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| decorated with abstract designs in white relief. He stayed in a more recent two-storeyed annexe on one side of an inner courtyard, above where sheep and goats were kept. A flight of wooden steps led to a rickety verandah, with at one end the hammock in which he had been carried during his illness and at the other a broken Lewis-gun. The decoration of the room inside was a framed coloured print entitled ‘Raising the Maypole in Merry England’, in the corner of which was stuck a black-edged card ornamented with forget-me-nots, on which was typed: |
| ‘Mr. and Mrs. Asomasi165 request the plesaure (sic) of Mr. and Mrs. |
| Oya’s company at the confirmation of their daughter, Adjua Asomasi, at the Scottish Mission. Come one and all. |
| Tea and hot cakes. |
| R.S.V.P. |
| From his base he finished the Kwahu history. On the day he was to |
| return to Pepiase he was invited to visit the shrine of Ampong Agyei, the local ancestor-god who was supposed to have led them from Mampong. He was woken by the shuffling of sandalled feet and the tapping of a stick along the verandah. Simultaneously, his ‘boy’ James announced: ‘Them old woman this country folk call ohema (queen mother) have come. I drive her, but she say she not fit be driven; she fit for see you’: |
| ‘The Queen Mother, for it was she, with some difficulty settled herself |
| on the low sill of the window-ledge beside my camp-bed. I hastily slipped my bare feet into an old pair of pumps that, braving jiggers, had served me for years as bedroom slippers; I smacked Adenyinanyame (his dog Jock’s daughter). Still hardly awake, I offered the Queen Mother some tea. This she readily accepted and seemed to enjoy, which struck me as curious in a land where new and strange drinks and foods are generally taboo to the older folks. “How was it she had learned our fashion?” I inquired, and was told, “Oh, Governor (mentioning a name of one of the great ones of almost three centuries ago [Governor Ussher is the most likely]) used to give it to me’. |
| 165 I.e. 'So-and-so' — either Rattray could not remember the name or he did not want |
| to be too personal.] |
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| I wish that ‘Maga’ published photographs’, Rattray went on in the article |
| from which these descriptions are taken,166 ‘that its readers might see the beautiful face of this old African woman — kindly, dignified and queenly. I wonder what it is that seems so often to ennoble these Africans of the past generation, and gives to hem that indefinable something which their Europeanised fellow-countrymen so often lack’. |
| She had come to explain that she would not come with him to attend the |
| ceremony at the Mausoleum of Mampong Agyei to which she had been invited, but she would pray to her ancestor to bless him: ‘I helped the old lady down the stairway and out through the many courtyards of the “palace”, no longer crowded with horn-blowers, heralds, drummers, minstrels, and elephant-tail fly-switchers, but given over to a few lizards and wandering fowls, and returned to my room in contemplative mood to shave and dress and breakfast’. The ‘Mausoleum’ was a small black earthenware dish lying between two bifurcating buttress roots of a gigantic silk-cotton tree half way up the steep side of the scarp, in the depth of the forest. Above the pot a few inches of sword-blade projected from the tree- trunk — the rest of the sword had apparently been swallowed up by the trunk during its growth. Two sheep were sacrificed by Ampong Agyei’s priest — ‘a little, very old, white-haired man .... mottled all over black and yellow, arms, shoulders, breast, legs, with some curious skin complaint which gave his body exactly the appearance of having a leopard’s skin’ — and Ampong Agyei and the other gods were addressed in a manner which had by now become familiar to Rattray: ‘It was, like the other prayers, a beautiful and simple oration, spoken from the heart, and without any fawning or cringing — no whining intonation, almost as man to man, — but with the natural respect and courtesy these people accord to one who is a primus inter pares’. After the sacrifice, both sheep had to be finished off completely by the party of about thirty. Rattray was much helped by Adonyinyame with his share. From Abene he set out straight away up the hill to Pepiase: |
| ‘It is extraordinary what an elevation of no more than 2,000 feet will |
| effect in this part of the world. One seems to pass out of a land where a |
| 166R.S. Rattray: 'The Mausoleum of Ampon Agyei' in Blackwood's Magazine, June |
| 1928, pp.842-853. |
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| breeze is a clammy heated puff of warm air, into a world where the winds have a nip in them. In an hour and twenty minutes I had climbed to this cooler zone, inexpressibly pleasing after the heated plains, and stepped from the forest track on to the main motor road, about a mile from home. The sound of a two-stroke engine fell upon my ears, and a few seconds later, round a bend in the road, coat-tails flying and parson’s black felt hat pulled well down over his broad beaming face, came the Rev. ___, of our local Scottish Mission, an African. He was also our local “Postal Agent”. From him I buy my stamps and receive my English mails. Like the good fellow he is, he had run out to my bungalow with letters which had just arrived. Straddling his motor- cycle, he stood and talked for a while, and I told him, with a twinkle in my eye, that I had just been attending a memorial service to one, ‘Ampong Agyei’. He knows my pagan propensities, and he and I often talk “shop”. I tell him I am really a kind of padre myself, in that my work is done in a poor endeavour to interpret “the idiom of the soul” of his countrymen’. |
| The day’s events ended with the opening of the dead man’s room, which |
| has already been described, after which Rattray had a drink and a bath, during which he could see, through the half-open door ‘the flickering of many hurricane lamps and the flitting to and fro of dark figures, and I could hear the sound of an occasional half hysterical giggle’. By the time he had finished his bath, they and the coffin had disappeared. He had dinner and crawled to bed under the mosquito-net ‘saying to myself aloud — that sure symptom of too many years of solitude — “This has been a somewhat amusing and interesting day”.’ |
| The ‘next day’s guest’ was G.A. Stevens, the art-master at Achimota, |
| who had come to discuss the possibility of getting his students to illustrate Rattray’s collection of Ananse stories. It had been Rattray’s suggestion in the first place, though Stevens took it up eagerly. They thought that, just as the spoken stories would be developing into a new phase by virtue of being written down and read, so would illustration take African pictorial art into a new phase: as Stevens put it, ‘fused with this molten metal of the Folk- lore the first attempt by the people themselves to give it pictorial form, as it is poured into the mould’.167 In point of fact, the analogy between the text and illustration was false because whereas the first existed in a pre- |
| 167Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales, (1930) p.xv. |
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| literate form the second did not — it had never occurred to a traditional artist to illustrate an Ananse story. So it should not have surprised them when the results were not much better than the equivalent English schoolchildren could have managed. Nevertheless, the Achimota students enjoyed the project and it was one more step towards an African education for Africans. |
| At the end of July, he visited Bukuruwa, three miles East of Pepiase, |
| where Kwabena Kurovi, elder brother of the chief — ‘a very old man, full of lore’ — told him the stool history in the presence of the chief and several elders in the privacy of the ahenfie, for a week. At the end of the week they took him to see the magnificent waterfall Oku Ahen, to which fowls and spirits were offered. The rock ledges around the fall were thick with the droppings of bats who lived in the crevices. Two days later, a Sunday, he was taken to the most sacred place in the district: the Buruku Rocks, with the chiefs of Nkwatia, Kwahu Tafo, a priest, two priestesses and attendants of Kwesi Buruku. At three o’clock in the morning he went to the temple in Bukuruwa to ask the god’s permission for him to visit the place (the god had already been consulted once, but said it must be ‘carried’ again before the request could be granted). The only light in the temple was a small fire, as the priest set the god’s shrine on his head and the young ahenkwa walked round him ringing bells and gong-gongs and calling ‘Kwesi Buruku, skyiri akyinibere kyee’ (’Kwesi Buruku: it is far away but it seems near’). When the priest began to shake, indicating that the god had arrived, the Nkwatiahene told him (via the god’s spokesman) that their paramount chief ‘had sent them our master who loved abosom and all men’, to ask if he might visit the Rocks. In his turn, the god asked if, since the times of their ancestors, such a request had ever been made. ‘Never’, they said, ‘But the message came from the Omanhene that our master be regarded as a black man and one of ourselves’. The god asked the okyeame if he had ever seen such a thing. ‘No’, was the reply, ‘But the Omanhene’s stool has crossed the Birim River, and even now is at Akuapim’ (attending the Provincial Council of Chiefs — in former days it was forbidden for the stool to cross the river). The god then addressed Rattray. |
| They all thanked the god, and as he left the priest, the priest fell down |
| and had to be placed on a mat until he recovered and asked the okyeame what had gone on.168 |
| 168This account is based on Rattray's report in MSS diaries. |
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| The cavalcade set off down the wide path towards the Rocks with the |
| drummer calling out: ‘Bere bebo dabi’ (‘Customs will change’), with the priests and priestesses of the various gods, hornblowers and the stools of Tafo and Nkwatia, a sheep, fowls, gin and beer. Rattray followed last, with a certain Mr. Collins (perhaps a missionary?). About five minutes out of the town, the two chiefs diverged from the main party and made a sacrifice of an egg on a stone at the foot of a nkanee tree, where in the past a python lived and was fed with eggs thrown into its mouth. From time to time the path came out on to short grassland where they could glimpse the rocks through the trees, then they went down a slight slope to a stream called Bupuru, where one of the chiefs put an egg on the stream bed. Then they climbed again to the overgrown site of an old village, where there was a cluster of small pots in the centre of the path and a small log stuck with knives and staples beside a mound, called Aberewa so — the Place of the Old Woman. One of the priestesses became possessed here and fell on the ground, and everyone streamed back around her. A priest smeared mud from the small pots on his face and shoulders and asked the Aberewa spirit through the priestess if they might pass to visit the Rocks. At first it said that the spirit wanted another sheep beside the one they had brought, at which Rattray protested mildly that it might have stated its wish before they set out. The priest held an egg over Rattray’s head and held it up to the sun to see if he had addled it. The omen was favourable; gin and another liquid was passed round, water was poured into the pots and hands washed, and a bunch of chickens nailed to the log. At this the priest suddenly set off up the hill at a great pace, followed by the cavalcade. The climb up the wooded slop became increasingly stiffer until the rocks suddenly appeared at the summit towering perpendicularly above them. A small path wound round them to the top. Half way up the path a kind of bivouac hid the entrance to the shrine of Nyameama, which Rattray was not allowed to enter. Again the priestess and the Buruku priest became possessed, dancing and twitching while the women sang. Rattray was called to salute the obosom behind the cloth; mothers and small children had brought eggs and money to ask the god to make the children strong. Rattray was also given an egg to hold against his lips and make a request to the god, which he did (he did not divulge what it was — he probably knew from stirring the Christmas Cake as a child that to tell a wish halves its efficacy). A sheep was sacrificed, eggs broken against the rocks, and Rattray was asked to address the god. |
| ’I said’ (he wrote in his notebook) ‘that I had come here because I |
| knew that rites in the worship of abosom was not bad, and to show that |
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| one who believed in another creed could still respect this one, and to show that it was not necessary that because the children went to school or became Christians that they should ridicule or despise what in fact very few of them knew anything about, and that even a Christian could learn much from such rites, and that at any rate knowledge of what they really were would prevent ridicule and lack of sympathy. I also said that there was not any reason to laugh at the statement that God Nyame manifested his great spirit in this wonderful rock’. |
| The sheep was tied down and its throat cut. The blood was caught in a |
| small pot, prayer made to the gods and the blood consulted for omens. The meat was cooked and some passed to the priestess and Buruku Okomfo behind the veil, and the rest distributed amongst the party. Then the spirit of possession left the priestess and the Nkwatiahene announced the end of the ceremony. While they were preparing to leave, Rattray walked round the rocks to the point where the ledge ended. Facing in the opposite direction behind the spot where the ceremony had taken place, there was an inscription in large letters: |
| I.H.S. |
| W.J. Fergusson M.A. T.O.D. |
| Scottish Mission |
| 20/12/20 |
| And in smaller letters: ‘J. Brown’. In his notebook, Rattray called it a |
| ‘sacrilege’. |
| There was good news in September. It had been decided in Accra and |
| Whitehall that he was at the top of the rank of District Commissioners, in term of length of service compared with other officers, and if he had shown the ability would have expected to be made a Provincial Commissioner. As we have seen, his Annual Confidential Reports stated more and more emphatically as the years went by that he was not suited to be in charge of a Province (’An excellent anthropologist but unsuited by |
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| temperament for an administrative post’, his last report had said baldly). Since now that Guggisberg had left he was the best-known figure on the Gold Coast, it was impossible to ignore him. Once again a point was stretched and he was given the rank and pay of Provincial Commissioner (Special) without the duties. It was most satisfactory for Rattray, but it brought to a head all the resentment which had been simmering since his first appointment. It was bad enough for him to be placed on an equal level with those who did the ‘real work’, but it was ten times worse for him to be put in the select group of a half-dozen Provincial Commissioners, able to boss the small army of Deputy Provincial Commissioners, D.C.’s and Assistant D.C.’s. After he retired, there was not one political officer with whom he ‘kept up’, and before he retired he had some dealings with Achimota staff, doctors, engineers and missionaries, but as little as possible with D.C.’s. |
| However, it was not always possible for him to avoid taking a political |
| role, as was shown in October when there was trouble in Mpraeso. The people rose against the chief and tried to kill him, and when the D.C., A.H. Williams, read the Riot Act, they turned on him and ambushed the D.C., the Doctor (de Bono) and a forestry man called Burnett in the Doctor’s bungalow.169 Rattray was also called in to help. A vivid account of the incident was left by L.G. Lloyd, then a young engineer with the Railways.170 He was a Nkawkaw on the 17th, bridge building. At the end of his working day, he had just dressed for dinner and wandered outside his bungalow with a whisky and soda in his hand, when the D.C. dashed up to him in a car, dishevelled, excited and rather scared. He asked Lloyd if he had any guns and would he come up to Mpraeso to help fend off the insurgents; then he dashed off again. Lloyd followed up the scarp in his car armed with his .12 bore rifle and .45. On the way, he picked up an African who said he was an old soldier and produced two medals from a cigarette tin in his pocket to prove it. At the top of the scarp, there was an ominous silence broken occasionally by a police whistle and the noise of drumming. Finally, with the help of his guide, he reached the Doctor’s bungalow where he found the Doctor, Burnett of forestry and Rattray. They cheered the ‘reinforcements’ as he roared up in his old Morris. They had dinner, presenting a wonderful target as they sat at table near the window, after |
| 169The local D.C. at mpraeso was a disreputable character who used prisoners as his |
| personal servants and was eventually dismissed for gun-running. |
| 170Narrative based on L.G. Lloyd: Diary 1925-27, Rhodes House MSS Afr. |
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| which Lloyd went off with Burnett to Burnett’s bungalow, which was full of Hausa soldiers ‘who were out for blood’ (the blood of the Mpraeso insurgents, that is). |
| After a night disturbed by the Hausas, police whistles and cold (Burnett’s |
| bungalow was reputedly the only one of the Coast with a fireplace, on this occasion not lit), at dawn they all got into their cars — Rattray in his Ford lorry — and went to ‘raid’ the villages. Rattray and Lloyd did their best to control the Hausas, but, armed with spears and bows and arrows, they broke away and burst into the houses, looting everything they could lay their hands on, ‘from covercloths, hats, watches, clocks, chop, to money’. They half-killed some of the prisoners who had been taken, as did the police, knocking them about with their rifle-butts. After they had combed through all the villages, lorry-load after lorry-load of prisoners were sent off down to Nkawkaw. After Lloyd had finished seeing to this, he went back to look for Rattray, whom he found trying to calm down the Hausas who were sweeping through the village — ‘in wave after wave of yelling screaming demons (sic), waving spears, bows and arrows and clubs’. Burnett came up with a white face saying that he had killed someone with Lloyd’s revolver. He had fired off five rounds of ammunition, and Lloyd wisely relieved him of the pistol. As the Hausas came back from their plundering Rattray and Lloyd lay in wait for them at a corner of the road, held them up and took their booty from them. Hausas who had been thin men before going to the fight (Lloyd said) were returning very fat with the loot stowed about their persons. |
| That was the end of the brief but violent episode. Rattray took Lloyd off |
| to lunch and tea at Pepiase and read him the piece he had just written for Blackwoods called ‘The Mausoleum of Ampon Adjei’.171 At the end of the week, before Lloyd went back to Accra he called on Rattray again and showed him a story he had written himself, and lent him a copy of Edgar Wallace’s This England. They stayed up late talking about writing, shooting and ‘He seems to be a particularly nice fellow’, Lloyd wrote in his diary — ‘an interesting bloke and we seem to have much in common’. |
| The next morning, the young Queen Mother of Pepiase brought a ‘dash’ |
| of yams and eggs, and Lloyd was also introduced to the daughter of the Priestess of the Rock (Buruku). They walked to Abetifi and got caught in a downpour: ‘absolutely drenched — but rather fun withall’. As Lloyd was starting off in his Morris back to Nkawkaw, a pretty young ‘mammy’ ran |
| 171'The Mausoleum of Ampon Agyei', op.cit. |
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| up and asked for a lift. Lloyd told her to get in, and as they rode away Rattray threw rice over the couple. Back in Accra, Lloyd heard that the news was going round that Burnett had killed a Kwahu man, and it was feared that the Gold Coast Independent and Vox Populi would make a fuss about it. In Mpraeso it might have seemed that Williams and Co. had done all they could to keep a dangerous situation under control and avoid bloodshed, but from the viewpoint of the African in Accra, it could be seen as another attempt to keep the people down by enforcing the power of unpopular puppet chiefs and setting the Hausas to wreak havoc on despised infidels. Both, of course, were right. It was a practical illustration of the illusory nature of Indirect Rule on the Gold Coast. As R.E. Wraith has said, ‘what existed was in reality direct British rule exercised with the support of the chiefs rather than native rule exercised with the support and guidance of the British.’172 To put it crudely, the British had above all to keep order, and the rights and wrongs of a particular dispute between a people and their chief were almost irrelevant. |
| The promotion to Provincial Commissioner seems to have settled |
| Rattray’s mind for the moment about his plans for the immediate future. He had collected enough material for his folk-lore book, and after that the Pepiase area did not have much more to offer him. He was now bitten by the bug which infects most Europeans sooner or later on the West Coast: the lure of the Mysterious North. Scragg told me that a curious incident concerning his cook had a little to do with turning Rattray’s interest to that direction. This cook, was not a good advertisement for his country. He cooked badly, had a bad skin and was slow to the point of mental deficiency. He was badly bullied by his Akan wife, called Arabella, as well as by Rattray and Scragg. But while Scragg was staying at Pepiase, the news came through of a cure for Yaws which had just been discovered: a simple injection of bismuth. Reading about the symptoms, it became obvious to them that the poor man was suffering from the disease and they quickly arranged for an injection. The result was that in the space of a few days he turned into a bright and lively person, well capable of dealing with his wife, as well as Rattray and Scragg — and presumably, the cooking. The same miracle was happening all over the continent and gave rise to a flourishing black market in bismuth injections. But another result was that Rattray was able to stimulate his curiosity about the North by questioning the cook about his home territory. |
| 172R.E. Wraith: Guggisberg 1967) p.265. |
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| In any event, in November Rattray was summoned by Slater to Accra to |
| discuss the future of anthropology in the colony. It seems to have been an agreeable interview. Although Slater was critical of his as an administrator and although rumbles of jealousy were already reaching him about Rattray’s promotion, he had already decided that Rattray’s role would remain unchanged, at least until his retirement. Rattray told Slater of his plans to go to the North. Politically, there were good reasons to be given. The administration were just beginning to think of the Northern Territories as an area with a future, rather than one in which it was necessary to keep in its primordial state. But, as with Ashanti, the political reasons were an excuse rather than a motive for Rattray. Although Cardinall had brought out a book on the Northern tribes some years before, there was virtually nothing which could be called an anthropological survey — by comparison Ashanti had been worn threadbare when he first started work there. In any case, Slater agreed that he should have another tour, which he would spend in the North making a survey of the entire area. |
| They also discussed the question of his successor. Scragg had already |
| proved that he had a talent for picking up languages almost equal to Rattray’s (with a greater grasp of linguistics). He had helped collect material for the folk-lore book, and Rattray recommended very strongly that he should be seconded to take the Anthropology Diploma in Oxford, and then take up the job when Rattray left it. Slater seems to have listened seriously, and agreed that Scragg should study for the Diploma; Rattray left feeling that the plan would go through smoothly. |
| Yet another Achimotan came to stay with him when he got back from |
| Accra. This was Charles Kingsley Williams, the Assistance Vice Principal. Like Frazer, he was a Methodist missionary, but he had less of Fraser’s almost chilling common decency, and Rattray got on better with him than anyone else at Achimota except Scragg. Kingsley Williams described his weekend at Pepiase in letters to his wife which give a vivid picture of Rattray’s everyday life there, as it appeared to a sympathetic observer from the sheltered world of Achimota, and some perceptive observations about Rattray himself:173 |
| 173C.K. Williams: Papers, Correspondence etc., Rhodes House MSS Afr. |
| 149 |