Later in the year his reign of terror even extended to his closest councillors, some of whom he had executed. So many people in Kumase fled that the city was almost empty. Many left metropolitan Asante for the coast where Snider-wielding palace guards could not reach them. By early March 1883 Mensa Bonsu had alienated every segment of Asante society. The opposition to the king, led by disgruntled young men of good families who saw no future for themselves, was joined by senior councillors who demanded that the king cease his tyranny, especially his rapacious abuse of the husbands and relatives of the women on whom he chose to impose his sexual desires. They also insisted that he no longer order executions without the consent of his chiefs and senior councillors and that he consult them before imposing immense fines on his subjects, as he had been doing. These were reasonable, constitutional demands, but the young men who led the opposition were so angry that some feared they would seize and flog the king. There was every reason to believe that these alienated young men would destroy the monarchy.15 Only the king’s guards prevented his destoolment, and even they finally failed to intercede when coup leaders, led by his brother, General Owusu Koko, seized the king and sent him into exile, where he lived under guard in a small village in miserable poverty.
Though former King Kakari had stayed apart from the political turmoil that had splintered the Asante state for seven long and tumultuous years, he still had powerful friends, and as time passed, many Asante came to remember him fondly for his genial and courteous manner. His adherents began to argue that his years of exile had given him the wisdom he lacked before, and they convinced him to seek the stool. With armed support he mounted a serious challenge to his contender, Kwaku Dua, who eventually invited him and his army to a peace conference in Kumase to discuss the troubled succession. It was a classic trap. When Kakari’s six thousand supporters entered the wretched city, Snider fire erupted from all sides. At least two thousand were killed, but Kakari somehow escaped. After wandering alone for two weeks, he was captured and returned to Kumase where, hungry and exhausted, he was imprisoned under heavy guard while Kwaku Dua II was enstooled. A few days after Kwaku Dua’s accession to the throne, he ruthlessly but prudently ordered the execution of some three hundred of Kakari’s closest relatives, including women and children. Small children were killed by men who held their legs and smashed their skulls against tree trunks.16 But only forty-four days into his reign, Kwaku Dua II died, apparently poisoned by the general who put him in power. Soon after, former King Kakari was executed. After being strangled with a leather thong, his neck was broken with an elephant’s tusk, a traditional way of executing someone of royal birth whose blood could not legally be spilled.17 The Asante political arena had never been a place for the faint of heart, but it had never been more dangerous than it was now.
The entire kingdom became engulfed in the most horrible civil war the Asante had ever known. States fought states, private armies fought private armies, and what used to be the Asante union burned. There were no safe havens. No large towns survived, and even most small villages were destroyed. Probably half the population fled or was killed. When the fighting finally ended in 1885, after two full years of war, all the formerly tributary states were independent. All that remained of the kingdom was a small area around Kumase, and the city itself was largely abandoned. Elephant grass grew over fifteen feet high in its once immaculate streets, and the palace, rebuilt with bamboo and grass thatch, was a mockery of its former grandeur.
In 1888 a royal faction led by Yaa Akyaa succeeded in putting her son, a fifteen-year-old boy named Agyemon Prempe, on the stool. The challenge before him could hardly have been greater: to reconstruct a kingdom splintered in all directions, most of whose people were either dead or refugees and whose resources had virtually ceased to exist. The national treasury was so depleted that the royal family was reduced to asking the British governor at Cape Castle for a loan of £320 to pay for the enstoolment ceremony. The Colonial Office decided it would be a good investment to lend the money to the “impecunious monarch.”18 However, the British attached so many conditions to the loan that if Prempe had accepted it, he would have yielded his sovereignty to the British crown. Prempe and his advisers refused to sell the kingdom for £320, but they could not restore the dominance of the government in Kumase. In return for their support of the new king, the district chiefs and kings reclaimed much of their lost power.19
Partly as a result of the issue of the loan, Prempe’s formal enstoolment did not take place until June 1894. But more significant was the matter of whom the new King would rule. If he had been enstooled in 1888, he would have been no more than the king of Kumase district and a very impoverished district at that. Yet thanks to remarkably skillful diplomacy, Prempe’s mother and councillors were able to reconcile many of the rebellious states. In fact, conciliatory promises from the new king-in-waiting were so successful in reestablishing the loyalty of the dissident chiefs and kings that by 1893 the Asante kingdom was very largely reunited. Prempe’s own qualities had much to do with the successful reunification. Although he was plump and appeared effeminate, he was modest, respectful of his elders, and brave when in danger.20 He also truly believed in Asante unity, had no personal ambition, never went back on a promise, and possessed what the Asante referred to as “the sweet tongue”—an ability to win people over with his words.21
Now that the rule of law had been reestablished, peaceful trade once again began to flourish. This new trade did not concentrate on guns and gunpowder, which were blocked by the British. In 1890 the nearly forty thousand Asante traders who traveled to the coast purchased only 1,312 guns and 2,091 kegs of gunpowder.22 Asante still controlled major sources of gold, and new trade in cocoa and rubber was flourishing. In 1893 three thousand two hundred pounds of rubber were carried to Cape Coast each day.23 In 1895 alone, over four million pounds of rubber were exported from the Gold Coast, two thirds of it from Asante.
British “forward policy,” as it was known, continued to call for the destruction of the Asante state as an economic power in order to place the increasingly lucrative Gold Coast trade under British control. In support of the goal British administrators at Cape Coast rarely missed an opportunity to characterize the Asante government and its people as unworthy possessors of their empire. In 1892 Governor Griffith wrote of the Asante that “their proper characteristics are deceit, falsehood, treachery. In fact there is hardly a bad quality that they have not got.”24 His successor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, was convinced that the Asante social and political system was nothing but a “blood-thirsty despotism” that must be destroyed at any price. The various missionaries in the Gold Coast agreed, and so did Joseph Chamberlain, new secretary of state for the colonies, who was an outspoken advocate of the use of imperial power in West Africa.
In the past, British foreign policy had given France more or less a free hand in West Africa, concentrating instead on the strategic Nile Valley Chamberlain, however, was willing to risk war with the French to secure the Gold Coast and the territories to its north. On June 28, 1895, he declared that Asante independence was “an intolerable nuisance.” To add to Chamberlain’s annoyance, reports began to accumulate that the French, increasingly active in the Ivory Coast just to the west of the Asante, were attempting to establish an alliance with the Asante and that King Prempe was actively negotiating with them. In fact, although he had some preliminary contact with representatives of Almani Samori, the brilliant African rebel against French rule, Prempe was not interested in an alliance with the French. What he wanted was British help in bringing peace and prosperity to his war-weary people. His pleas were communicated to Chamberlain, who dismissed them. The Asante were a “nuisance,” and on November 21, 1895, Chamberlain cabled Governor Maxwell that military force would be used to subdue the Asante and bring about their submission to British rule.25
This decision to use force was made after Chamberlain’s rejection of an extraordinary entreaty for peace from a six-man Asante delegat
ion to the Court of St. James, a delegation led by Prince John Owusu Ansa and including his British-educated brother Albert. The delegation offered the British a large business concession and submission to the British crown. British authorities at Cape Coast, convinced that Ansa posed a danger to their interests, did everything they could to discredit him, even trying to deny him the right to travel to Britain.26 Chamberlain at first refused to hear from the Ansa delegation on the grounds that the ambassadors were not authorized by Prempe and therefore lacked legal standing. But Prince Ansa hired a British barrister, who informed Chamberlain that the Asante ambassadors’ credentials were authentic and presented their submission that, in addition to offering a huge business concession, King Prempe would accept a British resident in Kumase and faithfully conform to the dictates of the queen or her representatives. They promised that the practice of human sacrifice had been abandoned, as in fact it had been under King Prempe, and asked only for peace and trade.
Chamberlain agreed to consider the matter if the delegation returned at once to Cape Coast; he then traveled to Kumase with British representatives to reach an accord. The Asante sailed back to the Gold Coast, convinced that they had averted war and established a business connection that would benefit both the British and the Asante. But Chamberlain could not overcome his fears that the French were somehow conspiring to control the Asante and through them the Gold Coast. While the Asante envoys were still at sea, he told Governor Maxwell that the planned military expedition to Kumase would go forward. Ironically, Prince Ansa actually arrived at Cape Coast on a ship that was loaded with military supplies for the invasion of Kumase. Maxwell received the Asante diplomats coldly, telling them that a military force would proceed to Kumase but holding out hope of peace. The disillusioned Asante returned to Kumase, where they discovered that their countrymen were well aware of the impending British invasion.
As word spread of the gathering of British military force, the Golden Stool and other valuables were removed from Kumase and hidden. Some factions in Asante wanted to mobilize the army, but Prempe refused, saying, “I am not prepared to fight the British troops in spite I am to be captured by them [sic]; … I would rather surrender to secure the lives and tranquillity of my people and countrymen.”27 But disturbing the tranquillity of the Asante people was exactly what the British had in mind. When a delegation of Asante diplomats hurried to the coast with promises of payment of all verified debts, Governor Maxwell curtly rebuked them, saying that their promises were empty words and that words alone could not send away the thousands of British soldiers who had been brought to the Gold Coast. Words of peace were not wanted. A British army would march to Kumase.
Command of what was called the Ashantee Expeditionary Force was given to Colonel Sir Francis Scott, who in 1874 had been a young officer in the 42nd Highlanders during Wolseley’s march to Kumase. Scott’s contempt for Africans was extreme even for his time, and he was as confident of victory as he was eager to fight. He had served in the Gold Coast for some time and in 1893 had led an expeditionary force of four hundred Hausas equipped with a Maxim gun to the north of the Gold Coast to prevent Asante expansion. He was well aware that the Asante could not hope to mobilize more than a few thousand men to oppose him, but several hundred of those men would be armed with Sniders, and a few would have modern French rifles. Properly led, troops with these weapons could be dangerous.
If the Asante chose to fight, they would face a somewhat smaller but much better-armed force than Wolseley had commanded. The West India Regiment of 380 African troops commanded by 20 British officers and 1,000 Hausas led by 30 British officers, as well as perhaps 500 native levies, were joined by the West Yorkshire Regiment of 400 men and 20 officers, as well as a special-service corps of 12 volunteer officers and 254 picked men chosen from some of the most prestigious regiments in the British army, including the Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, and Grenadier Guards. What is more, Wolseley’s radical idea of highly qualified volunteers finally had its day Each man had to be at least twenty-four years old, have four years of service, be a good rifle shot, and pass a stiff medical examination.28 Nevertheless, one of these men died of “heat apoplexy” on his first day in the Gold Coast.
Unlike Wolseley’s force, Scott’s army had no Naval Brigade. He did have various surgeons, engineers, supply and artillery officers, and thousands of carriers, perhaps ten thousand in all. The combat troops would have an even greater advantage in weapons than Wolseley’s troops did. The Snider rifle had been replaced by a lighter, faster-firing and longer-range carbine, the Martini-Henry. The cumbersome and unreliable Gatling gun, which had been of little use to Wolseley, had been replaced by another American invention, the Maxim gun, a reliable, rapid-firing machine gun much like those that turned World War I into a slaughterhouse.29 They also had newly issued 75-mm field pieces, capable of rapidly firing heavy explosive shells for great distances. And, of course, they still had bayonets.
The first troops arrived at Cape Coast in December 1895 on board a far nicer ship than the one Wolseley and his special-service officers so detested. There were few duties, the food was surprisingly good, and the men arranged concerts that mysteriously featured, among other songs, “Swanee River.”30 As it was for Wolseley two decades earlier, health was Scott’s constant concern. The senior medical officer posted orders that called for men to eat “immediately” after rising because early morning was the “time of lowest vitality.” A cup of soup, cocoa, or coffee was recommended along with bread and butter. Two grains of quinine were to be taken immediately after breakfast. All told, five grains per day were issued on the march. Everyone was ordered to avoid the sun, damp clothing, unboiled water, and any food not supplied by the government. Bowels were to be “open daily,” and all men were required to wear a flannel cummerbund at night, apparently to prevent the loss of vital body heat.31 Hospitals were set up as far into the interior as Wolseley’s old camp at Prahsu, and a large hospital ship was anchored off shore. Huge depots of food were established, and as it was in Wolseley’s campaign, the emphasis was on meat (once again each man was to receive 1 ½ pounds of meat each day) and freshly baked bread. Despite all precautions, fever quickly began to take its toll, and victims were rapidly invalided home. One of the first to fall was a robust thirty-one-year-old major named Ferguson, whose fever rose to 110° before he died. He was buried next to Captain Huyshe, who died on Wolseley’s campaign.32
On Christmas Day two ships arrived carrying the special-service troops and the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. The men came ashore much more easily than their unruly mules, which threatened to capsize the small boats, and the white troops immediately began their march inland. Units of the special-service corps, including a company from the same Rifle Brigade that fought in 1874, had no difficulty on the march, but the 2nd West Yorkshire, the Old West Yorks, had a terrible time. This battalion had been stationed in Aden before being ordered to the Gold Coast, and many were ill. They were also said to have consumed far too much beer and done too little marching. On the first day eighty men fell out and had to be carried. It was not until much later in the campaign that the men became reasonably fit.33 Later that same day Prince Henry of Battenburg, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, came ashore riding a donkey and carrying a small white umbrella as protection against the sun. He was eager to show his enthusiasm for the military actions of his adopted country. With him as an aide-decamp was His Highness Prince Victor of Schleswig-Holstein. Christmas dinner for the troops included fresh meat, plum pudding, and a bottle of beer. It was declared excellent.34
The road that Wolseley’s engineers had built two decades earlier was in total disrepair. In many places the troops had to advance in single file, climbing over fallen trees and cutting away vines and underbrush. When clearings were reached, the troops were trained in the tactics Scott thought would be necessary to fight against an unseen enemy in the dense brush. Scott disdained Wolseley’s lightweight gray uniforms. This was the last time that Br
itish troops wore scarlet tunics on active service, but by the end of the first day’s march, the woolen tunics were so soaked with sweat that they turned black and stayed that way throughout the campaign. Somehow Scott had not learned from Wolseley. Before the force entered metropolitan Asante, patrols searched for the Asante army, and spies were paid to provide information about their whereabouts and plans. Though there were several alarms that led the British to take up defensive positions, there was no sign of Asante troops. All the British found were small villages, the formerly prosperous but now ruined towns of Fomena and Amoafo, streams that the engineers had to bridge, and shrines—so-called fetish houses—which the troops destroyed “in a ruthless, unheeding way,” despite orders to leave them alone.35
The Fall of the Asante Empire Page 21