Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/251

 Reviews, 227

training in this country enables him to turn this knowledge to practical account in dealing with administrative problems. These problems are the main subject of the volume before us, which should be attentively studied by every one anxious to see the government of our subject races carried on in a just and efficient manner. What chiefly concerns us here is the second chapter, giving a compendious view of native institutions, though interesting information occurs incidentally elsewhere.

The people dealt with in this work are the Ashantis and Fantis, who, though forming separate tribal organisations, are racially one, and speak languages closely akin, if indeed the difference is not merely dialectical. Indeed, Mr. Hayford says (p. 24), " They speak the same language with only a difference of accent." Both nations "once lived in the neighbourhood of the Kong Mountains, and were pressed southwards by external conflicts, and, subse- quently, by inter-tribal warfare." But they would seem to have occupied their present territories for at least 400 years. They are usually classed as belonging to the " Negro," in contradistinction to the "Bantu" race; their language, certainly, has no discoverable affinities with those of the latter, and it is provisionally placed in a " Negro " group, which still awaits further elucidation. With re- gard to customs and institutions, we find many points of similarity ; but, in general, those of the Gold Coast have a degree of fixity and definiteness not observable elsewhere. An organised priestly caste, an elaborate system of idol-worship, and the complicated machinery of a despotic government, seem, at first sight, utterly alien to every- thing we know of Bantu institutions. Yet, if we set aside the influence of a nomenclature adopted when ethnographical science was elementary and uncritical, we shall find, perhaps, that the two have more in common than we had supposed. Into the question of ethnic relationship we cannot enter here. It is a favourite theory that the " Negro " shows the unmixed race type, while the " Bantu " has been alloyed and improved by some admixture — Arab by preference. The late Miss Mary Kingsley, on the other hand, whose acquaintance with the Gold Coast people was some- what wider than that of writers who generalise from the worst characters gathered about the coast trading-factories, thought the Negro on the whole superior to the Bantu. But of the latter she had only seen some of the outlying north-western tribes between the Cameroons and Ogowe. Wherever the Bantu originally

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