ABSTRACT
In 1901 British colonial troops overran the West African kingdom of Asante, amalgamating it into the colony of Gold Coast (now Ghana). Twenty-six years later, Captain Robert S. Rattray, anthropologist and officer in the British administration in West Africa, published an ethnographic monograph, Religion and Art in Ashanti. Rattray was concerned to present a holistic account of Asante social life, including elements of tradition that had been suppressed under imperial rule just over a quarter of a century before. In the following passage of his monograph, Rattray begins to establish how the human sacrifices that had formerly occurred on the death of a king can be understood by placing oneself within the experiential world of the Asante.
