tution and laws. A knowledge of Akan law is of paramount importance to the local administration, engaged as it is in framing Native Jurisdiction Ordinances in schemes for the working of Native Tribunals and in plans for indirect rule. I therefore set out to blaze a trail which readers of the Department's published reports1 may have followed thus far. I intended to make strictly legal investigations my first and immediate objective, and I hoped to follow up these researches by enquiries into religious and social problems, and intended finally to examine Ashanti arts and crafts. It will have been observed, however, by those who have done me the honour to follow my work so far, that my programme as originally projected has been almost reversed. The reasons which influenced me and made me change my plans may be set down briefly as follows:

I soon found myself, in pursuance of my earlier intentions, constantly confronted with words in the Ashanti language, which, while primarily associated with religion, were nevertheless continuously found in connexion with legal and constitutional procedure. With regard to the exact significance of these terms, moreover, neither previous writings nor local authorities could throw very much light. In consequence I was constantly being held up in my inquiries and compelled, therefore, to endeavour to determine if possible the exact meaning of words, phrases or rites, apparently of religious import, but obviously in some way associated with legal and constitutional formulae. At the outset I came to suspect, what later on I was to discover to be an indisputable fact, namely that Ashanti law and Ashanti religion were intimately associated. It became advisable, therefore, to try to understand and explain the latter first, in order that the former could be described with a better prospect of making a contribution of value to this difficult subject. Hence the excursions in my first two reports into matters which at first sight may seem to have had little bearing upon the ultimate goal of these researches.

The Supreme God (Nyame); the lesser deities (abosom); fetishes (suman); ancestral spirits (samanfo); fairies and forest monsters (moatia, sasabonsam); the patrilineal exogamous divisions of the ntoro; religious rites and beliefs; the significance of certain apparently material objects, Ashanti, and Religion and Art in Ashanti. (Clarendon Press, Oxford.)

I

such as stools; birth, puberty, marriage, death, and a future life; the religion that still lingers in arts and crafts; the rhythm and ritual of the drums; all these and many other aspects of Ashanti religion have an intimate bearing on African customary law, which, without a knowledge of these subjects, cannot properly be understood.

To state, as I have not any hesitation in doing, that the law and constitution of these people were evolved from, and finally based upon, the indigenous religious beliefs, is to suggest something that goes deeper than the exposition of an interesting academic theory. It is to state a fact of considerable significance in the field of practical West African politics to-day. Upon the correct application of this knowledge must, I believe, depend our satisfactory tutelage of this people, and ultimately their own success in self-government. It is necessary here for me to make a brief digression before I elaborate this point.

There are, at the present time, two schools of thought as to the lines on which the progress of the West African should be directed.

The older school would relegate all that curious spiritual past which it has been my endeavour to set forth, if not to the African's own kitchen middens (suminaso), at least to the shelves and glass cases which have become accepted as the mausolea of dead or dying cultures, where-if I may draw another analogy which my Ashanti friends will understand-the souls of the peoples whom our civilization has robbed of these heritages, now seek a lonely and unhonoured refuge. This school, working by what seems to me a standard of purely material and economic prosperity, argues that because the African's beliefs appear to have served him but indifferently well in the past as stepping-stones to real progress, his culture has been tried and found wanting. For these beliefs this school would therefore substitute European civilization and thought. There is much, of course, to be said for the supporters of such logic and of methods which are frank and clear cut; they would prefer a tabula rasa on which to start afresh; they are free from sentimentalism; and are purely materialistic. This school offers to the African, all ready made, the experience and fruits which our race has gathered through centuries with labour, bloodshed, and suffering. It is our racial best that it

offers. Its exponents in fact, perhaps unconsciously, desire that the West African should commit a kind of racial suicide, not the less deadly in effect because it will be merely spiritual.

The direction of modern thought, both at home and in West Africa, has within the past few years been veering round happily to an attitude of mind which is the direct antithesis to what I have just described. This school of thought is a whole-hearted adherent of the slogan, 'the retention of all that is best in the African's own past culture.' The main difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that we and the educated African alike know so little of what that past really was. Some rather vague thinking and vaguer talking have resulted.

The African himself can assist us-at present-only indirectly. The few who possess the requisite knowledge which we would give almost anything to obtain are illiterate, and in consequence generally inarticulate for practical purposes, except when approached by the European who has spent a lifetime among them and has been able to gain their complete confidence. The literate African who is the highly educated product of one of our universities has had to pay a certain penalty for the acquisition of his western learning, for he has of necessity been cut off in great measure from his own country, customs, and beliefs. Of these he may have, it is true, some slight knowledge, but, with rare exceptions, it is only a fraction of what is possessed by the untutored ancients who are the real custodians of his country's traditions and learning. Again, he is apt to regard with suspicion the well-intentioned efforts of European enthusiasts, often ill-informed, for his race. He sees in their endeavours either a ruse to keep him in his place, or at best, a scheme so vague that it hardly seems worth substituting for the western studies and beliefs, where he feels at least that he and the Europeans are on familiar ground. He is, moreover, already beginning to find it difficult to reconstruct his own past, and is therefore sceptical of the ability of the European to do so. He wonders also, perhaps vaguely, To what end? I hardly know a more difficult or delicate question than that to answer. It always savours of patronage to describe the best of the so-called 'denationalized' Africans as 'highly intelligent' and 'cultured'; nevertheless that is high praise, and it might well be asked for what more need he seek.

Yet he seems to lack that indefinable something which often ennobles his wholly illiterate countryman, and raises him considerably above the common herd. I do not know exactly how to describe what it is that the one often possesses and the other seems to miss. It appears to me like some hand reaching out of the past and linking him with it. It gives the illiterate man confidence in himself at times when a man feels quite alone, which he is apt to do in the presence of strangers of an alien race or when in a foreign land. The cultured man has dropped that friendly contact, and I believe feels often lost in consequence, and is never quite at home anywhere, whether in the society of Europeans or of his own countrymen. If the educated African possesses an 'inferiority complex', a study of his own past must surely help to dispel it.

I now return again to my main theme, with an apology for what may seem an unnecessary digression.

The followers of the newer school of opinion are generally wholehearted advocates of what has come to be known as 'indirect rule'.' They see in it a remedy for many of those ills of 'denationalization' which they dread; they have focused their attention on that part of West Africa where this form of administration has proved successful, but have often failed, I think, to realize the one salient factor that, in my opinion, has there assured, at any rate, its initial success.2

In Northern Nigeria, those who framed the administration on the existing foundation were also fostering legal institutions which were based on the existing religious beliefs. In that country, however, this religious foundation of the legal and constitutional system remained unassailed and unassailable because it is against the government policy to permit Christian propaganda within areas which are predominantly Muslim;3 the respect which we show in Nigeria to the

"The methods of rule which shall give the widest possible scope to Chiefs and people to manage their own affairs under the guidance of the controlling Power.' (The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, Sir. F. D. Lugard.)

2

'I doubt, however, if the prospect of unlimited future advancement under Mohammedanism will be so great as under Christianity naturalized to suit a new environment.

3 The Northern Tribes of Nigeria, ii, p. 247, by C. K. Meek (Oxford University Press).

tenets of Islam could hardly be expected to be accorded in Ashanti to a religion, which, up to a few years ago, had been branded as one of the lowest forms of worship 'fetishism'. In the latter country indeed, there is some indication that its inhabitants may embrace Christianity -at any rate in a superficial and outward form-in years which may not be very remote. In introducing indirect rule into this country we would, therefore, appear to be encouraging on the one hand an institution which draws its inspiration and vitality from the indigenous religious beliefs, while on the other we are systematically destroying the very foundation upon which stands the structure that we are striving to perpetuate. Its shell and outward form might remain, but it would seem too much to expect that its vital energy could survive such a process.

A living Universe—the acknowledgement of a Supreme Godsanctity and reverence for dead ancestors-religion which is inseparable from law-these were the foundations on which the old order was based.

Are there not then any other alternatives except scrapping the African's past en bloc and the frank acceptance of European civilization in its widest sense, or making well-meaning efforts 'to preserve the best of the old culture' but without the courage, or perhaps the knowledge, to realize the fact that to the African ‘religion' was coextensive with every action and thought, that it is not possible to pick and chose from his culture, and say 'I will retain this and this', if at the same time we destroy that which gave the whole its dynamic force, or, realizing this, is the administrator to say to the missionary bodies, 'We are compelled to restrict your activities in the best interests of tribal authority; we find that the development of this people along their national lines is wholly incompatible with the tenets which you preach'?

In other words, are we to decree that the African is not to be Christianized because thereby he becomes denationalized?

The first of these suggestions must be dismissed except by those who are prepared to sacrifice most of the inherent characteristics of the African race.

The second suggestion is in many ways even more dangerous, for it