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| Rattray arrived in England in the middle of a bitter February. The |
| ‘native village’ was not ready, so he had to arrange for his party to stay in a boarding house in Bloomsbury. The short time before they arrived was spent setting up the stools, gold-weights, textiles, pots, drums and the seventy carved figures illustrating the Ashanti court in the Gold Coast pavilion. At the beginning of March, just before the Exhibition was due to start, the thirty Gold Coast craftsmen, soldiers and policemen (to act as guides in the Exhibition), all in the charge of the young acting D.C. Ejura, T.H. Mangin, landed from the Elder Dempster boat and made their way to the boarding house in De Vere Gardens, where Rattray met them. Kofi Kyem had been horribly sick on the journey, but Baa had come through smiling: |
| ‘It was snowing fitfully, and Baa’s balaclava helmet and woolly |
| muffler were flaked in white. Her nose, which would have been very red had it not been very black, just peeped above the turned-up astrakan collar of a fashionable coat. Her eyes twinkled as before; the top corners of her mouth which alone were visible, bore the same familiar smiling curves’.140 For a week, they all lived together in the boarding house, being treated |
| with utmost kindness and courtesy — Rattray was delighted to find — by the permanent residents, ‘the kind old English architect, the cultured Indian doctor, and the pretty English maid’. They did not have much chance to see London, spending most of the time huddled over the fire while it snowed, hailed and rained outside. |
| At the end of the week a charabanc arrived to take them to Wembley, |
| depositing them ‘at the foot of the towering stadium, looming out of the mists of the clay flats,’ and made their way past the richly-carved doors of the Walled City, donated by the Alafin of Oyo, to the Gold Coast castle and the ‘native village’. Rattray was given one of the huts to live in, with a lion and elephant painted on it (copies from those on the hut of his hunter friends Kweku Abonyowa of Mampong). Baa and her husband were next door, then the weavers, the woodcarvers and, completing the circle, two ‘diamond washers’ — part of the ‘minerals’ party. At the opposite end of |
| 140Ibid., p. 398. |
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| the ‘street’ was an altar to Nyame, whom on this occasion Rattray chose to call ‘the Rain god’. During the first weeks Messrs. Lyons’ eggs were regularly offered on this altar, but he noticed that they eventually gave up. Baa remained unperturbed. One particularly muddy morning Rattray squelched past her in gum-boots and made a sour remark about the state of the ground. Her only answer was: ‘I think the clay soil here would make good pots’. Fortunately, electric radiators had been installed in their huts. |
| The Exhibition, as I have indicated, was a great success, and the Gold |
| Coast section one of the most successful parts. The talking drums, demonstrated by ex-king Prempeh’s son wearing a balaclava helmet and heavy overcoat, stools on sale for a guinea each, the ‘shapes and shapes of the king and his chiefs carved in gleaming black wood by some African Epstein’ (as a visitor described them), all drew crowds, but the greatest attraction was the Africans themselves. The ‘village’ was closed to the public (which simply sharpened their curiosity) but during the day the pottery, weaving and carving went on outside the ‘castle’ while the public watched. Baa drew most attention despite the fact that she refused to dress like a princess and instead wore her potter’s uniform: ‘thick ribbed stockings with holes in the heels, hanging down or fastened with string, and an old grey cardigan jacket and grey petticoat’. Any new clothes she was given were packed away in her box to take back to Taffo. In her potter’s outfit she was introduced to Kings and Queens of England, Italy, Spain and Norway, not to mention prime ministers and ambassadors, much photographed in the papers, and made the subject of a facetious article in Punch. There was a better correspondence in the West African Press as to whether she should really have been called ‘princess’. She soon learned that anything she told reporters would be solemnly taken down and made up the most absurd stories for them about life in Africa. Rattray’s most treasured moment was when he took her shopping for jewelry at Selfridges and when the assistant failed to understand the word afwinie, which is a particular kind of bead worn round the waist, Baa whisked up her skirts to show everyone what she meant. She made a pound a day with her pots, which caused some bad feeling in her husband, whose cire perdue casings were not nearly so much in demand. It was settled when Baa persuaded him to make figure pots, which she sold with her own. |
| The six months of duty at the Exhibition gave him a chance to review his |
| position and his prospects for the future. Just after he arrived, his book Ashanti came out, and he was delighted to get another enthusiastic letter from Sir James Frazer (via the Clarendon Press) in which he said: ‘A very slight examination of it convinces me that it much surpasses even my expectations. It is clearly a book of the highest anthropological value, far |
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| more thorough and scientific than any former book on Ashanti with which I am acquainted .... I am very glad indeed that the direction of the new Anthropological Department of Ashanti is in such very capable hands’.141 This was slightly counter-balanced by the news that a new Secretary for Native Affairs had been appointed in the Gold Coast, C.W. Welman, which meant that the one high office to which he felt he could aspire was tied down for the foreseeable future. He immediately took up his dialogue with the Colonial Office again, trying to convince Ellis that he should at least be made a Provincial Commissioner. Possibly he realised the true situation: that no-one was taking him seriously as a future senior administrator, and was trying to pressurise them into raising his salary while keeping him in the same job. |
| At the Royal Anthropological Institute he met Emil Torday, the |
| Hungarian-born missionary-anthropologist who had done some work of his own in the Congo on (amongst other things) the talking-drums. Torday came to the Exhibition and cross-questioned Rattray’s drummers and told them that the Batatela of the Central Congo had gone one better, developing a mode of tonal-syllabic drumming which could cope with foreign languages as well as their own. Another visitor was Baden-Powell, with a party of scouts who tested the morse code adaptation of the talking drums, with some success. At the R.A.I. Rattray also met the Rev. Edwin Smith, the South African missionary-anthropologist, and they immediately took to each other. Smith was working on the moral problems of colonialism in Africa, as seen in the light of anthropology, and he was particularly interested in Rattray as someone who stood at the meeting- point of the colonisers and the colonised. Both Torday and Smith were convinced by Rattray’s argument that a too-free use of the word ‘Fetish’ had misrepresented African religion as idolatry, and that it should only be used in a very restricted context. The three of them wrote a joint declaration, suggesting the Polynesian word mana to express the spiritual force which the Africans (amongst others) believed resided in most natural and some artificial objects. This is now almost universal practice amongst anthropologists, though not amongst laymen and many church people — not to mention most Christianised and Moslemised Africans — who still talk of Traditional religion in terms of Fetish and Ju-Ju. |
| He said that his months at the Exhibition ‘combined delight, vexation, |
| excitement, boredom, hope and anxiety’. One of the excitements was taking |
| 141Oxford University Press, Rattray File. |
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| the Gold Coasters to an exhibition of stunt flying by R.A.F. pilots at Henley. Flying was taking an increasing hold on his imagination. Before he left the Gold Coast he had asked Guggisberg for permission to buy a plane and fly it back to the Coast. It was the great age of record-breaking solo flights, of Lindbergh and Amy Johnson, and he wanted to be the first to fly solo to West Africa. Guggisberg first agreed and then said no. Rattray’s persistence eventually triumphed but not for another five years. At Henley, Baa was greatly struck by the demonstration of Immelman turns and loops, and wanted to go up herself. She was less impressed by a demonstration of cow-girls roping steers, which she considered unladylike. |
| A moment of anxiety was when Baa was ill with malaria and pleurisy. |
| She became querulous over Rattray’s insistence that she take the full dose of quinine, and asked where the official Medical Officer was. When Rattray told her he was ill himself (with rheumatism), she told him sharply that in Ashanti when a doctor falls ill and does not quickly recover his head is cut off. |
| In June, he gave a lecture, with lantern slides, to the African Society on |
| the arts and crafts of ashanti. Lady Guggisberg was in the chair. Then in August, it was all over. The Gold Coasters were shipped back to Africa, referring to their time in England as a visit to the samandow — the land of spirits. Rattray ceased to be the ‘little man in charge of the harems’, as a visitor had described him, and went off to Oxford, where he had been given extension of leave to write up his book. |
| Religion and Art in Ashanti is really two books. One completes the |
| account of religion started in Ashanti.142 The other gives the result of his researches into technology in preparation for the Exhibition. ‘Art’, as I have already suggested, is almost a misnomer. He left it to Vernon Blake to write a rather unsatisfactory chapter on aesthetics and he almost completely skirted the aesthetic issues in his own chapters. Besides these two major sections, there are chapters on Cross-Cousin Marriage, Oaths, Dreams (by C.G. Seligman) and the rules of the game Wari (by Dr. G.T. Bennett of Cambridge, whom he had taught the rules at the Wembley Exhibition). Cross-Cousin Marriage was one of the few areas of theoretical anthropology in which Rattray got deeply involved. It means, briefly, marriage between first cousins who are related through the male line but not through the female (which in Ashanti would be incest). In many parts of the world, this kind of marriage is considered the most desirable, and |
| 142It was originally going to be called Ashanti Vol. II. |
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| Rattray sought to explain its advantages. He discussed it with Dudley Buxton, the physical anthropologist, in Oxford and they produced a paper together for the Journal of the African Society presenting a tentative hypothesis: that it was a survival of a system of dual inheritance and perhaps even of genetic value.143 Neither side of the argument is now accepted, but it showed that Rattray could cope convincingly with theoretical questions — he was not just a field worker. Finally, he asked Marett to contribute a general chapter on Ashanti religion. Like the other invited chapters, it does not add much that Rattray could not have said himself: it is a preface (although it comes at the back of the book) rather than an original contribution. |
| In Rattray’s own preface to the book, as in Ashanti, he comments on the |
| wider implications of his work. In Biblical language, he stated his belief that if the Ashanti had been left to their own devices, an African Messiah might have arisen to sweep their Pantheons clean of the fetish: ‘West Africa might then have become the cradle of a new creed which acknowledge One Great Spirit, who, being One, nevertheless manifested Himself in everything around Him and taught men to hear His voice in the flow of His waters and in the sound of His winds in the trees’.144 After the acknowledgements, he ended with an exhortation to the Ashanti: ‘Guard the national soul of your race and never be tempted to despise your past. Therein I believe lies the sure hope that your sons and daughters will one day make their own original contributions to knowledge and progress. Thoughtful Englishmen can never wish that free peoples such as you, members of a diverse and widely scattered Commonwealth, should try to become wholly Europeanised. In your separate individualities and diversities lies your ultimate value to the Empire and the world’.145 |
| At this stage he seems to have been toying with the idea of finding an |
| academic post, but when Ellis told him that Fraser and Guggisberg were thinking of giving him a Professorship of Anthropology at Achimota, he |
| 143R.S. Rattray and L.H. Dudley Buxton: 'Cross-Cousin Marriages' in The Journal of the African Society, 1925, pp. 83-91. 144Rattray (1927) pp.v,vi. 145Ibid. p.ix. |
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| told Ellis that he was not ‘a man of books and lecture rooms’.146 By February, Religion and Art was ready for the press. One the 2nd he heard that he had passed the B.Sc. examination at Oxford. On the 21st he was awarded the African Society Medal for ‘the best work in Africa.’ Just before he sailed at the beginning of March, he called on Ormsby Gore at the Colonial Office and expressed his worries about his prospects. At the end of the year he would be due for retirement, according to the regulations operating when he joined the Service. No doubt, Ormsby Gore gave him polite words and told him how much his work was appreciated, but there was not much he could do. There were two Deputy Provincial Commissioners still above him. On the day after he sailed, on 4th March, his Annual Confidential Report came through to the Colonial office. In it, Guggisberg wrote: (Rattray) ‘is carving a great reputation as an anthropologist, in which post he is probably doing excellent work. He is entirely and completely unsuited for administrative work of higher standard than District Commissioner’147 |
| 146Foreign Office file. 147Ibid. |
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| Chapter 9. Ashanti Law and Constitution |
| Back in the red-roofed bungalow at Mampong, his life resumed what |
| was now a pattern. Apart from some further enquiries into Cross-Cousin marriage, to be added as a ‘Stop Press’ to his book, his plan of campaign for the next twelve months was comparatively simple: to get the detailed histories of the various sub-states of the old Ashanti Empire for his next book, Ashanti Law and Constitution, starting naturally with Mampong. There were, of course, interruptions a few days after he arrived, while he was on his usual evening walk with Jock (the son of his fox terrier Jess who had been run down by a car while he was on leave), a car rattled to a halt behind him, and out jumped Baa ‘no longer encumbered by trailing skirts and wrinkly stockings, but with a pretty cloth draped tightly round her plump little figure’. She bombarded him with questions and ended with her one word of English (beside Thank-you), which was ‘onions’. She had come from Taffo to buy yams in Attabubu: |
| ‘The short dusk of a tropical evening was falling, and she had still |
| some thirty-five miles to go; so climbing back on top of a huge pile of yams, she waves me good-bye with a cheery “Thank-you”, and Jock and I continued our lonely walk’.148 |
| 148“A Wembly Idol”, p. 402. |
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| After she left, he decided to write up his experiences at the Wembley |
| Exhibition, with her as the central figure, for Blackwood’s Magazine. Throughout the Empire, the latest number of ‘Maga’ as they used to call it, was almost official equipment for D.C.’s, army officers and traders. Most tried their hand at writing up one of the more bizarre events in their experience of the colonies as a ‘yarn for Maga’. Sir Hugh Clifford had been a prolific contributor mostly of stories about the Malayan jungle. Rattray called his piece ‘A Wembley Idol’ (the idol, of course, being Baa). It was accepted, he was paid twenty-five pounds — a decent sum for those times — and from this time he increasingly thought of himself as a writer as well as an anthropologist. |
| A more striking interruption was the Prince of Wales’ visit in April. A |
| grand palaver was held in the polo ground at Kumasi, attended by fifty- four groups of chiefs from every corner of Ashanti and the North. Amongst the spectators was ex-king Prempeh, the Asantehene who had been allowed to return from exile the previous November. The Times correspondent described him as ‘a mild person who talked of his church services while he drank his beer’, dressed in a European suit. The Prince received and shook hands with each chief in succession after which they made ‘a picturesque and dignified departure to the sound of much beating of drums and blowing of horns’. Afterwards, there was a drive through the packed and cheering streets and a garden party ‘at which British officials and their wives mingled with native doctors and lawyers. Outwardly, it was all serenity and delight, but Rattray learned afterwards that for one of the chiefs it was a tragedy. The chief of Wam had been unable to control his bowels during the long wait in the stadium and had soiled his royal chair. After the ceremony, he did the only thing possible under the circumstances and hanged himself.149 |
| The Prince was swiftly followed by another ‘royal’, Princess Marie |
| Louise. She arrived two days before he left, and since most people in Accra took her to be his wife, there was much gossip about why they did not arrive together, and why she let him go on alone. She was travelling on her own account. Her brother Prince Christian Victor had been killed in the 1895 Ashanti campaign, and it was partly in pious memory to him and partly her own curiosity and adventurousness. She had been one of the visitors to Rattray’s drum demonstrations at Wembley, and she called in on |
| 149R.S. Rattray, Diaries and Notebooks. |
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| him at Mampong, on her way north to Wagadugu. On the way back she called again, with Lady Guggisberg, and cross-questioned him about gold- weights, Ananse stories and other matters. The whole expedition must have been a nightmare for the D.C.’s who had to make her comfortable in remote rest-houses in tornado and motor break-down, but she found it all delightful. When she got home she published her Letters from the Gold Coast, which did much to draw attention to this apparently model colony, and contained many complementary references to Rattray. |
| Rattray’s life as government anthropologist could never be described as |
| routine, but the rest of this year came close to it. With his ‘anthropological assistant’ Kwame Sapon, he travelled in the Ford truck from Mampong to Bekwai to Asumegya to Kokofu to Juabin to Kumawu to Nkoranza to Tekyeman to Wam to Mo to Banda: in each case bringing presents to the chiefs and queen mothers, making diplomatic preparations, trying to induce in them the state of mind in which they would speak freely and not invent too much; then the days and sometimes weeks spent copying down the histories, cross-questioning and cross-checking to make them as accurate as possible. Nowadays many historians completely discount these oral stool-histories because their version of events is so coloured by later politics. When a new family usurped a stool, for instance, the whole previous dynasty might be left out of the records as if it had never existed. Rattray had few illusions about the possibility of complete accuracy: they are, he said, ‘as accurate as goodwill, careful examination, and no little patience have been able to make them’. But it looks almost like ingratitude to throw them out when so few alternative sources exist. And there is another side to the question: to Rattray’s informants the histories they told were not of the dead but of the living. The old Oyokohene of Juabin declined Rattray’s invitation to eat with him, saying with some heat: ‘Since I was a young man I have eaten in the room under the floor of which my ancestor is buried, and in whose presence I have daily partaken of food, and I do not with to now to do otherwise.’150 This awareness of the living dead may have made him biassed, but it also gave him a feeling for the reality of the past. |
| By Christmas Rattray was back in Mampong, having completed all but |
| one of the stool histories which he would include in Ashanti Law and Constitution and several which he would leave out for lack of space. He had also collected along the way much of the more general legal material |
| 150R.S. Rattray: MS Notebook. |
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| for the book. In January 1926, he carried out the last of his pilgrimages to the historically sacred sites of Asante. near Agona., half way between Mampong and Kumasi, was situated the home of Okomfo Anokye, the priestly law- and king-maker, co-founder with Osei Tutu of the Asante kingdom. Kojo Apao, the then chief of Agona, was a direct descendant of Anokye and Rattray received from his a full account of Anokye’s life and permission to witness a ceremony at the site of Anokye’s village, Agona Akyempim.151 This involved carrying the stools of various abosom (gods), including Anokye’s, from the temple in Agona to a place in the forest. The chief walked in procession with the stool-carriers and priests; Rattray followed in the Ford with the Queen Mother and the priestess of one of the abosom. On the way they picked up the drummers with their ntumpane drums. After pausing at a number of sites which recalled parts of Anokye’s story — where the houses had stoof of his son and favourite wife, and the market-place of the vanished village — they reached a great buttress- rooted wawa tree, where the ceremony took place. The drums recalled the names of the chiefs of Agona, and when Anokye’s name was spoken two of the priests were possessed and knelt down before the ancient metal bowl on a trestle table containing his spirit. The chief poured libations, and addressed apolitical speech to his ancestors: |
| ‘Your grandsire, Komfo Anotche, made the Ashanti nation, and he |
| made many kinds of laws for us that we might rule the people. He foretold that when an Ashanti king should break his laws, the red man would come and take the Ashanti people, and this prophecy also is fulfilled. Today we and the English white man (i.e. the Governor) are conducting the nation’s affairs, and it is good he is doing for us, and as for me, it is the white man’s law alone which I obey, since if you obey that law you will find peace, and it is a white man whom I have brought to this place; he has heard about you and he has come to find out if it is really true. Everything you have done I have told him about; indeed, I am still engaged upon it, and I beseech you to remind me that I may speak it all, and when he goes to the land of the white man far [Europe] |
| 151Anokye was born in Akronyere, about ten miles from Agona. he made his home at |
| Agona Akyempin, half way between Akrokyere and Agona. He did not have a burial place, because he did not die -- like Methusaelah's father Enoch, he was "translated".] |
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