Ashanti

...colleagues original: "brother officers", and more especially Africans themselves, to pick up the threads where I have dropped them and continue investigations in that particular branch of inquiry in which they find themselves to be most interested. Only in this manner will the labor and expense of this experiment be justified and the work carried to its logical conclusion.

With regard to the contents of this volume, the plan adopted throughout is, very briefly, as follows. I have tried to trace the growth of "the undivided household" An extended family unit living and working together under a single head. and its leader from its original simple beginning until we arrive at the present-day territorial (as opposed to family-based) groupings under a Head-Chief. I believe that the simple family group under the house-father was the early prototype for these larger groups.

The whole of the present volume, in fact, has a more or less direct bearing on the concept of the kingly office in West Africa. It will, I trust, make it clearer to us where the real source of a Chief’s power to command service, obedience, and respect lay in olden times. Not the least relevant of the questions it suggests is one upon which I have already placed some emphasis—the inevitable reaction likely to occur when an Ashanti person becomes a convert of one of the local missionary bodies, if that body has not taken the trouble to impress upon its convert that the adoption of Christianity need not lessen the respect due to tribal authority.

About two-thirds of the book deal with the constitution and history of many of the most important Ashanti territorial divisions, and the concluding portion deals with Akan-Ashanti law and procedure, a subject about which our previous information is particularly limited original: "scanty".

I would draw special attention to the chapter on land tenure land tenure the system of rules and customs by which land is owned, occupied, or used, which contains, I believe, some new and important data.

Acknowledgements: It may seem improper original: "an impertinence" to thank the local administration under which I have had the honor to work, but I am under a very special debt to its officials, although they may not know it. The success of work of this specially difficult scientific nature depends—at least, in my experience—on being as free as possible from the restrictions and burdens original: "fetters and trammels" of departmental interference. To the successive Chief Commissioners under whom my work has been carried out, who allowed me to carry on in my own way—a policy to which I attribute any success that the department has achieved—I offer my sincere thanks. The local government and the Colonial Office have also been very generous regarding "leaves of absence" original: "leaves" to enable me to write up the material collected in the field—a part of the...