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| ‘The warriors come in companies, village by village. Very old men |
| bear the corpse. It is carried upright. When they come with it to the water .... they dam it across with stones and mud, and down stream becomes quite dry. Then they begin to lay firewood on some rock in the stream, and bring the corpse and put it on the pile .... An old white- haired man makes fire, and when the hot ashes fall blows it into flame and sets fire to the pyre, and the flames go roaring up. They place the child (and heir) where the smoke is blowing to. He stands on one leg, his shield is in his hand. When the fire bursts out in sparks the men clash their shields and chant their war songs .... When the fire has burned out, and the corpse is consumed and turned to ashes, water is splashed over the spot .... They pull down the barrier, and all the ashes go down the river.’11 |
| This is not to say that Rattray showed any sign of ‘going native.’ In a |
| letter home, he described the native sports at Blantyre which he attended on New Year's Day 1904 as ‘a large cran of niggers’ (‘a word which the black man hates beyond any other term of abuse’, he was to say at the other end of his life). In his Chinyanja Folk-Lore he used words like ‘savage’ and ‘raw’ freely to describe the Africans. The mystery is rather that he did not turn into a typical racist colonialist. He had many of the usual motives: a feeling that he had not ‘made the grade’ at home, ambition which was not likely to be satisfied. I think the reason is that, unlike many of his fellow whites who, despite their apparent ruggedness, badly needed to feel that they belonged to a community, Rattray really was an independent person. And he found out soon that he got on easily with most Africans he met; that in many cases there was a real psychological affinity which is partly explained by this analysis of ‘the African character’ by an African, which applies just as well to Rattray: ‘Although we are on the surface a loquacious and a gregarious people, we are essentially a secretive, inordinately jealous and individualist race’.12 It also presumably had something to do with his upbringing in a large ‘extended family’ within a small, nearly classless community. |
| 11R.S. Rattray, Some Folk-Lore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja, 1970, p. 100. 12L. Vambe: An Ill-Fated People, 1972. |
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| He spent his first Christmas, a year after he arrived, at Blantyre, when |
| he first made definite plans with Hetherwick to produce a collection of Chinyanja stories with linguistic notes like Hetherwick's Yao collection. The next Christmas was spent up-country on a hunting expedition with a young prospector called Stent. The Christmas after that, 1905, he was back at Blantyre, working up his Folk-Lore, Stories and Songs in Chinyanja for publication. |
| It was not a milestone in the history of ethnography. It was not even |
| meant to be exactly an ethnographic work, though it was one in spirit (as Hetherwick pointed out in his introduction). It was remarkable only to those who knew him best: a dry, meticulous little book. But it does have the unquestionable virtue of all his work: it is unmistakeably first-hand. In his preface he acknowledged Hetherwick's help: ‘Whatever be of merit in this little work, the writer owes to the Rev. Alexander Hetherwick D.D., to whose kindness and courtesy in teaching him Chinyanja, when he first came to the country, he owes all that is best in his knowledge of the language.’ |
| By the end of January 1906 he was back in Angoniland, applying for a |
| special licence to shoot buffalo, the nastiest and least reliable of all the big-game (he said after he had killed one). By now he had moved back into a more substantial brick house at Lilongwe. Then in the middle of the year he went off on a long expedition in Dedza uplands. In November, he shot two rhinoceroses in the same morning. It was the more remarkable because he had been down the day before with fever. Until that time, he had been remarkably free of illness. Lilongwe and Dedza, being in the uplands, were less malaria-ridden than the country round the Lake. Hetherwick said that a white man could stay for three years in the Lake region without needing home leave, and four in the hill country. Rattray had been in the hill country for almost exactly four years. After Christmas, he went off on another trip into the Dedza plateau and this time he came down with fever before he had the chance to shoot anything. He was taken in by the Catholic White Fathers in their lonely station under Dedza mountain. He afterwards believed that they had saved his life, and he was left with a lasting respect for their lack of sanctimoniousness. He had to stay with them for more than a week, and he came through looking ten years older. It was time to go home. |
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| Chapter 3. The Gold Coast |
| It was much the same story as before. His brother ‘Tubs’ was on the |
| officers’ training ship Conway, which meant money for uniforms, keep and gold braid. His youngest sister, ‘Fan’, old enough by now to take notice, remembers sitting in the corner of her father’s study for hours stroking the cats, unnoticed, while her father and Bobby fought over his future. ‘Papa Rat’ wanted Bobby to go into the Indian Civil Service, though wherever he went he would have to start almost at the bottom. Bobby wanted to go back to Africa. India, he said, was too civilised for him. ‘You will have all the hunting you want in India’, Paper Rat told him. Bobby said he did not want to hunt sitting on an elephant, Paper Rat tried to bring the weight of family tradition to hear. Bobby said he did not care about family tradition — which was not true: he meant that if he went to India, family tradition would crush him. Inevitably Bobby had his way in the end, though it was hardly a victory. A Rattray cousin, once or twice removed, was Assistant Comptroller of Customs in the Gold Coast. He came home on leave in September, and on 4th October, Bobby Rattray was enrolled into the Gold Coast Customs Service as a Second Class Supervisor at £250 per year. |
| In the hierarchy of the British colonial service, Africa came well below |
| India, and West Africa came below Central or South Africa. Even in West Africa, the Gold Coast was overshadowed by Nigeria. It was associated in most people’s minds with a series of wars against the Ashantis: notably the 1873/74 campaign, in which Sir Garnet Wolseley (the original ‘model of a |
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| modern major-general’) made his name by sacking Kumasi; and more recently in 1896 when Kumasi was sacked again by Baden-Powell and yet again in 1900. Strictly speaking, at the time of the Ashanti wars, Ashantiland had not even been in the Gold Coast, which was as its name suggests, the British territory along the coast. But when the Ashantis were finally defeated in 1901, Ashantiland and then the ‘Northern Territories’ beyond it were brought together with the Gold Coast into one colony. It was, of course, known as the White Man’s Grave. In those days, the Western border followed the Volta River and across the river was the German territory of Togoland. When Rattray arrived in the Gold Coast, although the last Ashanti war had finished six years earlier, Ashanti was still not completely ‘pacified’, and there was a lively business in the gun- running across the Volta. Two years before, A.H. Ross, who was to be Rattray’s immediate superior in the Customs, had noticed that an unusual number of people from Ashanti seemed to be dying in Togoland so that their corpses had to be ferried back (in coffins) across the river. It was some time before he had the courage to order a coffin to be opened, but it was indeed packed with guns and powder (there was also a corpse). Although the Customs was not a prestigious department, it had demonstrable practical value. |
| Rattray was rowed ashore from the Elder Dempster boat lying off |
| Accra at the end of October. His first impression of the Gold Coast was not encouraging. After the dry and often cool climate of Angoniland, it was sweaty and enervating. Accra was a scruffy conglomeration of shanty houses, which the Danish castle — then the Government House — and the solid administrative buildings failed to dominate. It was small-scale and without the picturesque setting of Blantyre. When news came through, as soon as he arrived, of the transfer of one of his colleagues to Nigeria, he wished he could have gone instead. But he must have been cheered by a letter forwarded to him from home about his Chinyanja Folk-Lore, which was printed just before he came. It was from J.G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough and, after Sir Edward Tylor, the most famous English anthropologist. Frazer described his book as ‘valuable’, enclosed a copy of his own ‘Ethnological Questions’ suggesting lines of enquiry in field-work, and offered help in publishing any further research. When Rattray received his summons from Ross to join him up the Volta River at Senchi, he took the letter with him as a talisman against passing the rest of his life as a customs officer. |
| The part of the Gold Coast which Rattray knew first is now at the |
| bottom of the Volta Lake, created by the Akosombo dam. His main base was at Krachi, 120 miles up the river, but he spent much of his time |
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| travelling up and down by canoe, either camping or staying at rest-houses along the way as far down river as Akino and as far north as Yeji. In those days, the Volta was for most of its length about as wide as the Thames at London, though rapids made parts of its almost unnavigable. It was the main highway, and Rattray became used to spending much of his life on the water. Customs officers acted in many ways like District Officers. They were responsible for keeping order and making arrangements with chiefs about road-building and sanitation, though their main job was inspecting the various customs posts along the River and seeing that the native officials did their duty. Relations with the Germans were easy enough and included an exchange of social visits with the various German ‘residents’ (i.e. District Officers) over the River. |
| There were moments of excitement. Krachi was the headquarters of the |
| so-called Aberewa(Old Woman) Fetish, which was connected with ritual murder and generally, the British felt, exerted a baleful influence. It was left to the Customs officials led by Ross, to abolish it. Rattray was away up river when Ross declared the fetish illegal and destroyed the shrine, but he arrived a few days later in time to experience the hostility that followed, and to help appease it. They succeeded by telling the chiefs of the government’s plans to build a railway to Krachi which delighted the chiefs, though the plans were never carried out. |
| An even more famous ‘fetish’ was that of ‘Krakye Dente’, which Rattray |
| visited and described in his Ashanti Proverbs: |
| ‘The present abode of its fetish priest is a cave, situated about |
| thirty feet high on a rocky hillside at Kete Krakye on the Volta River .... |
| ‘The spot .... is situated in a grove with a broad path leading to it. |
| At the entrance to the grove stands the symbol of this fetish, a tall, conical mound about seven feet high with the apex hollowed in the form of a bowl to receive the sacrifices made to it. The path and open space at the foot of the face of the cliff, where the cave is situated, are kept clean and swept; the grove itself contains a large circular clearing. Climbing up the face of the cliff, one comes to the mouth of the cave, which has been roughly built up, rags hang in front of this opening. The entrance is higher up through a narrow passage which leads into the cave, which again by another passage leads into a second chamber which opens on to the grove by the walled up front mentioned. Once has to wait quite a considerable |
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| time before entering the inner cave to allow thousands of bats to fly out. The floor of the cave where one enters is ankle deep in a fine powder caused by their droppings. Piled high against one side of the cave are hundreds of gin bottles, offerings to the okomfo (priest), who sits in the cave and gives utterance to those who come to consult the fetish, addressing them in the grove below, from behind the partially built up face of the rock.’13 |
| So (with one or two minor alternations) a pre-Christian anthropologist |
| might have described a visit to the Witch of Endor or the Delphic Oracle. |
| At the same time, they had to deal with ivory poaching, and to enforce |
| the law that elephant tusks under 25lbs (that is, from young elephants) should be confiscated. Rattray did some ivory-collecting of his own. He was lucky again in finding himself in good elephant country. He soon acquired a ‘Perete the Second’ (as he called him) a tiny little man called Akwatia, whom he later put in his book Ashanti as an example of an atavistic dwarf — to support his theory that the early dwellers of the Ashanti forests may have been dwarfs. Within nine months, he shot his requisite two ‘jumbos’, the second measuring eleven feet to the shoulder — a quite exceptional height in a country of small elephants. |
| He also kept up his study of languages, with the new incentive that a £40 |
| gratuity was paid for each pass at Standard II in the proficiency examination (‘candidates will be called upon to show that they can converse freely, translate passages of English into the vernacular, write accurately from dictation, and have a good knowledge of the grammar of the same language’). Yeji, and to some extent Krachi, was a crossroads of North and South in the Gold Coast. Hausa was considered the lingua franca of the North, although there were comparatively few Hausas living there (the true Hausaland being in Northern Nigeria). Rattray himself was to argue for Mole as a more useful lingua franca, since more Northerners understood it and there was an increasing influx of Mole-speakers from north of the Gold Coast borders, bringing down cattle and coming to work on the roads and railways. Nevertheless, Hausas, imported from Nigeria, were the mainstay of the armed forces and police service, and Hausa was the first language Rattray learned in the Gold Coast. He found it easy enough — compared with the ‘tonal’ African languages, it is easy. |
| 13R.S. Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs, 1916, p. 52. |
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| He started to plan another book. He got hold of a Hausa Mallam |
| (Moslem teacher), and asked him to write out a collection of stories, along the lines of the Chinyanja Folk-Lore, with the difference that the Mallam was to write down as well as tell the stories, not in Arabic which was the usual language for literature but in Hausa. This became the basis of his Hausa Folk-Lore, published in 1913, which gave many people the idea that he had worked in Nigeria — in fact, he never went there. |
| In those days, leave came every twelve months; after his four-year stint |
| in Central Africa, his first leave must have seemed quick to arrive. In the event, he was made to wait an extra two months for a replacement, and just when he was due to leave Krachi, the bungalow roof blew off. In Accra he was robbed, and all-in-all he must have been relieved to get on the boat for home. |
| Before he left, he had been told of a new scheme by which colonial |
| servants could take a course in anthropology at Oxford during their leaves, leading to a diploma. It was the first course in anthropology at any British university, and the first candidates would sit their exams for the diploma that year. It was a godsend for Rattray. If he had been told a year earlier that he would one day be a member of an Oxford College, he would not have believed it. Now, with an ethnographical book already published, he could hardly be refused admission. Sure enough, in April he was matriculated at Exeter College Oxford as a student reading for the Diploma in Anthropology. |
| Anthropology in Oxford was a hybrid growth from a number of older |
| disciplines, and as often happens (more often than people outside the universities realise), it was an almost chance product of Oxford geography and particular Oxford personalities rather than of any grand design. The pioneer was Sir Edward Tylor, who had just retired when Rattray came to Oxford and who set the common-sensical, empiricist tone of social anthropology in Britain. For some years, there had been only a professor — Tylor — and no course or department (this also happens more often than is sometimes realised). With the new impetus from the colonies, a course was set up combining the various anthropological activities which were already going on in the university without necessarily being given that name. The three main centres were the Pitt-Rivers Museum, which held General Pitt-Rivers’ astonishing collection representing the material culture of almost the entire world (arranged according to his own system which continues to baffle visitors to this day); the Medical School, where students already learned some physical anthropology as part of the normal medical course; and Exeter College, where R.R. Marett had taken over |
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| from Tylor as the resident social anthropologist. The Diploma course, with Marett in charge overall, included Physical Anthropology, Ethnology, (the study of various peoples), Comparative Technology, Archaeology and above all Social Anthropology. Social Anthropology, as Marett interpreted it, meant, more than anything else, an enquiry into origins: ‘The Beginnings of Morals and Culture’, as he called his section on Social Anthropology in Gollancz’s Outline of Modern Knowledge (1931). |
| Marett, like Tylor before him, was originally a classicist. He was a |
| ‘donnish’ don, meticulous of speech, free in his thought but timid in matters beyond the range of university life. He came from Jersey, which was near enough to the edge of the civilized world to satisfy him. His attitude to students was partly paternal, partly patronising and partly like that of Raleigh in Millais’ picture, listening wide-eyed to the old seaman who points beyond the horizon. He took to Rattray immediately and Rattray for his part was flattered by Marett’s interest in him. They kept up a friendly if never intimate relationship until Rattray’s death, when Marett was almost heartbroken. |
| Rattray stayed in digs at the bottom of the High Street, kept by an old |
| couple; the husband always wore a bowler hat. (They were found some time after Rattray left them gassed together in the front parlour). There was a stuffed animal’s head in the hallway which Rattray said reminded him of home (i.e. Africa). He used to push the end of his umbrella up its nostril whenever he came into the house, as a kind or ritual, until one day a pile of dust fell out of the nostril and covered the hall carpet. He did his best to live the undergraduate life, punting on the river and cycling out into the countryside, but he was already a little too old to do it convincingly. He found the undergraduates too young and most of the dons too narrowly academic. He got on best with Henry Balfour, Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum. (Balfour and Marett were notoriously unfond of each other). But although he was not drawn towards academic life, he found every branch of anthropology thoroughly absorbing, except perhaps the new science of Biometrics (the statistical analysis of human measurement) which Dudley Buxton was in the process of introducing, and which involved mathematics. For the rest, it absorbed him because he could relate it at every point to life which is had observed at first hand. From his first days in Oxford he developed an ambivalent attitude towards the academic world: he liked to impress it and he liked to be thought of as a scholar, but at heart he despised any learning which could not be immediately related to ‘real life’. |
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| At home, in the university vacation, he found that the gloomy |
| atmosphere had lifted. His parents were naturally happy at his successes — the book, and his entrance to Oxford — and he felt less need to justify himself. He enjoyed seeing his sisters again. ‘Boo’, whom he had rather lost touch with while she was at school was now in her early twenties and they picked up the threads of their old intimacy. He had resumed his childhood role, as the ringleader who went farther than the others, who brought news of the larger world beyond Gatehouse, but who felt more at home with them than with anyone in the world outside. They were beginning to be proud of him. |
| During this leave in Oxford and Scotland he mapped out a plan of work |
| which he intended to take him up to a respectable administrative position, and then (who knows?) to the governorship he had promised himself. One of the pillars of his career would be the anthropology diploma, another would be command of all the languages widely used in the Gold Coast, the third would be to become a barrister. For the third, he joined Gray’s Inn and started on the chain of law exams. From this time he made a point of keeping the Colonial Office in touch with his progress. They received his messages with a mixture of admiration and contempt: his files are full of prim remarks like ‘We do not know that he will succeed in being called to the Bar, or that he will do much at anthropology’, ‘trop de zèle’, ‘a zealous, deserving little man’. He had not learned that it was not so much a question of winning or losing as how you played the game. |
| In September he was back in Kratchi, dealing with a smallpox epidemic |
| and floods. Although the bungalow was normally fifty feet about the river, the water nearly came in at the door. Then, as soon as the floods started to subside he went off on an elephant-hunting expedition, got lost and nearly died. Fortunately, at this point we can introduce the true Rattray voice, because it was the subject of his first long letter to have survived. He wrote exactly as he spoke — especially when writing to his family, as here — so if we imagine the slight lowland-Scots accent, clear and fast-talking, it is almost like a tape-recording. For this reason, I have done nothing about the punctuation (or lack of it) which, like Shakespeare’s, follows the pattern of speaking rather than syntax. I have tidied up the spelling a little. The letter is addressed to ‘Boo’: |
| Gold Coast Colony |
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| West Africa |
| Burai 19th Oct/09 |
| Dearest Child & wee Wifey14 |
| Shot an elephant on Saturday or Sunday? 16th at 12.30p.m. one shot |
| forehead. One tusk broken off the other a small one so no cable!!! |
| I have had an adventure, such a one. I got in here on Friday the 15th |
| about 4 p.m. had tea went for a walk to look around for signs of elephant saw nothing but determined to go out next mng. on Saturday? 16th got up about 5.30 a.m. feeling rather rotten and had half a mind not to go out but shook feeling off had only a cup of cocoa and started off with one boy the son of the old man in the photo, (hanging near the door in the library (the photo not the old man). I took with me only a sparklet bottle of water, no food and a compass. We found fresh spoor about 9.15. A.M. followed up came on elephant about 3 or 4 in dense bush but got to windward of em and they stampeded — went after em fording two streams came on em again, again got out wind but soon after boy who was leading by a few years said "esono" (Tchwi elephant) I said kese ana? Is it big. Then I spotted him standing about 7 yards ahead with his tail towards us. I waited and he turned very slowly round just as if he was a performing elephant turning round on a tub, he reminded me of the one at the Marine Gardens!!! do you remember? He turned right round and stood facing me. I fired at his forehead and he fell stone dead. He had only tone tusk worse luck. I pulled out a few of his eye brows to take back to camp (usually cut off tail) but had come out without knife. We came back along our tracks and I didn’t pay much attention to where the boy was going as he was a native of the place and I thought he knew all about the way, but about 4 p.m. we suddenly came out on a swamp stretching as far as we could see. I knew then we were on a different way from that we had come. The boy said we would go round the swamp so we set off but wherever we went we seemed to be surrounded by water. |
| 14 Elizabeth Rattray |
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