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| soon we were struggling along knee and then waist deep and often |
| falling in up to our necks when we put our feet in the holes the elephant had made. we came at last to a place where the water was running deep and strong about 10yds then we had to swim once across dry ground again and we struggled on grass about 6ft every inch of way you had to tramp down the grass before you could move. Night at last came on. we chose as dry a place as we could find and the boy pulled branches and piled them up to keep one out of the water which was a few inches deep everywhere. |
| I took off my soaking puttees and tied them round my stomach to |
| prevent me getting a chill!! and lay down the boy beside me. He said he was lost!! I dozed off and on all night getting up once to fire a few shots to frighten off crocodiles which were all about roaring all night (did you know crocks roared. I suppose not, but they do though few people know it.) I was eaten by insects. Next mng. at 5.A.M. I got up couldn’t stand properly at first so stiff. I knew direction of Volta running North and South and knew if we struck due east we must come out on river somewhere. |
| You see this part of country is absolutely uninhabited you might go |
| for a few hundred miles and never come on a village. the only places being our own police out posts on the frontier. well we started off. I walking with the compass in my hand: sometimes we would be walking for two or three hours arm-pit deep in water. twice we had to swim. I had on the short pants I got at Jardines and by this time my legs were raw flesh cut by the grass. I was also getting weak from want of food. fortunately there was water everywhere and we could drink. the boy also found a tree which he said was food and I eat the branches |
| You can imagine the position was rather trying — all one could do |
| was to trust to the compass and it had got water under the glass and it would not work, so I broke the glass to let the water out not being quite sure after that if it would give correct direction. I never lost my head once and I’m bucked now I didn’t. I was afraid of one thing that I would get too weak or get fever and lose my head when we would have been done for. Every now and then we climbed trees. but all you saw was miles and miles of swamps and grass when we sat down we could hardly get up again so we kept on about 6 p.m. a tornado came on but it didn’t bother me at all as I could not be wetter. I was just beginning to make up my mind to lie down for night but determined to go on through one more bit of swamp to some rising ground where it would be drier before stopping for night. we came out on a sort of ridge falling over it. |
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| It was just light enough to see, and it was a road!! an old disused road leading from Kratchi to Burai. I did thank heaven in reality and the Pet love 15 whom I had often thought of and you all for you see if the compass had not been true we would have walked on and on into the bush another day it would have been the end. |
| I do feel I have been saved for something. Well it was about 6.30 p.m. when we struck the road. it was quite |
| overgrown but we had only to follow it and would eventually get to Burai. we could now hardly walk and kept falling down every now and then. some of the road was under water for miles. there were four or five wooden bridges under water you had to cross them waist deep and feel for the trees under your feet which formed the bridge. it was quite dark by now of course. I kept firing my rifle along the water in front to scare off the crocodiles and often after a shot: you would (hear) them roaring. One thing that I noticed was the warmth of the water it was often quite hot. we had struck the road about 2 hours from Burai but it took us about 6 hrs to do the journey. the men at the station had heard some of the shots and met us about 1 mile from home and I got on their back and was carried in. I could just walk. There was great drumming and noise going on (the funeral ceremony in honour of the boy who was with me)!!! Sic! |
| I didn’t feel awfully hungry strange to say. I had eggs and milk and |
| whisky and a bath and turned in. |
| Next day I was pretty fit; but my legs and arms in a state all swollen |
| and cut. |
| The boy could not walk at all. Today the 19th. I am resting. about 30 |
| men have gone off to cut up the elephant carrying the boy in a hammock to show them where it is as he can’t walk yet. as for me I am feeling very fit and don’t believe I’m even going to have fever even. |
| The whole thing happened through my trusting the black swine out |
| here who are some of them little short of idiots. you are always inclined to give a native best in wood-craft at least as to trust he is leading you right especially when the country is where he lives. You’ll see the tusk one day. I’ll keep him always I think as a memory. I also have some of |
| 15Their uncle Maynard Rattray (also called ‘Blessings’) who had given him the |
| compass. |
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| the branches I eat the two days in the bush. This elephant I call my Tchwi elephant as the boy was a Tchwi boy I had with me. I’m making good progress in Tchwi. I have such a nice boy Thomas who is teaching me. He wept and would not eat all the time I was lost I was told. he is about 15 or 16. I may bring him home when I come. I’m glad to get away from Kratchi and the small-pox and sleeping sickness for a bit. |
| I’m so anxious to hear your news wee wifey. (till I find one) but |
| never quite like you) I have put in a claim for £30 for my lost kit The river is going down every day. I’m vaccinating a lot of people here today!!!! Can you picture me?? |
| Goodby my little one buck up and never say die. I feel I’m saved to be |
| Governor. Sic! Don’t tell people about all this at least not too much I feel it is something not to be talked about somehow. |
| My love to old Teddy16 I sent I & P £3 for a costume for her. No |
| word about the Asst. D.C. ship but I shan’t hear till Jan anyhow. |
| Much love to Fan. Remember me to my friends we have left!! (Have |
| you ever heard from Coats)17 Its things like that that have made me achieve any success I have for it makes me all the more determined to show them some day what one can do and become and be able to snub em the christian spirit!! |
| Don’t forget the stage but I’ll expect you’ll get married and then |
| whatever will I do. How Tubs so like to hear his news Love to Dodo If you write I keep this open to put in an eyelash its "ju-ju" you know |
| Your Bob. I would love to see you in the Kitty!! hat. The golywogs are loves and |
| I tell Thomas they are my fetishes and he is much afraid of them. |
| 16Henrietta 17Dr. Coats: presbyterian minister at Gatehouse — see chapter 1 above. |
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| 20/10/09 just got yours of 15 ult. sorry to hear about Newtie18 its one |
| of two things 1. either he’s crying off or 2. He wants to get you all on his loni o!! mark my words Arthur19 |
| am quite recovered from experience all but legs and arms which are |
| still raw |
| Right ho keep the girl for me but what’s her name you silly Christian |
| I mean I could get some idea if you’d told me. HAS SHE ANY MONEY??? |
| Do write to P.M.G.20 about the charge of 1d on P.P.Cs21 don’t forget |
| I expect your both in gay Paris by now. well I wouldn’t exchange places. Tell Hog22 [.] not to whine it makes me ill and I’ve too much to do within the next 12 months to do that. Ask Alice23 to thank Emmy very much indeed for her jolly letter. |
| Your own Nigs |
| The passage about ‘black swine’ shows that he had not developed any |
| romantic idealisation of Africans in general, but it should not be taken as evidence that he was a racist. The common logical (as distinct from the psychological) mistake of racists is to suppose that because members of a certain group are not what we think they should be, the whole group is inferior. A large number out of any human group will be stupid, ignorant, badly-behaved, etc. At this stage, Rattray seems to have grasped this elementary fact without trying to generalise any further. He was not a T.E. Lawrence, giving his soul to another culture in exchange for a sense of belonging; but neither was he a racist — as the next sentence about the boy Thomas virtually shows. |
| 18Henry (later Sir Henry) New, Elizabeth’s future husband 19His brother Arthur Rullion (‘Tubs’). 20Post Master General. 21Picture Post Cards 22‘Tubs’ again. 23Identity unknown. |
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| After this exciting episode, life returned to the more normal round of |
| trips up and down the river (he was spending fifteen days out of every month, often sleeping in his canoe which he had made into a primitive houseboat), the occasional arrest, floods and epidemics. He began to accumulate pets: first a parrot called ‘The Old Witch’, then in quick succession two monkeys, called Meba (Twi: ‘I come’) Meba’s Wife, a serval cub called Obosom (Twi: ‘god’), and a genet (name unknown, because it did not live long enough). He took the parrot and the serval with him for company on his trips down-river. He continued his Twi studies. |
| In Oxford, Balfour had asked him if he could find out something about |
| the bronze-casting process which went to the making of the marvellous bronzes taken in the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897. General Pitt- Rivers had bought up a fine collection of these after the campaign, and some of them were in the Oxford museum (a good many more were in the other Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham in Dorset, whence they have now been scattered to the four corners of the earth). In point of fact, Balfour seems to have thought that Rattray was serving in Nigeria — perhaps because of his knowledge of Hausa — but although Kratchi was three countries away from Benin, it so happened that Rattray was able to help. His Hausa Mallam was able to introduce him, over the river at Kratchi, to a Yoruba artist called Ali. Rattray got the artist to make a model of a woman’s head and to explain in the detail the process, called cire perdue (‘lost wax’), because the initial wax model is covered with clay, and then the wax is melted out (i.e. lost) and replaced by poured-in bronze. Ali’s examples showing the various stages of the process are now in the Pitt- Rivers Museum. Rattray got Ali to make him another model of a chief on horseback, attended by his wives and courtiers; and a pair of figures, male and female, supporting two of Rattray’s elephant tusks, from which hung a copy of the original female mask which Ali had made. It looked like — and could be used as — a dinner-gong. They are, I suppose, early examples of West African ‘tourist’ art (which, then as now, was by no means always despicable). Balfour ‘wrote them up’ for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute that autumn, in which he refers to Rattray as ‘one of my anthropology students, Mr. R.W. Rattray, (sic) who holds an official position in Nigeria’.24 Rattray also used them in his Hausa Folklore. |
| After a short holiday in Gatehouse, he spent most of the summer and the |
| autumn term in Oxford. Though he could not realise it, it was his last visit |
| 24Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol.XL (1910), pp .525-520. |
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| to the family at ‘Roseville’, but it was a particularly happy one and it was crowned, on his return to the Gold Coast, by the news that he was promoted — at last! — to Assistant District Commissioner. |
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| Chapter 4. Ashanti |
| Ejura is at the northernmost limit of the forest country of Ashanti, |
| before it levels out into the orchard bush stretching up to the edge of the Sahara. Even today it has the feeling of a remote place, surrounded by attractive wooded hills. In Rattray’s day it was much more remote: ‘limitless miles of forest stretching away to a faint blur of hills on the distant horizon’, as Princess Marie Louise described the view from the ‘round-house’ bungalow which Rattray built for himself just outside Ejura, when she stayed in it in 1925.25 At the same time, it was on the main highway from the North, from Yeji, Salaga (the great slave-market in the days of the trade), and Tamale through to Kumasi. Hausas, Moshi and Fulani were constantly passing through, bringing cola nuts (the classic trade of the old times), yams, leather and cattle to the markets of the south. To the west, the dirt road went off to Nkoranza, Tekyeman and Kintampo: the areas in which Rattray was to search later on for the roots of Ashanti religion. The traditional capital of the area was Mampong, second only to Kumasi in importance in Ashanti history. |
| When Rattray arrived to take up his appointment, Ejura was in the |
| process of being connected more surely to the south by the new metalled trunk road which would eventually go up to Navrongo and the Upper |
| 25H.H. Princess Louise: Letters from the Gold Coast (1926), p.l69. The book contains |
| a number of complimentary references to Rattray. |
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| Volta border. The most important part of his job was supervising the provision of labour for the work, which had almost reached Ejura. Otherwise, it was a matter of inspecting the local police, sitting in on disputes at the chiefs’ courts in Ejura and the outlying villages, and generally covering the area, which he did on a bicycle. At first he lived in two round thatched huts connected by a thatched open-sided room. This was while he built, first the ‘round-house’ with its dramatic views over the surrounding forest, and then a more substantial rectangular ‘D.C.’s House’. The main drawback of the round-house was felt to be that on one side the sun shone straight into the room, which meant that a pith helmet had to be worn (this was before the doctors discovered pith helmets give virtually no protection against sun-stroke, which is usually caused by eye-strain). |
| The most interesting part of the work on the Kumasi-Ejura road was |
| when the excavators unearthed large numbers of stone celts, some of them up to a foot long. The Ashanti workmen called them ‘Nyame akuma’, that is ‘God’s axes’, and attributed some spiritual potency to them. Rattray collected over a hundred and handed them over to Balfour at the Pitt- Rivers on his next leave, and Balfour ‘wrote them up’ for the Journal of the African Society.26 |
| Many of the workers on the road were Moshis (by 1913 27,000 were |
| passing through Ejura in one year) and he soon found that although Hausa was supposed to be the key language for the North, more workers who were not Moshis themselves spoke the Moshi language than spoke Hausa. He set down straight away to learn Mole (as he called it). He also learned that the Moshis had a terrible reputation as thieves and rogues, so that when an Ashanti father lost a number of children he would call the next one ‘Moshi’, so that the sorcerer who had done the others in would not bother with him. |
| Rattray, after hearing a number of trials in which Moshis were accused |
| of every crime in the book, came to believe that although they were by no means always innocent their worst crime was not being able to speak either English, Twi or Hausa: ‘When one gets to know him he is rather a lovable rascal, and as for his reputed thieving propensities one who has difficulty in stating his own case and is in the peculiar circumstances in which the Moshi finds himself here, is not likely to be given too good a character, in fact it will often be said “the cat must have done it”, when it was not the cat |
| 26Journal of the African Society Oct. 1912. |
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| at all’.27 His tutor was a Moshi who did not speak English, so everything had to be done through the intermediary language of Hausa. Early in 1912, he produced a small Mole-English Vocabulary, with Notes on the Grammar and Syntax, which was published by the Clarendon Press with the help of a Government grant. It was the first book on the language, and it was impossible for him to add Mole to the languages in which he had passed the ‘higher standard’ exam, because there was no-one apart from himself remotely qualified to examine him.28 |
| It was during this tour, from 1912 to 1914 (with a leave in Oxford?) |
| that his interest shifted — finally, as it turned out — from language and folk-lore in whatever African language was closest to hand, to the Ashanti, and in particular Ashanti culture rather than Ashanti language. The turning-point was probably during the first week of 1912, which he spent at the Fort in Kumasi staying with Sir Francis and Lady Fuller. Fuller had been Chief Commissioner of Ashanti since 1905, when he took charge of what he described as ‘A sullen and suspicious race, still smarting from defeat’ 29 — the last Ashanti war had been four years earlier in 1901. He was getting towards the end of his career, but as the Ashanti developed daily with the success of the cocoa trade from a ‘sullen and suspicious race’ into a ‘contented and prosperous people’30 he took an increasingly lively interest in their past: eventually putting his researches together in a book called A Vanished Dynasty: Ashanti, published just after he retired in 1920. Lady Fuller also took an interest in Ashanti culture. She was something of an artist and did pen-and-ink drawings of old buildings and village scenes to illustrate her husband’s book. They were amongst the first administrators to regard the Ashanti as not so much a political problem as the raw material for an ideal African colonial state. By the end of his book, Fuller was describing them as not only contented and prosperous but ‘valiant, clever and lovable’.31 |
| 27R.S. Rattray, An Elementary Mole Grammar, 1918, p. 7. 28The book was extended in 1918 into An Elementary Mole Grammar, op cit. 29Francis Fuller: A Vanished Dynasty: Ashanti (1921) p.v. 30Ibid. 31Ibid, p. 229. |
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| Fuller appreciated Rattray’s interest in language, anthropology and law, |
| and questioned him about the traditional politics of his district — questions which Rattray would have found difficult to answer after less than six months in Ashanti proper, and those six months spent studying Mole and Hausa. Also, it did not occur to Rattray at first that Ashanti might be a promising field for research. Like most anthropologists, he tended to assume that once a white man had passed through the area it was ruined; and considerably more than one white man had passed through the area it was ruined; and considerably more than one white man had passed through Ashanti. ‘The general ideas,’ he wrote in his preface to Ashanti Proverbs, ‘would seem to be that this is a field of research that is so well trodden by alien feet as to offer little chance or opportunity of retracing thereon the tracks left by the original husbandmen. They have been described by Ellis, and Bowdich, and Cruikshank, some will say. They have been contaminated (for to the anthropologist all civilisation affecting his “pet” people or tribe is contamination) by centuries of civilisation, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English.’32 I imagine that Fuller persuaded him that the last word had not been written by Ellis in his Tshi-Speaking Peoples, and once Rattray entertained the possibility, and started asking questions as if he were the first European to set foot in Ashanti, he found how limited Ellis was. |
| At the same time, he found how almost unlimited in scope and |
| accomplishment was the work of the old Basel Missionary, J.G. Christaller, who back in the 1870’s had written the standard Grammar and Dictionary of the Twi language, and a collection of no less than 3,800 Twi proverbs. The existence of Christaller’s work was good enough reason in itself for putting off linguistic research into Twi. At the same time, like any newcomer who approaches the older people of Ashanti, particularly when operating in a formal capacity at the court of a chief, Rattray had been struck by the central part which proverbs played in communication. This took him to Christaller’s great collection of proverbs, and also impressed on him that Christaller had not lived long enough to make any notes or translations of them. The idea occurred to him to make a selection from Christaller with his own translations and notes. Like his Chinyanja Folk- Lore, it would serve the double purpose of illustrating linguistic points and opening up the Ashanti soul to a wider world. The unfortunately subtitle which he eventually chose for his collection was The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People’. He chose it very much under the influence of Marett, |
| 32Rattray (1916) p.9 |
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