GOLD COAST COCOA FARMERS 39 



feature of the Gold Coast style of costume for grown- 

 ups, whilst a string of beads serves as full dress for most 

 of the pickins. The men wear their cloth toga 

 fashion, frequently without any undergarments, some- 

 times over a common woven singlet, sometimes over 

 trousers, and sometimes over singlet and trousers ; there 

 is a half-comic, half-tragic suggestion of the sublime 

 and the ridiculous in European clothes, which are 

 generally rags of cast-off garments, peering through 

 the folds of a picturesquely draped toga in cloth of 

 artistic design and colour. The women wear their 

 cloth hanging from under the arms like a high-waisted 

 skirt; sometimes it is drawn round over a white 

 muslin or flowered print jumper, but very often it 

 affords a display of bare arms, shoulders, and low 

 neck. The most fashionable clothes among the 

 Fantis are, as you see from the costumes of the crowd 

 you are studying, Oriental in design indigo blue or 

 white ground, with geometrical patterns in terra cotta 

 and coppery hued shades of brown; these cloths are 

 precisely similar in designs and colourings to those 

 worn in the Far East as sarongs by the Malays and 

 Javanese. 



In the Gold Coast Colony most of the farmers are 

 Fantis; in the dependency of Ashanti the land is 

 worked by the Ashantis. In both territories, most of 

 the farmers are smallholders; the exceptions to this 

 rule are the headmen of a village, the petty chiefs, 

 and the paramount chiefs, all of whom are big land- 

 owners. All the farmers go in for mixed farming: 

 cocoa and staple chop crops such as yams, maize, 

 Guinea corn, and plantains; unfortunately, there is a 

 growing tendency to sacrifice food crops to cocoa. It 

 is impossible to discover the area of land cultivated 



