The Fall of the Asante Empire

Home > Other > The Fall of the Asante Empire > Page 24
The Fall of the Asante Empire Page 24

by Robert B. Edgerton


  For the Nigerian troops led by Captain Harold Biss and Captain Charles Melliss (soon to become a major and a recklessly courageous leader), the march included their first, and wildly exciting, ride in a railroad train. These men, who had never before even seen a train, next had their first sight of the sea as they were ferried aboard a modern steamship on their hurried way to Cape Coast. One of them saw an ice cube for the first time in his life. Fascinated by this strange object, he carefully wrapped it in a cloth and put it in his pack. When he returned with a friend to show off the mysterious object, he found that it had disappeared, and he was convinced that it had been stolen. It took a British officer some time to explain to him what had happened.1 These African soldiers were not only naive about ice and various aspects of European technology, they were young and inexperienced in the ways of modern warfare. They were so likely to fire wildly, wasting precious ammunition, that British officers chose not to issue them repeating magazine rifles, and many of their officers openly doubted that they would stand against the Asante.22 Wolseley had used the same concerns to insist on being sent British troops.

  The first troops to reach Kumase were 107 Hausas who had marched down from the north, led by an ill-fated captain named Middlemist. Two other officers, named Marshall and Bishop, along with a doctor named Hay (who would prove to be exceptionally brave) accompanied them. They arrived on April 18 without meeting any opposition. The following day, on Hodgson’s orders, two columns of troops marched out of the fort to destroy abandoned war camps near Kumase without encountering any hostilities. The Asante leaders were still trying to avoid war. But five days later, when Hodgson repeated the order to punish the Asante, one hundred fifty men led by the recendy arrived Captain Marshall marched into a deadly ambush. Four men were killed and fifty-eight wounded, including Marshall, Bishop, and Dr. Hay. The column withdrew to the fort in disorder. All that night the Asante sang and drummed in celebration of their victory. Sleep was impossible in the fort, and Governor Hodgson spent the night sending telegrams requesting more reinforcements. They were the last telegrams to leave Kumase. By morning the line was cut. The construction of the stockades had been completed, and the Asante were ready for war.

  The Asante did not intend to starve the British garrison out of the fort. Even though the fort was impregnable to Asante weapons, at ten o’clock on the morning of the next day, the twenty-fifth, the Asante attacked. Despite heavy fire from Hausas deployed outside the fort and from machine guns and artillery in the fort’s turrets, the Asante advanced steadily, taking the barracks and other European buildings as well as the Basel mission where they were delighted to find hundreds of bottles of wine. Thousands of African civilians fled toward the fort ahead of the Asante advance, and as some of the British troops withdrew into it, they made a panic-stricken charge to join them inside its walls. Captain Middlemist was so badly crushed against the fort’s iron door that he was critically injured, and it was only with the utmost effort that he was pulled inside and the door locked shut. The white missionaries, led by Friedrich Ramseyer and his wife, Rose, were admitted to the fort, but their African students and teachers were forced to remain outside where they huddled together, terrified and utterly disillusioned.3 There was not enough room inside for all of them, but all the same, it was not an attractive advertisement for the advantages of converting to Christianity. Machine guns and cannon from the fort stopped the Asante long enough to allow a cordon of Hausas to dig trenches and set up a perimeter defense around the refugees, who were now huddled under the protection of the fort’s guns. Among these forlorn people were several wives of one of the detained Asante kings. They lived in a green canvas tent and were visited only by their sovereign.

  The light from the burning city, the wailing of terrified women and their children, and the triumphant shouts of the Asante troops made the night one that the besieged people in the fort would never forget.44 This night, as on most that would follow, the forts’ occupants were kept awake by the seemingly incessant drumming and shouting coming from the Asante war camps behind their stockades. Well fueled by gin, men in the various camps would shout challenges like these back and forth:

  CAMP A [to Camp B] : “We are like the mighty bull that prowls about the forest; what are you?”

  CAMP B [to Camp A]: “We also are as strong as that great bull.”

  CAMP A: “Are you ready?”

  CAMP B: “Yes, we are.”

  CAMP A: “Then man your stockades.”5

  Sounds of cheering men rushing to their positions followed, as one camp after another manned its position. At 5 A.M., when British buglers sounded reveille, the Asante still had enough energy to answer with loud soundings on their elephant-tusk horns.

  ASANTE BATTLE ZONE in 1900

  During the afternoon of April 29, the trapped occupants of the fort listened expectantly to the sound of heavy fighting just beyond Kumase. As the light began to fail, they saw a column of troops straggle toward the fort. Led by Captain J. G. O. Aplin, 250 troops from Nigeria had arrived at Cape Coast on the nineteenth. Accompanied by carriers, they immediately began to march north through heavy rain along the same primitive road that Wolseley and Scott had followed. On the twenty-first they met Captain Davidson-Houston, the British resident at Kumase, who was on his way to the coast to pursue what was referred to as urgent private business. Davidson-Houston told Aplin that there was some unrest at Kumase but assured him that there was nothing to fear—a dubious assessment, considering that only a few months earlier Davidson-Houston had been so concerned about a possible uprising that he forced all the major chiefs to swear an oath of loyalty to the queen. As Aplin continued his difficult trek north, he met nonAsante traders fleeing to the south. These men told a different story. They assured him that there was a great deal to fear—indeed, that there would be war. Aplin’s first real evidence of Asante hostility came when his men encountered an injured British employee of the telegraph department who had been waylaid by the Asante. They had used pieces of telegraph wire to beat the soles of his feet bloody before leaving him. Davidson-Houston had assured this man, too, that there was nothing to fear.

  Ignoring Davidson-Houston’s sanguine appraisal of the situation, Captain Aplin continued to press on as rapidly as he could along the rain-sloshed path, his men fording flooded rivers with great difficulty, making use of the bridges erected by Scott’s expedition. On the morning of what he thought would be his last day’s march of seventeen miles into Kumase, a sudden glare from unexpected sunlight saved Aplin’s life by causing him to tilt his helmet to shade his eyes. As he did, his helmet flew off his head, and he felt pain in his throat. An Asante sniper in a tree had fired a rifle shot that had nicked Aplin before it was deflected through his orderly’s calf and then into the ground. It signaled the start of a tremendous fusillade of Asante fire from both sides of the path. Thanks to heavy machine-gun and cannon fire, the Hausa soldiers were eventually able to move forward. After a spirited bayonet charge the Asante troops withdrew into the forest. It was only 2 P.M., but Kumase was still miles away, so Aplin decided to halt to tend to his twenty wounded men, including all six officers. Three men had been killed. As usual it rained that night, and the Asante did not attack.

  It was nine the following morning before enough hammocks could be improvised to carry the wounded and Aplin could resume the march. The column crossed the Ordah Biver without opposition, but three miles from Kumase they once again came under such heavy fire that Aplin later said that if the Asante had not fired high, no one would have survived. Even so, there were many casualties and progress was very slow, until finally the troops saw looming ahead a large, horseshoe-shaped stockade blocking the only path through the jungle. Machine-gun and artillery fire had no effect on it, and a frontal bayonet charge only resulted in heavy casualties. After continual firing their machine gun overheated and jammed, and ammunition for their only cannon was exhausted. Just as a disastrous retreat seemed unavoidable, a small path was found that led thro
ugh the jungle toward the flank of the stockade. When twenty-five bayonet-wielding Hausas unexpectedly charged around the end of the stockade, the startled Asante defenders fled, leaving the path to Kumase open. Abandoning their dead and their only artillery piece but carrying their wounded as well as they could, Aplin’s men dashed for Kumase before the Asante commander could rally his men. The defenders of the fort welcomed the bloody and grimy men, but they were privately horrified to learn that all six officers and 139 of the 250 men were wounded and that the column had lost its food, ammunition, and cannon. Aplin’s men had fought splendidly, but they could do nothing to relieve the garrison; and if the siege were a long one, the additional mouths to feed would be a burden.

  In addition to the thirty Europeans now in the fort, there were hundreds of Hausa soldiers, many wounded men, and half a dozen Asante chiefs and kings, some of whom were being held against their will. To maintain morale as well as to search for food, the British launched a number of raids, including one at night. All were driven back with losses, even one in which the venerable Chief Kwatchie N’ketia sat calmly on his chair, both arms raised, as Asante bullets flew by. In his left hand he held a gold-hiked sword, while the two forefingers of his right hand were upheld as if in benediction. Since the firing lasted for three hours, the chief’s attendants had to hold his arms in place. Food was being rationed ever more tighdy, and many of the troops were feeling weak. To keep up their spirits, the fort’s garrison played “God Save the Queen” at full volume on their gramophone at night to counter the incessant singing and drumming of the Asante. The spirits of the men in the fort were never high, and they were dampened even more on May 6, when the popular Captain Middlemist died of internal injuries suffered when he was crushed against the fort’s gate.

  On May 10, some of the ostensibly loyal Asante kings detained in the fort proposed peace talks with the “rebels,” as the British insisted on calling the Asante who had taken up arms. Hodgson agreed, and under a flag of truce, talks among the Asante factions began. The British had no reason for optimism. On April 14, before the stockades had been completed, the Asante leaders had presented five peace terms to Hodgson. In addition to demanding the restoration of slavery and the cessation of government demands for forced labor, they insisted that King Prempe be returned from exile and the British, along with all other foreigners, leave. Not surprisingly, these terms were not agreeable to the British. It is also no surprise that, now that the Asante held the upper hand, they did not lessen their demands. Nevertheless, Hodgson allowed the talks to continue because while the truce was in effect, the Asante commanders allowed women to sell food in the Kumase market, to the great relief of the hungry refugees outside the fort as well as the garrison.

  On the afternoon of May 15, as the peace talks dragged on, 170 African soldiers and three British officers commanded by Major Morris marched into Kumase past a stockade that was undefended because of the truce. Despite terrific heat each day, rain each night, and several small battles (in one of which Morris had been painfully wounded in the groin) the column had covered 238 miles from the north in only thirteen days. Unlike Aplin’s, most of these men were unwounded, and they had with them a fair amount of food and ammunition. Their machine gun and cannon were welcome, too. They also had some ponies, which soon made good eating for the Hausas. Morris knew nothing about a truce, and Hodgson may have known nothing about Morris being on the march, although there were rumors that troops were on the way. Still, the timing of Morris’s arrival was suspicious, to say the least, and the Asante were furious. They abruptly canceled the truce and resumed the war.

  On May 10, the same day the truce was proposed, forty-oneyear-old Colonel James Willcocks, second-in-command of the recently raised West African Frontier Force of northern Nigeria, received orders from London to take command of all the forces preparing to relieve Kumase. Willcocks was only three days away from the exhilarating prospect of launching an attack against a hostile emir in northern Nigeria, but pleased by the chance for his first independent command, he left immediately, pushing himself and his lame pony to their limits in a nightmarish walk and ride toward Lagos where he hoped to board a ship for the Gold Coast. Willcocks suffered acutely from bouts of temporary blindness and from severe gastric pain as a result of food poisoning, and he had badly blistered feet from walking and a sprained knee from a fall, yet he somehow reached Lagos only fourteen days later, a distance of over three hundred miles. Lucky to find a waiting ship, he limped ashore two days later at Cape Coast in a drenching rain. To his dismay he found no staff officers, no troops, no supplies, and no carriers.

  During twenty-two years of army service fighting Britain’s batdes in India and Afghanistan, Willcocks had proven to be a distinguished and aggressive officer who adored action. But he had learned to be prudent, too, and he would not make the mistake of trying to relieve Kumase without adequate force. He was well aware that a premature attack with an inadequate force might inflate Asante morale so much that relief would prove impossible. He resigned himself to wait. Unfortunately, other officers already operating in the Gold Coast outside his command also had orders to relieve Kumase, and they were not at all cautious.

  Captain Wynyard Montagu Hall, who had marched to Kumase as an officer with the West Yorks in 1896, had landed at the Cape Coast two days before Willcocks in command of 450 men of the West African Frontier Force from Nigeria. The Fante were so alarmed by the prospect of yet another Asante war that nothing Hall could do would induce them to carry relief supplies to Kumase. Disgusted, he loaded up his soldiers with ammunition and boxes of food and set off through the rain and mud toward Kumase. On the fifteenth of May, he reached the base camp at Prahsu where he found a cable from the colonial secretary in Accra, telling him that the fort’s garrison only had food enough to last to the end of the month and urging him to hurry. Hall wasted no time; pausing only long enough to sign a treaty of friendship with the king of Adansi, he arrived at Fomena on May 20. Fomena was the place where Wolseley had set up his supply base twenty-six years earlier and the principal city of the kingdom of Bekwai, whose King had so far reftised to join other Asante states in the war. The king urged Hall to occupy a town named Esumeja, a strategic hamlet on the main road just one day’s march from Kumase, and Hall did so on the twenty-second.

  The next day he led two hundred of his men toward Kumase, but Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s large and formidable army was encamped in his path at Kokofu, the site of one of Wolseley’s great batdes. Hall’s force was stopped in its tracks and was lucky to succeed in retreating before being surrounded. No sooner had Hall returned to Esumeja than the king of Adansi thought better of his pledge of unbounded loyalty and joined in the war against the British, leaving Hall with all he could do to keep the king of Bekwae out of the Asante alliance. Any idea of relieving the fort at Kumase had to be set aside. Hall was barely able to defend his hastily fortified camp at Esumeja.

  The next attempt to move toward Kumase was made a few days later, in early June, when Lieutenant Colonel Carter, who had been camped near Hall with 380 men and several machine guns and cannon, tried to join Hall’s beleaguered force and together dash to Kumase. Before he could reach Hall, he was ambushed by a large Asante force. Though his men returned fire, the Asante fire was so heavy that all the officers went down, including Carter with a serious wound over his left eye. There was no lack of courage on the British side. A Lieutenant named Edwards was shot down while ramming shells into a cannon with his walking stick. One officer was shot through both wrists but continued to carry ammunition to his men by holding it between his forearms. Another officer went down while firing a machine gun that jammed. All the while Hausas were falling in alarming numbers.

  After about two full hours of intense fighting, enough of the vegetation had been cut away that the British could finally see what they were up against. To their amazement they discovered that the Asante troops were firing at them through loopholes in a six-foothigh, six-foot-thick stockade that
extended parallel to the road for about a quarter of a mile. It became immediately obvious that the Asante were completely protected against any fire the British could throw at them. The only unwounded senior officer, a colonel named Wilkinson, could see no hope of victory and tried to organize the battered British force for an orderly retreat. But while he was pondering how to manage this without having it turn into a rout, a Scottish colour sergeant named John Mackenzie, on detached duty from the Seaforth Highlanders, asked permission to lead a bayonet charge against the stockade with his company of Yoruba troops from Nigeria. The colonel reluctandy agreed, and one hundred men with fixed bayonets followed Mackenzie, charging direcriy at the stockade. Improbable as it may seem, before the Nigerians even reached the stockade, the Asantes abandoned it and ran. For this remarkable feat Mackenzie was awarded the Victoria Cross and was given a commission in the Black Watch.6 Although the Asante had gone, Wilkinson had too many wounded to continue the advance. He withdrew toward the relative safety of the camp at Prahsu. The first two battles went to the Asante.

 

‹ Prev