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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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I, the Ashanti porcupine chief's drummer,
I am scarcely awake,
I have made myself to rise up,
I am about to sound the drum.
If you have gone elsewhere and I call you,
Come;
The fowl has crowed in the morning,
The fowl has awakened and crowed,
Very early,
They are addressing me and I shall understand .....
While the old drummer was drumming out the piece, messengers
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were coming in from without bidding the chief to hasten as everyone
was waiting for him. To keep other people (of lesser importance than
yourself) waiting is essentially the correct court etiquette in Ashanti.
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At length the omanhene
came out, dressed in one of the magnificent
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cloths woven on the primitive looms of the country, and heavily adorned
with gold ornaments, his hands and fingers so bedecked with massive
rings and bracelets that he could hardly lift his arms.
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He stepped from his room closely followed by the two kwadwumfo
,
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those wonderful minstrels who, on state occasions, drone like a hive of
bees, into the king’s ears, the names and deeds of dead kings and queens,
as far back as their traditional history has any record.
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He listened as they sang, with his heart full of sadness for the dead.
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The chief’s head was bound with a fillet of velvet inlaid with gold. As he
stepped out of the courtyard he was met at the ‘palace’ gate by young
‘royals’, bearing ostrich-feather plumes, state swords, the handles bound
with leopard hide and gold leaf, children with tails of elephants, linguists
with gold and silver staves, his treasurers holding enormous bunches of
iron keys, sandal-bearers carrying spare sandals, mpintine drummers
and the umbrella-carriers carrying the immense silk and velvet
umbrellas under which, as these revolve and dance, he is escorted to the
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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balance and ‘very slowly’, ‘very carefully’, lest he ‘stumble’, he seated
himself at the apex of a double lane, composed of these young ‘royals’
and other high court officials. Behind him stood the minstrels, his
linguists, gun-bearers, executioners, etc., and a place was reserved on his
left for the ‘Queen Mother’.
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The big talking drums were immediately behind him and beat out:
The King has sat down,
The destroyer of towns has sat himself down,
The powerful one, etc., etc.
Every one, from the youngest child present, knew exactly his place
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and fell into it without fuss and without an order. No women were
among the select throng.
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Down the dense lane of drummers, fan-bearers, and elephant-tail
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switchers marched one by one the sub-chiefs who had come to do
homage to the stool; slipping their sandals from their feet and baring the
left shoulder, they bowed from the waist, saying: ‘Grandfather, good
morning’, and retired, making way for another. The chief acknowledged
their salutations by the slightest possible inclination of his head, and with
an expression absolutely impassive and unmoved ....
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The state officials, carrying bottles of rum and whisky, now marched
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up to the chief, who ordered the distribution among those assembled.
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When all had partaken, the leader of the advance guard came forward,
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and bowing, said: ‘Grandfather, I thank you .... ’ Then all gave thanks.
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The chief might not, however, retire to his room or eat any food until
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the Queen Mother came to greet him. This very important lady, fully
conscious of her own proud position in the state, might in her turn
possibly keep him waiting. She meanwhile had been performing her
Adae
.’
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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This strikes me as perfect description, worthy to rank with Bowdich’s
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great set-pieces which Rattray himself admired so much — and, of course,
more accurate. It successfully strikes a balance between dry objectivity,
which makes some pieces of ethnography read like reports of chemical
experiments, and sentimentality which makes others read like Rider
Haggard. It is no coincidence that parts of Rattray’s description are like a
translation from Homer (‘He listened as they sang, with his heart full of
sadness for the dead’). His position was not so far removed from Homer’s,
as the recorder of society of warrior-kings who held daily conversations
with the gods.
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At the beginning of September, Harper asked the Rattrays to come and
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stay with him in Kumasi. On the 11th he had a ‘great talk with Rattray’, as
he noted in his diary, about the Ashanti family system, native affairs
generally and gold weights: ‘He has got his teeth into his business and is
refreshingly keen,’ he added. He was also impressed by the Ashantis’
response to Rattray’s interest in them: ‘I am glad to say he has found the
natives intensely interested in his researches and has received great
assistance from them.’
59
Two articles, on the Classifactory System and
Gold Weights were almost ready for printing, and Harper was keen to find
the extra £150 needed to print photographs and transfer Rattray’s
phonograph recordings of drum-language onto positive cylinders.
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On the following day, the 12th, the Rattrays left for Obuasi. The timing
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was unfortunate, because it meant that he missed by half a day the first act
in the drama of the Golden Stool, which began — so far as the European
authorities were concerned — that evening.
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59
Sir C.H. Harper, Memoranda etc.
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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The Golden Stool affair hit the headlines at the time and has never been
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entirely forgotten. Fifty years afterwards, it can be seen to be of symbolic
rather than historical importance, but as a symbol it still commands some
force. It had all the ingredients of an early film drama: the natives getting
restless and threatening colonial authority; the central image of the Golden
Stool expressing romantic kingship in a way which Europeans find easy to
understand; disaster averted by swift decision on the part of an enlightened
D.C. who ‘understands the natives’. It was a pity that Rattray was away
from Kumasi as the curtain rose, but as soon as he heard of the drama he
was quick to get on to the stage.
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The whole affair might have been calculated to draw attention to
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Indirect Rule in action and to validate Rattray’s work. The Golden Stool
was that which, in the reign of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye, the fetish
priest who was Merlin to Osei Tutu’s King Arthur, caused to descend from
heaven, as Rattray described:
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‘Anotchi, in the presence of a huge multitude, with the help of his
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supernatural power, is stated to have brought down from the sky, in a
black cloud, and amid rumblings, and air thick with white dust, a
wooden stool with three supports and partly covered with gold.
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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This stool did not fall to earth but alighted slowly upon Osai Tutu’s
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Anotchi told Osai Tutu and all the people that this stool contained the
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sunsum
(soul or spirit) of the Ashanti nation, and that their power, their
health, their bravery, their welfare were in this stool . . . Anotchi told
the Ashanti that if this stool was taken or destroyed, then, just as a man
sickens and dies whose sunsum
during life has wandered away or has
been inured by some other sunsum
, so would the Ashanti nation sicken
and lose its vitality and power.’
60
In 1900, Governor Hodgson had committed one of the memorable faux
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pas
of colonial history when he went to Kumasi and ordered that the Stool
be brought to him, with the words:
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‘Where is the Golden Stool?
Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?’
61
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As Rattray was to point out, no-one, not even the Asantehene, was
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allowed to sit on the Stool. In fact it was the most offensive gesture, both
politically and spiritually, which the Governor could have offered to make.
The result was the last Ashanti war — the ‘Ya Asantewa’ war of 1900, so-
called because it was led by the Queen Mother of Ejisu of that name,
62
a
small enough affair in terms of troops engaged and lives lost, but involving
the ‘Siege of Kumasi’, when the Governor and twenty-eight other
Europeans (as well as several thousand Africans) were kept in the Fort
until starvation forced them out. Most of them, including the Governor,
had died. The Ashantis were soon ‘pacified’, but it left more sourness on
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60
Rattray (1923) pp.289, 90.
61
The usual source for this quotation is W.W. Claridge: A History of the Gold Coast
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and Ashanti (1915), Vol.2, p.445, based on the Parliamentary Paper on the Ashanti War
(p.16). Hodgson's wife later denied that he had asked to sit on the stool, but that is how
the speech was reported in shorthand as it was delivered, and as it was understood by the
Asante. The full story of the ensuing campaign is told in F. Myatt: The Golden Stool
(1966).
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62
The Asantehene had already been exiled in 1896
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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both sides than perhaps any other of the Ashanti campaigns, and a lasting
sensitivity on the Ashanti side about the Golden Stool.
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Twenty years had passed, at the end of which, according to Sir Charles
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‘Peace, Prosperity, Progress, and all the ensigns of Modern
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Civilization were conspicuous in the towns and about the countryside of
Ashanti. Kumasi had been transformed from a squalid ramshackle native
village into an attractive and flourishing township with broad streets and
motor traffic, Church, Public Offices, Banks and other large business
premises, Schools, Telephone Exchange, Railway Station. Radiating
from Kumasi were hundreds of motor roads. In most of the large
villages there were telegraph offices, schools and shops. .... An
increasing number of Ashantis could speak and write English, and it is
hardly an exaggeration to say that English would frank a stranger from
one end of the Colony to the other. A large number of Ashantis were
becoming Christians .... What place or function then could there be for
the Golden Stool in an order of things that on the face of it had broken
so utterly and so happily with the barbarous past?
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That question was raised and answered by the startling re-appearance
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In the August of 1920, a road was being built through the forest between
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Abuabugya and a neighbouring village. One of the villagers working on it
struck his pickaxe into a tin box. The chief of Abuabugya, Kujo Danso,
was one of the first to see that was in it. With some presence of mind, he
almost immediately told the others that they had interfered with a smallpox
fetish, which got rid of them. He then took the Stool — which had been
hidden in the box — into his keeping. Unfortunately, a villain called
Seniaya got to hear of it, and he managed to talk Danso and another man
into dividing the gold and the ornaments between them. When the gold
started appearing in the local markets a year later, the Kumasi chiefs —
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63
C.H. Harper: 'The Golden Stool of Ashanti', in Blackwood's Magazine
, May 1935,
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pp.703-4. My version is taken from Harper's original typescript, kindly supplied by his
son, the Hon. J.C.D. Pennant, which differs slightly (but significantly) from the printed
version.
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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who were already suspicious — sent for the three. Then, to continue
Harper’s words:
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‘The news spread through Ashanti and the consternation was general.
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Ordinarily in the early morning large numbers of Ashantis trooped past
my bungalow into Kumasi laughing, singing, hailing one another. But
now wrapped in their mourning cloths — for the country had gone into
mourning — bodies of Ashantis were passing into the town in strange
foreboding silence. For some days Kumasi, as a Chief described it, was
“rough and shaky”. No market was being held for the women were
afraid to come in, and strangers who had the opportunity fled from
Kumasi. The Regiment was kept under arms, and a fearsome armed car
occasionally paraded the streets....
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For it was manifest that to the emotions and to the imagination of the
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Ashantis, particularly of the Kumasis, the Golden Stool still made a
sovereign appeal. Old loyalties and old suspicions awoke. All manner of
rumour and wild talk was abroad, and there were sinister possibilities in
the feeling of general blind resentment. Within hail of Kumasi were
sixty thousand Ashantis, and a chance blow or a gibe might easily have
started a conflagration.’
64
The touchiest point was that the Ashanti could not believe that it was
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some of their own people who had desecrated the Stool. At the very least,
they felt that the British had put them up to it. ‘Indeed,’ Harper suggested,
‘in the confusion of the first few days it might not perhaps have been
difficult to have taken possession of the Stool, and in the state of official
knowledge at the moment there might have been some justification and
repute in doing so.’65
It would be nice to be able to say that the authorities
were on the point of doing just that when Rattray stepped in to point out
the error of their ways — that is the impression which, with Harper’s
connivance, Rattray tended to give afterwards. But the records show that
Harper saw from the very first the unwisdom of trying to get hold of the
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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Stool and he went out of his way to assure the chiefs that he would not ask
for it, or any of its insignia, in evidence.
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However, they did immediately call Rattray from Bekwai. Rattray
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arrived on 20th September, a week after the trouble had started, and set
about getting all the information he could about the Gold Stool, a subject
which he had hitherto avoided: ‘
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During many years’ residence in Ashanti, I have, like all officials,
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avoided any questions, direct or indirect, concerning this subject, not
wishing to offend the susceptibilities of the Ashanti by discussing this
somewhat delicate question, and I doubt whether any results would have
been obtained had I done so.’
66
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But by now, his understanding with Kakari was such that there would be
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no suspicion of underhand political motives. In a few days, he produced a
short paper based on what Kakari had told him, describing the miraculous
origin of the Stool, something of its history, an explanation of the blunder
which had started the previous Ashanti war, and ending with a passionate
plea to show better understanding in future:
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‘There is still an aspect of the whole question which I would
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respectfully beg to submit for earnest consideration. I do not think we
realise what a power, working for us, this stool has been, hidden away as
it was; or that we fully grasp the results which I believe might follow
were we ever to take it from this people. I believe it will be found to be
the case that all the obedience, the respect, and great loyalty we have
been given by the Ashanti is given through and by reason of the Gold
Stool. I believe that, so far from benefiting, had we ever taken this stool
— which would have been little more than a ‘trophy’ to us — that its
power would then have worked against us. I go further and say that if it
be true that this symbol of Ashanti nationality has now ben lost or
destroyed, that the results will soon be felt by us in a way we can hardly
grasp. But I do not believe it to have been totally destroyed, and I think
66
Rattray (1923) p.287.
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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that once the Ashanti realize the wise policy that decrees that the stool is
not to be asked for, that we shall know that much of it is still in being. I
believe that once we are assured of this fact, that we have the key to the
delicate situation which may possibly arise if the miscreants who
desecrated the Golden Stool are found guilty and there is a demand for
the death penalty, which the Ashanti law demands. For every Ashanti,
man and woman, would understand the fairness of our plea for a
mitigation of sentence of death to one of exile (to let them out in Ashanti
would be to sign their death-warrant) on the ground that if the stool
itself — i.e. the wooden foundation — is intact, then the sunsum
, or
soul, or power, or whatever we like to call it, has certainly not been
destroyed.’67
If Harper did not need converting, the report certainly confirmed his
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attitude, and enabled him — as he acknowledged — ‘to enter into the spirit
of it all’. The Ashantis were allowed to conduct the whole trial; Harper
would not be present, though the result would be submitted to him for
confirmation or ‘review’. Rattray was at the trial and was impressed, as all
the Europeans were, by the dignity of the proceedings, the three thousand
spectators watching in almost complete silence while the chiefs and elders
of the various Ashanti states conferred and heard evidence under their
umbrellas from the fourteen people accused of complicity in the crime. At
two o’clock on the fourth day, Rattray rushed round to Harper to tell him
that it was over: all the suspects had been found guilty. Six were sentenced
to death, seven to life imprisonment and one to ‘drink fetish’ — that is, a
find and an oath that he had given up all the gold he had received. Harper
commuted the death sentences to banishment, discharged five of the others,
and made the remaining three ‘drink fetish’ before the chiefs. Rattray’s
prophecy was borne out. The chiefs seemed content to have their sentences
mitigated, so long as the Stool was not threatened. And he was also right
that the essential stool had not been destroyed: he already knew enough of
Ashanti religion to tell that the gold, and even the wood of the Stool was
insignificant compared with its sunsum
, which remained so long as there
was a speck of it left.
68
In the official report, it was clearly stated:
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67
Ibid. p.293.
68
Three years later, as described below, Rattray was to be the first European to see the
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Stool, which was indeed hardly more than a handful of dust .
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An Old Coaster Comes Home
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‘The attitude of the Government towards the Stool is that the Ashantis
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may, if they so desire, keep open custody of the Stool, that as far as the
Government is concerned they need not think it necessary to bury or
conceal the Stool, that Government will not interfere unless the Ashantis
allow its worship to degrade it into an impure fetish or unless they make
use of it for seditious purposes.’
69
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The affair ended in an orgy of mutual congratulation. Six months later,
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Guggisberg visited Kumasi and praised the chiefs for their conduct, and the
Linguist of the Council of Chiefs congratulated Harper on his ‘good
counsel and guidance’. It was a great day for Indirect Rule, and a
marvellous vindication of Rattray’s work. Harper saw this very clearly and
deliberately understated his own grasp of the situation before Rattray had
arrived on the scene, ‘It is due to his investigations’, he wrote in his report,
‘that much that is new in the history of the “Golden Stool” has come to
light and with such knowledge Government has seen the way to deal in a
sympathetic spirit with the disturbing event of its desecration.’70
In fact, as
we have seen, Harper was well aware of the Stool’s importance, if not of
the specific history and ‘theology’ surrounding it. But he knew what a
useful weapon this version would be in Guggisberg’s hands against those
who had criticized Rattray’s appointment. And he was so successful in
‘selling’ this version that it became the authorized one. By the time Edwin
Smith, the South African anthropologist-clergyman-missionary, wrote his
book ‘The Golden Stool: Some aspects of the Conflict of Cultures in
modern Africa
’, in 1926, Rattray had become the hero of the event:
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‘In earlier days the authorities blundered through sheer ignorance. But
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recently they had appointed an anthropologist whose business it was to
study Ashanti customs and beliefs, and this officer, Captain Rattray, a
man of conspicuous ability and long experience, endowed with much tact
and wholly sympathetic in his attitude towards the people, had
investigated and reported on the history of the Stool. What he said
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69
Annual Colonial Report, Ashanti (1921), p.29.
70
C.H. Harper: Memoranda, etc.
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