The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  The Fall

  of the

  Asante Empire

  THE HUNDRED-YEAR WARN

  FOR AFRICA’S GOLD COAST

  Robert B. Edgerton

  THE FREE PRESSA

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  Copyright © 1995 by Robert B. Edgerton

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Edgerton, Robert B.

  The fall of the Asante Empire: the hundred-year war for Africa’s Gold Coast / Robert B. Edgerton.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 0-7432-3638-6

  eISBN: 978-1-451-60373-6

  1. Ashanti (Kingdom)—History. 2. Ashanti (African People)—History. 3. Ghana—History. I. Title.

  DT507.E34 1998

  966.7′018—dc20 94-36626

  CIP

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1. A Cause Worth Dying for

  2. The Empire of Gold

  3. “A Bravery Not to Be Exceeded”

  4. “The Bush Is Stronger Than the Cannon”

  5. “Does It Not Make One’s Heart Ache?”

  6. “The Most Horrible War”

  7. “Britannia Waives the Rules”

  8. “We Are Going to Die Today”

  9. “An Inaudible Murmur of Admiration”

  10. “For the Ashes of Their Fathers and the Temples of Their Gods”

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  WHEN DURING THE PAST CENTURY WESTERNERS THOUGHT ABOUT Africa, it is unlikely that they paid much attention to the military prowess of the African societies that were reportedly being conquered with little difficulty by one European force or another. There was one notable exception. The dramatic 1879 war between the Zulus and the British immediately captured the imagination of people throughout the West. In the first great battle of their six-month-long war, the Zulus very nearly annihilated a large British force, killing 52 officers, 806 soldiers, and about 500 of their African allies. More than a century later, the pageantry of red-coated Britons wielding bayonets against the short stabbing spears of flamboyantly costumed, impossibly brave Zulu warriors continues to be celebrated in books, on television, and in epic motion pictures such as Zulu and Zulu Dawn. The extraordinary bravery and the military success of the Zulus earned them the respect of the British who fought against them and fascinated generations of Europeans and Americans, who have read about their resistance or seen it depicted in films. But for most people in Europe and America, recognition of the valor of African fighting men begins and ends with the Zulus. It has gone very largely unnoticed that both before and after the Anglo-Zulu war, African soldiers fought against invading European armies whose modern rifles, machine guns, and artillery killed them in terrible numbers. The men, and sometimes women, in these African armies were often gallant, and sometimes they won battles despite their inferior arms. But most of the battles these African soldiers fought made little impact on European consciousness at the time, and they have since faded into almost complete obscurity.

  Some of the longest and most effective military resistance to European conquest took place in West Africa; by far the longest was the century-long struggle of the Asante of Ghana against the British. From 1807 to 1900, Asante armies fought numerous small and large battles against the British. In several of these they were the clear victors, the only West African army to defeat a European army in more than one major engagement. In the final conflict of 1900, despite the British use of machine guns and powerful 75mm artillery, the Asante several times forced British columns to retreat. One of the British invasions of the Asante kingdom was led by Sir Garnet Wolseley, Britain’s best-known general at the time and the man who later commanded British troops during the Zulu war. Wolseley had fought and been wounded in several previous wars, but he called his campaign against the Asante the “most horrible war” he had ever fought in. And he very nearly did not win it.

  The Asante and the British fought more than one horrible battle. They fought bravely and cruelly as they struggled with disease and starvation as well as bullets and bayonets. Most of all they struggled with their colossal incomprehension of one another’s values, religious beliefs, diplomacy, sense of honor, and national purpose. Much of this misunderstanding was the inevitable consequence of the British insistence on their racial and cultural supremacy, but the Asante too could be arrogant and self-righteous. The roots of conflict lay in the differing cultural heritages and economic interests of the two peoples. Although the most fundamental cause of the conflict was economic, the Asante practices of human sacrifice and slavery also played a part, as did British ignorance about the significance of the Golden Stool. Not only did the two nations misunderstand one another, they consistently underestimated one another’s military strength.

  What follows will describe the conflict between these two proud peoples, especially their military campaigns and something of the men who fought in them. The emphasis will be on the military resistance of the Asante, but that can only be understood by examining the actions of the British, not least because most of the firsthand accounts of these wars were written by them. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Asante and British troops fought dozens of battles. Some were small-scale affairs fought more or less by mistake. Others were well-planned campaigns that involved many thousands of men. The Asante fought with such bravery that from the first battle to the last the British sang their praises. Despite an inferiority in weapons that grew as the years passed, the Asante willingness to face death in battle never wavered. How they fought and why they did so is the subject of this book.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK DESCRIBES THE MILITARY CONFLICT BETWEEN THE Asante and British that filled the nineteenth century. In the mid-1980s, when my long-standing interest in this subject was piqued enough to start this project, all of those people who had firsthand knowledge of the events had passed on, and although searches of the Public Record Office in London, the Balme Library at the University of Ghana, the Basel Missionary Archives, the British Museum, and many other libraries and archives yielded much, I discovered nothing of major significance that previous scholars had missed.

  Instead of continuing my frustrated search for something original, I found myself relying heavily on the published work of scholars, missionaries, soldiers, travelers, and newspaper correspondents. To modern-day scholars who find themselves cited in the bibliography, I extend my thanks for their marvelous work, as I do to all of those earlier merchants, missionaries, soldiers, colonial officers, and newsmen who braved inclement weather, deadly diseases, and bullets to record their experiences of that tumultuous century.

  This book, like my two earlier books for The Free Press on African resistance to colonial rule—Like Lions They Fought and Mau Mau—is meant mainly for the general reading public rather than scholars. To make the book as accessible as possible to these readers I
have avoided the use of technical anthropological terms for various aspects of Asante society and culture, and I have held the use of Asante terms to an absolute minimum. For example, I have referred to the Asante monarch as “king” rather than Asantehene, the Asante term, which is routinely used by most scholars when referring to the holder of this office. I have also tried to reduce the number of place-names for villages, rivers, districts, and the like as well as the personal names of men and women whose roles were not central to the events being described. For this I apologize to the Asante people, but I hope that they will understand that my purpose is to make their history more easily understood to outsiders.

  I would like to thank John McLeod of the British Museum for helping me to get started long ago, Merrick Posnansky for good advice about sources, various people at the University of London for helping me track down fugitive unpublished materials, and many of my students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for critically reviewing earlier versions of the manuscript. Doran Ross, Associate Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, has my gratitude for so generously helping me locate illustrations. I thank John Olmsted for skillfully and good-naturedly making the manuscript ready for the light of day, and Sharon Belkin for drawing the maps. I am especially grateful to my editor, Adam Bellow, for giving me his continuing support and for his enduring interest in the African experience.

  My greatest debt is to my wife, Karen Ito, for her astute anthropological criticism of the manuscript and, even more, for making everything worthwhile.

  1

  A Cause Worth Dying For

  AT THE START OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, WHEN ASANTE AND British interests first collided, the Asante Empire was at its height. Incomparably the most powerful state in West Africa, it ruled over more than three million people throughout what is now Ghana (then called the Gold Coast). This was more than half as many people as there were in the United States at that time and more than one quarter as many as the population of Britain, which was only eleven million in 1801. In area the empire was larger than England, Wales, and Scotland combined or, from an American perspective, the state of Wyoming. From south to north it stretched for over four hundred miles, and it dominated nearly five hundred miles of coastline.

  If one could have flown over this large area at that time, the dominant impression would have been a seemingly endless expanse of dense tropical forest, only occasionally broken by clearings for a few large towns, smaller villages, and widely scattered plantations. One would see little to suggest the presence of the complex civilization that the Asante leaders had developed over the preceding two hundred years by military conquests that gave them dominion over defeated peoples, many of whom were forced into slavery. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Asante armies fought and won over twenty major battles that extended their empire to include all of present-day Ghana. These were anything but bloodless victories, and this remarkable success could not have been achieved unless a very large number of Asante men and women believed that their empire was worth dying for.

  Great states had existed in West Africa for centuries before the Asante Empire—or Greater Asante, as historians now prefer to call it—came into being. Far to the east of modern Ghana, the ancient kingdom of Ghana flourished for about a thousand years before it collapsed and disappeared in the middle of the thirteenth century. Its capital city of Kumbi Saleh, some one hundred miles north of modern Bamako, was the largest yet seen in West Africa, having about fifteen thousand people. Ghana owed its greatness to its army of two hundred thousand men, whose iron-tipped spears allowed them to exact tribute and collect taxes from smaller states and chiefs over much of the western Sudan. Ghana also maintained trade routes north to the Arab world, and it began West Africa’s flourishing trade in gold. Arab visitors raved about the wealth and elegance of the court, mentioning such extravagances as royal guard dogs wearing gold and silver collars and a thousand royal horses with silken halters that slept on carpets attended by three men for each horse.1

  Ghana was succeeded by many other states in the western Sudan, the greatest being Mali, which remained powerful until sometime after 1400 A.D. Farther to the east the Songhay Empire arose, and directly to the north of the Asante were the Mossi states. All of these states emerged in the savanna zone north of the great forest belt that covered the land closer to the sea. Free of the tsetse fly of the forest area, horses thrived there and trade flourished. Contact with the Arab world of merchants and scholars enriched these African states as well. The kingdoms of the southern forests were smaller in size and less opulent, but when the earliest Portuguese traders came to the Gold Coast in the 147Os, they found surprisingly regal men ready to trade with them shrewdly and with dignity. For example, at their new trading post of Elmina, they met a king whose jewels, brocaded jacket, and elegant manners, combined with his shrewdness, fairness, and good judgment, made a highly favorable impression.

  Along the coast and just inland from Elmina lay numerous kingdoms of Akan- or Twi-speaking peoples, whose land contained many of the richest gold deposits in the world. This gold and Akan proximity to the European traders’ guns and gunpowder would soon give them a powerful advantage over the older and previously more powerful states to the north, which lacked ready access to firearms. These Akan people shared similar religious beliefs and governmental practices and were excellent farmers and skilled cattlemen despite the great heat and humidity. They manufactured many tradable goods, from cotton cloth to spears and fishhooks, and were highly accomplished gold miners. They also kept slaves, most of whom came to them from the north in return for gold. The abundance of these two sources of wealth—slaves and gold—would bring more and more Europeans to the area until the British achieved a monopoly on trade and finally conquered the Asante.

  The tropical forest zone of the Gold Coast has two distinct rainy seasons, May-June and September-October, when torrents of rain flood the rivers and create almost impassable mud. The temperature often reaches 90°F, with humidity reaching 90 percent. In addition to several large rivers—the Tano, Pra, and Volta—the entire area is cut by innumerable streams. The Asante homeland is wet, luxuriant forest, so dark in many places that there is not enough light to read by. The only dry period is December-January when dry winds blow south from the Sahara and nighttime temperatures fall into the sixties. When the rains begin again in February and March, hail the size of musket balls is not uncommon.

  The heartland of the Asante people was a forested area centered some one hundred fifty miles from the coast. At the end of the seventeenth century, there were two great powers in the forest, the kingdom of Akwamu to the southeast of the Asante and the kingdom of Denkyira to the southwest. Denkyira possessed the richest veins of gold in the region, dominated the coastal trade, and held the Asante as a tributary state until 1701, when, shortly after they first came to the attention of the Portuguese, the Asante defeated the Denkyira in battle. The leader of the Asante at that time was Osei Tutu, who had brought a number of smaller chiefdoms together by conquest and had attracted other immigrants through the appeal of his governance. The Asante, like other Akan groups, made stools the symbols of political authority Now each chief was made to bury his personal stool while Osei Tutu and his legendary priest, Anokye, gave the kingdom new unity by conjuring down from the sky, as Asante tradition has it, a Golden Stool said to contain the soul or spirit of the entire nation. Whatever legerdemain may have been involved, the idea was a brilliant success. The stool remains a powerful symbol of Asante unity to this day.

  Armed with a new sense of national unity, the Asante were ready to break their economic dependence on the Denkyira with newly acquired guns supplied by the Dutch who believed that the Denkyira were thwarting their trade with tribes farther north. Aware that the Asante were restive, the Denkyira king attempted to force them into a premature attack by raping one of Osei Tutu’s favorite wives, who was paying a courtesy visit to the Denkyira court. Inc
ensed by this calculatedly public insult, Osei Tutu sent his forces to battle in 1698, but it was not until 1701, when other kingdoms tributary to the Denkyira turned against them, that the Asante finally won, beginning the series of conquests that gave them preeminence over the Gold Coast.2

  The origins of the Asante people are unknown. The Asante themselves say that they “came forth from the ground very long ago” somewhere in the southern part of the rain forest.3 Their culture probably developed from small bands of hunters, gatherers, and farmers, who have left fragments of stone axes and pottery throughout the forest zone. Sometime during the first millennium A.D., iron working was introduced to the area from the north. Many other influences were to follow. Before the Asante emerged as a kingdom under Osei Tutu, groups of related people must have migrated through the forest zone for hundreds of years. Lineages expanded and broke up as people quarreled or needed more land. Larger chiefdoms fled from their enemies, and new people migrated into the area. Early in the nineteenth century an English visitor to the Asante capital was surprised to learn that the Asante believed the British were so quarrelsome that they chose to live in wheeled houses in order to escape from their angry neighbors.4 This Asante perception mirrored their own past.

  From 1300 to 1500 A.D., a prolonged drought in the savanna of the West Sudan drove many thousands of people to the well-watered forest zone where they mingled with the Akan speakers already there. Archeological finds show that they lived in thatchroofed, mud-walled houses, each with its own cistern, built around central courtyards. They farmed, raised cattle, sheep, and goats, and hunted game, especially antelope. In addition to antelope, elephants, leopards, and lions, all of which had value to the Asante for meat, ivory, and hides, the nearby forests were home to innumerable baboons and other monkeys, hyenas, civet cats, anteaters, sloths, wild boar, and porcupine. Tsetse fly-borne disease must have been less of a problem than it became later, because the Asante had horses in earlier times. In addition to having brass foundries and iron smelters, some of the larger towns manufactured textiles using the same spindle whorls used in Ghana today. They left behind many beads, ivory carvings, tobacco pipes, and stone or ceramic weights, presumably for weighing gold dust.5