Ashanti

...ready-made, the experience and fruits which our race has gathered through centuries of labor, bloodshed, and suffering. It is England’s best that it offers. Its proponents, perhaps unconsciously, desire that the West African should commit a kind of racial suicide—one that is no less deadly because it is primarily spiritual.

The direction of modern thought, both at home and in West Africa within the past few years, has fortunately been shifting toward an attitude that is the direct opposite of what I have just described. This school of thought is a whole-hearted supporter of the slogan, "the preservation 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 even vaguer talking have resulted from this. The African himself can assist us—at present—only indirectly.

Those few who possess the necessary knowledge, which we would give almost anything to obtain, are illiterate. Consequently, they are generally unable to communicate this knowledge for practical purposes, except when approached by a 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; of necessity, he has been largely cut off from his own country, customs, and beliefs. While it is true he may have some slight knowledge of these, with rare exceptions, it is only a fraction of what is possessed by the uneducated elders original: "untutored ancients", who are the real custodians of his country’s traditions and learning. Again, he is likely to regard the well-intentioned but often poorly informed efforts of European enthusiasts with suspicion. He sees in their endeavors either a trick to "keep him in his place," or, at best, a scheme so vague that it seems hardly worth substituting for Western studies and beliefs, where he feels at least that he and the European are on familiar ground.

He is, moreover, already beginning to find it difficult to reconstruct his own past, and is therefore skeptical of the ability of the European to do so. He also wonders, perhaps vaguely, "To what end?" I hardly know a more difficult or delicate question than that to answer. It always feels patronizing original: "savours of patronage" to describe the best of the so-called denationalized A term used in this period for Africans who had adopted Western culture and moved away from their indigenous traditions. 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...