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| wood-dust. This was all that remained of the almost mythical Golden Stool, which, of course, was originally a wooden stool heavily ornamented with gold plates.’123 |
| It was another striking example of the Ashantis’ ability to invest the most |
| insignificant-looking material object with the greatest spiritual power. A detail which he did not put in to this account for the Illustrated London News was that a cat (live) was chained near the Stool. Perhaps with memories of ancient Egypt in his mind, and knowing that in the old days Ashantis bought cats as repositories of their okra or ‘personal soul’ (okra also means ‘cat’), he asked what it was there for but the answer was that it was to catch mice.124 |
| He then set about investigating the ceremony which more than any other |
| had provided a ritual focus for the Ashanti in the past: the Odwira. When Bowdich visited Ashanti at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the stories he brought back of the ‘Yam Custom’ (as he called it), with its tumultuous drumming and dancing, sexual free-for-all and generous chopping-off of heads, did much to establish Ashanti in the British imagination as one of the most splendidly savage African kingdoms: ‘I never felt so grateful for being born in a civilised country’, Bowdich said after a procession had gone by of two hundred executioners, brandishing the heads of all the chiefs the Ashanti had conquered, and ‘clashing their knives in the skulls’.125 |
| From the Chief of Bantama, who had taken part in the last Odwira |
| ceremony before Prempeh’s exile, Rattray learned the ceremonial details which lay behind the surface hubbub. The purpose of the Odwira, he was told, was to honour and propitiate the Ashanti kings who had ‘gone elsewhere’, and to cleanse the whole nation from defilement. In many respects it was an inflated version of the Apo ceremony he had witnessed in Tekyeman, including on a grander scale the ritual defilement of sacred objects, particularly a ‘scape-ox’ on whom the sins of the Ashanti nation |
| 123R.S. Rattray: 'The Golden Stool of Ashanti' in The Illustrated London News, March |
| 2, 1935 p.334 |
| 124R.S. Rattray: MSS Diaries, Royal Anthropological Institute. 125Cited in R.S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, 1927, p. 56. |
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| were gathered. The human sacrifices were generally condemned criminals or captives. At the royal mausoleum at Bantama each was ‘sent off’ in turn — a knife through his cheeks to prevent him from cursing his executioners — to serve one of the Ashanti chiefs who had gone on to the Land of Ghosts. Later anthropologists and historians have criticised Rattray for missing the full political import of the Odwira. They have stressed that it was the ceremony which above all confirmed the unity of the Ashanti confederacy and the supremacy of the Asantehene over the divisional chiefs. Rattray’s informers (it is said) being themselves divisional chiefs and with the Asantehene away in exile, chose to present Ashanti as much more devoluted system than it actually was. Certainly, Rattray’s main purpose, when he came to ‘write it up’ in Religion and Art in Ashanti, seems to have been to show the social, and even moral, sense which lay behind the apparent chaos of the Odwira as reported by earlier Europeans, rather than to analyse its political significance. |
| Still in pursuit of the majesty of buried Ashanti, he went to the little |
| village of Bremang, just north of Kumasi. The chief and a small retinue met the Ford lorry at the outskirts. When Rattray got out to shake hands he was told that he was the first white man to stay in the village. The old chief, called Dokyi, was frightened to enter the truck, so they went on ahead with his nephew to a house which had been immaculately swept and prepared for Rattray, with vases of flowers even. The man who was to look after him had been a steward-boy at the Bibiani mine. On the following day, he was taken to a tumble-down mud building at the end of the village street, which was the mausoleum to which the bodies of Ashanti kings had been removed from Bantama in anticipation of the British invasion of 1895. The old chief had himself been wounded in the campaign of 1874. Inside, Rattray was shown the coffins of Kakari and Mensa Bonsu — ‘more sacred, perhaps, than the Golden Stool and its regalia, in the pursuit of which our blood and treasure had vainly been poured.’ |
| ’I gazed upon these coffins’, he wrote afterwards, ‘objects of so much |
| veneration, and began to feel some of the awe and reverence the Ashanti have for these relics, and almost unconsciously, as I stood bareheaded before the dead kings, I found myself greeting them in the Ashanti formula, “Nananom makye o” (‘Grandsires, good morning’).’126 He expressed the hope that one day the Ashanti might be able to bring their dead kings back to a more worthy mausoleum which did not have to be |
| 126Ibid., p. 145. |
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| hidden from the authorities. A decade later later this was indeed done, though the present concrete Pantheon at Bantama is a poor substitute for the lovely building which Baden-Powell burned down in 1895 — (’and a splendid blaze it made, he said’).127 |
| The last place of pilgrimage was the Barim Kese, another mausoleum |
| which had escaped the attentions of the British. Its other name was Asonyeso ‘the place of the drippings’, because the dead kings were taken here to rest for eighty days until the decomposing flesh had left the skeletons. Its guardian was an ancient man called Ofusu, nearly a hundred years old and totally blind.128 He nevertheless showed Rattray round the building, ‘pointing out with unerring accuracy sights and objects his eyes could no longer see,’ past the seven rooms, each bare except for two brass pans, a small jug (English) containing water, and a chewing-stick.129 |
| The months which followed were increasingly taken up with |
| preparations for the Exhibition. He began to collect around him at Mampong a small community of weavers, potters, carvers and metal workers. I may sometimes have given the impression that Rattray’s approach to his job was romantic: that he skipped the more mundane details of existence in Ashanti. If so, the impression can easily be removed by a look at the section on weaving in Religion and Art in Ashanti. Northing shows better the dogged energy he put into a subject once he had decided to master it. I am not sure what use the mathematical diagrams are, except to future generations of weavers when the tradition has died (fortunately, it shows no signs of dying at the moment). |
| But Rattray did not consider it his job to select: he had to be complete. |
| At the same time, although he had been brought up with some awareness of the arts (his sister Henrietta by now had set herself up as a painter, and could have called herself a professional if she had ever been prepared to get rid of any of her work) he was not particularly sensitive to the aesthetics art in Ashanti. He got someone else to write a chapter on aesthetics for his book and he showed surprisingly little enterprise in hunting down original works of woodcarving. When compared with the |
| 127Rattray quoted Baden-Powell’s account of the destruction of the mausoleum in |
| Religion and Art in Ashanti, no doubt with some deliberate irony. |
| 128In the old days it was a capital offence to touch even his robe in anger. 129Rattray (1927) p.145. |
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| Yorubas, or Baule (another branch of the Akan people), the Ashantis do not have a great reputation as artists. They are known for their stools, gold-weights, some other metalwork and the dolls known as Akua Mma, but not otherwise as woodcarvers. This is partly because their artists have tended to be amateurs rather than full-time professionals, as many Yoruba woodcarvers are (a point which Rattray failed to point out). It is perhaps even more because they hide their religious carvings in shrines within the houses rather than parading them in the streets for any European visitor to see. |
| Rattray must bear some of the blame for not explaining this situation. |
| Instead of hunting down carvings, Rattray hunted down wood-carvers, and got a group of them to work at Mampong making stools and a series of figures representing the members of an Ashanti court in the olden days.130 They entered into the job with great enthusiasm, making sure that every detail of the figures’ dress and regalia was accurate. As it progressed, the news spread to the surrounding country and there was soon a stream of visitors to the bungalow — most of them older people to see the spectacle. Rattray was once again impressed by the depth of knowledge shown by the old people at these ‘private views’, and unimpressed by the reaction of the younger generation — who ‘showed just such an intelligent interest in them as did the millions who later gazed upon these carvings at Wembley, and, with few exceptions until enlightened, merely regarded them as the wooden “idols” or “ju ju” of a people who the majority supposed were steeped in idolatry.’131 One old man accused one of the carvers of giving an okyeame a type of cloth which he was not entitled to wear; the carver thought quickly and answered that this okyeame was the husband of the Queen Mother, and ‘may wear by day the cloth which covers them both at night.’ Rattray also got the carvers to make representations of the Sasabonsam (the Ashanti wood-demon) and mmoatia (fairies). A metal worker was found — ‘a stout fellow, and son of an Ashanti war-lord who had once commanded 50,000 fighting men and fought us to some purpose”. A new forge was consecrated at Mampong and the metal worker was set to make Kuduo and gold-weights. He was sadly out of practice, gold-weights having gone out of use when gold-dust ceased to be currency. The odd European |
| 130We should not forget that ‘idolatry’ was still a live issue in Rattray’s Gold Coast. He |
| did not feel free to encourage the carvers to make religious images (i.e. non-Christian). I am not suggesting that in any event he should have raided shrines: by ‘hunting down’ carvings, I mean looking for them and recording them. |
| 131Rattray (1927) p.274 |
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| had commissioned a weight from a smith as a souvenir, but it could hardly be called tourist trade yet. One of the smiths had so many failures that he decided to sacrifice a fowl over his forge. Rattray’s project at Mampong probably did much to start the new trade, so that now gold weights are once again plentiful (and despite what people always say about tourist art, they are sometimes just as attractive as the old ones). For the next six months, he got used to ‘the sound of the weavers’ swiftly-passing tuneful shuttles, the squelch of the wet clay of the “potteries”, the puff and wheeze of the bellows of the metal worker, and the chip-chip of the woodcarvers’ axes’132 from dawn to evening outside the red-roofed bungalow. |
| He still found time to do other research. In June, he managed to |
| persuade Nana Efua, a midwife, to tell him the details of childbirth — an example of the ethical trickiness of anthropology, and the extent to which he was able to win people’s confidence, since a woman who disclosed to a man the ‘secret of her sex’ was supposed to die. She told him how children were sometimes born as half-monkeys, half-fish, or hermaphrodite, in which case they would be destroyed, and described the process of childbirth and its attendant ritual in great detail. ‘I shall always consider it one of the proudest rewards of our friendly association, and of my work among the people,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘that some of the old mothers of Africa have given me their confidence in these matters.’133 He might also have thanked the Ashanti proverb which says ‘A stranger does not break laws’ — Nana Efua may have regarded him as morally neutral, and so told him things she would never have told an Ashanti man. In the evenings, he asked one of his assistants, Kwaku Abu, about his dreams, and was told how Osai Abotirim’s brother had been executed because he dreamed that he had slept with the Asantehene’s wife. He listened to Ananse stories, putting down the foundation of his Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales. In Bonwere, the weaving village between Mampong and Kumasi where he stayed to collect authoritative information about textiles, he met Yao Adawua, a self- confessed Bonsam ‘Komfo or male witch, survivor of two hundred who had been killed by order of King Mensa Bonsu in the previous century. Adawua’s master was the dreaded Sasabonsam, whom he described as ‘very tall, has long thin legs, long hair, very large red eyes, sits on an odum tree and his legs reach the ground’. As an afterthought, he added ‘there are no |
| 132R.S. Rattray, “A Wembly Idol” in Blackwood’s Magazine, March 1926, pp. 395- |
| 402. |
| 133R.S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, 1927, p. 56. |
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| Sasabonsam any nearer than Sefwi’ (towards the Ivory Coast border).134 Rattray made friends with him and took him around in the Ford lorry, quizzing him about witches. Yao Adawua would sometimes nudge Rattray as they drove and point to a man or a woman who he said was a witch — he could tell by the red smoke coming out of their heads. |
| Witchcraft was one of Rattray’s weakest points. Malinowski was to |
| complain that his books were not of the slightest use on the subject. Only six pages in Religion and Art in Ashanti are given over to it, mostly the result of his conversations with Yao Adawua. The reasons for the omission are complex. The main one seems to be that the old Ashanti aristocrats who were his main informants were not particularly interested in it. They classed it along with suman (with which it is closely connected) as a difficult and rather distasteful topic. Similarly, the akomfo of the various gods tended not to approve of witches — like suman, they ‘spoiled the gods’. But witchcraft had already proved an important subject for administrators. While Rattray was on his last leave a tricky political situation had arisen out of the activities of a witch-hunting institution on the banks of Lake Bosumtwe, centred in the Fwemso (Hwe-me-so) fetish. Rattray had visited the place during the previous March, taken photographs and watched a witch- finding dance. Because he had to leave that day, his investigations were not very thorough. Then, while he was away on leave the government decided that the cult was a focus for anti-government feeling, and by the time he came back it had been banned and the shrine destroyed. This may have had something to do with his later reticence about witchcraft: he felt that the government had been heavy-handed, but as the same time he could not deny certain anti-social aspects in both witchcraft and witch-hunting. It was also to some extent pushed out by his new commission to prepare for the Exhibition: he was reluctant to go back and reconsider religion when there was so much else on his mind. Whatever the reason, it is one of the few major defects of his work. In the process of cultural disintegration, rather than fade, witchcraft was to gain in importance. |
| By December, most of the material was ready for the Exhibition. The |
| music of the shuttles and the squelch of the clay came to a halt and gave way to more prosaic activities such as vetting and vaccinating the craftsmen who were to go with him to England, and issuing them with passports. Rattray took the opportunity to go to Kumasi to continue his investigations |
| 134R.S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, 1927, p. 29. |
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| into the deaths of Ashanti kings. Asamoa Totoe, the old ex-chief- executioner, told him how the first intimation to outsiders that the death had occurred was the sight of blood pouring from the royal bathroom, where the body had been carried to be washed and dressed and at each stage of the process an attendant had been killed, ‘to carry his bath mat, one the sponge and soap, one the bath robe’ etc. The Queen Mother would choose which wives would follow him to ‘the land of ghosts’: they would be strangled, which was the aristocratic method of killing — there was no blood or mutilation. Young boys had their necks broken over the King’s elephant-tusk foot-rest, to act as attendants and heralds — their faces smeared with white clay as a sign of joy. Others would volunteer for death, compelling the executioners to kill them with the words: ‘I swear the great oath that you must kill me that I and my master may set out, for I am hungry’. |
| Chief Totoe described how he had been sent out to tell the King of |
| Gyaman (in the Ivory Coast) of the Asantehene’s death. Whenever in sorrow he recalled his dead master, he said, he cut off one of his attendant’s heads.135 He went on to describe in detail the Atopere or dance of death, by which a man who had slept with the Asantehene’s wife was systematically and very slowly sliced to death, accompanied by wry jokes such as ‘Since your mother bore you and your father begat you, have you seen the skin of your back?’, when a slice of his back was waved in his face. It was particularly difficult to apply the ‘tout comprendre, tout pardonner’ rule to these activities, and yet Chief Totoe was by now one of his cherished friends, whom he described as ‘a most delightful, humane and benign old gentleman’. As Rattray said in his introduction to his next volume: ‘I have considered it my duty to set out the details of many of the horrors of the old regime. I have done so in order that the motives and reasons for them may be better understood’. Even the Dance of Death could be justified by Totoe’s claim, and again, if one believes in an afterlife, was it so terrible to send a wife or servant into it after their lord and master? Rattray found a quotation from a report by James Swanzy, the Welsh merchant prince, to the House of Commons in 1816, to set against the horror-stories. ‘It is a singular thing’, Swanzy had said, ‘that these people — the Ashantees — who had never seen a white man nor the sea, were the most civil and well bred I have ever seen in Africa. It is |
| 135Totoe took him on a tour of the various sites in Kumasi where human sacrifices were |
| made in the old days during the King’s funeral, one by a lamp-post in Adum St., another beneath Delbaco’s store and another under F & A Swanzy’s. |
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| astonishing to see men with such few opportunities so well behaved’.136 It exactly expressed Rattray’s own feelings. |
| Back in Mampong, he found an absurd situation had arisen. One of the |
| men in his party for the Exhibition, a wood-carver drummer, had misbehaved himself with a woman in the town and was in the Chief’s lock- up — the result of the cuckolded husband’s action. What was worse, the woodcarver-drummer was married to Rattray’s potteress, who refused to go to England without her husband. So two of his party were lost at a stroke. At a council which he called together of all the other craftsmen, they decided that the only solution was for one of the men to find a potteress to marry. Kofi Kyem, the metalworker and son of an Ashanti war-lord, volunteered and was given a single car fare to Kumasi and a return fare for two and was sent off with the best of luck. Three days later he was back, shyly leading his bride by the hand. Her name was Baa and Rattray was to make her the subject of the first of many articles for Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘A Wembley Idol’.137 |
| ‘My first impression of Baa was that she had the broadest smile I had |
| ever seen. She was hugging a little flat, black, moon-faced doll . . . She was duly introduced to us all as Akosua Baa, Taffo Chema’ba, from which it may be gathered that she was of blue blood, and the daughter of the queen-mother of Taffo. Introductions were hurried through, she was given some clay and asked to prove that she could make pots. She spent the first three days of her honeymoon thus employed, and demonstrated that she was a more than capable little craftswoman. I found out later that her ancestral female ghosts had been “potteresses” when in this world (and were now, incidentally, plying their trade in the next) for the past three hundred years’.138 |
| 136Ibid. p.vi. 137R.S. Rattray: 'A Wembley Idol', Blackwood's Magazine, March 1926, pp. 395- |
| 402. Most of my account of the exhibition and its preparation is based on this article. |
| 138Ibid., p. 396. |
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| There was a fatuous exchange with the authorities in Accra who, hearing |
| of the problems he was having, telegrammed: ‘How many wives do you intend sending to the Exhibition?’ Rattray’s answer, which he meant to read ‘One only who is potter’, came through as ‘One only who is pottee’. But these difficulties were cleared up and Baa went back to Taffo to prepare for her expedition. |
| A few days later, Rattray followed her to Taffo to explain what was |
| happening to her mother. Taffo was (and is) the chief pottery of Ashanti, because of the high quality clay beds beside the river Santan which flows behind the village. The Taffos were supposed to be descended from the river itself. Baa’s mother, the queen-mother, was ‘as charming as only these white-haired Ashanti mothers can be’. He stayed in her spare sleeping-room and was introduced to Baa’s sisters — ‘all potteresses and all with smiles as delightful and irresistible if not quite as wide as the bride’s’. At first the queen-mother refused to let her daughter go saying that Baa would be thrown overboard to the Sea-God if she became ill. It was a grim memory of the slave-trade days when that is exactly what happened to sick slaves. Rattray managed to persuade her that the practice was now musuo (taboo), after which she was happy with the arrangement, and spent the evenings telling him Ananse stories. On the last day Rattray went with her, the queen-mother, the chief and an old red-skinned priestess called Adjua Kyewa, with a chicken and a pot of palm-oil to the river: |
| ‘In the cool forest glade through which the Santan meanders, stands a |
| moss-grown altar to ’Nyame (the Sky god) — just a forked stock upon which a pot reposes for offerings. The fowl was quickly dispatched in the customary manner, and its blood bespattered the leaf-mould beneath the altar; the palm oil was poured upon the surface of the water. Baa and the rest of us stood attentively reverent, while the old “red” priestess recited the following prayer: |
| “You, Santan, who are sometimes red. You, Santan, who are sometimes black. You, Santana, who rest upon the old woman’s jaws, receive this fowl and |
| eat, and this oil with which to dress your open sores [a reference to the clay pits] |
| You, Santan, who are the friends of the widowed and of orphans and of |
| the childless, and bring them golden nuggets, your child Baa is setting |
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| out to the-land-of-White-men-far; grant that she may arrive safely, grant that she may return safely”. |
| I said good-bye to this simple happy family, as I was sailing for |
| Europe to help prepare at the Exhibition for the reception of our Africans .... My last glimpse of Baa, smiling from behind the corner of a hut, was of a maiden somewhat decolletée adorned with many rows of shimmering beads; then the old Ford was pushed into noisy action, and I was off for Kumasi, Sekondi and London’.139 The British Empire Exhibition of 1924 was in its own way as significant |
| as the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851. It enabled people to feel for a moment that the Empire was an organised entity consisting of people and things rather than an abstraction. It covered 216 acres of Wembley and cost more than ten million pounds. Temples, castles, whole villages even, were set up so as to bring the visual atmosphere of places like Rangoon and Kumasi to London. On its busiest day, Whit Monday, it had a third of a million visitors, the biggest crowd ever seen at any exhibition, more than visited the 1851 during the whole of its first week. Of course, the unity it gave the Empire was an illusion. It was intended to celebrate the future, as the family of nations quickly expanded in trade and slowly grew in political maturity; whereas in fact it could almost be taken as the point when the Empire began finally to dissolve. |
| The West African section was called the ‘Walled City’, taking its form |
| from the Northern Nigerian fortified towns like Zaria, and covering three acres. The Gold Coast pavilion covering 15,000 square feet was built like one of the European castles, Christiansburg, Cape Coast or Elmina. It had the best position, just by the entrance to the Walled City, and with its ‘tea chalet’ and cinema it looked more impressive than the Nigerian effort. Inside, it was as dim as a cathedral except for the brilliant dioramas of cocoa-farming, gold panning and floating timber, simulating the tropical sunlight. Behind was a custom-built ‘native village’ where the Africans were to live. |
| 139Ibid., pp. 397-8. |
| 119 |