The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa.: Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, Etc.

1887. London, Chapman and Hall, 1887. 15.5 cm x 23 cm. VII, 343 pages. Map near front showing Gold Coast. Hardcover [publisher's original burgundy cloth] with gilt lettering on spine. Blind tooling to boards. Dark brown surface-paper endpapers and pastedowns. Deckled edges. Very good condition with only minor signs of external wear. Rubbing to corners and spine ends with minor scuff marks to boards. Very minor staining to spine. Cracking to gutter between front pastedown and endpapers near head of spine. Cracking to gutter between rear pastedown and endpaper also but binding still strong. A hint of browning to a nice and clean interior. Includes, for example, the following: Religious Beliefs / General Deities / Srahmantin and Sasabonsum / Local Deities / Deities Worshipped by Particular Sections of the Community (Company, Market, Town, and Family Tutelary Deities) / The Priesthood / Psychology and Human Sacrifices / On Fetishism / Oaths, Ordeals, Omens, Etc / Family Divisions and Animal Worship / Division and Mode of Reckoning Time / Ceremonies at Birth, Marriage, and Death / System of Government / Laws / Language / Music / Traditions and Folk-Lore etc. Ellis took a sympathetic, if condescending view of the region's inhabitants: he argued that the hostile environment, rather than inherent characteristics, explained their then-current conditions. "That the condition [of the inhabitants of the region] is one low in the scale of civlisation cannot be denied. There are, indeed, many reasons why it should be so. Uncultured man is that which the circumstances in which he is placed make him, and it is upon external surroundings that his progress to civilisation in a great measure depends. He is either obstructed or assisted by the influences of surrounding Nature. Of such influences none is more important than that exercised by climate." The climate of West Africa, Ellis judged, "is most inimical to man...the worst in the world." Indeed he wrote that "it is doubtful if the Caucasian had been similarly placed, whether he would have been able, unaided, to reach that higher state of civilisation from which he now complacently regards the Negro." (p.6-8) He is at pains to define the "religion" and "religious beliefs" of the natives as something different than a belief in the Supreme being as would be commonly understood. Instead it is "a belief in the existence of beings, ordinarily invisible, upon whose favour or indifference man and his fate depend. In this form religion is commonly found amongst savage tribes, and the less developed is the intelligence of the people, the more crude and the more absurd appear their religious notions.... With people in the condition in which the natives of the Gold Coast now are, religion is not in any way allied with moral ideas, whose source is indeed essentially distinct, although the two become associated when man attains a higher degree of civilisation." (p.10) These invisible beings or "spirits," capable of inhabiting inanimate and sentient beings alike, crowd upon the natives' individual and collective imaginations as they seek to understand and interpret events - both of the unusual and unusual varieties. And "the belief in the imaginary beings of the Gold Coast is steadfastly kept up by the priests and priestesses - for their own ends, for the maintenance of their power over the people, and for the maintenance of their avocation. Were there no local deities to be appeased and mollified, or propitiated, a most lucrative portion of their business would be at an end." (p.15) Describing the custom of human sacrifice at funerals, Ellis writes that the practice "arises from a feeling of affection, respect, and awe for the dead. It is done so that the departed may suffer no discomfort in his new abode, but find himself surrounded by those attentions and ministrations to which he has been accustomed." Wives and slaves and other attendants are destined to follow the deceased and the number of persons sacrificed depended upon the wealth and rank of the dead individual: "[h]the greatest slaughter takes place at the decease of a king of Ashanti, and scores of human beings are sacrificed whenever a member of the royal family dies." (p.159) Ellis quotes at length from accounts of ritual funeral slaughter provided by German missionaries as well as other instances were humans are offered as bloody propitiations to deities. Ellis also devotes chapters to Fetishism and oaths, omens, animal worship, religious ceremonies and festivals before focusing on more worldly areas such as the law and system of government. Alfred Burdon Ellis (1852-1894) was a British Army officer and ethnographer, known for his writings on West Africa. Ellis was commissioned lieutenant in the 1st West India Regiment in November 1873 and accompanied them to the Second Ashanti war later that year, beginning a long connection with West Africa. He would go onto serve throughout the region, eventually become a colonel and briefly serving as the de facto governor of Sierra Leone. (Wikipedia)