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| and speaks, then they will perceive that of a truth you achieved something.’152 |
| It is not surprisinging that Rattray gave some credence to the history |
| which the chief had told him, after such a speech by a man who took it as unquesitonable fact that he was surrounded by the spirits of the man whose history he was telling, including Okomfo Anokye himself. After the speech, the last of the libation wine was poured on the blackened stools, then they all went down to the nearby stream where they smeared themselves with the black lignite from its bed (it was supposed to have started from a fire which Anokye had used to boil some medicine and then quenched — the ashes becoming the black river bed and the water the stream itself. A sheep was sacrified, palm-wine was distributed and the servoice ended with a blessing from the Okyeame: Yen hyira, hyira, hyira, (‘We invoke blessings, blessings, blessings.) |
| He stayed for the next few weeks at Kumawu, using the Omanhene |
| Kwame Affram, his Mother Ya Amponsa and an ex-Ko’ntirehene Kweku Kodia as his guides to traditional Ashanti law (Kwame Affram had been destooled by the Government during the 1914 war for misappropriating Red Cross funds, but Rattray had been present at his re-stooling during his last visit in August (1925). Their information would provide the bulk of the material for the chapters on Law and Procedure in Ashanti Law and Constitution. |
| During the last year or so he was increasingly aware that another |
| establishment power besides the Government was taking an interest in his work. The foundation-stone for the new College at Achimota, which from its beginning was planned to evolve into the first West African university, had been laid at the end of 1924. By 1926, its character was established, as a place in which the African (the African, that is, whose parents could afford the subsidised fees) would be trained according to the besty tradition of British public-school education to take his rightful place in the family of nations. Like its headmaster, A.G. Fraser, it was almost impossible to find anything to condemn in it, except that its atmosphere was almost too wholesome, cheerful and so unrelentingly benign that a man like Rattray could hardly exist in it. It aroused his old jealousy, his fear of being usurped by people with better paper qualifications than his own (though by |
| 152R.S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 1929, p. 406. |
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| now his could hardly be beaten). His instinct was to leave Achimota alone, but it refused to ignore him. |
| Fraser and his staff shared the principle which he had preached so |
| insistently: that Africans should not be turned into pseudo-Europeans but taught to retain the highest values of their own culture and in order to carry this into practice, they needed his help. Fraser told new staff coming out from England to read Ashanti and not surprisingly once they arrived they tried to make contact with the author, and in some cases to take up the same kind of work. An example was the historian W.E.F. Ward who got his fingers badly burned when he said in his first report how surprisingly easy it was to get people to divulge their stool histories — Rattray referred to this in Ashanti Law and Constitution as ‘a good example of how easy it is for a newcomer, with only a slight knowledge of local conditions and difficulties, to be misled into supposing his task an easy one’,153 which was rather unfair to an innocent remark by a much younger man. It showed that he still felt sensitive about his own status as an academic. This also largely explains why he rejected so abruptly the idea of being established at Achimota himself: academic institutions made him feel uneasy. |
| However, he accepted Fraser’s invitation to stay at Achimota for a few |
| days and give a lecture. His reputation for ‘temperament’ had gone before him and they were relieved to find instead that he was polite to everyone and even modest. His lecture was an unqualified success. It was to the entire College, including all the staff, on his favourite subject: the value of the traditional Ashanti culture, and it moved both the Africans and Europeans. He tactfully avoided any suggestion that some aspects of traditional religion might have been more desirable than some aspects of Christianity, and he spiced the talk with information about talking drums, gold weights and proverbs. Fraser was delighted. After the lecture he asked Rattray to talk to some of the classes by himself. Without other staff present he spoke rather more freely. He told them that he was in a rather similar position to theirs: he was descended from the early Britons but he had none of the ancient Britons’ customs. He did not even share the religion of his parents, and yet he did not think he had lost his national character. The missionaries had banned drumming and dancing; but they had brought in not only monogamy but the wedding-ring, bridesmaids and the wedding-cake, which on moral grounds were hardly more commendable than drumming and dancing. This account comes from the |
| 153Rattray (1929) p.129. |
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| students as they reported it back to Fraser. They were clearly both impressed and disturbed by what Rattray had told them. They decided he was a radical, who was tired of old customs (his own) and liked new ones (theirs) whereas the missionaries were conservatives who liked what their own parents had approved, but disliked new ideas or customs. They could not decide whether they were conservatives or radicals themselves, but whatever happened their characteristic national life would persist because they all ‘thought African’ (an expression which was gaining currency at the time).154 |
| Fraser genuinely liked Rattray: he was another in the line of prim |
| academics like Hetherwick and Marett, who found him almost disconcertingly attractive. And Rattray can only have been pleased with is reception at Achimota; but he knew that it was at bottom a missionary institution. He had never been very fond of missionaries, and by now he regarded them almost as rivals to his own mission which was (one might almost say) to save the Ashanti from the worst effect of Christianity. |
| By April, with two months to go before his leave, he was beginning to |
| feel the effects of a long tour spent mostly on the move. He decided to have a break, which characteristically took far form of cycling down the long dirt road from Mampong into the Afram plain in search of elephant. Tragi-comedy struck. He found an elephant and shot it, but it was not killed and turned on him,. He managed to escape to a fallen tree, under which he lay until the elephant gave up interest in him. Then he made his way as quickly as he could to his bicycle but as he mounted the saddle slipped sideways and he fell down, rupturing himself. He left no record of how he managed to get back to Mampong, but it must have been horribly painful, and perhaps even worse was the thought that he might not be allowed to travel to his leave. The doctor insisted that he should have an operation, but Rattray managed to persuade him that it would be better done in England. |
| Despite the accident, he continued to do fieldwork, questioning the |
| Mamponghene about Totemism, which was the other area of theoretical anthropology besides cross-cousin marriages in which he had become interested. And just before his leave, he took down the stool history of Nsuta, which was conveniently only five miles from Mampong (if he had not been confined to Mampong area and looking for something to do, he would probably not have bothered with Nsuta, which is a comparatively |
| 154Reported by A.G. Fraser, Papers, Rhodes House MSS Brit. Emp. |
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| insignificant stool). Meanwhile, the thought of writing up Ashanti Law and Constitution on top of the operation prompted him to write a heartfelt letter to the Government asking for an extension of leave. he pointed out that since 1921 he had given himself hardly more than two weeks’ real holiday in each leave, spending the rest of the time for seven or eight hours each day writing his books. He had had a ‘particularly hard and trying tour, living in the bush, and for many months occupying the roughest of native quarters’; and then there was the operation.155 Maxwell, Rattray’s childhood acquaintance from Dumfries who had succeeded Harper as Chief Commissioner Ashanti, supported him and he was told he could have until the following April. Cheered by this he went off on leave in ebullient mood, despite the hernia. On the boat, he refused to behave as if there was anything wrong with him, rampaged around and as a result the hernia strangulated. He very nearly died, and the surgeon in the hospital at Plymouth would not hold out more than an even chance for the success of the operation. It was successful, but even so there was some doubt as to whether he would be able to go back for his next tour. |
| While he was still in hospital, he saw an advertisement for a Reader in |
| Anthropology at Cambridge. In spite of all his doubts about academic institutions, he applied and staggered from his bed for an interview in July. Everyone liked him, and he was their second choice, but it was decided that he did not have quite enough academic training and did not know French or German (which was not strictly true — his French was quite passable). Hodson was appointed instead. If Rattray, convalescing in a Harrogate hotel, was disappointed, he did not make a fuss about it. I suspect that he would have liked to be given the chance of turning it down and of using it as a lever to hoist himself up the Gold Coast establishment. |
| The leave was spent recovering from the operation and then writing |
| Ashanti Law and Constitution. It is the most complete of all his books and shows none of the strain he had been going through when it was written. Apart from the weight which he attached to stool histories and which some historians would now question, only one major criticism has been made of the book. A central part of his argument was that the old Ashanti kingdom was not a centralised despotism but an intricate system of interlocking but partly autonomous groups — in other words, that it was more like feudal Europe than Louis XIV’s France. Historians now tend to picture it as more like a European monarchy, welded into an efficient fighting unit by the |
| 155Foreign Office file. |
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| great Asantehenes, such as Osei Tutu. It is an important issue in relation to the original purpose of Rattray’s work In the last chapter of Ashanti, he argued that the chiefs were losing much of the old loyalty they commanded because they were adopting the role expected of them by the Europeans — of a petty autocrat. We talk about democracy, he said, but to an old Ashanti our democracy is a sham: |
| ‘An Ashanti who was familiar alike with his own and our Constitution |
| would deny absolutely our right to apply this term to ourselves or to our Constitution. To him a democracy implies that the affairs of the Tribe (the State) must rest, not in the keeping of the few, but in hands of the many .... To him the State is literally a Res Publica; it is everyone’s business’.156 |
| At the same time, he recognised, though less emphatically, that the old |
| democracy was dependent on the old way of life: ‘the real fraternity based from time immemorial on common needs, a common daily intercourse, in market, farm, hamlet, or forest, and a common outlook upon life’.157 Small is beautiful. Whether or not his argument was historically accurate, it could make little difference to the direction in which politics were going. |
| Once again, he used the preface to his new book to preach a sermon on a |
| central issue arising from the book. In this case, it was even more like a sermon than in the previous volumes. It arose from his experiences at Achimota and his reading of Edwin Smith’s book The Golden Stool which had just come out, and it was about religion and education. He began by explaining why he came to Law and Constitution last amongst the subjects he had set himself to investigate. The reason was that when he began he found himself ‘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’.158 As we have seen, this was a rationalisation after the event: |
| 156R.S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, p. 406. 157Rattray (1929) p.407. 158Ibid. p.i. |
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| he started by investigating religion because that seemed the most interesting and important area quite apart from any practical application it might have. He then went on the say that if the information he was supplying on Law and Constitution was to be correctly applied, it would have to be used with reference to the religious belief which underlay it at all points: ‘Upon the correct application of this knowledge must, I believe, depend our satisfactory tutelage of this people, and ultimately their own success in self- government’159. |
| The gist of his argument which followed was that Indirect Rule was all |
| very well and simple in an area like Northern Nigeria where the British Government had agreed not to interfere with local (i.e. predominantly Muslim) religion and Christian missions were positively discouraged. In the Gold Coast, the Government was busy trying to encourage Indirect Rule (’the widest possible scope to Chiefs and people to manage their own affairs’) while also encouraging the missionaries to destroy the old religion on which the traditional rule was founded: ‘A living Universe — the acknowledgement of a Supreme God — sanctity and reverence for dead ancestors — religion which is inseparable from law — these were the foundations on which the old order was based’.160 What then should they do? Stop the missionaries? Even if desirable, it was too late. The only possible answer was that given by Edwin Smith in his chapter on ‘Christianity in Africa’ in The Golden Stool: ‘It is necessary to urge that our religion be presented to the Africans, not in antagonism to, but as a fulfilment of, their aspirations .... It implies not a paganisation of Christianity for the purpose of making it easier to Africans, but the Christianization of everything that is valuable in the African’s past experience and registered in his customs’.161 In other words, preserve and encourage everything that is not obviously inadmissible in the traditional way of life. |
| It is a little odd to see Rattray writing so positively about missions (‘it is |
| from Christianity and Christian Missions Colonial Administrations and Africans who love their own country will yet come to draw that inward power which alone will justify the retention of “the best in the Africans’ |
| 159Ibid. p.vi. 160Ibid. p.ix. 161E.W. Smith: The Golden Stool (1926) p.261. |
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| culture and beliefs”.’).162 In private he was much ruder about them — though his admiration for Smith was quite sincere. This preface was polemical and he felt that the only hope was to convert the missionaries who were the very spearhead attacking the traditional culture. If he really hoped that by doing so he would get Indirect Rule to work properly, he was doomed to disappointment: nothing would stop the march of centralisation, either before or after independence. But his instinct was probably right: it was at least as useful in the long run for the anthropologist to ‘interpret the idiom of the soul of the people among whom he labours’ as to set out the details of legal procedure, and if modern Ghana is comparatively free of the symptoms of cultural disintegration, Rattray must take at least some of the credit. He gave the educationalists a chance to carry into practice their principle of educating the African (or at least the Ashanti) into rather than out of his culture. He could not foresee that independence would come much later in education thana in politics, so that Ghanaian teachers at secondary and university level are still only beginning to carry into practice the idea of an African education by Africans for Africans. It means that only now are his books (still not read nearly widely enough by Ghanaian educationalists) beginning to be used for the purpose for which above all he intended them: to use his own simile, as a hand reaching out and linking the modern Ghanaian with his own past. |
| In September, Rattray was forty-five. Like most active men he was very |
| much aware of the arrival of middle age. He had finished the work he set himself five years earlier, with the exception of a collection of folk- stories which was hardly more than a postscript. Retirement was already due, and he had no very good immediate reason for going back to the Gold Coast. The change which was coming over him can be seen even in the style of writing in Ashanti Law and Constitution’. In the first two volumes, despite their dense subject-matter, he could not hide the almost continuous excitement he had felt in hunting down his material. The latest book was written more with an air of calm authority. It is at the same time the most admirable and the least human. He was beginning to think of himself as the Old Coaster, less worried about possible rivals, confident of respect from both academics and the younger colonial officers. In some ways he had aged prematurely, especially in these months when he was recovering from the operation. ‘A short, brown, leathery-looking man’, someone called |
| 162Rattray (1929) p.x. |
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| him.163 But he was also refusing to grow old. he took up Indian club exercises, and continued to make plans for the flight to the Gold Coast, which was beginning to assume more importance than his anthropology.164 |
| Perhaps because it harmonised with his feelings about his own life, he |
| was captivated by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West which had just been translated into English. Everyone was reading and discussing it on the boat back to the Gold Coast. One of his co-passengers was John Scragg, whom he had met on the return from his previous leave, when Scragg was going out to take up his first post as a teacher at Achimota. Rattray had not seen him at Achimota because Fraser had sent him off to learn Fante at Cape Coast, where he was also acting headmaster of Mfantsipim School. They had long discussions on the boat especially about Spengler, together with another man who was going out to study the Tuareg in Northern Nigeria. Superficially, Scragg was Rattray’s opposite: over six foot tall and with a highly respectable conventional academic training. But he had a strain of irreverence uncommon in Achimota teachers, and he was longing to get out into the bush and do some hunting, both for animals and for ethnographic material, and they got on extremely well. It probably struck Rattray immediately that Scragg might be a suitable person to take up the banner when he had to leave it, though no specific plan was formulated until a year or so later. The feeling of things ending was accentuated by the fact that their outgoing boat passed the boat which was bringing Guggisberg back from his last tour as Governor of the Gold Coast. He was to be succeeded by Ransford Slater, the man who had been most keen to get rid of Rattray from the Secretariat in 1920. |
| Rattray did not go back to the red-roofed bungalow at Mampong, which |
| had been taken over as District headquarters when they were moved from Ejura. Instead, it was arranged that he should be based at Pepiase, 2,000 feet up on the Kwahu scarp overlooking the Afram plain, about half-way between Kumasi and Accra. It is hard to know exactly why he chose to set up his base here, except for minor reasons of convenience, the main one being that the house was available. His next project was a collection of Anansesem or ‘Spider Stories’, and since these are universal amongst the |
| 163Foreign Office, Rattray File. 164Before he went back from his leave, he arranged an interview with Sir Charles |
| Strachey, to ask if he would be considered for the post of Secretary for Natyive Affairs when C.W. Welman retired. Strachey was almost convinced, but when the occasion arose two years later, Slater would have nothing of it. |
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| Akan-speaking peoples any area was as good as another for collecting them — the only qualification being that the language may differ slightly from area to area, hence the title of the volume: Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales. Then, he had already agreed to do some more teaching at Achimota, and Pepiase was nearer Accra than his previous bases. Again, he may have thought it a good idea to set his researches in the heartland of Ashanti against findings in a more peripheral area. And finally, he may already have been planning to go to the North for his next campaign — if time and support given to him — and Pepiase was a convenient stopping-off point where he could negotiate with Accra. |
| The folk-stories did not take up much of his time and energy. He did not |
| try to analyse them, except in a general introduction when he came to write up the book, but only to write down the Twi text as closely as possible to the words he originally heard, and then to translate them as faithfully as possible. The project was given a slight sense of urgency by the fact that A.W. Cardinall had just written a piece on Anansesem for the Gold Coast Record. The Gold Coast Record was the brain-child of the new Secretary for Native Affairs, C.W. Welman, a house-journal for the Gold Coast in which the new spirit of cultural awakening could be given expression. Rattray virtually boycotted it. He only contributed one article during its short life, and that was a rehash of his Blackwood’s article about his 1929 flight. By refusing to contribute any anthropological articles he condemned it to amateurishness. The fact that Cardinall had written the piece on folk- tales made him all the more sensitive about it. Cardinall was, like him, a political officer who had shown leanings towards anthropology, but unlike Rattray he had never taken any academic courses. He had written, in 1922, a book on The Natives of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, and during this year, 1927, he brought out another travelogue called In Ashanti and Beyond. A straightforward ‘colonial type’, he regarded many of Rattray’s activities as window-dressing and no doubt he resented Rattray’s being paid to do what he (Cardinall) treated as a hobby. Rattray on his side took every opportunity to ignore Cardinall, although on this occasion he could not pass over the fact that Cardinall was showing an interest in folk- tales. |
| Rattray’s bungalow at Pepease was rented from a local cocoa-farmer, |
| one of the many who had grown rich out of the cocoa-boom. It had been occupied by the farmer’s brother — a ‘noseless gentleman’ Rattray called him (a sign of the prevalence of syphilis in pre-penicillin days) — who carried on living in the compound next door. He also asked if he could keep one room in the bungalow, which Rattray agreed to as long as he did not need it for a guest. When eventually a guest did arrive, it turned out |
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| that the room was still occupied by the previous owner. It had never been opened since he doors were painted, sealing the cracks between the door and frame. The noseless brother still carried out his side of the agreement, and told Rattray he could open the room: |
| ‘Any one who knows West Africa will have experienced the mouldy |
| vault-like exudation that emanates from a room which has been shut up for even a short time. Advancing again with a candle in each hand, I entered the chamber, to find I was in a Tutankhamen’s tomb such as the Pharaoh would have had had he lived in the Victorian age. I need not describe in detail all the paraphernalia it contained, but amid red plush chairs and gilded mirrors, and set upon a great Victorian bed, was the largest coffin I have ever seen. It was a double-tiered bier, that is, it had the appearance of being a lesser set upon a greater coffin; it was padlocked with three great padlocks, and it was very heavy. I shut the door and sat down over a whisky and sparklet to await Amadu and the rest of the carriers.’ |
| Amadu — ‘the faithful Amadu’ as Rattray always called him with an eye |
| over his shoulder to Kipling — was his police orderly. The other permanent member of his household was James, his ‘boy’, who came from Southern Nigeria. |
| Although it is hard to know for what specific use he intended it, he set to |
| almost at once to record the history and constitution of Kwahu, for which purpose he went down to the headquarters of the paramount Chief at Abene, a ‘hot and particularly filthy village’ five miles down to the foot of the scarp on which Pepiase stands. He had only been there five days, staying in a ‘native’ compound, when he went down with amoebic dysentery, despite the fact that he had followed his usual routine of having the floors, window- ledges and furniture scrubbed with water and disinfectant (‘It always spells contentment to feel that shorts or pyjamas, or bush-shirt, or other article of apparel may be dropped on floor or laid on table or window-ledge without my having to worry unduly, because just possibly the last tenant may have been a corpse, a lepper, or a sufferer from yaws or craw-craw.’) A hammock had to be borrowed to haul him up the steep slope to Pepiase, where the local Medical Officer dosed him back to life with Emetine and Stoversol. This time, he asked if he could stay in the ahenfie (palace) which was deserted while being purified after the death of the late Chief, one of those beautiful old steep-roofed Akan compounds |
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