Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing
The University of Kent at Canterbury
1998
First published 1998
by CSAC Monographs
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing
Eliot College, University of Kent at Canterbury CT2 7NS
© 1998 The Estate of Noel Machin
| Editorial Foreword |
| When I arrived at the University of Kent in 1976, one of the first people |
| I was introduced to was Noel Machin. He was a good friend of Professor Brian Simpson, then Dean of Social Sciences, and what we had in common was that all three of us had worked in Ghana. Brian suggested that Noel's work on Rattray might be of interest to the weekly social anthropology seminar which I had to organise at Kent. Noel at that time was teaching art history in Maidstone, but had previously worked as an English teacher in Ghana. There he had acquired an abiding interest in African art, Akan culture, and, as a bridge between them, the work of R.S. Rattray. This interest had led him to collect together the material for a full-length biography of Rattray, and by the mid 1970s the writing was well under way. The seminar duly took place and was a memorable event, as Noel arrived complete with a trunk of Rattray photographs and memorabilia amassed from various likely and unlikely sources during the course of his research. |
| Noel had originally hoped to be able to publish the biography in time |
| for Rattray's centenary in 1981, but in the event this proved impossible. Part of the reason was that the shape of the book had changed. He had come to the conclusion that Rattray's talents and achievements were so diverse, that he could only do him justice in an edited volume, with papers on different aspects of his career written by specialist writers. In this new version, a shortened version of his own biography served as an extended introduction to the other papers. The major problem was that as a result the manuscript had swelled to a size which made it difficult for commercial publishers to contemplate taking it on. |
| At this point, tragically, Noel himself died in 1986, with a further |
| revision left unfinished. In 1990 I discussed with Brian Simpson and
Noel's widow, Carol Machin the possibility of including the book in the CSAC series which I was planning to start. The main question was which version |
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| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| to use. Among Noel's papers were two complete versions and a number
of fragmentary versions, in addition to the papers contributed by the other writers. By the late 1980s, however, the most important of these had already been published elsewhere, and Brian had already had most of the main text of the original longer version typed up on a computer. Therefore, after further delays caused mainly by my own move to Japan, it was decided to return to Noel's original conception of a stand-alone biography by a single author based on this longer version.. |
| Much of what follows was therefore written in the early 1970s, and so it |
| is, in its way, as much of a historical document as Rattray's own
books. No doubt the author, had he lived, would have continued to make revisions and corrections in the light of changing ideas both within anthropology and about Africa. In particular, the transparent writing style is in marked contrast to the opacity of much of the writing on the history of anthropology which has enjoyed such a vogue since the mid-1980s. This is hardly surprising, given that the early 1970s were closer to the colonial period than they are to the present. But as a result of the delay in publication, it is now possible to read the biography at various levels. At one level it is a textual product of its time, the early post-colonial period, capable of analysis and deconstruction like any other text. But hopefully this will not obscure the fact that, at a more immediate level, it is also a labour of love by one writer on behalf of another, as well as evidence of the deep affection of both of them for the peoples and cultures of Ghana. |
| Jerry Eades |
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| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| Preface |
| Rattray's life might almost have been invented by John Buchan. The son of |
| an impoverished Scottish colonial family who runs away from school
to the Boer Way, sets up as trader and big game hunter in East Africa, learns a number of African languages and makes a special study of local customs, joins the colonial service in a humble capacity in the Gold Coast (the "White Man's Grave"), is the first man to be appointed government anthropologist in an African colony, to help the government to "understand the natives", helps avert a new Ashanti war through his special knowledge of local ways, is the first man to fly a plane solo to West Africa, dies as a pioneer of the new sport of gliding. |
| When he died in that gliding accident in 1938, several people considered |
| writing his life-story, but certain aspects of his private life (innocent enough as it seems now) and his touchy relations with the colonial government made them feel it was impossible. Then the Second World War came, and Independence to the Gold Coast, and those who have known him in his prime began to feel that his reputation would survive only amongst anthropologists, through his books on the Ashanti, as one of the greatest representatives of the great age of ethnography. In modern Ghana he is remembered by a street named after him in Accra, and by those who are officially concerned with traditional culture. But to some extent the old suspicion survives that Rattray's interest in traditional African life was part of the conspiracy to "keep the black man in his place". |
| But now that Rattray's Gold Coast seems almost as dead as the animal |
| heads he brought back from East Africa, we can see his career in a
wider context, not just as a colonial adventure but as a model example of the creative meeting of cultures. For although he was in some ways a John Buchan character, he was almost the opposite of a white supremacist. He developed from a rather brash young adventurer into a most eloquent interpreter - in every sense - for the Africans. And if the niceties of Indirect Rule are now as obsolete as the solar topee (which Rattray found early on in his career was not much use against the sun), the meeting of cultures is still urgently relevant. |
| The story of Rattray's life is the story of his gradual conversion to this |
| point of view. For him, anthropology was not a matter of book learning, but was about living people. He was no Lawrence of Arabia, with a neurotic urge to sink his personality in another culture. He was more than |
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| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| anything else a hunter, and his discovery that even the white man
had something to learn from traditional African culture was almost like shooting an elephant when he had expected to get a lion. It made him all the keener to let Westerners know that pre-colonial Africans had not been mindless savages, and to let the modern African know that an intelligent sense of continuity with his past would enrich the future. Both lessons still need learning. |
| I discovered Rattray for myself when I first arrived in Ghana, ignorant |
| of most African history and (as Rattray had been) not entirely convinced that there was much history or culture, in the usual sense of the word, to discover. Here was this voice from the colonial past of a decent, outward- bound, public school young man (as it seemed to me) talking matter-of- factly about a world of fetish-priests, fairies, witches, gods and human sacrifices, but in such a way that "culture" really did seem the word; so that sacrificing a sheep to one's ancestors seemed the only reasonable way to behave. It made me curious as to how such an apparently colonial type came to be engaged on such an uncolonial exercise. There was one rather fuzzy photograph of Rattray in Religion and Art in Ashanti, sitting on a very dead elephant beside an African tracker (illustrating the section on atavistic dwarfs by showing how although Rattray was a very short man, the African was even shorter standing up).1 It confirmed the impression of a matter-of-fact public-school type, stocky and blunt. I learned later than it was a bad likeness. I also learned that it was typical of him to arouse one"s curiosity while being apparently self-effacing. |
| My own hunt for Rattray would have ended there if Godfrey Lienhardt |
| had not taken seriously my casual remark, made over a glass of beer
in the Victoria Arms in Walton Street (at that time the nerve-centre of anthropology in Oxford), that someone should write a biography of Rattray, and transferred to me some of his own enterprise and enthusiasm (of which he had plenty to spare) to follow it up. He gave me the courage to put an advertisement in The Times, which was answered by Rattray"s sister, Lady New, and the woman he was hoping to marry at the time of his death. From that moment, my picture of Rattray started to change from a stereotype to a living person who was indeed quite unlike the young man in that fuzzy photograph. I saw that this was virtually a disguise forced on him because of his ambivalent position. The real man was much more complicated and attractive: a man of action with "an artistic temperament" (in the words of his "Chief" in Ashanti, Sir Charles Harper), ambitious to |
| 1R.S. Rattray, Religion and Art in Ashanti, 1927, figure 24. |
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| An Old Coaster Comes Home |
| get on in the colonial establishment but an instinctive rebel against
it, self- dramatising and self-effacing at the same time, sceptical and irreverent but with a strong element of mysticism; above all with a physical, intellectual and imaginative vitality which struck everyone who met him. And despite this complexity, it was said of him that "the secret of his attraction lay largely in his simplicity and in the ardour of a youth he never lost". |
| This book has only been possible because of the hold which Rattray"s |
| personality still keeps over those who knew him. It has been very
much a detective search. Rattray was not a great letter-writer (perhaps I should say he was not a copious letter-writer: when he got down to it, his letters were marvellously vivid). However, not a great deal of his correspondence survived a fire in his family home in Hastings. Only his anthropological diaries have survived. It has only been possible because of the enthusiasm and dedication with which friends and relatives have ransacked desks, attics and - above all - memories to help me. They have inspired me, just as Rattray's memory has inspired them. Above all, I have to thank Noelle and Robin Rattray, Lady New, Mrs Frances McCutcheon, and Mrs Peggy Boyle. Of those who knew Rattray in the Gold Coast, John Scragg, Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke, W.E. Ward, Lady Harper, Stewart Simpson, and A.C. Lloyd have been especially helpful. The Hon. John C. Douglas Pennant, (although he only met Rattray in his later years), has given me extraordinarily generous help with respect to his father, Sir Charles Harper. On the anthropological side, Professor Meyer Fortes, the late Sir E.E. Evans Pritchard, G.I. Jones, Malcolm Macleod, and T.K. Penniman have all helped in ways which make it difficult to thank them adequately. Godfrey Lienhardt is, as I said, both midwife and godfather to this book. R.E. Wraith, Tom McCaskey, Professor Theo Von Laue and Peter Greenhalgh have given valuable historical advice. I must also thank Sir Arthur Norrington and P.H. Canham, and the staff of Rhodes House, the Balfour Library, the Institute of Social Anthropology Oxford, the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Colonial Office and the Clarendon Press (especially Dan Davin). Dr Kwame Arhin and Dr George Ofosu Amah have given useful detailed comment from a Ghanaian direction. Professor Brian Simpson has helped in every possible way, both practical and theoretical. There have been very many others, though the book's faults, I hasten to say, are my own responsibility. |
| As I said, the search for the real Rattray has been an inspiring |
| experience: confirmation that gaps between generations are more apparent than real, and that stereotypes of "colonialists" or similar convenient groupings are as superficial as stereotypes of nations. Above all, it has been inspiring because Rattray's life showed that courage is indeed, as he said, a |
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