The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  Christian missionaries of the rival Wesleyan and Basel missions who operated nineteen mission schools in the region had done everything in their power to subvert Asante sovereignty for over fifteen years. In addition to spreading lurid tales about Asante despotism and cruelty, especially human sacrifice, they gave intelligence to the British about Asante actions and on several occasions supplied Christian converts to the British as carriers, interpreters, and even soldiers. When Scott invaded, the former captive Reverend Ramseyer supplied hundreds of men to him as carriers. In appreciation for his services, only five days after Prempe was taken into custody, Governor Maxwell invited Ramseyer to open a mission in Kumase. When the missionary arrived, he was exultant: “It is no longer a dream…. Kumase is now a Basel missionary station…. All Asante lies open before us.”59

  As time passed and British demands for labor and taxes were exceeded only by the missionaries’ demands for children to convert to Christianity, Asante bitterness became obvious even to disinterested European visitors.60 Surreptitiously, the Asante made more and more efforts to acquire modern weapons and ammunition. People still had hope that King Prempe would be restored to his stool, but patience was wearing thin. The British were impatient, too. As Secretary of State Chamberlain later explained in Parliament, the Golden Stool alone gave legitimate supremacy to the ruler of Asante. “Therefore it was of the greatest importance to get hold of this symbol of sovereignty, if we could possibly do it.”61

  The British resident at Kumase, Captain W. B. Davidson-Houston, had no comprehension of the importance of the Golden Stool for the Asante. He and other British government officials thought of it as nothing more than a potent symbol, like the crown or throne of a European king. That the stool embodied the soul and well-being of the Asante people and linked generations of their ancestors in spiritual common cause was simply not grasped. Davidson-Houston made several thinly disguised attempts to find the Golden Stool, but they were as unsuccessful as they were deeply offensive to the Asante. In December 1899, almost four years after Prempe’s arrest, a lame Asante boy named Kwame Tua appeared at Government House in Accra, now the seat of British power in the Gold Coast, where he offered to reveal the hiding place of the Golden Stool. Without bothering much about what the boy’s motives might be, the former lieutenant governor, now governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, immediately dispatched his private secretary, Captain C. H. Armitage, with some Hausa soldiers and carriers in search of the Golden Stool. After marching north for about one hundred miles, the boy slipped away from Armitage and unaccountably told a local chief that the expedition was searching for the Golden Stool. Armitage lamely tried to convince the alarmed chief that the boy was quite mad and quickly marched on, the boy still in tow. Some twenty-five miles north of Kumase, the boy panicked again, refusing to go any farther. Armitage tried both threats and bribery with no success. By now it was widely known that the British were searching for the Golden Stool, and the countryside was thoroughly up in arms. When the chiefs learned that Governor Hodgson would soon visit Kumase, they assumed that he too was in search of the stool. And they were right.

  Despite their anger, the Asante people received the governor and his large party with the dignified protocol typical of the royal court. Rose Ramseyer, now ascendant in her new Basel mission station outside Kumase, presented Lady Mary Hodgson with a bouquet, and the children from her mission school sang “God Save the Queen.” Later that day bugles sounded to announce his excellency, an honor guard of Hausa soldiers presented arms, and in full-dress uniform, Sir Frederick strode vigorously out of the fort to address an assemblage of Asante chiefs and nobles. The slim, graceful Lady Hodgson sat proudly next to the stocky, bull-necked governor, who spoke while sitting down. After some reassuring words about his pleasure at being in Kumase and some soon-to-be self-evident nonsense about his good knowledge of the people and their customs, the crude, overbearing Hodgson delivered a series of hammerblows to the Asantes’ pride, religion, and treasury.

  First, he declared, King Prempe would never return. Power would remain forever in the hands of the British. Second, not only would the fifty thousand-ounce war indemnity have to be paid, but interest was accruing. He read out the amounts of interest owed by the various district chiefs and kings. He then launched into this astonishing casus belli: “What must I do to the man, whoever he is, who has failed to give to the Queen, who is the paramount power in this country, the stool to which she is entitled? Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?” He carried on in this vein, making plain to all Asante that he was a barbarian determined to violate the sanctity of the Golden Stool on which an Asante monarch had only physically sat during the most sacred occasions.62 When Lady Hodgson wrote her memoirs, she loyally denied that Hodgson had ever mentioned sitting on the stool, but Hodgson’s signed transcript of his speech makes it clear that he did, and Asante who were present vividly remember his words.63 Hodgson’s confrontational approach was a calculated one. He firmly believed that only if the Asante knew their king would never return and the Queen of England possessed the Golden Stool would they submit to British rule. But because he had no understanding of the meaning of the Golden Stool for the Asante, his tough talk would start a war.

  The Asante audience left without an open display of anger, but there was little hope of averting war now. The loss of land to British mining concessions had already driven many Asante to the point of insurrection. In addition to the loss of land, the Asante were outraged when the British resident ordered chiefs to produce carriers for the European miners. It was bad enough that families had to send their slaves to work for the hated miners, but free Asante were forced to carry supplies as well, something that the Asante found deeply humiliating. The British also forced free men to work as laborers on the roads, and if they refused, they were flogged or their chiefs were fined. The Hausa soldiers who enforced these demands were seen as tyrannical and rapacious agents of a foreign government. Moreover, British efforts to abolish the slave trade, which still flourished, infuriated many others.

  Slavery was still vital to the Asante economy, especially to agriculture and the important kola nut trade to the north. These northern people had no other means of paying for kola nuts than slaves, and as several British observers pointed out, by now Asante slavery was such a benign institution that when the British actually freed slaves from their Asante masters, they refused to leave.64 The French did nothing to discourage slavery in their West African possessions, including the Ivory Coast, which adjoined the Gold Coast to the west, and the Germans encouraged it in Togo to the east; but the British frequently tried to hold to principle even if social and economic conditions might have called for a more cautious policy. Caution finally won the day. The Colonial Office chose to be pragmatic: “If we make it known that we have entered a crusade against slavery, we will not have any allies and they might all combine against us. So we should move very warily and carefully in this matter. To abolish domestic slavery would mean a social revolution of the greatest character. All in Ashanti who have anything to lose would gravely resist this act.”65

  The Christian missionaries’ attack on Asante religion was another factor that led many Asante to consider war. The Asante religion was as meaningful to them as Christianity was to the missionaries, and they saw no reason to embrace alien ideas that would profoundly alter their way of life. The people of Asante had come very close to open rebellion several times during the past two years, and now Hodgson’s aggressive declaration that Prempe would “never again” rule in Asante and that he should possess and “sit on” the Golden Stool pushed most of them over the brink.

  A few hours after Hodgson’s provocative speech, most of the great chiefs and nobles met in secret. After the men had begun to debate the issues, the sixty-year-old queen mother of the kingdom of Edweso stood up. Asante queen mothers were expected to lead in times of great national crisis, and this one, Yaa Asantewaa by name, was a forceful woman with a gr
ievance and a vision. Her son, the king of Edweso, had been one of Prempe’s most devoted allies. It was for that reason that he had been arrested and sent into exile along with Prempe. Edweso was so loyal to the monarch that it was there that the Golden Stool was hidden from the British until it had to be moved in December 1899, when the British began to search that area.66 The queen mother was determined not only to restore her son to his place of authority but to reunite the Asante Empire under King Prempe. She began her impassioned speech by declaring that she would never pay one penny of her portion of the interest on the indemnity that Governor Hodgson had demanded. She then asked the men how they could sit idly while the British humiliated them time and again. “If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments.” She then grabbed a rifle from a startled chief and fired it into the ground. That night, it is said, all the chiefs swore an oath to fight a war of national liberation from the British.67

  To give their rebellion legitimacy, the Asante ruling council offered the Golden Stool to the closest relative of King Prempe left in Asante, Asibe II, the chief of Kokofu. He humbly agreed to accept the stool and to lead the war effort, but before he could take any action, he was betrayed, and Governor Hodgson had him arrested and detained in the fort. He later—and gallandy—escaped but was again captured. Kept in irons, he was soon after deported. Well advised by British sympathizers, of whom there were many, Hodgson also managed to detain five or six major kings in the fort at Kumase, effectively neutralizing the participation of troops from their districts, but the remaining Asante leaders nevertheless mobilized their men for war.

  The war began three days after Hodgson’s bellicose speech, when the same boy who led Captain Armitage on a wild-goose chase after the Golden Stool reappeared at the fort in Kumase with a new offer to lead the white men to its hiding place. Ever hopeful and ever naive, Hodgson again sent Captain Armitage, with another British officer, Captain Leggett, and fifty Hausa troops with their many African carriers, to follow the boy in search of the hidden treasure. As the column entered each of two small villages, they found the young men restless and excited, but they were allowed to search the villages without opposition. Leaving Captain Leggett and fifteen Hausas in a village named Bali, Armitage ordered his Hausas to bully and actually whip some of the children in search of information about the stool, but the only product of his brutality was even greater Asante outrage. Armitage then followed the boy through a dense, silent forest for more than three hours before coming to a clearing where they found three small huts. Here, the boy guide assured them, lay the Golden Stool. Picks and shovels dug deeply underneath the floor of each hut until the boy finally admitted that he had made a mistake.

  Thoroughly disgusted, Armitage and his men trooped back to Bali, where they discovered Captain Leggett and his men faced off against forty or fifty armed Asante. As perhaps only British officers ofthat era could do, the youthful-appearing Armitage and the strikingly handsome Leggett calmly sat down to have tea prepared by their thoughtful orderly. The excited Asante looked on in amazement while a folding table (an essential piece of furniture that had been lugged along by sweating carriers) was set with two enameled cups and saucers, a butter tin, condensed milk, and a teapot. While the two sides stared at each other with their fingers on their triggers, the officers sat down on folding chairs. Without warning, the tin of condensed milk flew into the air, followed by the cup and everything else on the table, as Asante slugs flew everywhere, slightly wounding Armitage and Leggett as well as several of the Hausas. The British troops quickly took cover in nearby houses and returned fire. With nightfall such heavy rain fell that the Asante troops could not prime their flindocks, and the night thus passed quietly.

  Early in the morning Armitage and Leggett tried to fight their way back to Kumase. The Asante followed them all day, firing from the thick brush. By late afternoon the column had so many wounded that it could go no farther. Armitage issued ten rounds to Leggett and each of the men still able to march and ordered them to break through to the fort. He divided the rest of his ammunition among the men who remained. It came to three rounds for each man able to fire. Completely out of food and water, the men licked the dew off leaves and waited. Providentially, the Asante did not attack, and Leggett ran into a patrol from the fort that escorted the entire force to safety. The exhausted, thirsty, and wounded men were tended to by the six surgeons in the fort, then fed, and allowed to rest. After having his minor wounds treated and eating breakfast, Armitage slept for days.

  So began the ultimate Victorian melodrama: British troops and white women besieged in a fort by “cruel savages,” their food running out, hope almost gone, as British troops fought valiantly to reach them in time. It was a script that could have been done for Hollywood. The drama was real enough, but so was the terrible war that had just begun, a war that would see some of the fiercest battles ever fought in West Africa and that, despite conspicuous Asante courage, would result in the loss of Asante independence forever.

  8

  “We Are Going to Die Today”

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGAN, THE ASANTE PREPARED FOR war—or rebellion as the British always called it. They were surprisingly well organized, considering how unexpectedly the conflict had come. Guided by Opoku Mensa, their political leader, and Kofi Kofia, a vigorous young general, newly mobilized soldiers rapidly assembled outside Kumase where the first battles would have to be fought. Some few of the Asante troops had breech-loading rifles, for the most part older models such as Sniders, but almost all their men were still armed with antiquated flinlock muskets, and they were chronically short of shot and powder. Asante generals were fully aware that the British troops they had chosen to face would not only all be armed with the most modern rifles but also have machine guns, powerful, rapid-firing 75-mm cannon, and seemingly limitless supplies of ammunition.

  In searching for a way to neutralize British firepower, Asante military leaders seized on the idea of the stockade, which had apparendy been explained to them by Mende travelers who knew of the use of stockades against the British in Sierra Leone in 1898. Despite inexperience with this kind of defensive structure, the Asante accomplished an astonishing engineering feat. There were only a dozen roads or paths that led out of Kumase through the dense jungle barrier that surrounded the city. If these paths were blocked, British reinforcements could not reach Kumase to relieve the British fort, nor could the forces in it hope to escape. In the space of only three weeks, the Asante managed to block all these roads with twenty-one massive log barricades. Using slave labor driven on by armed troops, the Asante cut thousands of huge logs and dragged them into place. Two six-foot-high walls of logs, lashed together with telegraph wire torn down from its route from Kumase to the coast, were filled in with five to six feet of densely packed dirt, stones, and smaller logs. Loopholes were cut to allow firing. Many of these stockades were built in zigzag patterns to allow cross-firing if the British troops were able to press their attacks close to these formidable barriers. These stockades were so monumental that they were impervious to the heaviest artillery fire the British guns could manage. What is more remarkable, these were not narrow structures that merely blocked a path, like the fallen trees that had been used to impede Wolseley’s advance. Several stockades were over four hundred yards long, and many others were nearly that extensive. The flanks of these stockades were also fortified and entrenched, so that even if British troops succeeded in cutting their way through the jungle to outflank the stockade, they would still encounter heavy fire from well-protected defenders.

  Behind each stockade the Asante leaders built extensive war camps capable of housing many thousands of troops. These camps consisted of a thousand or more well-made huts equipped with bamboo beds, outside sitting areas, and some large structures with reinforced log roofs capable of withstanding anything but a direct hit from a 75-mm shell. The camps included large markets and supply areas
well-provided with food and gin, the staple beverage of Asante campaigns. Most of the occupants of the camps were armed men, but there were some women and children, too, and traders came and went with supplies. As was the case in earlier Asante wars, sanitation was poor, but the comforts that these camps provided so amazed British officers when they later examined them that the Europeans wondered aloud why they were living in far less comfort.

  In addition to the well-built Basel mission station that was now established in Kumase, the British had constructed a prison, a hospital, and large barracks for troops, but the key to their power in the city was the gleaming white fort that commanded the area. Its twelve-foot-high, loopholed stone walls enclosed a fifty-square-yard area that included various multistoried living quarters for residents, large storage rooms, a small hospital, sundry offices, a kitchen, and a well. Large, well-protected circular firing turrets for machine guns and cannon rose above the walls at each of the fort’s four corners. The turrets and the living quarters had roofs of red corrugated iron. The only entrance to the fort was a massive iron gate. The fort mounted four cannon and five machine guns that commanded the city, a nearby vegetable garden, and numerous sheds and houses.

  While the Asante forces were building their stockades and war camps, Governor Hodgson was frantically telegraphing for reinforcements. The British government was sympathetic to his plight, but the British army was stretched to its limits by the expanding war against the Boers in South Africa and, most recently, by the need to send an expeditionary force to China to help quell the Boxer Rebellion. Even if the War Office had troops to spare, it was not comfortable about asking white soldiers to campaign during the rainy season in the Gold Coast. London had not forgotten that only sixty-eight of the four hundred men of the Royal West Yorkshire Regiment were fit for duty after Scott’s force returned to the coast five years earlier. However, British public opinion, which was already ill-tempered after the many reverses suffered in South Africa, would not tolerate a defeat in the Gold Coast. A victory was badly needed, and African troops led by British officers and noncommissioned officers would have to do the job. As orders came over the telegraph lines, troops began to muster in Accra to march north to Kumase, while others in the Northern Territories made ready to march south. Other troops from Sierra Leone to the west and Nigeria to the east began their march to the coast where ships were waiting to carry them to the Gold Coast.