PORTRAITS OF AKAN AND CAMEROONIAN GRASSFIELD KINGS AND CHIEFS

sion the linguist's formulation of what had been decided was the decisive communication
to the visitor. I would also argue that such contacts played a large role in the way missionar-
ies learned about their cultural environment and its specific implications for whatever they
intended to do or communicate. Of course, it may be that what is propagated nowadays
as a fundamentally unchanging custom centred on the role of the "linguist" is a modern
"invention of tradition," but having found a nineteenth-century linguist's staff in figure
5.10. I am strongly inclined to argue that what I was told in southern Ghana was normal
and ancient etiquette in a chief's court will have applied to these encounters.65 It is clear that
their involvement in indirect rule formalized aspects of chieftaincy in Ghana. But very early
photographs in the Basel Mission collection-photographs, like these from Kwahu, which
can with some justice be categorized as pre-colonial rather than colonial-repeat what are
now familiar Akan court formations, like that in figure 5.10.
Having raised this point, other broader considerations and patterns of information can
be brought into relation to the photographs discussed here. We have already seen that Guy
Thomas argues that the central point of relations between missionaries and their Cameroon
colleagues on the one side, and chiefs and kings on the other, was a question of "mutual
recognition, tolerance or defiance," and that co-existence between "'traditional' customs
and Christian values had to be [or better, were being] negotiated."66
In relation to Ghana, Michelle Gilbert and I in a recent publication comment on docu-
ments pertaining to a sharp conflict between the king of Akwapim and the Basel Mission
Church in 1900, which demonstrates how much expertise had been gathered by the two sides
about each other in sixty years of the Basel Mission presence in the state capital, Akropong.67
This conflict was about the terms to be observed if a certain king's "Soul" was to be allowed
to resign from his traditional duties and become a frill member of the church.68 The crucial
point in relation to the argument of this article is that both sides-"church" and "state"-
sought to defend themselves and manipulate the other by reference to rules and regulations
prevalent on the other side of the dispute. This became most clear during fierce arguments
about the ex-soul's marriage status, which was linked to the question of the disposal of the
man's estate in the event of his death (he was a wealthy merchant, elderly and childless,
and had been seriously ill). The king's knowledge of Christian ethics and congregational
rules was extensive, and he incorporated them in his attempt to steer the church towards
agreeing that one of the King's own female relatives should be acknowledged as having the
right to be the man's single Christian wife. But the church responded by citing traditional
procedures which had linked the man to another women in what was to be regarded as his
primary formal traditional marriage, which gave that woman the right to be regarded as his
single Christian wife.69 The king, in the traditional way, had accepted the role of witness to
that marriage by accepting "drinkables" at the time this news was passed to him. He could
scarcely now cast serious doubt on the existence and validity of this other marriage.

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