The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  Generals senior to Adu Bofo furiously demanded the opportunity to demonstrate their own military genius and to achieve the same honors and wealth. The British at Elmina were an obvious target. They made their case to the king and inner council by assuring one and all that the British were incapable of opposing them.56 With the help of many well-placed friends, Amankwatia IV, the son of general Amankwatia III, lobbied successfully for his own command to reoccupy the British protected southern states lost after the defeat of 1826. For the Asante inner council the decision for war was not difficult. Their economic interests were at stake, the coastal people were too weak to resist, and the British did not seem to have the resources or the will to intervene.57 Governor Pine’s humiliating defeat was to have a terrible legacy. Even so, it was not until October 1872 that the national assembly called for war and the generals announced that they would march to the coast. The king grandly replied, “If you go, I shall go with you.”58 After prolonged ritual preparations an Asante army that may have numbered eighty thousand men marched south in December 1872. Despite his pledge the king did not accompany them. In fact, he was personally opposed to the war and was angry when his council overrode him. By September this huge force was encamped only five miles from Cape Coast. Led, as expected, by General Amankwatia IV, the army was so well established that it had replanted abandoned Fante farms and built huge camps. At that time there was no food shortage.

  They soon began to launch a series of small-scale forays toward Cape Coast itself. Newly arrived troops of the 2nd West India Regiment, along with British marines and sailors led by a valiant and intelligent Royal Marine lieutenant colonel named Festing, did what they could to oppose them, but Festing had such limited troop strength that he could do little more than defend the fort and Elmina town. Later, some hot skirmishing developed, and the Asante learned a deeply troubling truth: while they were still armed with their cumbersome, inaccurate, and short-range muskets, the British marines and West Indian soldiers now had powerful artillery and carried rapid-firing, breech-loading rifles that could kill at long range. One senior Asante general was so appalled by the disparity between the weapons of the two armies that he urged peace. Asante soldiers complained that the new British rifles could kill five men at long distance with a single bullet, while their own flintlocks were worthless beyond point-blank range. Nevertheless, other officers and men were more than willing to fight and were frustrated because no general attack had been ordered against Elmina.59 While Amankwatia hesitated, the food supply gradually became exhausted, and by October disease was again ravaging the army. According to one Asante prisoner, their situation had become desperate.60 Their major camp at Mampon was a mile square and probably held twenty thousand men. Supplying that many men for a long period was a logistical impossibility. For a while crops could be stolen, purchased, or even grown, but all too soon food would run out. Eventually, too, large camps would breed disease. Amankwatia’s son died of smallpox shortly before the general finally agreed to retreat.61

  Amankwatia had long refused to attack Elmina, and now he appealed to Kumase for permission to withdraw his sick and dissension-ridden army from the coast. King Kakari rebuked him with this harsh reply: “You wished for war, and you have it; you swore you would not return till you could bring me the walls of Cape Coast, and now you want me to recall you because many chiefs have fallen and you are suffering. It was not I; it was you who wished it.” 62 The king also insisted that he would not recall his disgraced general until the many chiefs who advocated war agreed to repay him for the costs of outfitting the army. They finally agreed, but when Amankwatia heard the king’s message, he drank himself into a stupor and had to be carried to his quarters. Nevertheless, despite being harassed by small British forces that initiated several sharp skirmishes, the orderly withdrawal was carried out with such skill that a British officer wrote that any European army would have been proud of the accomplishment.63 By early December 1873 the entire army had crossed the Pra Biver into metropolitan Asante.

  The Asante army had not suffered defeat, but neither had it accomplished anything of note, and King Kakari now faced a dangerous political climate. His dispirited generals and soldiers were demobilized and some were so rebellious that they openly threatened not to go to war again. Members of die peace faction were again listened to in the inner council. And although the king did not yet know it, while his troops had been threatening the coast, officials in the British government had decided not to negotiate peace with the Asante in good faith but to destroy their power once and for all.

  5

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

  WHILE GENERAL AMANKWATIA IV WAS CONSIDERING WHETHER HE should withdraw his army to Kumase and the king and his inner council were debating their options for peace or war, the British government had been implacably preparing for war. In late July 1873 the colonial secretary, the Earl of Kimberly, received a letter from a former Royal Navy captain, John Glover, recently an active entrepreneur on the Gold Coast, offering to raise an army of Africans and lead them up the Volta River to the east of the Asante and eventually attack Kumase from the northeast. Glover had earlier demonstrated his ability to raise and lead native troops in the area, and Lord Kimberly eagerly accepted his plan, agreeing to supply arms, money, and a few British officers to serve under the captain. But before Glover’s expedition could get underway, the government decided to appoint a British army officer to command all British armed forces in the Gold Coast, including those led by Glover, and to serve as civil governor as well. The man chosen was Colonel Sir Garnet Wolseley, who, while in the Gold Coast, would hold the rank of major general and the title of governor.

  Wolseley’s selection came as no surprise. As early as August 1873 he had been asking everyone he could in London for information about the Asante, and he soon became convinced that Asante imperialism badly needed a stern lesson in the folly of opposing British military might. He proposed the idea of leading a punitive expedition to Kumase to his patron Sir Edward Cardwell, Prime Minister Gladstone’s secretary of state for war. Colonel Wolseley had been CardweLL’s principal adviser as he pushed through far-reaching reforms in the British army after its many weaknesses had been exposed in the Crimean War, where, incidentally, Wolseley had been blinded in one eye by a shell fragment. Cardwell convinced Lord Kimberly that the expedition was needed and that Wolseley was the man to lead it. The decision was a fait accompli. Remarkably, there was no cabinet discussion of the expedition until two months later, and Parliament was not consulted at all.

  Many in the army were less than thrilled by Wolseley’s selection. He was seen by many of his superiors as too young at forty (King Kofi Kakari was thirty-seven) for this rank, too brash, and worst of all, largely responsible for the reforms that most older officers detested. Yet no one could deny that he had fought bravely in four campaigns, had been heavily decorated, and had been wounded many times as well. In addition to his blind eye, he still occasionally suffered great pain from a leg wound, received in Burma, that had never fully healed. Short, slight, with a receding chin, he did not look the part of a distinguished general, but those officers who had served with him earlier could not wait to volunteer for this campaign, and hundreds of other officers applied for temporary leave from their regiments to serve as special-service officers under the young general. Wolseley handpicked his officers from candidates representing the most distinguished regiments in the British army. Those he finally selected were mostly young men he already knew well, and he proved himself a great judge of talent. Without exception the men who served with Wolseley proved to be energetic and brave, often astonishingly so. Many were also notably intelligent, a trait less common among British officers of that time than bravery; it was a common joke among European armies to refer to the British army as “lions led by donkeys.” Most of the officers who survived the Asante war went on to perform with great distinction in Zululand, the Sudan, South Africa, and World War I, and almost all of those who s
urvived achieved high rank.

  Wolseley and his “ring,” as his young special-service officers were known to sneering senior officers, immediately attempted to learn everything they could about the Gold Coast and the Asante. They discovered precious little. Asante—or Ashanti as it was then known—was hardly a household word in Britain, even among highly educated people. When one of Wolseley’s officers mentioned to a civilian shipmate that he was on his way to fight the Asante, the man, who had been educated at Rugby and Cambridge, asked “What part of India is Asante in?”1 It was especially irksome to Wolseley’s officers that there were no decent maps of the Gold Coast available, and although they read Bowdich’s, Dupuis’s and Hutton’s accounts of their trips to Kumase a half century earlier, they somehow missed their description of hills and rolling terrain near the coast. As a result, Wolseley intended to build a railway inland from Cape Coast and actually had many tons of rails shipped there from England. It was to prove a comic and costly misadventure. However, Wolseley’s men did learn that during the rainy seasons no European army could hope to campaign effectively on the Gold Coast and that disease was a terrible threat.

  Perhaps no military commander before or since has given disease so prominent a role in planning his campaign. Wolseley was well aware that the Gold Coast was known as the “white man’s grave,” and as he went forward with planning his campaign, he was seldom allowed to forget it. For example, when he asked an old West African hand what he should take to the Gold Coast, the answer was “a coffin, you won’t need anything else.” 2 He also learned to his dismay that earlier in the nineteenth century the surgeon general of the British army estimated that the life expectancy of a British soldier on the Gold Coast was one month! Elephantiasis and Guinea worm were endemic at the coast, and both smallpox and yellow fever were common. Many died of dysentery, but the greatest killer of Europeans was malaria, or fever as it was simply called. At the time, no one knew that malaria was carried by anopheles mosquitos, but the disease’s association with rainy weather, swamps, and tropical vegetation was widely observed. Most contemporary physicians believed that it was caused by poisonous vapors exuded by swamps and rotting vegetation, but others believed it to be the result of a lack of ozone in moist and fetid tropical air. Some seriously recommended the use of a Rube Goldberg-like instrument called an ozonometer to measure the ozone content of Gold Coast air.3

  Mosquito-repellent oils and lotions were available to the British army, but only a few officers used them. Some officers carried mosquito nets, and one officer wore a brown veil during the campaign, but the veil was intended to filter out poisonous vapors, not defend against mosquitos. There were no nets, veils, or repellant oils for the soldiers. Wolseley’s ignorance about the role of mosquitos in the transmission of malaria can hardly be held against him since the scientific community did not become aware of it until more than twenty years after this campaign.4 What is more, Wolseley’s personal experience gave him good reason not to suspect mosquitos as disease vectors. A few years earlier he had led the British troops on a summer campaign in the mosquito-infested forests of Canada without a single man falling victim to fever.5

  It had been known for centuries that quinine offered some protection against malaria, and Wolseley would order all his white troops to take quinine under supervision every morning. It is not clear how large a dosage they took (probably one grain), but it would prove not to be enough. Wolseley also planned his invasion for the dry season when fever was said to be less common, and he arranged that his troops would spend the shortest time possible in the Gold Coast. He also made elaborate preparations to provide healthy campsites for his men. Every night on the march the men would sleep in roofed huts on bamboo beds raised off the ground so that they would not become wet or chilled (both were thought to bring on fever), and each camp was provided with a huge supply of logs so that immense fires could be kept burning throughout the night to dry the air and keep the deadly vapors at bay.

  Captain Huyshe, an otherwise healthy young officer who had served with Wolseley in Canada, believed in the prophylactic powers of cold tea. He died of malaria. Captain Maurice, an intellectual officer who survived the campaign to write a book about it, believed that the key to avoiding fever lay in not drinking too much alcohol—or too little.6 Maurice also recognized the value of quinine but, like many other officers, stopped taking it because of its side effects, which included dizziness, deafness, loss of memory, and a pounding sensation in the head.

  When malaria struck, it did so suddenly, almost without warning. One moment a man was capable of performing his duties, the next he was incapable of any activity except writhing in his bed with a fever of 105° or 106°, followed by agonizing chills that no number of blankets could assuage. Sleep was impossible for days at a time, and those who recovered commonly referred to their bout with fever as the most painful experience of their lives. Too weak to care for any of their needs, unable to eat or sleep, they experienced terrifying delusions of being attacked and devoured by horrific demons or beasts. They also became obsessed with the need to carry out some trivial task that they were too weak to perform. When the fever finally abated and the delirium was replaced by sleep, men were so grateful that they often wept. Wolseley himself had a severe case of malaria. After terrible suffering he returned to duty, but not until two weeks had passed. He had been delirious for six full days.7

  Wolseley’s precautions undoubtedly saved many lives, but malaria remained a terrible enemy. Before he even left the coast, he had to leave two hundred men behind because they were too ill to march inland, and after the campaign’s last battle as many men had to be invalided to the coast for malaria as for battle wounds (12 percent in each category), and more men died of malaria than of their wounds. Fully 59 percent of the European troops contracted malaria, and 71 percent suffered from some debilitating illness.8 One who died of malaria was the popular Captain Alfred Charteris, the oldest son of Lord Elcho, who collapsed soon after making a heroic long run in great heat to deliver a message. Taken on board a hospital ship, he received the preferred therapy of having his head shaved and a huge blister raised on it to reduce the fever. He died soon after.9

  In November 1873 Gladstone urged Wolseley to make peace without entering Kumase, but Wolseley had already decided in favor of destroying Asante power, not simply by defeating its army in a decisive battle, but by destroying Kumase, thereby “leaving our mark of victory stamped in the country.” 10 To accomplish his mission, Wolseley was not prepared to rely on African soldiers, as Glover proposed to do; he wanted “English” troops, as British battalions were typically called in those days. He asked the government for two battalions of British infantry (one thousand three hundred men), sixty men of the Royal Artillery with four mobile mountain howitzers, and forty Royal Engineers to join his fifty volunteer special-service administrative officers from various regiments.

  Wolseley’s request for British troops alarmed the government, which was all too aware of the dangers of disease. But he did not stop there. Instead of asking for two regular battalions, he made the extraordinary request for handpicked officers and men, that is, those best suited for combat in the tropical rain forest of the Gold Coast. In many armies this would have been a reasonable request, but not in the British army, which had always been organized by battalions (two to a regiment), each of which had long traditions, enormous pride, and the belief that it was the finest fighting force on earth. The idea of breaking up the regiment, much less the battalion, was akin to breaking up a family. Wolseley’s scheme was rejected. If he was to receive British troops at all, and this issue was still in doubt, they would fight as battalions.

  In the end the government was unwilling to commit British troops to Wolseley at all, and the general was told that he and his ring were to sail to the Gold Coast alone. If Wolseley found that he could not defeat the Asante with the troops available at Cape Coast, he could again request British troops, but only with a compelling justification of why the
y were needed, how their health would be safeguarded, and how victory would be assured. Before sailing, Wolseley drew up a remarkable list of supplies to be shipped to Cape Coast. In addition to 6 howitzers, 1,000 Congreve rockets, 4,000 Snider rifles, and 3,200,000 rounds of Snider ammunition, he asked for 30 foghorns and 100 railway guard whistles. The abortive railroad plan explained the whistles, but the foghorns remain a mystery.

  Instead of their scarlet tunics or their kilts, Wolseley wisely decided that all officers and men (if any were to be sent) would wear uniforms of drab gray homespun, cork sun helmets, and long hobnailed boots. This was the sort of break with tradition that infuriated many senior officers. Officers were also to leave their swords behind, carrying sword bayonets instead, weapons that could also be used to hack away jungle vegetation. No officer could bring more than fifty pounds of gear, the maximum that Wolseley believed a native carrier could manage, but Wolseley and his officers did not impose any such limit on themselves. A reporter who sailed with them wrote that “no equal number of men ever started upon a warlike expedition with so immense a train of impedimenta,” including generous supplies of whiskey, champagne, and wine.11 He did not note, however, that they were denied the right to a soldier servant, an unusually spartan way to go to war.