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| or believers. Rattray was not really an intellectual himself and his beliefs, as we can see from the letter, were quite simple. This prevented him from making Ashanti thought seem much more coherent than it actually was. (It could well be argued that even so he made it seem more coherent than it was.) Cultures are, of course, always complex and often surprisingly coherent, but in such a way as is usually visible only to an anthropologist and only rarely to even the smallest group of intellectuals within the society itself. Like the above average members of the societies he studied, Rattray constructed a rather simplest rule-of-thumb pattern of ideas against which their life could be understood. Especially when compared with the great generalising anthropologists of earlier and later generations (J.G. Frazer, Claude Lévi-Strauss), he did not let the wood hide the trees. |
| Even in the far north, away from any obvious reminders of Ashantiland, |
| he saw his work in relation to the Ashanti — as is shown by the title which he chose for his next book: The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland. He was still in search of origins. When he first arrived in the North, the sight of the near-naked inhabitants assured him that he was going back from the ‘barbarous’ state of the Ashanti to the truly ‘primitive’ and in the Nankanse and Isala he saw, in their pristine state, institutions which the Ashanti had refined so as to become more mysterious. The matrilineal system of the Ashanti was one of the more obvious survivals (be believed) of the earlier state. But even in the North the primeval society had been to some extent overlaid by invaders from the Moslem empires further to the north, though they had had very little influence except at the political centre — i.e. the chieftaincy. This is how things used to be: |
| ‘Wealth in our modern sense was unknown; the people went about |
| naked; their property consisted only in bows and arrows, pots, calabashes, and live stock. Disputes were settled by the Elders of each family group. The priestly ruler was appealed to only in cases affecting a breach of the tribal taboos, or in matters of wider than family import. Fear of the anger of ancestral or other spirits moulded every action to a degree far surpassing anything found even among the ancestor- worshipping Ashanti — ancestral spirits moved between God and man and man and God — a link which is missing or less obvious in the South; men and women spent a considerable part of their lives at the soothsayers’ shrines....’191 191R.S. Rattray, Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, 1932, Vol 1, p. xiv. |
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| But the longer he stayed in the North the less he saw the pattern of life, |
| either in the North or the South, as a static, almost eternal state occasionally disrupted by the incursions of invaders, and the more as constantly dissolving and reforming and, in the case of the Ashanti, developing more sophisticated political forms in the process: ‘The reshuffling of tribal units and the formation of territorial groupings, these are the origins we have to trace. We have been confusing, I believe, the migration of a few families of a higher and more civilised type, who produced these changes, with the migration of a people.’192 |
| It was the nearest he came to answering the problem which has |
| continued to befog not only anthropology but, even more, African politics: when you talk about the Ashanti, the Yoruba or the Ibo, to whom are you actually referring? The people living in a certain geographical area? Those who call themselves Ashanti, Yoruba, etc.? Those who speak a certain language? Those who share a common history or a common origin? In the North he saw how different the answers to each of these questions are, without the existence of a quasi-nation-state such as existed in Ashanti. Where, instead of the elaborate court of the Ashanti chief standing at the centre of a cluster of family houses, you had a countryside scattered with little fortress-like compounds, each apparently turning its back on its nearest neighbour which may be half a mile away, the family immediately seemed to take on more importance than the tribe. And where Isala has freely intermarried with Tampolense, Namnam with Kusase, the tribe itself seems to dissolve as a concept. It was left to Rattray’s successor in the North, Meyer Fortes, to show the full complexity of family relations in a typical area of the North, but Rattray had already (despite the title of his book) shown how the Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland were more homogeneous, and also more fragmented, than the name ‘tribe’ suggests. |
| However, this did not stop him looking for origins, especially when |
| towards the end of the year, when the retreat rains made westward travel impossible, he visited the Lobi country near the French border. The Lobi had the reputation of being the most primitive of the Gold Coast tribes. When Rattray visited them, the French were conducting a campaign against them across the border, and those in British territory were understandably wary. But Rattray discovered that he could communicate with them in Mole, and soon found them approachable. He said they were ‘absolutely |
| 192Rattray (1932) Vol.I p.xx. |
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| delightful to work among, and I have carried away very pleasant remembrances of my stay among them.’193 He thought that he had found among the Lobi the evidence he was after, of a double system of matrilineal and patrilineal clans which he felt must have preceded the more one-sided system in Ashanti, though his successors established that there was no evolutionary process at work, but that (to quote Fortes) ‘in every primitive society both sides of the family always count’, in his review of Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland.194He was given evidence, too, of how the coming of the Europeans had upset the traditional order. In the old days they had had no other chief than the Tengsob, the head of the clan who was also trustee for clan land and head-priest: |
| ‘Formerly we did not know anything about Chiefs. In olden times any |
| man who had many sons commanded respect, he was Libiesob (the rich man). When the Europeans came, these were the men who came forward to meet them with a white fowl, while the Tengsob ran away. They (i.e. the former) became the white man’s Chiefs.’195 |
| As we have seen in most cases the puppet chief was (according to |
| Rattray) a Moslem heir to invaders. This example showed that there did not have to be a chief already in situ for the British to recognise one. It confirmed Rattray in his conviction that under the colonial regime the Tendanas, or Tengsobs, were the neglected sheet-anchors of traditional society in the Northern tribes, as the queen mothers had been in Ashanti, and it was his mission to attract recognition for them. And as with the queen mothers in Ashanti, he was not thanked by the D.C.’s. ‘If Rattray suggests that Tingdamas in Dagomba should be chiefs’, the local D.C. wrote to Duncan-Johnston when Rattray’s report reached him, ‘I must with all due deference disagree with him. It has repeatedly proved a failure here |
| 193Ibid. Vol II p.425. 194M. Fortes: Review of 'Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland' in The Journal of the African Society Jan. 1933, p.93 195Rattray (1932) Vol II p.429. |
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| even when they have been made into small headmen.’196 And again, they had a point. As the behaviour of the Lobi Tengsobs showed when the British arrived, a traditional priest of the land will not necessarily be able to cope with the new situation. |
| While he was visiting the Lobi, the Colonial Office was debating with |
| Accra about his future. He had written to Ellis asking again what chances there were of staying on as Deputy Chief Commissioner or Secretary of Native Affairs. J.E.W. Flood wrote back to Slater: ‘Rattray (on whom be peace, though I doubt whether he really deserves it!) has asked Ellis who is the only man whom he really knows in the Office, what are the chances of his further promotion in the Gold Coast .... I am sure that he would make a mess of being Chief Commissioner, even in the Northern Territories.’197 Slater’s answer has not survived, but he certainly agreed that it was time for this gaudy ornament of the Gold Coast to be put on the shelf. |
| He spent Christmas 1929 at Navrongo, and by way of a Christmas |
| present heard that he had been awarded a Doctorate (D.Sc.) by Oxford. He immediately wrote to tell the Colonial Office, and added ‘I would also beg to request that you will be so kind as to notify His Excellency, the Governor of the Gold Coast, whose unfailing kindness to me, and interest, assistance, and encouragement in all my work, has so largely contributed to the generous recognition which my anthropological work in the Gold Coast has been accorded by yourself and others.’198 It is not recorded whether Flood was mollified by this, or if it increased his irritation. |
| By Christmas, he had gathered notes on the Nankanse, Talense, |
| Namnam, Builsa, Dagaba, Lobi, Wala, Isala, Awuna and Kasena. In January, he moved to the Eastern corner of the country to add the Kusasi and Mamprusi — and taking in some hunting with Simpson. Then back via Tumu and south into the broad thinly populated belt of Gonja country. He had heard by now that his time was quite definitely up (‘he has had a long innings’ — Flood), so at the beginning of March he packed up his belongings, said farewell to Kanton, the Tumu Chief, to John Kinjanga and the rest, and set off for Tamale, calling in at Zuarungu to say good-bye to Simpson and the other British officers. He dropped Aboya and his wife at |
| 196A Duncan-Johnstone: Papers, Rhodes House MSS Afr. 197Foreign Office file. 198Ibid. |
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| Winkongo, so by the time he reached Tamale he had only the faithful Amadu with him. |
| It was not quite the end of his field-work. From Tamale he went off to |
| Yendi for a few days to interview the Dagomba chief (the Ya Na) and members of his court. He realised by now that he would not be able to do justice to the empires, rather than chieftaincies, of Gonja and Dagomba lying geographically and culturally, between the ‘true’ North and Ashantiland, which were to have taken up the third volume of his book. There was not time, and, besides, Cardinall, Armstrong and others had already been working on them for a constitutional conference at Yendi at the end of the year. And, for once, he was entirely dependent on an interpreter, a Mr. Tamakloe who, if his name is anything to go by, was not a Dagomba but an Ewe. The 15th of March was his last day at Yendi, recording from the Mba Dogo, the chief’s cook (and a rather more important official than that might suggest), the ceremony of a Na’s enstoolment. The last words he noted down were the new chief’s farewell to the sub-chiefs who had helped in the ceremony: ‘My uncles, you have spent some time in Yendi; God has given you lucky heads; return to your lands and assist me in making the earth good.’199 It must have seemed like his own valediction. |
| He called in at Achimota to say his good-byes there, expressing to |
| Williams his frustration at having to leave before he had done more than take a glimpse at the North, and at the Castle to see Slater. It must have been an agreeable interview — nothing was easier for Slater than saying good-bye to him. And on the 15th, he sailed on the Aba home for his last leave. |
| ‘As I write these last lines’, he said in his Blackwood’s article “My Last |
| Tour” describing his last hunting exploits, written in Hastings just after he returned, |
| ‘I can turn my head and see two yellow tusks leaning against a trim |
| glass-fronted cabinet. Outside the window, the sunlight dances on the English Channel; an aeroplane has just droned overhead; below lies the ‘Old Town’, with its red roofs and grey house-tops. Beachy Head stands out clearly, seemingly just beyond a green strip whereon old Hastings |
| 199Rattray MS Diary. |
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| Castle appears to cling lest it topple over into the sea. It is a perfect day in early summer in as perfect a spot as England can offer to the returned wanderer. |
| ‘Why is it, then, that the home-comer is not content? In the answer to |
| this question lies the secret of Africa’s hold upon all who have really come to grips with her, who have ever come under her spell, who have ever duped themselves into imagining that they have eluded her. In the moment of self-congratulation at this escape, which is epitomised in the word ‘retirement’, one suddenly comes to realise that Africa was, after all, the victor. She will always hold you with memories or with quiet confidences which, like those of a bride, only she and you can ever share in common.200 |
| A little trite perhaps, but no doubt it accurately expressed what he felt |
| on being stranded on a quiet English coast after thirty years in the deep. |
| 200“My Last Tour”, p.432. |
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| Chapter 11. An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| In retrospect there is an elegiac quality in Rattray’s years of retirement, |
| though at the time most people who met him were struck by his youthfulness. He was still hoping to marry the French mother of his child (now being looked after by his sister ‘Boo’), and went to stay with her in the Pyrenees for his first Christmas, putting together the book on the Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland, which he combined with skiing — something he had always hoped to do, but had never had the chance. Then he went on to Berlin to take a short course on German, so as to give him another European language as a qualification for an academic post. Back in England, he stayed at first in Hastings near his mother and sister. He applied for various professorships and fellowships, including the Chair of Anthropology at Sydney, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship ‘to study psychology with a view to its application to my anthropological data collected during the past twenty years on the Gold Coast.’201 Neither was successful: he was too narrowly specialist for the first and too ‘mature’ for the second. Marett did his best to persuade the Colonial Office to find a use for him, but the economic situation was making things tight and in any case many of the Colonial Office people felt that they knew him too well. The university academics expected him to follow up his ethnographic work with something more theoretical, but he disappointed them. |
| 201Foreign Office file. |
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| He described his state of mind during these first years in a pot-boiling |
| article called ‘An Old Coaster Comes Home’.202 ‘A certain restlessness’, he said, ‘coupled with vain heart-longings for Africa and the old scenes, which seems at times to assail the sojourner who returns to settle down at last in “the old country” may become almost a menace to that happiness usually associated with quiet retirement. He wanders from house to house, from home to home, more than half-fearful to commit himself to any particular spot or habitation. Moreover, he thanks his lucky stars for his timidity as he flees, after a brief trial, from garden city or suburban “villa", and again sallies forth in quest of the perfect home’. It took him nearly three years to find a point of rest, in a picturesque cottage in the Buckinghamshire village of Winslow. He ‘did it up’ called it, with some self-parody, ‘The Old Homestead’, and settled down in it for the rest of life. People always referred to him as ‘Captain Rattray’, which he did nothing to discourage. He bred dachshunds: do doubt there was some narcissism in his attraction towards the plucky little red-haired animals. Opposite ‘The Old Homestead’ was a church whose chime on the hour Rattray translated as ‘This great big flea is biting me I feel it on my bum’. |
| Winslow was almost exactly half-way between Oxford and Cambridge, |
| which was convenient because by now he was teaching trainee colonial officers taking the anthropology course at both universities, in Twi and Hausa. But it was much nearer to Dunstable, the headquarters of the new sport of gliding. The distance reflected quite accurately the relative importance of these places in his life. |
| At the same time, he did not leave Africa behind him completely. His |
| Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland came out in 1932. He knew that it would not have the same authority as his Ashanti books, that it would be not much more than an introductory survey; though in his usual way he made a political point in his preface, this time that administrators should pay more attention to the Tendanas (the traditional priestly ‘lords of the earth’), rather than ignoring them in favour of the secular chiefs, who Rattray claimed were often foreign newcomers. Fortes, who was to make the classic study of a Northern people, the Tallensi, in the late ‘thirties (largely through Rattray’s encouragement), welcomed Rattray’s book enthusiastically; but some of Rattray’s old colleagues took the opportunity to get some of their resentment off their chests. C. Vivian wrote a long article, rather than a review, in the West African Review, under the title of |
| 202In 1934 Christmas Souvenir of Nigerian Affairs, pp. 104-8. |
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| ‘Anthropology in the Gold Coast: Discoveries of Known Facts.’203 It started with a bitter attack, not just on Rattray’s book but on the institution of Government Anthropologist itself, and particularly for keeping on Rattray at the rank of Provincial Commissioner for so long, doing what most officers did anyway in the evenings as a hobby. ‘Captain Rattray .... chose to work by himself rather than to correlate, verify and edit the accumulated knowledge of previous writers, and the records of present-day observers in the field’. He also accused Rattray of taking all the credit for the Golden Stool settlement. Another, milder, review in The Geographical Journal by A.W. Cardinall again accused him of ignoring earlier sources, possibly influenced by the fact that Rattray had only referred twice, dismissively, to his own Natives of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.204 |
| Rattray did not bother to answer, but J.B. Danquah, Ofori Atta’s |
| nephew, who had once planned to make a study similar to Rattray’s of the Akan people and had gracefully stepped aside when he saw how well Rattray was doing, took up the argument for Rattray. Under the title of ‘A Defence of Captain Rattray’s Work’, he answered Vivian’s criticism by saying that the value of Rattray’s work lay in its independence of secondary sources: ‘As a Twiman with both Akim and Ashanti ancestry .... I may be privileged to say that no truer and more intimate or better-informed record of the customs and institutions of the Akan-Ashanti peoples of the Gold Coast is extant in the English language ... it seems to me certain that school, college and university books .... will, in future, draw largely upon the inexhaustible mine in Rattray.’205 |
| Ignoring these snipping attacks, Rattray was opening a campaign of his |
| own against the institution of Indirect Rule itself, from the security and freedom of his retirement. It began quietly in a review of Stephen Gwynn’s Life of Mary Kingsley in 1932. If it is possible to be in love with a dead person you have never met, then Rattray was in love with Mary Kingsley. In fact, it is hard to believe that he had not met her, when he talks of ‘the beautiful, elusive, almost whimsical expression of her face’ and ‘the |
| 203The West African Review, Feb. 1933, p.29. 204The Geographical Journal, Feb. 1933, p.175. 205The West African Review, Feb.1933, p.29. |
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| haunting charm of her utterly fearless nature’.206 Most of the review is hagiography. Like other people in love, he ascribed his own values to her: her belief in traditional African culture, her ambivalence towards the colonial establishment, her feeling that African religion was like her own, and above all her courage (‘that “lovely virtue” ... which Barrie so rightly extols"). He said that his own books owed ‘everything of value which they contain to her example and inspiration.’ |
| At the end of the review he quoted Mary Kingsley’s words on Indirect |
| Rule: |
| ‘Ruling on European lines through natives is not the same thing as |
| ruling on African principles through native rulers .... The English tradition is to maintain the native law when that law is not too bloodstained to be handled by a Christian gentleman. This tradition is a fine one, but it causes dangerous friction that alienates the affection and confidence of our dark fellow-subjects if that native law form is said by England to be administered and is not administered, but in its place a mongrel uncertain thing, a thing which we necessarily get when we administer a law we do not take the trouble to understand, as is the case of African law.’207 |
| Rattray said that this was as true in 1932 as when Mary Kingsley wrote |
| it. Colonial governments had been too much encouraged by the success of Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, where it meant little more than allowing the centralised Fulani and Hausa Emirates to carry on as they had before British rule. It was very different in the decentralised societies of Ashanti and the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, One necessity was for the governments to make sure that they really did understand the traditional political structures, through studies such as his own. But much more important was the need for the ‘detribalised’ educated Africans to be involved in the evolution of forms of government which combined the best of traditional and Western forms. Governments should be educating the |
| 206In theory, it is not impossible that they had met, when March Kingsley went to |
| South Africa at the beginning of the Boer War — where she died of typhoid caught while nursing Boer soldiers. But it is fairly clear from Rattray's review that they had not. |
| 207The Journal of the African Society. Oct. 1932. 354-365. |
| 189 |