Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People

by Robert Sutherland Rattray, Hugh Clifford (Foreword)

Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I A; Belief In A Supreme Being, Onyame, Onyankopon, Animism, Fatalism, Minor Deities And Charms, Tutelary Deities, Fetishism And Fetish Priests, Manes And Ghosts, The Soul, Death And Burial, Evil Spirits, Witches And Wizards, Soothsayers And Medicine Men. It Asase terew, na Onyame ne panyiii. (2787) Of all the wide earth, the Supreme Being is the elder. Asase. Deriv. possibly ase, down, beneath, as opposed to osoro, above, the heavens (asase reduplication of ase). Here means the world, the earth, which is also expressed by wiase-=-owia ase, under the sun; owia being again derived from root tip, seen in wim=.wimu, in the firmament. Terew. May be either taken as an adjective, or, if the pronoun e is understood, as a verb, 'is wide '. Na. This particle can often be rendered by the conjunction 'and ', but is often used to give emphasis to a word or clause. Onyame. The late Major Ellis in his The Tshi-Speaking People s of the Gold Coast of West Africa, writes as follows: 'Within the last twenty or thirty years the German missionaries, sent out from time to time by the mission societies of Basel and Bremen, have made Nyankupon known to European ethnologists and students of the science of religion, but being unaware of the real origin of this god, they have generally written and spoken of him as a conception of the native mind, whereas he is really a god borrowed from Europeans and only thinly disguised. . . To the negro of the Gold Coast, Nyankupon is a material and tangible being, possessing legs, body, arms, in fact all the limits and the senses and faculties of man., . For this reason no sacrifice was offered to him, . . There were no priests for Nyankupon . . . consequently no form of worship for Nyankupon was established. . . All...

194 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

From Wikipedia:

Robert Sutherland Rattray, GBE, known as Captain R. S. Rattray (1881, India – 1938), was a barrister and held a diploma in Anthropology from Oxford. He was an early Africanist and student of the Ashanti. He was one of the early writers on Oware, and on Ashanti gold weights.