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  An Old Coaster Comes Home

  Africans in their own cultural heritage, because ‘Educated Africans are
ultimately the only men and women who can make what we call “Indirect
Rule” a success.’

  He developed this theme in a series of articles and papers which got a
  very sour response from the colonial establishment.208 They felt they did
not need to be lectured on the difficulties of Indirect Rule — ‘He seems to
spend a lot of time arguing with fervour against the theory that two and
two make — say, five’, one of them said209— and they accused him of
grossly oversimplifying the situation in Nigeria. Their reaction shows how
little value they attached to anthropology, despite the theorising. When he
sent a copy of one of his papers to the Colonial Office, one of the officers
wrote in the margin: ‘I have read this paper through several times over the
last six weeks and each time I read it I become more convinced that it has
an anthropological bias’210 — a curious response to an article by an ex-
government-anthropologist. There was some justice in their criticisms, but
it is now undeniable that Rattray was right to say that the future was in the
hands of the ‘detribalised’ Africans. A modern historian almost echoes
Rattray’s words when he says: ‘Guggisberg and his successors .... the
Colonial Office and the British Government were misreading history and
building for the wrong kind of future. It was incomprehensible to them, as
it would have been to any of us, that several million family farmers —
‘real’ — people — were of less account to the country’s political future
than a handful of educated natives.’211 Rattray should be given the credit
for reading history more accurately, and against his own bias.

  He may have been influenced by the growing interest among people of
  African origin outside Africa in their African past. The black cultural
revival which had started at the beginning of the century with the fashion
for ragtime and jazz reached a climax in the mid-thirties. Josephine Baker
and Feral Benga (a genuine African from Senegal) were at the Folies
Bergeres; black poetry from Langston Hughes, Senghor, Birago Diop and



  208They were: The Journal of the African Society, March 1934; a series of articles for The West
  African Review, May, June, July 1934; an article on Sir George Taubman Goldie: 'The Founder of
Nigeria', in The Fortnightly, April 1935; and 'Anthropology and a New Outlook' in West Africa, Nov.
1935.

  209Foreign Office file.

210Ibid.

211R.E. Wraith:   Guggisberg (1967) p.262.

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  Aimé Césaire introduced the idea of ‘highbrow’ black culture. But the man
who virtually personified the black world at this time was Paul Robeson,
who was in England in 1934 making ‘Sanders of the River’ with Zoltan
Korda. He played the African chief Bosambo, and took his research for the
part seriously enough to look up Rattray at Winslow for help with the
background, and also to see if there was any chance of Rattray’s helping
him to trace his own ancestry. Like almost everyone who met him, Rattray
saw Robeson as the black man of the future, with the old African virtues of
extravert charm, humour and tolerance combined with a modern political
and intellectual awareness. They got on extremely well, and Rattray
showed Robeson his own contribution to the literature of ‘black
consciousness’: the manuscript of the novel he had been working on for the
past year, to be called The Leopard Priestess. When it was finished, he
dedicated it to ‘Paul Robeson, athlete, singer and genius, who is proud to
claim Africa as his motherland and whom Africa is proud and very happy
to welcome as a son’ (though he could not tell Robeson much about his
particular African background).

  The Leopard Priestess, he claimed, is based on a true story he heard in
  the Northern Territories, about a hunter called Opoku212 who had a love
affair with a girl who was within the prohibited sphere of blood-relation,
and its tragic consequences. It was a good story, but it had the built-in
danger of easily tending to melodrama. Rattray used all his anthropological
knowledge in telling it, but he could not prevent it from reading too much
like an Edwardian romance about black nudists — in Marett’s only-too-
appropriate phrase in his review for the Oxford Magazine: ‘lissom children
of a fiercer sun for whom life is a sort of ritual dance.’213 And he made
the bad mistake of mixing local detail from the very different cultures of
the North and Ashanti, which makes it unconvincing for anyone who
knows the setting at all — as if Hardy had made Tess of the D’Urbevilles
say “Och aye”.

  Some books are successful despite bad reviews: with The Leopard
  Priestess it was the reverse. It was well received by the Times Literary
Supplement and many other papers, and serialised in the West African
Review, but nothing much more happened. It was a great disappointment to




  212This was the name of his Ashanti hunter-friend. Either the real Opoku was the source for the story,
  the setting of which Rattray moved partly to the Northern Territories, or else he heard the story from a
Northern hunter to whom he gave Opoku’s name.

  213The Oxford Magazine Feb.7 1935.

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  Rattray, because it was his attempt to write something popular, and quite
soon it became clear that its sales would be exceeded by Ashanti and other
of his more specialised works.

  By 1936, he had written his last piece on Indirect Rule, and from then
  on, Africa receded in his mind (though he continued to plan a hunting
expedition when he could get the money together). His mind was taken up
more and more with his latest obsession: gliding.

  The sport of gliding had developed as a by-product of the Treaty of
  Versailles. The Germans had been prohibited from making power-driven
planes, so they took up flying without engines. The first gliding meeting in
England had been in 1922, but the real expansion of activity took place a
dozen years later, when pilots learned to use thermal currents under
cumulus clouds for lift (the meteorologists had said it was impossible)
instead of the upward currents over hills. Rattray was not one of the very
first, but he was only the thirteenth man in England to win the ‘Silver C’
certificate, which meant a continuous flight of five hours, another flight
reaching 1000 metres above the landing-point, and a flight of 50
kilometres between two points. (During the distance part of the test he
found himself in the papers again: he landed near a main road, and a
passing journalist thought he had crashed when he saw Rattray and helpers
carrying parts of the dismembered plane towards the trailer.) With E.J.
Furlong, he bought a ‘Cambridge II’, an improved model of the ‘Grunau
Baby’, the smallest machine of its kind. It brought him into contact again
with Amy Johnson, whom he had first met at Stag Lane when he was
preparing for his West African flight. She came and stayed several times at
Winslow and bought one of his dachshunds (for a short time, he even set
up as a registered ‘kennels’).

  By this time, the French mother of his child had given up waiting for a
  divorce and he had lost touch with her. After a series of inconclusive
relationships, he had met an Oxford girl, Peggy Thring, thirty years
younger than him, who shared his obsession with gliding and whom he
wanted to marry. Once again he started the battle with Connie through his
solicitors. They also thought desperately of running off to America, but
that would need more money. With an almost touching cynicism he
planned a new novel which would be tailor-made to be turned into a film
starring his two most famous acquaintances, Amy Johnson and Paul
Robeson: a sequel to The Leopard Priestess in which the daughter of an up-
country District Commissioner who dies of yellow fever (Rattray had seen
people die of yellow fever during the epidemics of the ’20s) grows up to be
an air-ace and meets up with Opoku junior, son of the star-crossed lovers


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  in his first book. He got no further with Missianna than the yellow-fever
episode, but he told his publisher that ‘what follows will deal with Anne’s
life at Oxford, her rise to world fame as an airwoman, her record-
breaking flights, and finally her forced landing “somewhere in Africa",
where she again encounters Opoku. Here the real tragedy, the real drama,
will draw to a climax, with, at last, Anne’s escape from a dreadful situation
in a glider which she constructs from the wrecked plane, and in which she
flies four hundred miles to safety’. It seems almost a shame that it was
never made into a film: it would have been a marvellous period-piece.

  In October 1937, he received a letter from Kingsley Williams of
  Achimota. His answer seems almost like a premonition of what was soon to
happen:


  The Old Homestead

  Winslow

  Bucks

  18 Oct 1937


  My dear Kingsley Williams,


  The postman brought me a good mail today. A first air mail from a
  former pupil — Cartland — and your letter.

  So glad you wrote. You and John Scragg are the two men I liked best
  at Achimota....

  What do I do?

Well I’m happy in a way. I live in the skies. I have taken up the finest
  of all sports — gliding — and have the very comforting feeling that if I
get killed there are worse deaths.

  I’m diffident about writing to those I left behind. I don’t know who
  liked me and who hated me. I have the most delectable old 16th Century
cottage and this I share with a whole pack of dogs, and glide and teach at
Oxford and Cambridge between whiles. Come and see me.

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  That will be fine.

Yours very sincerely,


R.S. Rattray214


  At Christmas, he went skiing in the Arlberg with Pegg Thring, John
  Scragg (now headmaster of a school in Sussex) and a New Zealand
acquaintance. His endemic jealousy showed itself again when Scragg and
Peggy Thring went off for an entirely innocent afternoon together. Back in
England, the wrangling with lawyers continued, and the rest of his time
(apart from teaching) was taken up with trying to find a site for the
Oxford Gliding Club which he was planning to found, together with such
unlikely people as Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) and the philosophers
Gilbert Ryle and Professor H.H. Price. Amy Johnson also helped.

  One of his pupils, Peter Canham, has given me his picture of Rattray as
  he saw him at this time: ‘All of us fell for him: this quiet, modest,
reserved, leathery little man who was so different from the rest of the
course instructors and former colonial civil servants. He never talked to us
at any great length, and never lectured in formal style. His views and
comments were often disjointed and hard to follow, and if in our eagerness
we pressed him too hard, the grit in his soft Scottish accent would indicate
that we must not be impatient, and we felt like over-enthusiastic novitiates
being firmly repelled from the veils which protected the inner mysteries.
There were often quite long silences in his company, silences which in time
we learned to interpret as well as his words. It was all very much like
being gradually initiated into sacred rites. He brooded over us, too, like a
hen faced with a clutch of cuckoo-chicks — were we really likely to
become birds, would we be able one day to fly to the heart of Africa? .... It
was his constant theme that “Africa found a man out” .... to be worthy
servants of the Leopard Priestess we would have to show unusual qualities
of moral and physical endurance, and of compassion. It was a curious
discipleship. He was, though we had not then learned the word, our guru.
We did not worship him, but when he talked about Africa he glowed like
an old stove .... He did not take part in the general course activities, and




  214C.K. Williams: Papers, Correspondence, etc.

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  did not appear to be much interested in what we were being taught by the
other lecturers. I do not think he felt much at ease with the academics, and
he was certainly ill at ease with his fellow pro-consuls ....’215

  Rattray sometimes asked his students over to Winslow, particularly if
  they showed any interest in gliding. At ‘The Old Homestead’, they saw him
more in his element, amongst the family portraits and animal skins. ‘I can
remember a huge log fire in the sitting room ’ (Canham says)’and the ice
in the water jug in my bedroom .... In the evening George (Sinclair) and I,
supported by dachshunds, squatted round the fire while Rattray read us
excerpts from the script which he was writing for a film about Africa. It
was a splendidly Boys-Own-Paper yarn’.

  To some extent, Canham saw him playing his ‘Captain Rattray’ role. He
  had always dramatised himself. In the early years it was the daredevil man-
of-action. Now it was more a part for Ronald Coleman: the still-waters-
run- deep veteran, hiding a sensitive spirit behind a ‘pukkah’ exterior.
Peggy Boyle (nee Thring), who knew him best at this time, saw someone
more complicated and difficult, with much of the almost desperate energy
— the feeling that he must be ‘getting somewhere — still surviving, and
very variable in mood; either a highly engaging companion or morose and
melancholy. Despite the ‘Captain Rattray’ facade, he had none of the
stiffness of age, and his closest friends were all decades younger than him.
He was still hoping to go back to Africa for a hunting expedition.

  Early in 1938, representatives of a Commission to look into the cocoa
  trade rang him up at Winslow to find it if was worth his joining them. He
told them he could only see them at Dunstable. Two of them turned up
there in their city suits, and he gave them practically none of his time. He
made it abundantly clear that the cocoa trade could not begin to compete
with gliding. By now he had written several articles on the subject,216 and
recommended that it should be taken up in West Africa, where the
‘thermals’ which kept the vultures soaring to such stupendous heights
would also be ideal for man-made gliders.

  In April of 1938, the trips across the Oxford countryside in the Morris
  with its aeroplane mascot, looking for landing-sites, were over. They had




  215Correspondence with author.

216‘Sun-soaring’ in The West African Review, May 1936; ‘When the Wind is in the West’, in
  Blackwood’s Magazine, Nov. 1937.

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  managed to lease a field at Farmoor, and on May 7th, although the hangar
was only half-finished, the Oxford Gliding Club was inaugurated with a
launch by the Austrian ‘ace’ Kronfeld. There were still legal problems
about the site, and the Dunstable club was unco-operative over the loaning
of equipment, but there was a good crowd, and it all went off well. The
next week was almost entirely taken up with gliding matters, with a little
work on the second chapter of Missianna.

  Saturday, 14th May, was a gusty day. Rattray went over to Farmoor in
  the morning and was one of the first to go up, in the ‘Cambridge II’. He
left the ground after a very short launching run. The right wing-tip dipped
as he rose, almost touching the ground, but it levelled again and he rose to
300 feet, when he released the launching cable. He made a broad right-
hand turn until he was going with the wind, back towards the field. Then
he made another complete turn to the right, very slowly and so narrowly
that the plane seemed to be revolving on its right wing-tip. Things started
to go wrong. The turn seemed to get even steeper until the glider slid into
a spin from which it never recovered. It hit the ground very hard and
upside-down. By the time they got to Rattray, he was dead. The impact
with the ground had been so hard that his signet-ring was filled with mud.

  Gliding is supposed to be a safe sport — and so it is now that glider
  design has developed so far. Even in Rattray’s day accidents were rare, but
they were certainly known — both before and after his death — and
especially in the very small machines. Two months earlier at Dunstable he
had had a nasty launch when the plane nearly dived into the ground. Once
he had slipped into the spin at Farmoor, he could only have got out of it if
there had been sufficient distance between him and the ground for the
plane to stabilise into a dive, and then for the diving speed to give him lift
again. There was some talk at the inquest about a wing-bolt which might
not have been tightened properly, but that was dismissed. The mystery is
that he put himself into such a narrow turn that the machine came out of
control. It did not look like suicide, and the possibility was not discussed at
the inquest. He had always lived dangerously, and he said himself that there
are worse deaths than falling out of the sky.

  The funeral service was in the chapel of Exeter College. Every seat was
  full. Marett, in the Rector’s seat at the West end was almost in a state of
collapse. The bier was carried in on the shoulders of four men of the
College, preceded by a marshal and the University bell-man, whose bell
punctuated the familiar sentences of the funeral service. After the hymn
‘Oh Valiant hearts’, Marett read the funeral lesson from Corinthians,
beating his breast as he always did when he was agitated. When he came to


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  the words ‘and this mortal shall put on immortality’, he broke down
completely, and it was some time before he could continue. The only
reminders of Ashanti were the presence of Rattray’s old ‘Chief’, Sir
Charles Harper, and a wreath from his students on which was written in
Twi (grammatically but unidiomatically) Yekra wo: ‘We bid thee
farewell’.

  When the students eventually found themselves in the Gold Coast, there
  were some shocks in store for them. One of the worst, Canham says, ‘was
to find in what low esteem our Rattray was apparently held by the Colonial
Establishment. It was made clear to us almost on arrival that the Colonial
Office was making a grave mistake in allowing such an outsider to have a
hand in preparing us for our career — a fellow who had written books
about Ashanti, for example, in which the power and influence of Queen
Mothers had been ridiculously inflated, to the great detriment of good
order and sound administration. It was granted that Rattray had mastered
the Twi language, but this had of course only been achieved by sleeping
with his dictionaries in native huts, etc. etc.’217 So much for Guggisberg’s
plans to build colonial government on the foundation of a sound knowledge
of the people governed. Apart from a few liberal intellectuals like Canham,
Rattray had already been handed over to the professional anthropologists.

  His reputation as an anthropologist has survived and grown. The top
  places in the pantheon have ben reserved for the theorists — the Frazers
and the Malinowskis — but amongst ethnographers he has few rivals. I
have never heard an anthropologist speak his name with anything less than
respect, and often it is with an unusual warmth and enthusiasm. When the
Ashanti are mentioned in works of anthropology or history, in almost
every case it is the Ashanti as found in Rattray’s books. In fact, the passing
of time makes him more unassailable, so that there is a danger of his being
treated as infalliable, like a fact of nature.

  But he would be disappointed to think that his books would survive only
  as archives on the shelves of libraries in Europe and America. Nor would
he like to be thought of as just a part of colonial history. He had no more
idea than his contemporaries that within twenty years the District
Commissioners would be as obsolete as the Queen Mothers (or more so).
But he wrote his books for Africa — and that meant above all for
Africans. As an exercise in Indirect Rule the project may have been
doomed, but as a source of strength and support for those who feel that the



  217Ibid.

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  African past is relevant to the future, it was an undoubted success. He (and
his contemporaries at Achimota and elsewhere who shared his views)
should be given much of the credit for the fact that in modern Ghana lip-
service at least is given to the value of traditional culture.218 If he were still
alive, he would be pestering the Ghanaian government with his usual
persistence, to make sure that every Ghanaian child was educated in his
own culture — which means more than stage-shows of drumming and
dancing. But he would be delighted to find that traditional institutions had
not been entirely consumed by ‘Westernisation’.

  When I first became curious about Rattray, I asked someone from
  Mampong-Ashanti what was remembered about him there. He told me that
Rattray had been taken captive in the Ya Asantewa war, and kept as a
prisoner in Mampong. He was made to climb the paw-paw trees to get the
fruit, instead of knocking them down with a stick from the ground. That is
how he learned the language and was eventually adopted by the people and
taught their customs.

  I am not sure how pleased Rattray would be with the story, which might
  have hurt his sensitive amour-propre, but as a parable of the Ashantis’
resistance to cultural colonialism he would certainly have approved of it.
There is also a certain irony about it, because historians have tended to
regard Rattray as very much an instrument of colonialism, and the
Ashantis as his ‘subjects’ almost in a political sense. Rattray knew that the
role of subject did not suit them, and that they were using him as much as
he them. If there is distortion in his work, it is towards the idealisation
which is inevitable when people talk about themselves. The worst criticism
that can be made is that he presented a model of Ashanti society as an
instructed Ashanti of the older generation would have seen it; and if there
is greatness in his work it is the reflected greatness of that society, stripped
of some of the muddle and failure of real life. He knew that people needed
models of society — that we can only see society with the help of models.
And although it has been suggested that his position as a colonial officer
automatically disqualified him from seeing the Ashanti ‘as they really
were’,219 it is surely remarkable that his version has never been seriously
questioned by those in the best position to do so — the Ashanti themselves.




  218It is probably not altogether a conincidence or unconnected with Rattray’s legacy, that one of the
  post-Independence leaders, Dr Kofi Busia, was himself an anthropologist.

  219This is the view put forward, in a moderate form, by Professor Theodore von Laue in an article
  entitled “Anthropology and Power: R.S. Rattray among the Ashanti”, African Affairs, Jan. 1976.

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  They have every reason to resent the fact that what is in effect the
authorised version of their Bible was written by a white colonial servant.

  As for his life, its lesson is more urgent now than it ever was: that the
  meeting of cultures need not be destructive, so long as people (whether
coming from different continents or the same street) approach each other
in the same spirit as Rattray approached the Ashanti — ‘in the spirit of one
who came to them as a seeker after truths, the key to which I told them
they alone possessed, which not all the learning or all the books of the
white man could ever give to me’ — and with a little of his courage.




























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