The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  When the troops entered the city, they marched through the marketplace, which was filled with not only many thousands of people but every important person in the court, including the king. The soldiers were dirty and disheveled, their hair tied up in long spikes and coils, their beards unkempt—even the officers were much the worse for wear—but they were received with great applause. They fired their muskets in salute to the king, then circled around and repeated the salute. A day of mourning followed, complete with fasting, while the inhabitants of Kumase painted their faces and upper bodies red to symbolize the blood that had been spilled. The following day, rum was available everywhere, as it was during the yam festival, and many people became quite drunk but not too inebriated to be enthralled by the human sacrifices that then took place to expiate the deaths of the great men who had died in battle. Many slaves were required to die for each of the fallen senior commanders.45 A kernel of corn representing every soldier who died was dropped into a large urn by each senior commander while the king looked on sadly, sometimes feeling a personal loss because among the dead were usually members of the aristocracy or even the royal family. He did not grieve for dead slaves, but he worried nonetheless because slave soldiers would have to be replaced, and heavy losses would invariably strengthen the power of those members of the inner council who regularly opposed the use of force as an instrument of state policy.

  Britain and Asante: The Balance of Forces

  As the Asante and the British marched toward battle, the Asante had a great advantage in numbers. The British were sometimes able to recruit African allies from coastal peoples, but these soldiers, however numerous, were rarely a match for the Asante in bravery or discipline. The Asante also had an advantage in jungle fighting where it was difficult for the British forces to see their enemy, much less use their usual infantry tactics, such as their famous square formation, or deploy their artillery effectively. Also, the Asante were relatively immune to the malaria that so quickly struck down all but a few Europeans.

  British forces were reasonably secure in their stone forts, although not completely so as we have seen, and they were at a distinct advantage when combat took place in open country where they could deliver well-aimed musket fire at far longer range than the Asante could and were able to bring their cannon and rockets to bear long before the short-ranged Asante muskets could take a toll. These weapons would make the difference in a large battle in open terrain in 1826. As time passed, the British advantage in weapons became even more decisive. By 1853 the Enfield rifle, accurate up to eight hundred yards, was available to British troops, and in 1866 the .577-caliber Snider rifle (that strangely enough had been invented by a New York wine merchant) was adopted. It was this weapon, along with artillery, that gave them success in the great battles of 1874.46 When the final round of fighting took place in 1900, British forces had still more accurate and longer-ranged rifles, along with Maxim machine guns (like their precursors, the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns, also invented by Americans) and modern 75-mm artillery—weapons that with little modification were used throughout World War I to deadly effect. Most of the Asante were still armed with muzzle-loading, smooth-bore flintlock muskets.

  But early in the nineteenth century when the Asante and British first clashed, their arms were relatively similar. Muskets were abundant, at least along the West African coast. The British sold guns along the coast as early as 1646, and in 1829 alone, British traders in West Africa sold 52,540 muskets and pistols and nearly two million pounds of gunpowder.47 The Dutch sold nearly as many guns and perhaps even more powder. In 1833 alone, the Asante placed an order for ten thousand guns with the Dutch.48 From 1870 to 1872, as the Asante prepared for impending war with the British, they purchased over eighteen thousand muskets and twenty-nine thousand kegs of gunpowder. The Asante problem was not the availability of guns and gunpowder but their poor quality.

  Typically, the muskets sold to the Asante and other West Africans were shoddily made. Their stocks split easily, and their barrels were likely to burst, leading to the development of gun-repair shops operated by Asante blacksmiths to repair them. Most of the gunpowder was low in saltpeter, partly because it had been adulterated by European traders and partly because the Asante preferred weaker powder that was less likely to make the poorly made barrels of their guns explode. However, the low saltpeter content often reduced the explosive power of the powder so much that the Asante had to increase the amount they used in order to give their guns a range of even as much as forty or fifty yards. What is more, they had few bullets, relying instead on the much cheaper slugs of lead, pewter, or iron, but these had such limited penetrating power that they were only lethal at very close range.

  European armies loaded their flintlock muskets in several stages. First, powder was poured down the barrel, then wadding was pushed down behind it with a ramrod; finally, a bullet that fit the barrel snugly was rammed in. Later in the century the wadding and the bullet were rammed down as a single unit. The high-quality muskets used by the British before the introduction of rifled barrels—the famous .75 caliber “Brown Bess”—had a deadly range of up to 150 yards. The Asante did not use wadding to compact the powder, nor did they have bullets that matched the size of their musket barrels. They simply poured a huge charge of powder down the barrel, then poured an assortment of lead slugs, nails, and even stones into the barrel. When they fired, this array of projectiles fanned out erratically. The first volley the Asante fired was typically the most deadly because their Dane guns had been carefully loaded before the battle. Reloading was often done by slaves, who hunched down in shelter trenches out of the line of fire and poured powder and shot down the gun barrels as rapidly as they could. The extra powder the Asante used typically caused such an enormous explosion that rather than risk bruising their shoulders, soldiers usually fired from the hip, more or less without aiming. The powerful recoil typically guaranteed that their fire would fly high over the heads of their enemies.

  The inability of most Asante soldiers to deliver accurate fire was decisive in almost every battle. When British officers led trained West African or West Indian troops against the Asante, these men too sometimes fired wildly, and when they tried to rely on coastal allies like the Fante, disaster was a common result. But some of their West Indian regiments and virtually all British regiments were so thoroughly drilled in musketry that they fired as accurately as any troops in the world. In battle officers constantly reminded them to aim carefully and fire low. If Asante troops were drilled in musketry at all, there is no record of it. The closest example of target practice was recorded by the young princes of a tributary state who learned how to fire their muskets by using the nipples of young women as targets.49 In battle after battle, the British were stunned by the volume of fire that harmlessly tore through the leaves above their heads. The Asante did fire volleys on their officers’ command, but their marksmanship was dreadful.50

  Another disadvantage for the Asante was their failure to purchase or manufacture bayonets. Bayonets were not needed against their weaker African opponents, but they could have made a crucial difference against the British. Time and again the British would save the day only by a bayonet charge. The ponderous Dane guns the Asante relied on usually took close to one minute to reload and could never be reloaded in less than thirty seconds. After the Asante fired a volley, they would usually be defenseless against a bayonet charge for a full minute. Lacking bayonets of their own, the Asante often fled. In most nineteenth century wars bayonets seldom played a major role in the outcome of battles, but the British valued them so much against the Asante that they issued a newly designed bayonet for their 1895 campaign. This weapon had a saw-toothed back for cutting jungle foliage and a broad, oval spear tip that resembled a canoe paddle and was capable of inflicting a huge wound.51 The Asante not only had no bayonets, they did not even use swords or knives in combat, although every man carried at least one knife, mostly to cut off the heads of fallen enemies.

  Despi
te its remarkable discipline the Asante army was anything but uniform in its dress. Officers and men alike dressed quite idiosyncratically in the field. Some wore dramatic feathers, leopard skins, and buffalo horn caps, but others wore nothing but a kind of loincloth. Hair styles varied, too, from long spikes tied up like horns to shaggy braids. The slaves spoke dozens of different dialects of Akan and other West African languages. Some were devout Muslims, and some were teenagers, while others were in their forties. What they all shared was bravery and endurance. At the start of the century this was an offensive army. Its enemies did not attack the Asante; the Asante attacked them. Surprise was much to be desired, but with such large armies, it was rarely possible. Instead, the various units of the army slowly assembled, making ready for a grand assault that would attempt to envelop and crush their enemy. Often they would shout taunts and threats against their opponents for days before the final assault came. When it came, it was signaled by thousands of voices singing defiantly, accompanied by drums and horns. Suddenly there would be a deafening roar as thousands of muskets were fired. If the enemy withstood this fire long enough, the Asante flanking forces would eventually close in and there would be a charge. The Asante army was large, well disciplined, resourceful, and above all, brave. It was more than a match for any West African army, and early in the nineteenth century, fighting in the thick forest its men knew so well, it could also be a match for the British.

  4

  “The Bush Is Stronger Than the Cannon”

  THE LARGE, MAGNIFICENTLY UNIFORMED ASANTE ARMY BOWDICH saw in Kumase in 1817 had just returned from another successful campaign against the Fante. As noted in chapter 1, the devastating military defeat the Asante inflicted on the Fante in 1807 did nothing to resolve the trade route dispute between the two states. The Fante had pledged allegiance to the Asante on several prior occasions, only to forget their oaths as soon as the Asante troops had withdrawn. When disease and hunger forced the Asante to leave the devastated Fante coastal area later in 1807, the Fante immediately boasted to all who would listen, particularly the British merchants, that they had forced the Asante to flee. Predictably, they again closed off the trade routes through their territory, forcing the Asante to trade with the more distant forts at Accra or Elmina. Determined to control trade even outside their kingdom, the Fante next besieged Accra, and although they could not take the fort, they succeeded in blocking Asante trade to the British and Danish ports there. The Asante king was given no choice but to yet again send an army to the coast where, after unexpectedly hard fighting, it drove the Fante and their allies away from Accra.

  Despite the victory at Accra, the more direct trade roads through Fante itself to Cape Coast remained closed until 1814, when King Osei Bonsu again sent a large army to make war against the rearmed and defiant Fante. Led by an aggressive general named Amankwatia IV, the great-grandson of the original general Amankwatia, the Asante won a series of battles that led them close to the coastal forts of the British and Dutch. Amankwatia was under orders not to attack the European traders, but they were sufficiently alarmed by the approach of the Asante army to propose a peace treaty that for a brief period reopened coastal trade. It was after this war scare that the Dutch sent Huydecoper to Kumase, followed shortly after by the British expedition described by Bowdich. On behalf of the African Company of Merchants, Bowdich signed a treaty with King Osei Bonsu that guaranteed peace and free trade. The signing ceremony was conducted with the utmost gravity. Accompanied by the most important men in the realm, Osei Bonsu led the British negotiators to an inner square of the palace where some three hundred of his wives sat “in all the magnificence which a profusion of gold and silk could furnish.”1 After asking Bowdich and the other British officers to stand and swear on their swords that they had told the truth, the king’s councillors swore their oaths of agreement to the treaty on their gold-hiked swords before Osei Bonsu himself swore with the utmost solemnity that if he did not keep the treaty, God should kill him. He then declared that anyone violating the treaty would be punished with the utmost severity.2 For the Asante king, this treaty, like all treaties, was a sacred agreement that everything about his understanding of diplomacy made him feel lawfully bound to follow. For the British governor, John Hope Smith, the treaty was only a means of buying time. This treaty promised peace, but it actually set the stage for war against the British.

  Not surprisingly, it was the Fante who precipitated the slide toward conflict. In 1818, one year after the Bowdich treaty had been signed, a rumor circulated along the coast that an Asante army had suffered a terrible defeat in the north and that King Osei Bonsu had died in battle. While the Fante were raucously celebrating this long-awaited event, Asante emissaries arrived at the coast with the unwelcome news that there had been a great Asante victory, not a defeat. They were greeted by the Fante with derision, denied drinking water, and even pelted with stones. When the infuriated diplomats moved on to Cape Coast to complain about their treatment, Governor Hope Smith refused to listen to them, even though the newly signed treaty clearly required him to defend Asante trade interests at the coast by taking action against this kind of mistreatment.3

  In January 1819, while Osei Bonsu and his councillors were debating their best course of action, the first British official directly appointed to the Gold Coast by the British crown arrived at Cape Coast castle. Joseph Dupuis was to serve as the first British consul at Kumase, a position that was a clear threat to the authority of Hope Smith and the British merchants, who made no attempt to disguise their hostility to him. They were so determined to undermine Dupuis that they took every possible step to prevent him from traveling to Kumase. First, it seemed that supplies could not be assembled, then carriers could not be found, no translator was available, and finally the rains came. Dupuis also suffered several protracted bouts of malaria that further delayed his departure. Frustrated by the obstacles put in his way and furious about the interference with his royal authority, Dupuis freely expressed his contempt for the “servants of a mercantile board.”4 Dupuis’s keenly developed sense of self-importance did nothing to smooth relations with the merchants, and it would be twelve long months before he would finally begin his journey to Kumase.

  In March 1819, while Dupuis was cooling his heels at Cape Coast, a high-ranking emissary from Osei Bonsu, bearing his golden sword of rank, arrived to ask for a meeting with Governor Smith, known to the king and his council as “Smitty.” In a mild and courteous manner the diplomat reminded Hope Smith of the Bowdich treaty provision that called for the king to seek redress from the governor in the event of any aggression against Asante traders by people living under British protection. He requested that the governor punish those responsible for the mistreatment of his messengers so that the king would not have to send a punitive expedition of his own. However, when this speech was translated by a man well-known to detest the Asante, it was given a menacing tone, and the merchants’ translator even fabricated an ultimatum to the effect that if nothing were done, the king would invade the coast in forty days. In fact, it was unlikely Smith was deceived by this translation because he actually knew the language well enough not to need a translator. Nevertheless, in his return message the governor not only refused to acceed to Osei Bonsu’s request, he sarcastically added that for all he cared, the king might come down to the coast “in forty days, or in twenty, or as soon as he thought proper.”5

  For some time the king’s emissary remained at Cape Coast, terrified by the prospect of delivering this insulting reply to King Osei Bonsu. When the unfortunate man finally returned to Kumase with Hope Smith’s answer, Osei Bonsu refused to believe that the British governor had sent such an inflammatory message and ordered that the messenger be tortured to determine if he had told the truth. The torture apparently proved unsatisfactory, because in June the king sent another senior envoy to the coast to determine whether the first one had told the truth. He was dismissed by Hope Smith with the curt assurance that the message was correct.
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br />   The second envoy returned to Kumase with confirmation of Smith’s insult and, to make matters worse, reported that he had seen fortifications being constructed to defend Cape Coast in apparent anticipation of an Asante invasion. Osei Bonsu was bewildered and angered by this British treaty violation and troubled all the more because, although his armies were at war to the north, his inner council urged immediate war against the Fante and British. Despite their pressure he resisted precipitous action, insisting on sending yet another emissary to Cape Coast. It was a singular mission. This gold-sword messenger, a diplomat of the highest rank, reported to Hope Smith that the king denied having sent a menacing message to the governor and reaffirmed his sacred commitment to the treaty. He then added these authentically menacing points. The king, he said, could not make war against anyone with whom he had signed a treaty. He therefore sent back the treaty, the “book” as he called it, and asked frankly whether Hope Smith wanted peace or war. If peace, he demanded satisfaction for past insults. If war, then the treaty should be abrogated by the British so that he would be free to attack, no longer restrained by the principles stated by the treaty he had signed and considered binding.