The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  Burroughs was already concerned about his losses, and he knew that a conventional attack on this stockade would cost him many more casualties. He also needed to conserve ammunition in case he was attacked on the march back to Kokofu. Anyone who had seen the “gouty little colonel” when he first arrived in the Gold Coast would have been amazed at what he ordered done next. Audaciously deciding to test the willingness of the Asante troops to stand up to a bayonet attack at night, he sent a company out in daylight to scout their position. Based on the information obtained, Burroughs decided to attack at around nine that same night. He would take only five hundred men, plus some two thousand unarmed carriers to help with the stockade’s destruction. No shots would be fired; the men would rely entirely on bayonets and swords. After the colonel’s orders were explained, all the men had a meal, Biss and Melliss sharing a pint bottle of champagne with their dinner on the very good grounds that they might not live to have another.7

  They moved out after dinner as planned under a clear, moonlit sky. As the troops approached the stockade, officers whispered orders that were passed quietly back down the column: “No smoking, no talking, no noise, no firing, bayonet only, follow me.”8 Everything possible had been done to silence the men’s equipment, and it appeared that everything was now ready for a stealthy approach to the stockade. But as the tense soldiers crept silently toward the stockade, the Mende carriers from Sierra Leone burst forth into a wild crescendo of song meant to encourage the troops to victory. Horrified, the troops froze, expecting an answering volley from the Asante, while the British officers rushed back to whack the Mende carriers with the flats of their swords. Eventually, but by no means easily, the officers succeeded in quieting them. Hoping to cover up the racket, the fort bugler played “last post” as if it were just another ordinary night.

  The troops crept closer to the stockade, hoping against all reason for a complete surprise until, in what sounded like a thunder-clap, two sentry signal guns exploded with seemingly deafening roars. Immediately, a volley came out of the stockade’s loopholes, and a British lieutenant fell mortally wounded. The African troops were stunned and began to waver, but as the young officer lay dying, he waved his sword, indicating the charge, and all the British officers shouted the word “charge.” Everyone went forward, scaling the stockade with an ease they later could not understand. The Asante troops were caught so unaware that they rushed out of their huts in the war camp just in time to be impaled by a bayonet or sword. One officer was so tired by his exertions with his sword that he had to put it down and disobey orders by firing away with his pistol. Captain Biss recalled that only exhaustion on the part of the British officers and men allowed most of the Asante to escape.9 As the war camp was being set fire and the stockade pulled down, a child was found and taken back to the fort. Remarkably, the entire force was back in bed by 11 P.M.

  The next day, after leaving reinforcements behind in the fort, Burroughs marched his men back toward Bekwai, picking up on the way a young Asante woman who reported that the night attack had so distressed Yaa Asantewaa that she had called various commanders together to discuss this new tactic. While the Asante were considering their options, the British wounded were being conveyed to the coast, and those who remained in Bekwai were delighting in listening to news of the world, which the newly strung telegraph brought them. For a week the troops at Bekwai enjoyed a badly needed rest, and the officers had time to shave with hot water, drink cocoa and tea (which, unfortunately, often contained a dead fly or two), and read mail from home.

  No one needed rest more than Willcocks, who suffered from a severe sore throat, a badly abscessed ear, a sprained knee that refused to improve, and bouts of nausea and diarrhea. His chief surgeon strongly advised him to return to England, but he refused, saying that he could not honorably leave until the Asante war had ended. He also believed that the climate at Kumase was much healthier and that once his headquarters was moved there, he would improve. This was a forlorn hope because neither Willcocks nor his surgeon understood malaria. Although both British and Italian pioneers in tropical medicine had shown several years earlier that malaria was transmitted by anopheles mosquitos, British officers on this campaign continued to believe that fever, as they still called it, was a product of the vile vapors of swamp land. They recommended five grains of quinine per day as a preventive dose and ten if fever actually struck. Whiskey, too, was still thought to be helpful, but not until evening.

  During this period of rest, several Asante prisoners were brought in charged with murder, mutilation, or both. Willcocks convened a military court, but because he was concerned that these men might have behaved in ways that were permitted by their own laws, he asked the king of Bekwai to join the court, an offer the elderly monarch gladly accepted. Before the trial began, Willcocks gave the king’s interpreter a copy of the charges against the two men so that the king could prepare for the trial. Willcocks was surprised when, half an hour later, the interpreter “returned, beaming with smiles, and said, ‘I am glad to inform you that the King has already found both prisoners entirely guilty.’ Considering that he had never seen either of them, nor heard a single word of evidence, I came to the conclusion that future prisoners under trial would stand a rather better chance without the presence of one of their own Chiefs on the tribunal.”10

  About this time, Lieutenant Colonel R. A. Brake, a highly decorated officer, arrived in Bekwai with a battalion of the Central African Regiment, a well-disciplined unit fresh from fighting in Somaliland (now Somalia). Brake’s troops quickly proved that their reputation was well earned by carrying out several successful small-scale attacks. In one raid, in the direction of Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s headquarters at Edweso, his men surprised a force of Asante, killing their leader and driving them out of their war camp, where they found a remarkable collection of valuables including £100 in bank notes, bags of gold dust, books, parts of machine guns, and sundry flags, chairs, and umbrellas.

  Before Willcocks was ready to move his headquarters to the now partially pacified city of Kumase, he sent two columns to the east to despoil the area around the large lake called Bosumtwi that covered at least forty square miles. Its many fish were the property of the Asante king, and under ordinary circumstances fresh deliveries were made to Kumase every day.11 The only hostility the British troops encountered was produced by a lone Asante man, who decided to fight a one-man war. Sitting astride a large log in the lake and paddling with his hands until he was more or less in range of the incredulous British forces on the shore, he somehow managed to fire his Dane gun without knocking himself off his perch. Having made his point, he unhurriedly turned his awkward conveyance around and paddled away. The British officers who witnessed his attack were amused and impressed by what one of them referred to as a “most absurd mixture of dignity and comedy.”12 There was no other Asante resistance, but the British troops caught immense numbers offish, violating all the royal proscriptions against fishing as they did so, and burned many of the fertile fields in the area before marching back again, the unruly locusts who followed them happily destroying everything in sight and capturing unwary women and children.

  Toward the end of August, Willcocks decided to move toward Kumase in two powerful columns, leaving only a token force at Bekwai to pacify its still-skittish king. With one thousand infantry and four guns Willcocks marched north through Pekki, reaching Kumase on August 30 with no serious opposition. At the same time, Colonel Brake, with over seven hundred infantry and two guns, moved northeast to attack Edweso, where Yaa Asantewaa’s army was said to be camped. He was to be supported by a large force of untrained African soldiers moving toward Edweso from the east, led by Captain Benson of the Shropshire Light Infantry, with a handful of British officers and noncommissioned officers. Benson’s orders were to block the retreat of Asante forces, not to attack them with his ill-disciplined, nearly mutinous mob of men. For some reason Benson advanced anyway, was attacked, and saw his men flee in wild disorder whil
e the Asante pursued and killed many of them. Benson and his British officers fought their way to safety, but shamed by his failure, suffering from malaria, and aware that he had disobeyed orders, he shot himself to death the next day.

  On the morning of August 31, Brake attacked the Asante stockade at Edweso, where he met with tremendous fire, much of it from captured British rifles. In by-now-standard fashion he sent troops into the brush to flank the stockades and wheeled up artillery to blast away at it. For the first time these cannon, commanded by a lieutenant named Halfpenny, fired eighteen-pound shells called “double common”7 (the usual shell weighed twelve pounds), which blew great chunks out of the log-and-dirt barrier. These quick-firing cannon blasted away at the stockade for two interminable hours, killing and maiming hundreds of defenders, but other Asante resolutely maintained a heavy fire until the British finally fought around their flank through log barriers, rifle pits, and brush entanglements and made a bayonet charge that successfully ended the battle. Colonel Brake was wounded in the chest, another officer was killed, and two more wounded. Thirty-four soldiers were hit, many severely. The dead Asante had been so terribly mangled by shell fire that one British officer described the sight of them as “sickening.”13 Yaa Asantewaa was said to have been in the thick of the battle, but hers was not one of the many bodies, including those of prominent commanders, that were identified. If the sixty-year-old queen mother was present at this battle, it was only because she lived in Edweso. She wore a leather belt and a sword to symbolize her defiance of the British, but despite her size (five-foot ten and about two hundred pounds) neither she nor any other Asante woman was known actually to have fought in battle.

  Within days the British forces were consolidated in Kumase, which quickly became a major camp and supply depot, thanks to the efforts of some eight thousand carriers, the best of whom were two thousand experienced men shipped in from Zanzibar and Mombasa in East Africa. In addition to tons of rice and tinned meat, even luxuries such as butter, jam, milk, various sauces, and wine were now becoming plentiful. Whiskey and sparkling water began to replace the earlier staple for officers, a concoction known as “a doctor,” made from rum, tinned milk, and water stirred together. A bakery was opened, officers began to invite each other to impromptu dinners, and on the seventh of September, the telegraph line to Kumase was reopened. Officers were now able to discuss the latest news from Reuters over an evening whiskey. The African troops, carriers, and locusts soon enjoyed a thriving market filled with local food products. They also sang, danced, drank palm wine, and enjoyed the women who came to the market with their wares. The only troops accused of raping women, however, were some from Sierra Leone.

  The best evidence that Kumase was no longer besieged was the daily occurrence of a cricket game on the parade ground in front of the fort. British officers used hand-carved cricket bats to smack homemade India rubber balls far into the outfield where long grass concealed various parts of dead human beings that disconcerted the fielders when they stepped on them. Some of the African soldiers had seen cricket played by their officers before, but the carriers and Asante market women watched in fascinated bafflement. There were also endless card games. Despite continuing bouts of malaria and dysentery, Kumase was beginning to resemble a peace-time garrison.

  The war was over in the town of Kumase, but the district outside Kumase was still defiant, and so was much of northern metropolitan Asante. Willcocks soon sent various columns of troops followed by the inevitable carriers and locusts to crisscross Kumase district, burning villages and chopping down anything that still grew in the fields. Some Asante began to surrender, and those not charged with being war leaders or murderers of British subjects were sent back to their villages with a pass indicating their surrender and told to fly a white flag. Some war leaders were captured and hanged, and it was becoming clear that most Asante had lost their enthusiasm for war. Late in September even Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa sent envoys to Kumase to discuss peace terms, but some of the locusts intercepted them, insulting them so profoundly in the process that they left in a rage without ever meeting with British authorities.14

  To encourage more surrenders, on September 15 Willcocks invited every Asante who could be persuaded to come to Kumase to witness a display of British military might. As a large crowd of Asante looked on, a trio of 75-mm cannon fired double-common shells into a stout stockade, tearing it to bits. It may have been this demonstration that convinced Asante commanders to abandon their stockades for the duration of the war. Willcocks also paraded 1,750 infantry and nine 75-mm artillery pieces in another display of British power that was said to have impressed many of the Asante who looked on. Some important chiefs began to inquire about peace terms, but even though it was obvious to everyone that the remaining Asante armies could not defend themselves against a British attack, the area north of Kumase nevertheless remained defiant.

  Determined to end all resistance, Willcocks decided to send two columns north. The first of these marched over two hundred miles without encountering any serious fighting, but it did accept the surrender of a king and eleven important chiefs. Many villages and crops were also destroyed, weapons were captured, and the area thoroughly terrorized. The second column was led by a veteran commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur F. Montanaro of the Royal Artillery. It was Montanaro who first devised the use of the double-common shells to cope with stockades, and now, fittingly, he would be the first to lead troops in a battle that would take place in the open. He led 950 infantry, two cannon, many carriers, and about one thousand locusts north to attack the still defiant Kofi Kofia and his army of several thousand men. Some dozen miles north of Kumase at a village named Dinassi, Montanaro’s advance guard, once again led by the indestructible Major Charles Melliss, learned that there were indeed Asante still willing to contest British power. Returning fire with everything his troops had, Montanaro was surprised to see that instead of firing from behind a stockade, the Asante troops were fanning out on both flanks, attempting to envelop his column. Recognizing this as the classic Asante tactic from the Wolseley war, Montanaro ordered the favorite response of the British—another bayonet charge. For a few minutes the fighting was hand to hand, and one British officer was killed, but Melliss, though slightly wounded again, killed two more men with his saber. The Asante force, which was not very large, then withdrew in reasonably good order, leaving thirty-four dead bodies behind but taking many others with them.

  These men were an advance guard of Kofi Kofia’s army, but he would choose another place for his showdown with the British. Montanaro marched on to the town of Ofinsu where five major chiefs surrendered along with 320 muskets and other war supplies. Montanaro returned to Kumase on September 26. Willcocks had planned to send Montanaro back into the field to punish Atchuma villages to the northwest, an expedition that the Asante quickly learned about, but before troops could march, some scouts returned with a challenge from Kofi Kofia. He wanted the British commander to know that he had gathered five thousand men and he invited the British to fight him in the open. With a well-calculated sneer he added that he was certain the British would not dare to do so.15 Sensing a chance to end the war by answering this challenge, Willcocks mustered every able-bodied man in Kumase—one thousand two hundred infantry with five cannon—and on September 29, followed by thousands of carriers, he marched out to accept Kofi Kofia’s invitation to battle. Montanaro was with the force but, bad leg and all, Willcocks would command. Near nightfall they met an Asante patrol that withdrew, and Willcocks’s column settled down to spend the night in the open under a drenching rain. After a dinner of tinned beef, rain-sodden biscuits, and a dose of quinine washed down with whiskey and rainwater, the officers tried to sleep under banana leaves but with no success. The sun warmed the sleepless men as they marched forward at daybreak on the following day, the thirtieth. It was Sunday, to the Asante a dangerous day when they would try to avoid warfare, but so far a lucky day for the British, who had won several major battles on
their Sabbath. By 8 A.M. the advance guard under Montanaro ran into Asante fire, beginning what the veteran Captain Harold Biss called “one of the fiercest encounters ever fought in West African warfare.”16

  Montanaro found his advance guard under heavy fire from captured British rifles as well as Dane guns in the hands of a long line of Asante lying in a shallow ditch with open ground in front of them. Without waiting for Melliss, who was behind him with three hundred men, Montanaro positioned a machine gun on his flank to cover the advance and sent his four companies forward in a flanking maneuver. When he thought he saw signs of wavering on the part of the Asante, he immediately ordered a charge. Four hundred men with fixed bayonets ran forward toward the Asante line. For the first time in such a major battle, the Asante did not quaver at the sight of bayonets. Instead, they delivered such a steady fire that if they had not fired high, the British line would have been shot to pieces. Even though few were hit by the lead whistling over their heads, Montanaro’s men slowed, then hit the ground. Unable to urge his men forward, Montanaro sent word to Melliss to come up. By now the Asante held an eight hundred-yard-long front with wings drawn back to prevent flank attacks. The pinned-down British forces were still firing, but like most infantry the world over, once they had been forced to take cover, it was difficult to get them going again. The remarkable Melliss ordered his three hundred men to charge over them, and though they did so with great verve, they too were soon forced to take cover to avoid the hailstorm of lead that the Asante fired at them. In perfect order the Asante then withdrew a short distance to a crest, which gave them an even stronger position.

  No Asante army had stood so resolutely against a British bayonet charge before, and these men had now done so twice. Nevertheless, they had been continuously exposed to machine-gun and cannon fire along their extended line and were taking many casualties. After the second charge Willcocks arrived at the front with his staff and a unit of Sikhs under Captain Godfrey. These bearded veterans with their tall turbans were such champions of the bayonet charge that Willcocks thought they might be able to inspire the seven hundred pinned-down African soldiers to follow them. Willcocks ordered the heaviest fire possible all along the front while Godfrey extended the Sikhs into a line, preparing for the charge. Unable to resist the lure of battle, Willcocks’s staff officers again left him alone as they ran to join the Sikhs. Major Melliss had seen the Sikhs’ maneuver, and before Godfrey could give the order to charge, with the inspirational help of massed bugles and drums, he was somehow able to drive his men to their feet. His Africans charged before the Sikhs did, closely followed by the English officers just ahead of the now-sprinting Sikhs.