The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  With the Asante conquest of the Denkyira, the dynamics of the Gold Coast changed radically. The Asante now had access to the European traders at the coast, and with the rich Denkyira gold deposits they could purchase more slaves to work in their mines, cultivate their fields, and serve in their armies. Their gold also allowed them to purchase the guns they needed to defeat other kingdoms, and this they did with remarkable success. By 1750 they had defeated and largely incorporated into their empire nearly twenty kingdoms, including the Gonja and Dagomba of the savanna lands well to the north of metropolitan Asante. Welding these subject peoples into a relatively peaceful and subservient empire required great statesmanship, but the Asante also used force against conquered people when that was thought necessary.

  Most of these conquests were directed by Osei Tutu’s successor, Opoku Ware, after his death in 1719. Opoku Ware’s thirty-year rule led to a remarkable expansion of the Asante Empire, more extensive than that brought about by any previous or succeeding king. In 1766 John Hippisley, the governor of the British trading company at Cape Coast, wrote that Opoku Ware was the wisest and most valiant man of his time in West Africa.6 When he died in 1750, a Gonja obituary notice recalled him this way:

  In that year, Opoku, king of the Asante, died, may Allah curse him and place his soul in hell. It was he who injured the people of Gonja, oppressing them and robbing them of their property at will. He ruled violently, as a tyrant, delighting in his authority. People of all the horizons feared him greatly.7

  Asante traditions glorify their military victories, and there can be no doubt that war was the engine that drove them to prominence. But their far-flung subject people could not have been held together, much less made to contribute to the prosperity of the empire, without skillful governance. Beginning with Opoku Ware’s successor, Osei Kwadwo, far-reaching steps were taken to permit the Asante government in the capital city of Kumase to rule effectively. Unlike the Romans, who stationed professional soldiers—the legions—in conquered territories to maintain order, Asante kings had no full-time soldiers. All their fighting men, whether free or slave, were only part-time soldiers who returned to their ordinary economic pursuits after each campaign ended. Lacking the military resources to police all of their newly conquered territories, Osei Kwadwo instituted effective practices of returning to loyal chiefs and kings of these subject territories much of the tribute they delivered to Kumase, often augmented by generous gifts from the royal treasury. The new Asante king also augmented the established system of spies who reported to him, an always important source of information, but his most valuable contribution was to begin the development of a skilled bureaucracy to oversee every aspect of government.8 During the second half of the eighteenth century, Asante leaders tried to keep the empire together with shrewd diplomacy balanced with force. Though there would be fighting, none changed the course of empire until 1807, when the Asante came into conflict with the British. The first battle was fought largely by accident, but soon after, the British began to seek the destruction of the Asante Empire, and generations of Asante men and women fought and often died to defend it.

  The Warrior Tradition in Africa

  In most of Africa south of the Sahara, warfare and the warrior tradition were so inextricably tied to everything of importance—honor, wealth, religion, politics, even art and sexuality—that it is no exaggeration to say that most men’s reputations, fortunes, and futures depended on their martial valor. To be sure, some small societies had no tradition of warfare and tried to avoid fighting by fleeing into dense forests, remote mountains, or barren deserts. Others only now and then engaged in warfare that led to great loss of life or property; for the most part, these societies fought only to capture women or animals or to prove their courage, not to slaughter their enemies. But a large number of African societies used their huge armies to kill, enslave, and conquer their neighbors in wars that continued seemingly without end.

  Prior to the large-scale introduction of firearms from Europe, African armies shared a similar set of weapons. Except in the savannas and deserts of western and central Africa, where men rode horses and camels, African soldiers fought on foot. Frequently protected by tough cowhide shields, they threw spears or stabbed with them, used bows and sometimes poisoned arrows, and carried swords, clubs, and knives. While their weapons were similar, their tactics varied greatly. Some relied on stealth to surprise their enemies, some specialized in ambushes; others favored massive twopronged enveloping attacks, and still others built formidable fortresses. Although some societies maintained peaceful relations with their neighbors or made alliances that protected their interests, warfare was an ever-present fact of life over much of Africa.

  In addition to fighting among themselves, Africans fought against foreigners who came in search of ivory, gold, hides, and slaves. Chinese, Malay, and Indian traders were usually content to carry out peaceful trade from anchorages along the coast, as were those Arabs who crossed the Sahara to trade with the great African states of West Africa. However, the great Arab caravans, containing as many as a thousand men armed with muskets who marched a thousand miles or more into the interior of East Africa in search of slaves and ivory, sometimes met with resistance.

  The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Africa, and at times they too relied on peaceful trade; but as early as 1575 a Portuguese priest in Angola wrote to his superiors that the Africans would have to be conquered by force because “the conversion of these barbarians will not be attained by love”.9 Angolans resisted Portuguese demands for slaves and for conversion to Christianity so fiercely that they fought them every year from the mid-1500s to 1680, when the Portuguese troops finally established their rule. Their profits were immense, especially from the slave trade. (The Portuguese eventually shipped millions of slaves to Brazil, most of them from Angola.) However, in West Africa, where the Portuguese had sought gold and slaves since their arrival in the late fifteenth century, force was not an option, since most fifteenth century West African kingdoms could mobilize armies of twenty or thirty thousand men. Given the thickly forested terrain, the endemic diseases, the heat and rain, neither the Portuguese nor the other European powers who followed them to West Africa chose to try a contest of arms with a West African power until the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century European writers left vivid accounts of West African armies now largely armed with muskets but still sometimes using bows and arrows or crossbows. The soldiers’ ability to march long distances carrying heavy loads impressed most observers, and so did their discipline in battle. To protect themselves against such armies, several kingdoms surrounded their cities with thick walls and deep ditches filled with sharpened stakes. The city of Kano, in northern Nigeria, was surrounded by a fiftyfoot-high, forty-foot thick wall and by two rings of ditches. The enclosed area was half the size of Manhattan.10

  THE ASANTE EMPIRE Early in the 19th Century

  Some of the earliest fighting took place in southern Africa, where British troops fought seven wars against the Xhosa people—“Kaffirs,” as they were disparagingly called—in the nineteenth century. In one of these, even though the British eventually managed to win, the Xhosa held off the invaders for over a year, inflicting heavy casualties on some of the most famous battalions in the British army.11 A few years later in Natal, to the north, Zulu bravery earned the undying respect of the British. Later in the century British troops usually required little more than punitive expeditions—“nigger hunts” they called them—to pacify and “civilize” restive tribes. Sometimes, though, a particular tribal group like the Kikuyu fought so hard to protect their land that more extreme measures were required. One officer wrote, “There is only one way of improving the Wakikuyu [and] that is to wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food.”12 The Kikuyu were not renowned as warriors, but these small, naked men with their spears, swords, and bows and poisoned arrows, resisted the British for so long that in 1904 three large British columns
were sent against them “to put them in the right frame of mind.” Armed with repeating rifles and machine guns, the British burned homesteads, destroyed crops, rounded up cattle, sheep, and goats, and killed about one thousand five hundred people, a number so large that they were unwilling to reveal the truth to London.13 After 1890 European armies were equipped with Maxim machine guns, but even with these weapons it took British forces in Uganda ten years to defeat and capture Kabarega, the king of the Nyoro.

  The Germans were not to be outdone by the British. Their attempts to conquer the large country of Tanganyika (now Tanzania) began with Imperial German Marines going ashore and more or less literally shooting everyone they saw, as one contemporary observer put it.14 Later they sent large expeditions inland to conquer societies that were slow to submit. In 1891 a powerful German column, well-armed with machine guns and artillery, was routed with many casualties by Hehe tribesmen armed only with spears. It would be seven more years before the Hehe were finally subdued. The subsequent administration of Tanganyika by the Germans was so draconian that in 1905 several tribes rose against them. Three years later between 250,000 and 300,000 Africans were dead, most from starvation, but many from machine-gun bullets. When the Herero of Southwest Africa rebelled against the brutality of the German settlers (brutality that included punishing men and women alike by sadistically flogging them, not on their backs, but on their stomachs and genitals), the kaiser sent twenty thousand first-line troops of the Imperial German Army, equipped with the most modern weapons, to put down the rebellion. After over two years of almost unimaginably brutal fighting, the Herero were nearly annihilated. German losses were about one thousand four hundred dead and another one thousand or so wounded, not a small price to pay for a victory over eighty thousand poorly armed cattle herders in the barren lands of Southwest Africa. When the war finally became a rout, untold numbers of women and children were shot, bayoneted, and even burned alive. The Hereros had fought brutally, too, but the Germans easily outdid them.15

  The German suppression of the Herero rebellion, though brutal by any standard, was hardly unique. At the same time that the Herero rebelled, the Shona and Ndebele of Southern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Mozambique rose against their British and Portuguese colonizers. It is not known how many were killed, but ten thousand is probably conservative. Nor did rebellion end in the early twentieth century. The well-known Mau Mau uprising in post-World War II Kenya led to the deaths of some eleven thousand Africans. Over one thousand were hanged as criminals and many others died of torture in British detention camps.16 Three years earlier the French army joined French settlers on Madagascar in putting down another rebellion. When French torture chambers closed and the shooting ended, it is estimated that at least 50,000 and perhaps as many as 120,000 Malagasy tribesmen had been killed.17

  Throughout West Africa even badly-armed African armies found causes worth dying for as they resisted British, French, and German forces. Most of the serious fighting took place after 1885, when the Berlin Conference divided Africa into various spheres of European interest, although some particularly fierce combat took place in 1857 between the French and the Tokolar Empire. France took the lion’s share of West Africa, fighting mostly in the open grasslands north of the forest zone, where their troops were occasionally bested and were often made to respect the bravery and skill of their African opponents, but the French were ultimately victorious. A few African leaders, like the famous Samori, gave French troops trouble for years, but most of these battles were relatively small ones that ended in French control of yet another part of West Africa—Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger, Togo, Benin, Chad, Congo, Cameroun, Gabon, and the Central African Republic; an empire of four million square miles.

  Some of the French fighting was done in the forest zone; for example, the series of battles between French legionnaires and the army of Dahomey, led by its women warriors—Amazons, as a credulous European press decided to call them. These Dahomean women attacked so fiercely that the French called them suicidal, and the hand-to-hand fighting that followed (during which some legionnaires had their noses bitten off) was demoralizing to the French, who nevertheless went on to defeat the Dahomean forces in a series of small-scale battles.18

  Many West African armies resisted European invaders with great bravery and martial skill, but no army fought more courageously or well than the Asante, and none fought over such a long period of time. The Asante Empire that its armies defended so valiantly had no huge cities or monumental architecture to set it apart from its neighbors. Its works of art were beautiful, but that was true of the art of most West African peoples. By local standards it was a new empire with only a little over a hundred years of ascendancy, and not until its first contact with the British in 1807 would it become known to Europeans as a major West African power.

  Probably the most remarkable aspect of the Asante state was the success of its political structure, which balanced the powers of its king and its oligarchy in controlling the endless competition for wealth and power by members of its privileged upper class, the threats of rebellion by its subject kingdoms, and most perplexing, its enormous and sometimes restive slave population. Its success had much to do with religion and ritual, but it was also a product of a large and growing government bureaucracy that oversaw the affairs of state. The empire had a military government at the time of Osei Tutu, but in 1807 it was rapidly evolving into a rational, civilian-led, bureaucratic state.19 The single most impressive accomplishment of the Asante rulers lay in creating a national identity and deep patriotism that survived the worst dislocations that military defeat could bring. The odds against such an achievement were enormous because the Asante Empire was a recent congeries of defeated states, in most of which hostility to Asante rule was plain to see. It was also dependent on the labor and military service of slaves, many of whom were ill-treated and rebellious. Its privileged ruling class was bitterly divided on many issues, including when to have recourse to war.

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, this hodgepodge of people would split apart in many ways, but there was always a surprisingly large core that was willing to fight and die for the Asante union. One measure of a society is its ability to instill in its people a willingness to die—for their king, their country, their gods, their honor. This the Asante did, and it is no small achievement that its people were so steadfast for so long.

  2

  The Empire of Gold

  THE CAPITAL CITY OF DWABEN DISTRICT WAS BOTH LARGER AND than Kumase, having perhaps forty thousand residents, but the Asante kingdom was centered in Kumase, a city built on the side of a rocky hill. In the early nineteenth century it ordinarily held some twenty-five thousand people, but it was large enough to accommodate a hundred thousand on important ceremonial occasions. In addition to the Kumase division or district, which contained several other sizable villages, the districts of Bekwai, Dwaben, Kokofu, Mampon, and Nsuta made up metropolitan Asante, where probably just under one million Akan-speaking people lived in the four thousand-square-mile core of the kingdom. To put these populations in perspective, in 1801 Glasgow had only seventy-seven thousand inhabitants and Manchester ninety thousand, while New York and Philadelphia, America’s largest cities, each had fewer than forty-five thousand inhabitants.1

  The Asante government in Kumase exacted tribute primarily in slaves and gold from the forty neighboring kingdoms that Asante armies had defeated in battle or intimidated into submission. So dominant was the Asante state in the early nineteenth century that all the European powers maintaining forts along the coast paid rent to the Asante king,2 and whenever an Asante envoy visited the Dutch trading center at Elmina on the coast, he was honored by a sevengun salute—European traders were not usually given to such deferential behavior.3 Much of the credit for the ascendancy of the Asante Empire must go to the wise and inspirational leadership of generations of kings, councillors, and priests, especially King Osei Tutu, who was instrumental in f
ounding the Asante state. But it is unlikely that even the wisest of leaders could have achieved such political dominance if they had not possessed the enormous wealth in gold that allowed them to acquire European firearms, that gave their large and highly organized army a decisive advantage over its neighbors.

  As early as 800 A.D. the ancient state of Ghana to the northwest was known to Arabs as “the land of gold,” even though its deposits were far less rich than those of the Asante.4 In 1471, the Portuguese, newly arrived on the coast at Elmina, south of the Asante kingdom, were so impressed by the flecks of gold that sparkled in the streams as they emptied into the sea that they called the area the Gold Coast. The name stuck.5 The sixteenth-century West African gold production has been estimated at nine tons a year, and the total amount mined from early times to 1900 was at least seven thousand tons.6 Many millions of dollars’ worth of gold dust were maintained in the Asante treasury in Kumase, but private individuals also held huge sums. One government official who died in 1814 left an estimated $500,000 in gold dust, and another a few years later left over $300,000.7 Gold dust had long been the official medium of exchange throughout the region, and the weighing and appraising (and adulterating) of gold was a major industry. In Kumase alone, one hundred men worked as full-time specialists converting gold ingots into gold dust.8

  The European traders who sailed to West Africa from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Brandenburg (as Prussia was then known) in search of gold, ivory, and slaves built trade forts, or “castles,” along the coast, but they did not bring enough armed men to permit them to establish their power beyond the walls of their forts. They were able to carry on trade on the coast of West Africa only because the Africans found them useful, not because they were feared or even terribly much respected. One of these trading enterprises was known as the African Company of Merchants; it had replaced the original British Royal African Company in 1750. This trading company was chartered by Parliament, which paid it an annual allowance to maintain its principal fort at Cape Coast. At the start of the nineteenth century, this British company shared the Gold Coast trade with a comparable Dutch company located farther west at Elmina and a Danish one to the east at Accra.