Ashanti religion was not |
| just a matter of heathens bowing down to sticks and stones. From the variety of rituals which he had observed, there had already emerged the clear outline of a cosmology which it was not ridiculous to compare with Christianity. At the highest point in it was a God — not just first among equals, but a supreme deity like the God of the Jews — a God who was worthy of a capital letter when speaking of Him. This God, Nyame, who ‘dwells somewhat aloof in His firmament’, sends as his ambassadors, ‘His vice-regents upon Earth’, the various abosom, or lesser gods such as Tano and Bosumtwe, to possess their priests and to be consulted on matters of importance by the people. The abosom are in their turn ‘graded in a regular descending scale, until they reach, or at times almost merge into, that class which the Ashanti themselves name suman, who are among the |
| 111Cf. also Introduction p.000 above. |
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| lowest grades of superhuman powers.112 Suman is the word which best fits the European ‘Fetish’ or ‘Juju’: objects, ranging from statues to bits of clotted hair in a leather bag, which are held to have immediate magical efficacy: the ‘sticks and stones’ to which the heathen do in reality sometimes bow down. In Rattray’s view, the suman were hardly more than an excrescence spoiling the face of the true Ashanti religion — ‘fetish spoil the gods’, as the old priests kept on telling him. Finally, merging into this hierarchy of greater and lesser gods and in harmony with it, was the human pattern of life, social organisation, passage from birth to maturity and death and reincarnation: and above all, the transition from human status to the semi-divine or entirely divine status of an Ancestor. |
| This was the beautiful pattern which had been obscured by the ignorance |
| of European observers, and by the school-educated Africans who, ignorant themselves, had tried to interpret it to the Europeans: |
| ’The educated African has been cut off from, and is out of sympathy |
| with, the life of his own people. He has learned, in nine cases out of ten, if he has not actually been taught, to despise his own illiterate brethren and the unlettered past of his race .... |
| ‘If, as is probable, he has been educated in one of the mission schools, |
| then his whole training, until quite recently, has been one in which it has not appeared orthodox or even conceivable to his teachers that there might be something in the African’s own culture and religious beliefs worthy of retention side by side (for a time at least) with the greater, because higher, ethical teachings of Christian theology.’113 |
| The key to an understanding of the real nature of Ashanti religion lay in |
| an uncompromising respect for the people who still retained it: ‘the old expert, the custodian of the past lore of his race, whose head is full of wisdom undreamed of in the seventh standard board-school philosophy of the interpreter.’ There must be no spiritual slumming in the enquirer’s approach to these people and no academic coldness: |
| 112R.S.s Rattray, Ashanti, 1923, pp. 141ff. 113Ibid., p. 87. |
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| ’He must first gain their fullest confidence, and inspire their trust and |
| affection. He must make them believe that this interest in them is not one of idle curiosity or kindly superiority, nor yet again merely inspired by love of knowledge. I approached these old people and this difficult subject (their religious beliefs) in the spirit of one who came to them as a seeker after truths, the key to which they alone possessed, which not all the learning nor all the books of the white man could ever give me. |
| ‘I made it clear to them that I asked access to their religious rites such |
| as are here described for this reason. I attended these ceremonies with all the reverence and respect I could accord to something which I felt to have been already very old, before the religion of my country had yet been born as a new thought; yet not so entirely new, but that even its roots stretched back and were fed from that same stream which still flows in Ashanti today. |
| The steam crosses the path, The path crosses the stream; Which of them is the elder? Did we not cut a path to go and meet this stream? The stream had its origin long, long ago, It had its origin in the Creator, He created things, Pure, pure Tano.’114 |
| Rattray considered this passage important enough to repeat in his |
| Preface when he had completed the book. It stands as a model of the way cultures should meet. |
| 114Ibid., p. 89. |
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| Another important part of this message was that the Ashanti should be |
| educated into rather than out of their own culture. He was to become more insistent about this as his work progressed, and Propaganda was the word which he used himself for it. In the annual report for Ashanti which came out at the end of 1921, he wrote: ‘No opportunity has been missed of instituting a propaganda among these people .... They have been told that their ideal should be, not to become pseudo-Europeans, but to aim at progress for their race which is based on their own institutions, religion, manners and customs; that they will become better and finer men by remaining true Ashantis and retaining a pride in their past, and that a greater hope lies in their future if they will follow and build upon lines with which the national sunsum or soul have been familiar since first they were a people.’115 He repeated these words in the Preface to Ashanti. In the Report, he followed them with a plea to the Europeans: |
| ‘It cannot be said it has been fashionable for us in the past to take an |
| interest in Ashanti national beliefs and customs. It is difficult to take an interest in that which we do not clearly understand. |
| ‘Many a European Officer has in an official capacity listened to a |
| native band, sweatingly blowing out Rule Britannia upon instruments with which he is familiar, and has congratulated the bandmaster and the Chief upon his new acquisition, and enterprise. The same Officer has possibly more than once sent his orderly to “stop that drumming” the sound of which seems to him possibly even worse than the martial strains to which he has just been compelled to listen. |
| ‘The old drummer is, in any case, little likely to be called up before |
| His Majesty’s representative and congratulated. Yet the best of his drums is talking to the old men and women who sit and listen to its recital, in their own tongue, of the names and deeds of dead kings and the history of their ancestors.’116 115Annual Colonial Report. Ashanti. 1921 nn 17.1 116Ibid. p.19. |
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| The same report contained statistics on the enormous increase in the |
| number of converts to Christianity in Ashanti — nearly fifteen thousand in a year. The Times quoted extracts from this part of the report together with some of Rattray’s under the heading ‘Old and New in Ashanti: Mass Movement to Christianity.’117 |
| His leave was not entirely taken up with illness and writing. In October, |
| he was invited to accompany Lady Guggisberg in presenting the Silver Stool to Princess Mary at Chesterfield House (Guggisberg was still in Accra). After Christmas, he flew on the new Handley Page service to Paris, and it is probably on this winter holiday that he met the French girl who was to be the mother of his only child. He regarded his marriage to Connie as finished, and the long struggle began to try and get a divorce from her. It is impossible at this distance to apportion blame: he felt she was holding on out of spite, but it could well be that she hoped they might come together again. |
| In March he was back again in Oxford, finishing off the manuscript for |
| Ashanti and discussing it with Marett and the Seligmans. He wholeheartedly acknowledged their help but he gave pride of place to his African friends — ‘chiefs and hunters, priests and priestesses, medicine men and witch doctors’. There was an elegiac note too, in memory of the two who had already died; Kakari, the ‘old Ashanti aristocrat, who left his village to follow me, contributing each day from his treasures of African lore’, and Sewa Akoto, ‘a fitting representative of a class for whom I cannot speak without unbounded enthusiasm, the Queen Mothers and old women of Ashanti.’118 |
| Rattray belonged to the pre-Malinowski school of anthropology, which |
| usually assumed that the most interesting aspects of a ‘primitive’ culture were the ‘mysteries’: religion, totem, taboo, witchcraft and rites of passage. More recently, family relationship and political organisation had been given more attention. But technology and arts and crafts were considered separate branches of anthropology, until Malinowski showed how closely the spiritual and physical sides of life were related. Rattray might not have bothered about technology if history had not intervened again, this time with the great Empire Exhibition at Wembley which was |
| 117The Times, Jan.2, 1923. 118Rattray (1923) p.13. |
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| already being planned for 1924. Sir Francis Fuller was on the committee, and Lady Guggisberg took an active part. |
| Maxwell asked him to take charge of the Gold Coast contribution to four |
| parts of the exhibition, which were to be called: (a) Manufactures of the Empire, (b) Machinery and Implements of the Empire, (c) Fine and Industrial Arts (d) Electrical and Mechanical Appliances. His first reaction was disappointment in having the line of his research broken, and a certain amount of scepticism as to whether there could be any Gold Coast contribution to those sections — ‘I am inclined to think that some one who really feared that none of these existed among the indigenous population of our Colony, had suggested that these sections be turned over to me, as being credited with a facile pen.’119 |
| No doubt he expressed this opinion to Maxwell, but Maxwell was good |
| at dealing with him. His character was almost the exact converse of Rattray’s: conventional, conciliatory and without a trace of jealousy. He was able to offer Rattray quote sincere flattery. (Rattray on his side despised Maxwell, but it was impossible to dislike him). Maxwell also told him that there would be a certain amount of money available to help in collecting exhibits. |
| On the 21st, he read a paper to the African Society in London on the |
| Drum Language of West Africa, illustrated with his recordings.120 It caused something of a sensation and was widely reported. The talking drums were a familiar part of the mythology of Africa, and here was an expert not debunking them, as experts were expected to do, but demonstrating that they were exactly what popular mythology had made them out to be. Sir Robert Baden-Powell was one of those who were deeply stirred by it. He had been in charge of the 1895 march on Kumasi and talking drums were very much in his line. He was inspired to try and adapt the principle for his Boy Scouts, and Rattray later came up with the idea of using the ‘male’ and ‘female’ drums for the dash and dot of the morse code — which rather went against the point of the talking drums, but worked quote well when he and the Scoutmaster tried it out in Mampong. Baden-Powell grilled Rattray about his other researches and |
| 119R.S. Rattray: 'The Arts and Crafts of the Gold Coast and Ashanti' in West Africa, |
| British Empire Exhibition Supplement. May 24. |
| 120It was 'written up' for the Journal of the African Society, April/May 1923, and |
| Chapter XXII of Ashanti. |
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| gave him a copy of his book The Downfall of Prempeh. In the inscription with almost touching immodesty and inaccuracy he called himself ‘Kantankye’ which is nearly the Twi for ‘hero’.121 |
| A week later, he sailed for the Gold Coast. he set up his headquarters |
| again in Mampong, and this time there were fewer excursions into the bush and frantic hopping from rest-house to rest-house. He soon found that his fears about the interruption of his research were only partly true. As soon as he arrived in Mampong, for instance, he started investigating the techniques and varieties of weaving, as part of his preparation for the exhibition; but he was able at almost exactly the same time to record the ‘outdooring’ of a child. The main gaps left to be filled in his account of Ashanti religion were the rites de passage, the ceremonies attending the transition-points in human life from birth to death. There was no need to travel to the distant bush to find these. In Mampong, they happened at regular intervals around him. And in any case, he had already recorded many of the ceremonies and his research increasingly took the form of sitting in the evenings with a known and trusted informant. |
| There was one other line of research which he was eager to follow. His |
| previous tour had taken him to distant parts in his search for origins; now he wanted to get to the centre, to the heart of the Ashanti kingdom in Kumasi. The Golden Stool affair had made the Ashanti a little less cautious about revealing their political secrets. Guggisberg was making moves (in response to strong pressure from all quarters in and outside Ashanti) to return the exiled Asantehene Prempeh from the Seychelles. In May, Rattray stayed in Kumasi seeking out members of the Ashanti court who had not been exiled or had returned. Among them were Kojo Pira, the dwarf court jester who had been present at the surrender of Prempeh in 1896 and the Chief Executioner, Nana Totoe. With these he visited the Akyeremade mausoleum, where those members of the royal Oyoko clan were buried who were not enstooled as Asantehene, or who had been destooled. Then, a week later, on Thursday, 10th May, came what he called at the time ‘the proudest day of my life’, when he was taken to see the Golden Stool. He was told to bring two sheep for sacrifice which he duly did. He was in all probability the first European to see it, certainly in |
| 121It should be Okatakye. |
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| recent times, and for ten years he did not divulge his secret.122 Here is his account: |
| ‘We were in a room, lighted only through the open doorway, which |
| contained as its almost sole article of furniture, a round table, about three feet in diameter, standing on four bent legs and covered with a piece of red carpet, with some faded design upon it. On top of this table were arranged three bells, all different sizes, the largest about 8 in. high, another about 5 in. high, and the third much smaller; these bells were bee-hive shaped, with a small circular knob on top, with a hole. |
| ‘I was later informed that two of these bells were brass, and the third |
| gold. All were so thickly covered with congealed blood that it was quite impossible to see of what metal they were made. These bells were partly resting on what resembled an old piece of hoop-iron which, I was told, had once held the central piece of the old wooden stool together. Against the smallest of the three bells leaned a gold mask of Edinkira, the famous King of Gyaman, whom the Ashanti had once defeated. I did not see the death mask of Sir Charles McCarthy, possibly because my friends did not wish to hurt my feelings, but I was informed it still existed. In addition to these mask, bells and iron, there were a pair of gold fetters .... |
| ‘Behind the regalia now described lay a small bundle tied up in cloth, |
| or large handkerchief. This had, I think, once been white. On the fabric was a design of dark-coloured butterflies. The cloth was stained with blood. This little bundle — for all the world like some navvy’s dinner tied up in a kerchief — contained the Golden Stool. Later it was reverently opened, and the contents were seen to consist of a piece of wood, about 3 in. by 5 in., stained quite black with blood. This, I was told, was a corner of the base of the Stool. Besides this, the largest piece, were several smaller fragments and a few handfuls of what was almost |
| 122He told it in an article for the Illustrated London News, 2 March 1935, marking the |
| enstoolment of Prempeh II as Asantehene. ‘I do not think I am betraying a secret I have thought fit to keep for ten years,’ he wrote, ‘the old greybeard is now dead who, because he believed I had the Ashanti cause at heart, revealed to me, a solitary individual, what armies had tried in vain to discover. His action in taking the tremendous responsibility he did take in showing me the Stool contributed, I hope, towards the happy ending we now all acclaim. That, I consider, is a complete justification so far as my dear old friend’s action is concerned.’ (The ‘dear old friend’ was Chief Totoe.) |
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