| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| It was solved by his new Isala acquaintances who told him to hang his |
| rafters with thorn scrub, which eventually got rid of them — ‘all, that is, save one determined pair which insisted on remaining, and eventually hatched out a young brood in my bedroom.’ |
| He soon found that he had made the right choice of area for hunting: |
| ‘Almost every night, and more especially just before the dawn, we |
| heard the discontented woof of some dissatisfied lion or the full-throated reverberating roar which speaks of “good hunting”. The snoring-like grunts of leopards and the uees of hyenas prowling round the sleeping compounds in search of stray dogs could always be heard, and their respective pug-marked or claw-marked spoor could often be seen in the muddy station compound. Once a whole troop of red colobus monkeys came dancing and swinging across the compound almost up the bungalow, and flocks of wild guinea-fowls could constantly be seen mingling with my tame ones, tripping it with little quick affected struts accompanied by the ear-splitting, strident, irritating clamour peculiar to these birds’. |
| Once he looked up from his vegetable garden to see a leopard gazing |
| languidly at him from the branch of a tree. Later, the wild life came too close for comfort when he was awoken in the night by noises in the next room. By the moonlight he could see ‘a heaving mass which was composed of flying newspapers, cushions, coverlets, cats, and dominating all, a great black form with hindquarters reared high and head buried viciously low’. He fired his small automatic pistol three times, but each time the cartridge failed, and the leopard had time to gather up his dog Adinya and leave through the length of the bungalow and over the verandah to the ground ten feet below. Following it outside, they were met by ‘a little dark figure swaying and lurching towards us’. It was Adinya, too badly damaged to survive beyond the following afternoon — ‘I need not try to explain to anyone who has ever lived much alone in Africa what the companionship of a dog is to his master and what Adinya’s loss therefore meant to me’. |
| In twenty-two years in West Africa he had not yet seen a lion, and when |
| he saw that the rains were not making all travel impossible, he packed his staff into the Ford lorry, together with an Isala hunter called Kawai standing in for his previous guide, Salafu, who had to attend a mother-in- law’s funeral custom, and set off south towards the country around |
| 170 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| Asantegyan, near the Sisili river. The lorry had to be left after half a day and the rest of the way was covered on foot. They arrived at the small and by no means lion-proof rest-house at Asantegyan just before sundown: |
| ‘The country in these parts was comparatively open. It was dotted at |
| intervals of about a bow shot’s range with the round flat-roofed huts of the Isala. Cattle, sheep and goats grazed around the compounds, either in charge of Fulani, who gave their services in return for the milk, or of little Isala youths armed with toy-like bows and toy-like but deadly poisoned arrows. The heads of ‘sections’ who came to pay me a visit and bring the customary ‘dashes’ (presents) reported constant losses of cattle and constant encounters with lions, with whom, as the reader may have already guessed, this trip was not wholly unconcerned’. |
| From the rest-house he and Kawai made excursions into the orchard |
| country in search of lions, sometimes returning in the evening to set out again when they heard that a lion had killed nearby while they were away. After nearly a week of this, he decided to give up and wait for news while checking his notes on the Nankane with Aboya. He was rewarded a few days later by a Fulani herdsman reporting that he had left seven lions watching his herd of cattle. They went back to where the herd of a hundred head grazed, watched over by the Fulani’s ‘brother’ leaning on his long spear. The ‘brother’ pointed towards the edge of the bush about a hundred yards away: |
| ‘There, in an archway formed by the overhanding foliage of two trees |
| which formed a green portal, as it were, to the jungle-bush behind, sat a very large lion with two lesser ones, one on each side, lying on the grass beside him. As we watched, a fourth lion passed slowly across their front and walked into the bush. The whole picture, I recollect thinking at the time, was almost too artistically perfect to seem natural’. |
| They tried to encourage the lions by driving the game towards them, but |
| they would not come nearer, so Rattray circled round them to approach from behind, directed from a tree by Kawai. This was almost too successful, as Kawai indicated that he was in the middle of a circle of lions |
| 171 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| of different sexes and sizes, and eventually two lions took up a position in the open close by looking with interest in his direction. ‘I suddenly remembered a picture which I had once seen in ‘Punch’ of a little terrified man, gun in hand, helmet well off his forehead, whence it was pushed back by his erected hairs, while underneath was the inscription, “When you go out to look for lions, are you sure it’s lions you wish to meet?”’. He retreated to Kawai’s tree, from which he could see all seven lions spread fanwise around them. |
| ‘The whole situation was rapidly becoming ridiculous. Here were, at |
| last, after years of waiting, seven lions all sitting about without the least intention of running away — in fact, apparently undecided whether they would sup off cow or hunter. Here also was a little man very determined to bag if possible three of four of the lions, but looking for conditions infinitely more in his favour and to his liking before he could screw up courage to open the attack’. |
| He eventually broke the stalemate by climbing down and looking for a |
| position where he could get a clear shot without being too closes. Once again he got more than he had asked for: |
| ‘I was watching to see how many pairs of ears I could distinguish in |
| the grass, when Kawai touched me sharply on the arm. I turned round to see a large lioness. Looking almost white in the blazing sunlight — about ten feet away — and walking towards us with head slightly averted. Instantaneously she gave a queer sort of ‘woof!’ and a tremendous sideways spring, and then stood stock-still broadside on in the open. I am convinced now she had been coming to lie down in the shade of our bush, and that she was more scared of us than we of her, and that is saying a great deal as far as I am concerned’. |
| He shot at her; she leaped in the air, fell, then picked herself up and took |
| off into the long grass, while the other lions also took off in all directions. They followed her tracks and found her lying dead ‘with a hole behind her shoulder and a thin trickle of blood coming from her mouth’. |
| 172 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| A week later, back at Tumu, he was distracted from his shaving at 6 |
| a.m. by the trumpeting of an angry elephant. It was standing on his flower- bed below the verandah. Before he could find the appropriate bullets the station staff had scared it off, so he followed it with Salafu into the bush. It had uprooted a mango tree, flattened out an empty hut and almost given Aboya’s wife a heart attack as she came from the well. After a morning’s tracking, in which they had to cross a fifty-foot river, they found the herd which the bull had joined: |
| ‘With a bullet between the eye and ear, my favourite shot, I dropped |
| the last elephant I shall ever shoot. Down he sank, so instantly dead that he did not have time to topple over. A whoop of joy from Salafu, a wild stampede of the rest of the herd, and we ran and climbed triumphantly on top of this mountain of still twitching flesh’. |
| Salafu took a photograph of him seated on the elephant’s knee, looking, |
| as he had never before, like a senior colonial officer due for retirement in his solar topee, neat white socks and face weathered by sun and sickness. |
| In these last months in Africa he seems to have enjoyed, more than at |
| any time in his earlier career, both the solitariness of his job and the human contacts which it gave him. He found the ‘Frafra’ and Isala almost ridiculously easy to deal with, unconfused as they still were by the political and social upheavals of the south. Young and old had the natural dignity which he usually found only among the old in Ashanti and which comes from having nothing to gain or lose by intercourse with the stranger. He had regular, though not frequent, visits from British officers, most of them of course younger than him now and treating him with an awe which he enjoyed, while he also enjoyed deflating it. One of these was Stewart Simpson, who had just gone out as a vet and has described his first meeting with Rattray: |
| ‘My first few months in the country were spent at Tamale, the |
| Territory Headquarters. I heard many people, African and European speak about Rattray. One was John Symond, who was a provincial agricultural officer at Tamale, a keen hunter in the Tumu area when he had periods of local leave. He advised me to get in touch with Rattray when I was posted to the Northern Province. I had built up a mental |
| 173 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| picture of Rattray and imagined him to be tall, tough looking, perhaps bearded and altogether the sort of “white hunter” who could eat a duiker for breakfast. I was indeed surprised when I did meet him for the first time. He was small, slim and soft-spoken, his facial features deeply tanned. I cannot remember the colour of his eyes, but I can only describe them as being keen and penetrating. Although he was small and slim he was immensely tough and on my first hunting trip with him at Batisan, to the east of Tumu, he almost walked me off my feet. Accompanied by two local hunters provided by the Chief of Batisan we went out after Buffalo in the valley of the Sisili river and although we followed the herd from early in the morning to late in the afternoon neither of us got a shot in.’185 |
| I should not give the impression that Rattray spent the entire time |
| hunting. In rather less than eighteen months he collected enough anthropological information to fill thirty-four notebooks, covering fifteen tribal areas. But where hunting was still an essential part of the economy he could claim that the two activities went together. He must have felt that the beginning and end of his career were joining, harking back to his time amongst the Chinyanja and Ngoni, when the seeds of his anthropological interests were sown at the end of a day’s hunting by a camp fire, when the old men told stories of how things used to be and how they began. |
| In May, he had a letter from Kingsley-Williams of Achimota asking his |
| help in their campaign to adapt traditional ways and beliefs to Christianity rather than presenting them as alternatives. It was partly in response to the argument expressed in Rattray’s preface in Ashanti Law and Constitution, that missionaries should encourage an African ‘idiom of the soul’, but Rattray’s answer to Williams politely but firmly threw the issue back in his teeth. It is the frankest statement of his own attitude to African religion — much franker than his prefaces — and as such it is a valuable document. It shows the ‘essential Rattray’, rather than Rattray presenting himself to the outside world: |
| Nangode |
| 185Letter to the author. |
| 174 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| 21st May 1929 |
| Dear Kingsley Williams, Yours of 6/5/29 just received. I am in the bush, away from all my |
| books and notes and I can’t recollect off hand what I have written about the subject you mention. |
| You are correct of course in supposing ‘ancestor propitiation’ is basis |
| of the African’s whole social and spiritual world out here. Up in these parts every link lacking in Ashanti to prove that may be found. I don’t know how to help you, though, to bring that into Christian teaching. Not being one myself, I would have no compunction in advocating a hen or sheep to an ancestral spirit, if I thought the old fellow would really like it; anyhow, the occasion would be one when I would also possibly recall the old boy’s virtues or benefit by calling to mind his vices, and possibly would strive to emulate one and avoid the other. Superstition, the fetish, witchcraft — I agree and have advocated just what you suggest, i.e. the test-tube and the lab for all that kind of d__d nonsense. See final chapter of my last book, Ashanti Law. |
| You have omitted one other aspect of W.A. belief — the animistic |
| creed. What about it? Here is some deep doggerel I once wrote à propos that (writing from memory):186 |
| Animism |
| White man, rob them not of this thing nor scoff, But rather learn from them instead, ‘The Great God’ to them seems so very far off, They’ll know Him only when they’re dead. |
| 186I have tidied up Rattray's text a little, but it is still not perfect, as he explains. It is |
| easier to follow the sense if it is understood that the nature-gods (i.e. abosom) are speaking. |
| 175 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| ‘Tis true that our gentle187 souls seem neglected, The cult of the forest-flower, some dew-drop that quivers, And we mostly are sought for from where is expected Wrath, like the seas or the rocks or the rivers. Such are we who oppose you and slay you, Who come to this land of ours, denying us a soul. You, the white man, ‘nature’s intransigent son’, Who wander so far in quest of your goal. But they’re nearer to God who seek comfort in these: The soul in the sunset, the whispering of trees. In which I show myself incapable of anything but jingle and also stand |
| revealed as a rank pagan. |
| Congrats. on getting the little son, and I must write Thomas about |
| getting his little silversmith (?). |
| Hope you keep fit. I am very, but it’s very lonely at times, but a great |
| and wonderful field up here. |
| Best wishes always. So sorry I can’t help you really. I had a real |
| straight talk with H.E. about John Scragge (sic). I can’t do “no more”.188 |
| 187The sense might be clearer if this read 'gentler'] 188This refers to his attempt to have Scragg appointed as his official successor. Slater |
| now felt that Rattray had covered enough ground to make it unnecessary to make another full-time appointment. Besides, the effects of the economic depression were beginning to be felt; cuts had to be made and this seemed a painless place to make them. |
| 177 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| Yrs ever, R.S. Rattray Tell me what you think of my story in June Blackwoods (I think).189 |
| Glad you confined yourself to refereeing. I think rugger is silly out here — too dangerous from a climatic point of view. |
| R.190 |
| There were deeper personal undertones to the remarks about sacrificing |
| to ancestors. A week before he had heard that his uncle Maynard Rattray had died. ‘Uncle Blessings’, as they called him, was the last surviving of Robert Haldane Rattray’s sons, who had retired soon after forty from the Indian Civil Service, giving the family asthma as his excuse. He never married, saying that if he did he would not be able to go fishing at the hydropathic at Peebles, and looked on his nephews and nieces as his children instead. He had helped Rattray with such money as he could afford at regular intervals in his career, and had been part of the household at Hastings and it was no formality when Rattray wrote in his mourning letter to his sister: |
| ‘My deep sympathy goes out to you all. We will never forget the old |
| love, and he will always be one of those I shall look forward to greet if there is any hereafter where such things are possible’. 189His story of the flight in G.EBZZ, which Blackwoods had just accepted. 190C.K. Williams: Papers, Correspondence, etc. I have slightly amended the text of the poem, to correct obvious errors in Rattray's transcription. |
| 178 |
| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| So ancestors, death and the hereafter were already on his mind when |
| Williams wrote to him. But the poem is concerned not so much with ancestors as Nature. It is a strange mixture of Wordsworth (in sentiment though not in style) and anthropology, and it shows how he identified the African’s relationship with the lesser gods with his own feeling for the beauty of sunsets and the wind in the trees. I cannot believe that they rally were identical — there is a far cry between the aesthetic experience of a middle-class Scot brought up in the country and that of an African peasant whose life is at the mercy of natural forces. At the same time, we should remember that Rattray had put his own life at the mercy of natural forces on more than one occasion and so he knew what it felt like. The point of contact between his and the Ashantis’ belief about nature is expressed in the lines from the drum-poetry which he was so fond of quoting: |
| The stream crosses the path, The path crosses the stream; Which is the elder? Did we not cut a path to meet the stream? The stream began long, long ago, The stream came from the Creator. Man and nature have a common source, and nature comes first both in |
| time and importance. A late-Romantic Scot feels this in the solitary contemplation of the sunset: an Ashanti will feel it when he consults the obosom at the river or rock. |
| The letter to Kingsley Williams shows the two sources of Rattray’s |
| interest in anthropology, and two reasons why he made such a success of it. The first was his own passionate concern for family, and sense of the importance of relations within the family which allowed him to understand the importance of family — in the narrowest and broadest senses — in small African societies. The second was his sympathy with the African’s generalised religious sense, which found the superhuman wherever it looked rather than in a creed. Perhaps it even shows how his limitations suited his work. The fashion recently has been to treat members of exotic societies as thinkers first (if often unconscious thinkers), rather than doers |
| 179 |