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| ’It was a most interesting time. He is brim full of knowledge about |
| and interest in the people and their funny ways and customs. You would have laughed to see the village people stroll into his house, with a plateful of rice or a few eggs or an orange or two, and just talk in a friendly way; the chief or one of his ‘council’ or a couple of girls with babies on their backs. |
| ’One day he took me down the hill (he’s 2,000 feet up on a plateau |
| which in default of anything higher might possibly be made into a holiday place) to the head village of the district. There we called on the queen mother (descent is reckoned in the female line, you know) and the chief, and saw over a “palace”, built in clay of course, with quite elaborate and rather beautiful mural decorations (you’ll see pictures of similar houses in Religion and Art). It was great fun climbing down and up a real aboriginal bush path — of the kind that alone existed a dozen years ago before motor roads were built..... |
| ‘Rattray is I think quite as interesting to be with as his books suggest. |
| And that too although as he would be the first to admit, claim almost, he came out to Africa in the first instance with almost no education, certainly none in anthropology or anything like it, and even now he really is not much interested in the comparative aspects of his work. He is an observer; and an observer of people treated as people. It was most touching to see the folk drift in from the village, chiefs and village swells on the one hand (very often more than three parts tight) and on the other girls with babies on their backs, bringing a few eggs or a little rice, coming, twice over, to say thank you for some little present he had given them to day before. . . |
| ‘One of our men, John Scragg, is joining him in April, leaving us for |
| good; and together they are going to hunt the N.T.’s for the kind of thing he has been bagging in Ashanti for so many years now. The Northern Territories are quite untouched: there are almost no missionaries even, so they should come on, and come on more easily in a purer form, some immensely interesting stuff ...’ There is a distinct echo of Rattray’s own voice in this last paragraph, |
| with its big-game-hunting metaphors. Despite some important differences in outlook, Kingsley Williams seems to have caught very accurately the character of Rattray’s interest in anthropology. |
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| At Christmas Scragg came to stay with him again and they down to |
| Montemong on the Afram River, looking for the elusive bongo: ‘My mind wanders back’ (Rattray wrote after he retired), |
| ‘to dark tunnels in those magic forests — the home of Sasabonsam and Mmoatia — so low, and narrow, and dense, that one squirms along on one’s belly alternately pushing helmet and rifle ahead in a snake-like, snail-like progress, every few minutes disentangling, with infinite care, some clinging creeper, lest it should spring back with a warning smack, eyes trying to pierce the undergrowth for a glimpse of the hunted animal. Then a sudden movement, a moment’s frenzied attempt on the animal’s part to spring to its feet, and on that of the hunter to free arms from entangling clinging creepers and to disentangle liana from the bolt of his rifle; then — crash upon crash, growing ever fainter, until the silence of the forest settles down upon him once more.... The native hunters state that the great spiral horns of the male bongo are laid along its back, and then the beast, with legs gathered beneath hi, hurtles like a spear-head through the thicket, the matter undergrowth spiralling off his corkscrew-like horns instead of, as one would expect, becoming tangled thereon’. |
| Scragg, hardly more than half Rattray’s age, had trouble keeping up |
| with him as he relentlessly combed the forest, but once again the bongo eluded them. Rattray was fond of telling the story of the big-game-hunting lord who came out to the Gold Coast to hunt lions: after some time a runner arrived at headquarters with some samples of wool and a request to match them — the lord had given up trying to find any animals and had taken to his other hobby, which was knitting. Scragg went back to Achimota unsatisfied, but with a firm promise to join Rattray in April in the Northern Territories. |
| Meanwhile, Rattray got ready for his excursion to the North. It would |
| only be a preliminary foray, because he was due to go on leave in June, but he approached it with his usual almost desperate energy and enthusiasm. He set off in January in the Ford lorry with ‘the faithful’ Amadu and Adenyinna-wo-Nyame (Adinya for short), the red Pie-dog bitch, through Kumasi and up the new trunk road to Mampong and Ejura, then on to the beginning of the long red dirt ‘Great North Road’, crossing the Volta at his old stamping-ground of Yeji (in those days a ferry carried you over in ten minutes: now the other side is hardly visible across the man-made Volta Lake); to Salaga, the old slave-market and the last of the places he already |
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| knew, and along the tedious 170 miles, rattled to pieces by the road, scorched by the fiercer heat, passing apparently the same interminable stretch of brown, scrubby bush, much of it blackened and excoriated by fire (he went in the driest part of the dry season) until they reached the White Volta at Pwalagu. Here, as Rattray recorded in his notebook, the landscape suddenly changed. From an almost uninhabited flat wooded waste, it became a place where people lived: undulating hills and valleys, sometimes with dramatic outcrops of rock, and scattered amongst them isolated circular complexes of smooth-walled mud buildings, looking more like ceramic sculpture than architecture, with flat roofs or neat round thatch. Processions of women with pots on their heads, dressed only with a bunch of leaves at the back or back-and-front. The men were either naked or carried a goatskin across their back. ‘They may’, Rattray said, ‘without fear of contradiction, be described as a “primitive people”.174 |
| These people were Nankanse, what most Europeans (and almost |
| everybody now) called ‘Frafra’ — a ‘verbal monstrosity’ as Rattray called it, derived from their expression of salutation and thanks.175 His first place of call was Winkogo. Like other Northern ‘towns’ before the influence from the South and Europe made itself felt, Winkogo was no more than a constellation of Nankanse compounds, each one surrounded by a wide area of millet fields. When he stopped there and introduced himself at one of the compounds, he no doubt expected that he would have to rely on Mole or Hausa for communication, and it must have been something of a surprise when a young man was brought to him who could not only speak English but German as well, and could read and write both of them. He was called Victor Aboya. Aboya, meaning ‘lost’, was appropriate enough, since when he was hardly more than a baby he had been sold as a ‘domestic slave’ by his uncle in time of famine, for a few baskets of grain. He had been taken to the South, where he managed to free himself and was adopted by the Basel missionaries, who had taught him to read and write. Eventually he found his way back to Minkogo, in time to present himself as the ideal assistant to Rattray, who took him off with him immediately to Navrongo as his official ‘clerk’. In fact Aboya might well have claimed co- authorship of Rattray’s book. He not only virtually dictated most of the information on the Nankanse and interpreted for much of the rest, he |
| 174R.S. Rattray: The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, 1932, vol. 1, p. vii. 175As Rattray soon discovered, the nomenclature for the peoples of the Northern |
| Territories is a vexed issue. |
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| wrote a series of accounts in Nankane of rites de passage and folk-tales especially for the book. He was an exception to Rattray’s rule that literate interpreters virtually invent the material they are supposed to interpret — Aboya, he said, did not try and impress by ‘airing or dragging in his later acquired European knowledge’. |
| Aboya was also, of course, Rattray’s tutor in the Nankane language. |
| Even Rattray was daunted at first by the prospect of having to learn a dozen or more new languages — if he was to follow his own rule that you could not claim any accurate knowledge of a people until you had a colloquial grasp of their language. It turned out to be much easier than this suggests, because it was soon obvious that many of the languages were not much more than dialects of a common tongue. Apart from being of considerable ethnographic interest in itself (it suggested that the Northern ‘tribes’ were not nearly so distinct from each other as had been thought) it meant that he could often understand and make himself understood even when using a different language from his interlocutor. Even so, a good part of his time in the North was spent doggedly making out comparative vocabularies and lists of family classifications. |
| But besides the bread-and-butter work, there was more interesting |
| research to do. On the 23rd in Navrongo, he had his first experience of an almost universal feature of life in the North — the Soothsayer. He was taken to the compound of Asakeburunu, one of the local soothsayers, who, immediately he entered, scattered the contents of his goatskin bag, with its rattle (for calling the spirit), soothsayers’ stones, pumpkin shell (symbolising ‘mother’), ball from the stomach of a cow (‘death’ and ‘danger’), bangles, goat’s foot, etc., at his feet. Shaking his rattle, occasionally touching Rattray’s arm with his wand, and quietly droning ‘Nweyommm’ (hit straight), he consulted the sortileges. Eventually he told Rattray he would go hunting in such a direction (pointing West with his wand), and would kill an animal. This took Rattray aback, because he had indeed been going to ask him about a hunting expedition he was planning to Pina to look for elephants. ‘Very curious indeed’, he wrote in his notes, ‘more anon I hope’. He came back a few days later, ostensibly to make a plan of the compound, but no doubt also with the hope of more soothsaying. As he was making notes in one of the rooms, one of the women of the house came in to grind her guinea-corn, and improvised a song as she worked, which could be roughly translated as: ‘Good! Since long I have never had a cloth, but now a European has come to my room I will get a cloth’. Rattray took the hint. The Soothsayer had just come back from a funeral, where he had been looking into the cause of death — he had found that the man was killed by the spirit of his father. He consulted |
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| the contents of his bag again for Rattray, and told him that he would go and live at Tumu, and build a big house there, and also that he would not shoot a lion.176 As we will see, this was only partly accurate, and it was not enough to convert Rattray: ‘Time without number, I have wandered along in the cool of the evening to the compound of a friend, and on inquiring where he was, would be told that he had gone off to the baga man. Sure enough, I would find him there, squatting in front of the soothsayer, with one hand upon his magic wand, in — what seemed to me — a pitiful endeavour to try to discover why one or other of the hundred and one disappointments or worries which assail all of us in this work-a-day world, should have malignantly fallen his way’.177 |
| He stayed a few more weeks at Navrongo, during which he witnessed his |
| first religious ceremony in the North, the sacrifice of goat to the ancestors at Bolga. After that — presumably not on the advice of the soothsayer — he took off towards the West on a tour of the area he would get to know best, around Tumu, and to try and find some lions, which he failed to do on this occasion. He came back with useful notes on the Isala (many of them supplied by a ‘dear old man’ called Gyapa from Wobe (?), who spoke six languages beside his own, and a clear idea of the general form which his work would take. The vocabularies which he had made at Navrongo and on this tour showed him that there was a far greater linguistic homogeneity than he had expected amongst the various tribal groups, which meant that it would not be impossible for him to make a useful linguistic survey himself (learning a dozen or more unrelated languages would have been beyond even him). There was also enough cultural homogeneity for him to pass from tribe to tribe noting down the significant differences, rather than having to start from scratch, describing every detail of family structure, social organisation, religious beliefs, etc,. in very case. And there was also a problem which had soon struck him as being of central political importance in the Nankanse area, which occurred with only minor variations in all the other areas he visited. This was an apparently dual system of chieftaincy, with one man carrying out the obvious public political functions of chiefship, and another less obvious ‘priest-king’ — Ten’dana as he was called in Nankanse — whose function at first sight seemed more religious than political, though the people clearly regarded him as more than a priest. Rattray came to believe (how |
| 176R.S. Rattray, Diaries and Notebooks. 177R.S. Rattray (1932) Vol.II, p.313. |
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| soon it is difficult to tell) that in every case the Ten’dana was the original form of chieftaincy, and that invaders from the Moslem North had imposed their own, more autocratic form on the old system without changing it enough to remove the Ten’dana..178 The ‘new’ chiefs had most often been recognised by the British at the expense of the Ten’dana, or else a puppet had been put in place of both, so the issue had implications for current politics. |
| By the time he returned to Winkogo in March, he had decided that his |
| work would be no less than a total survey of the Northern Territories, and he immediately set to work on the Nankanse, whom he would use as his representative tribe. He was already accepted by Aboya’s relatives and friends, and he does not seem to have had to do much tentative preparation of the ground. He was taken to the ceremony of the First Sowing at the grove of Anudi, an Ancestor of Aboya’s section. He was excused having to strip naked, as the others had to, including Aboya. Prayers were said on his behalf as part of the ceremony (‘All of you look after this European; let him not fail to attend his work any day of headache and belly-ache or any part of his body paining him; that he may stay in this place and see only sweetness’) and he was given a hind leg of the sacrifice. It may also have been during this stay at Winkogo that he made the acquaintance of the original of the heroine in his novel The Leopard Priestess, Amalagane, ‘the most beautiful’. Her name appears in his notes among the list of Nankane names he was collecting, and on the same page another note: ‘If I were beautiful as these clouds how proud I would be” — Nankani appreciate beauty of nature’. He was understandably (at the time) reticent about his relations with African women, but his description of Amalagane in his novel leaves one in no doubt that he was attracted to beautiful black women as well as white. One’s interest in this question is not necessarily prurient. The history of sexual relations between black and white in the colonial situation will never be written accurately, being more befogged than any other subject by lies and evasions, but if we are interested in relations between black and white we cannot ignore the most intimate relationship of all. My own guess is that Rattray adopted the same attitude as most of the Africans with whom he dealt: that sexual intercourse is not a sin, except in certain social relationships and that marriage, as a social contract, and childbirth are much more important than sex. Where — as in the Northern Territories — it was sometimes common politeness to offer a ‘wife’ (and |
| 178Rattray may have been quick to interpret it in this way because in Central Africa he |
| had seen how one tribe (the Ngoni in that case) could simultaneously dominate another and be assimilated culturally by it, in the way he suggested for the Northern Territories. |
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| indeed sometimes one’s own wife) to a visitor, I imagine that he was sometimes happy with the situation. (I have some evidence for this, but of course it is hearsay.) This is not to say (as it has been said to me) that he left the Gold Coast strewn with his offspring: part of the difficulty of finding the truth is that his situation encouraged rumours. And it is quite certain that he strongly and loudly disapproved of political officers who used their position to have their way with the local girls. He was not a puritan in the usual sense of the word, but every word he wrote about African women (especially in The Leopard Priestess) suggests that he regarded them as people rather than sex-objects — though he was not above (or beneath) romanticising them. I am sure he was not a Don Juan: he was much too busy, and much of the time too ill, for that. A description of him by one of his Kwahu acquaintances seems to be reasonably accurate: “He was a white man who spoke Twi very well; who danced very well, like a woman, and who lived to do it; who chased after women; and who drank rather heavily”, though his interest in dancing stopped short of the ballroom variety, and others have described him as abstemeous with regard to alcohol.179 |
| From Winkogo he went east into the country of the Talense who, as he |
| soon discovered, were so like the Nankanse that he would hardly have thought of them as a different group if they had not been labelled separately on the maps. By this time his leave was only two months away and he was beginning to think less about anthropology than his next project, which was the solo flight back from U.K. to West Africa. After years of Rattray’s pestering the government for permission to buy a plane and use his leave travel money on it, Slater agreed, (possibly feeling that if Rattray crashed it would put an end to all the squabbling about his department). As soon as he heard that it was on, Rattray began seeing the remote country in which he was living as if from the air, with the natives below pointing up into the sky at the strange bird with straight wings passing on its way to Accra. The incongruousness of the picture appealed to him: it brought together the two sides of his life, his searching back into the past and his excitement about the future. It was brought home to him even more vividly at the beginning of May when he attended the Tong- Nab, which he described himself as ‘perhaps the most interesting and extraordinary of many curious rites which it has been my privilege to attend’. |
| 179Reported by P. Bartle, cited by J.G. Platvoet: Comparing Religions A Limitative |
| Approach, doctoral thesis, The Hague |
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| Tong-Nab means literally the Chief of Tong, which is the low range of |
| red hills rising out of the plain a few miles to the east of Winkogo. Although the hills are low, they are a different world from the flat lands with their compounds at regular intervals amongst the millet fields: ‘one enters a rugged defile, which winds up the hillside and then suddenly emerges on a grassy table-land, the home of countless flocks of guinea- fowl. There are no villages or compounds on the summit, for, after the punitive expedition many years ago, the people were ordered to come down from the hill-tops and live in the valley.’ The god lives in a cave, hung with filthy rags over the entrance, and a rock altar in front of another cave. On the morning of the 6th May, 1928, Rattray arrived at the first cave at about eight to find that he was the first of congregation, but soon afterwards pilgrims began to appear up the path, and to his astonishment many of them were not naked Tallensi but southerners, from Ashanti and the Coast, in city suits and smart frocks. He knew many of them from his days in Mampong and Kwahu and they were as surprised to see him as he was. This is what gave the ceremony its piquancy; for it was like a recapitulation of his career, and a reminder of how interlinked were the North and the South, the old and the new. The ceremony was conducted by the chief of Tengzugu and the Tendan, both magnificent-looking men, almost naked but hung with amulets and fetishes. The pilgrims were asked to undress, and as if symbolically Rattray saw the city clothes, garden- party hats and pith helmets, laid on the rocks while their owners joined their Northern brothers in the cave, where they were packed in so close that Rattray had a person sitting on each knee. He was asked to give his name and what he wanted, so through Aboya he made his by now familiar speech about the purpose of his work and asking the god’s blessing on his task, and adding that he hoped one day to fly over the spot, and promising a cow if his wishes were granted. The Tendan carried the prayer on to the god, translating the part about flying to: ‘let him go and return like a hawk, that you may be able to receive your cow’ — he clearly thought that Rattray was talking metaphorically. |
| ’Other pilgrims now rose one at a time, and the cave echoed to the old |
| familiar Ashanti tongue’. A store-keeper from Mampong complained that he got no profit from his store, or from the two cars he kept for hire. A cocoa farmer from Kwahu said that his cocoa trees were all diseased. A clerk said he always paid his debts and his neighbours paid their debts to him, but he still had no money. Barren women and sick of all kinds added their requests: ‘That was all; the statement, the repetition in Talene to the god, a wail, the clapping of hands, silence, a shuffling or a squelch of a |
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| sweaty naked body, as the next pilgrim squirmed to his feet to tell of his troubles’.180 After the service, they backed out into the sunlight and were led in silence to the second cave where the sacrifices were made, Rattray’s sheep being slaughtered last of all. Then they went back to the place where they had undressed and were smeared with a line of red clay on the cheeks, breasts, forearms, legs and backs. The southerners put on their clothes and Rattray said his farewells to them. |
| The leave was spent preparing Akan Ashanti Folk-Tales for the press, |
| and preparing himself and his plane for the flight to the West Coast. The plan was a yellow de Havilland bi-plane, Cirrus-Moth, No. GEBZZ, which he christened with less originality than usual, ‘Ashanti’. He commuted from the Junior Constitutional Club in Piccadilly to Stag Lane airport at Hendon where he systematically indoctrinated himself in every detail of the working of the engine and the plane’s structure. He was not a natural mechanic but he made up for that with doggedness. Stag Lane was a romantic place for him: non-stop, long-distance and solo flight records were being broken almost daily, and names like Lady Bailey and Sir Pyers Mostyn being bandied about made it seem like a new Arthurian court. There had already been solo flights to Cape Town and Karachi, so West Africa would not be one of the most sensational prizes, but Rattray’s project had some original features. Besides the flight itself, he wanted to show how useful a plane could be for a political officer in a remote territory; and it was another way of putting West Africa on the map. Like most records, its impressiveness is reduced by subsequent advances, but if we remember that his life was literally going to depend — as he put it — on an accurate adjustment to a millimetre with a spanner, that much of the ground he was covering was uninhabited and almost uninhabitable, that his plane was like a small open sports car with wings and nothing like a modern jet liner, that he had no radio and there was no organised rescue service, we can begin to feel what an adventure it was. |
| Certainly the possibility of his death was real enough to him. He made |
| careful arrangements with Norrington at the Clarendon Press about what should be done with the Folk Tales if anything happened to him. His worst fear was that they would be handed over to someone with a missionary background who would bowdlerise them — to ‘missionize’ the Ashanti, as he put it. There had been problems over the illustrations, which were of doubtful quality in the first place and difficult to reproduce; then it looked |
| 180Rattray (1932) Vol.II pp.363,4. |
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| as if the book would be too expensive for the more popular audience they had in mind without cutting. He also hoped that Law and Constitution would be out before he took off — ‘I want to see it before I die (fly)’, he told Norrington.181 it was almost as if he expected to finish his Gold Coast career with a spectacular accident: though perhaps it was as much that he wanted to make the sheltered university people’s flesh creep. |
| He took off from Croydon at 11.37 in the morning of the 5th December, |
| 1928.182. It turned out to be almost the worst day of the flight. As soon as he left the aerodrome he ran into impenetrable fog and could not get about it, however hight he climbed. After that, he tried to get below it, but was till in fog when he saw tree-tops almost on a level with him. Then he was over water, and came in to land on what he thought was a football pitch but turned out to be a steeply sloping field. It turned out that he was at Rochester, and luckily just opposite the Short Seaplane Works. The fog seemed to be clearing, so after getting his bearings from one of the Short pilots he took off again. At Maidstone the fog descended again and he only reached Lympne by following river, road and railway with his wheels almost touching the surface. His landing at Lympne was made almost blind. Everyone was most surprised to see him, and he turned out to be the only person to get through from Croydon that day |
| Refusing to be put off by even gloomier forecasts the next day, he took |
| of from France, starting behind the ‘giant’ Argosy air-liner so that he could hang on its tail; but he was soon left behind when the Argosy’s pilot lost sight of him and thought he had turned back. He touched down at Abbeville and, because the weather at Paris was so bad, at Poix. Next day he was on to Beauvais, passed over Paris seeing nothing but the tip of the Eiffel Tower, lost Le Bourget, landed on a field near a factory to ask his way, was told to follow the Route Nationale and landed at Le Bourget a few minutes later. There were two days and seven landings between him and London: he had done the same trip earlier in the year ‘between an afternoon and evening of the same summer’s day’. |
| He decided he had learned his lesson and waited, not patiently but |
| determinedly, for another ten days before he was able to start again. Fog |
| 181Oxford University Press, Rattray file. 182The account of the flight is based on his article 'A Solo Flight from England to the |
| Gold Coast in Cirrus-Moth G.E BZZ' in Blackwood Tales from the Outposts (1933) pp.l53-204. |
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