African Proverbs at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs

Following up on the Liberian proverbs post from yesterday, I wanted to share a book of proverbs available at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs translated by R. S. Rattray. There are 800 proverbs in the book, grouped by subject, with the original Twi language version, plus Rattray's translation along with some commentary about the language and also the cultural context. 

Here's the photograph that appears on the right, showing Owusu Sekyere (Kuma), the chief of Mampon in Ghana:

So, on the one hand, this is an incredibly valuable book, both for English speakers and even more so for students of Twi (more about Twi). The proverbs in the book were originally collected decades earlier in 1879 and published at that time without any translation or commentary, so Rattray's efforts to provide translation and commentary are very welcome. 

At the same time, the book was published in 1916, and it is permeated with the racism and white supremacy of the British colonial project in Africa. The subtitle gives you a hint right from the start; the book's full title is: Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. Think about that enormous historical irony — Europeans calling the Ashanti people "savages" as they were engaged in their own cataclysmic world war that would leave twenty million dead and even more wounded.

As I see it, an important task for us now is to take these books from colonial times and see what we can salvage from them. The study of African languages was a major part of the colonial project, and collecting proverbs and folktales was usually part of that linguistic research. As a result, there are hundreds of books and articles about African folktales and/or proverbs that were published in English, French, and German. Sometimes the framing of the contents is repugnant (even really repugnant), but I believe we can still hear the African voices in those folktales and proverbs, even when the books in which we find them are part of a deeply racist colonial project.

In the case of this project, Rattray worked closely with Mr. Samuel Kwafo of Mampon (see photo of the chief of Mampon above) in preparing the translation and commentary. Rattray does not tell us anything about Mr. Kwafo beyond his name (in sharp contrast to the tribute Herskovits paid to Mr. Sie Tagbwe for commentary on the Liberian proverbs), but I suspect this must be the Samuel Kwafo shown in this picture: Ordination of the first native pastor, Samuel Kwafo, in Kumase 15th August 1909.

And I suspect this might also be the same Mr. Samuel Kwafo mentioned in Richard Emmanuel Obeng's autobiography, which prefaces his novel Eighteenpence: "In the year 1888, my maternal uncle, Kwadwo Yeboah, arrived to take me back to Kwahu. I was delighted. A few days after our arrival, I visited the school. The Rev. Samuel Kwafo, then a Catechist, was in charge of the school."

Those are the only traces that I found of Mr. Kwafo through Google-searching, and I wanted to share at least that much since, of course, Rattray's name appears as the author of this book, with no trace of Mr. Kwafo except for the mention of thanks in the introduction.

Meanwhile, the name of Hugh Clifford does appear on the title page of the book: "With a preface by SIR HUGH CLIFFORD" (name in all-caps on the title page). More specifically: "His Excellency Sir Hugh Clifford, K. C. M. G., Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Gold Coast Colony." You can read more about his colonial exploits at Wikipedia. Clifford's contempt for Africans and African cultures comes through loud and clear in the preface to this book: white people are superior to all; he admits some grudging respect for "Orientals," and nothing but contempt for Africans — such was Clifford's colonial hierarchy. "Much has been said and written concerning the difficulty which the European mind usually experiences in comprehending the mentality of Orientals, but it is probably that the difficulties which beset a student of West African thought are far greater than any which are experienced in Asia. [...] To anyone who is acquainted with the proverbial wisdom of the East, the present collection will appear to lack the epigrammatic crispness of thought by which the former is characterized. This perhaps indicates that the mind of the people whose sayings Mr. Rattray is interpreting for us differs from our own more fundamentally than do the minds of the peoples of Asia."

As Rattray explains, Clifford provided the financial support in the form of a subvention that made it possible to publish the book. Clifford had no love for the proverbs (he expresses nothing but scorn for the proverbs in the preface); instead, Clifford's goal was to provide British colonial administrators with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they could use to dominate the African people over whom they ruled. Rattray was himself one of those civil servants (part of the Gold Coast Customs Service; more about Rattray at Wikipedia), but at the same time he was an anthropologist with a deep and abiding interest in both the proverbs and the folktales of the Ashanti people, and he also published a book of Hausa folktales; I'll have more to say about Rattray's other publications in later posts. Unlike Clifford, Rattray has a real admiration for these proverbs. As he explains, "These sayings would seem to be, to the writer, the very soul of this people, as of a truth all such sayings really are. They contain some thought which, when one, more eloquent in the tribe than another, has expressed in words, all who are of that people recognize at once as something which they knew full well already, which all the instinct of their lives and thoughts and traditions tells them to be true to their own nature."

As I explained in yesterday's post, I'm focusing on the animal proverbs, so I'm transcribing the animal proverbs from Rattray's book in a Google Doc, and I'm also making slides of the ones I think would be of general interest. I was especially excited to this a proverb about the tiny royal antelope, a.k.a. chevrotain, a.k.a. mouse-deer who is a trickster character in West African folktales; see this earlier post about cunnie rabbit. Here's the proverb: The elephant is big and bulky, but the tiny mouse-deer has the most experience and sense.

I also really liked this proverb about the baboon's red butt: The monkey struts about just like a conceited man, but its bottom is still red.

As I keep adding new animal proverbs to the collection, they'll appear in the slideshow (bottom sidebar of this blog) and also in the Padlet.