The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  Wolseley, Home, and Surgeon Major Gore also had to prepare campsites for the troops along the line of march. Eight sites were chosen along the route of march to the Pra River. Each camp contained housing for at least 450 men. There were eight large huts with wattled walls and thatched roofs, each capable of sleeping fifty men on comfortable split bamboo or palm-stalk beds raised two feet above the ground. There were smaller huts to house officers and even smaller ones for senior commanders. Deep latrines were dug, one for officers and the rest for the other ranks. Each camp had a small hospital (the largest one bore a sign reading The Forlorn Hope), and some had post offices and telegraph facilities. Four of the camps even had bakeries. The campsites were placed on elevated, well-cleared land with a good water supply, but even if the water appeared to be uncontaminated, it was not drunk until it had been filtered through a large mobile filter tank. There was also a large commissary filled with food supplies, a roomy, open-sided mess hall, and a canteen that sold wine to officers.

  Correspondent Winwood Reade was so impressed by these camps that he wrote, “In no campaign has the British soldier ever had such comforts and luxuries on the march. Each camp was like an hotel, and some were almost elegant, with neatly swept roads, and boards fixed up pointing the way to the Water, the Latrine, etc.” 31 Other correspondents agreed with Reade, but if they had seen these camps before the troops moved in, they would have received quite a different impression. Before the British troops arrived, African laborers were joined by people from nearby villages in making themselves very much at home in the camps. Some huts were used to slaughter sheep, and others as toilets. One of the larger huts had been converted into what one British observer discreetly referred to as a harem.32

  Wolseley distributed information to his officers and men instructing them about means for preventing illness, the need for kindness to carriers, and various infantry tactics. Then he made this astonishing declaration: “It must never be forgotten by our soldiers that Providence has implanted in the heart of every native of Africa a superstitious awe and dread of the white man that prevents the negro from daring to meet us face to face in combat.” 33 Colonel Torrane, Sir Charles MacCarthy, Captain Ricketts, and Colonel Purdon, among many others, would have been surprised to learn this.

  As ever, the health of the men Wolseley hoped to command was uppermost in his mind. He was determined to get his European troops to the point of battle as rapidly as possible and, of course, in a condition to fight. He ordered that every man take quinine daily, that they avoid chills at all costs, and that they be warm and dry when they slept. He also ordered, with the approval of his medical officers, that wherever the men slept, they protected themselves against malaria by burning huge fires to dry the poison-laden air. At each camp huge piles of logs were stacked up so that when the troops arrived, gigantic fires could be lighted to burn away the noxious vapors that were thought to threaten the men’s health. These fires certainly made the camps colorful, and they probably drove away mosquitos, thus perhaps inadvertently reducing the chances of malaria. The general was also greatly concerned that the troops he hoped to receive not overexert themselves, something that was thought to assure an attack of malaria and, in many instances, appeared to do so. This caution did not apply to his officers. They performed exhausting physical labor from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. every day, and all except one contracted malaria.

  Although officers were expected to run every risk, the troops were to be protected at all costs. Small hospital facilities were provided at each camp, and a major one hundred-bed hospital facility was built at the most advanced camp, where it was expected that casualties from the first battle would be treated. Even better facilities were available at the coast, where survivors would be cared for. There would be no fewer than sixty surgeons with the army It was also arranged that hospital ships would be offshore, ready to care for the sick and wounded and, when necessary, transport them to England.34 Incredibly detailed arrangements were also made for carriers to be provided with stretchers and hammocks to carry wounded from the battlefield to the nearest treatment center and, if need be, to the coast. Not surprisingly, these arrangements were calculated for European troops only. Sick or wounded African troops and carriers would be cared for as circumstances allowed.35 Despite the thought given to these matters, Wolseley did not provide enough hammocks for the sick and wounded, and his campaign was seriously jeopardized as a result.

  Wounds and malaria were not the only concerns. When some Europeans aboard ship were found to be suffering from yellow fever, a strict quarantine was imposed on all ships. Even so, some naval officers died of the disease while these ships sailed home. Dysentery was a killer, too. Reade, the correspondent, suffered a terrible bout of dysentery but survived. He also wrote movingly about Captain Huyshe, one of Wolseley’s favorite officers, who had served with him so courageously in Canada. Sick with ghastly diarrhea almost from the moment he stepped ashore, he nevertheless found the strength to save a fourteen-year-old Asante boy from certain death at the hands of Africans allied to the British, and he then treated him gently. But Huyshe continued to suffer so terribly from dysentery that when newsman Reade stopped by his sickbed, he could barely manage these last words: “Goodbye, we shall meet at the front.” 36

  Whatever the cost, Wolseley was determined that his men would be well provisioned. On the recommendation of the surgeon major, the soldiers’ daily ration would be enormous: each man was to receive 1 ½ pounds of biscuit or freshly baked bread, 1 ½ pounds of fresh beef or canned Australian beef without bone, two to four ounces of rice, potatoes, peas, or other vegetables, plus salt, pepper, tea, and three ounces of sugar. In addition to these prescribed rations, a large amount of sausage and cheese would also be available. Lime juice with sugar was to be provided four times a week. Preserved vegetables were so scanty and unappreciated by the men that a soldier’s diet effectively consisted of 1 ½ pounds of bread plus cheese or sausage and beef three times a day, washed down by very sugary tea. This was considered to be an ideal diet for troops marching and fighting in ninety-degrees heat and tropical humidity. Even well-filtered water tasted foul in the men’s wooden canteens, so they carried lukewarm tea, which proved to be a little more palatable.

  Wolseley’s otherwise meticulous preparations all hinged on the availability of transport, and here his plans miscarried so badly that the outcome of the campaign was significantly affected. There were no navigable rivers that approached Kumase and no beasts of burden. Everything depended on African labor, and in making his plans, Wolseley ignored what past experience had taught earlier British officers—namely, that neither the Fante nor other coastal people were eager to carry loads, especially not into the heart of the Asante kingdom. When he sent his officers out to round up men to carry British supplies, they usually returned empty-handed.

  Despite nearly three quarters of a century of experience on the Gold Coast, the British had somehow not yet understood that carrying heavy loads was not men’s work there, it was women’s. When they finally began to recruit women, they found that Fante women were not only willing but capable carriers. It soon became commonplace to see long lines of Fante women cheerfully chatting as they walked along, each with a sixty-six-pound box of Australian beef on her head and most with a baby on their back. For carrying this load over one hundred miles to the base camp at Prahsu, a woman would earn a maximum of ten shillings, the price of half a dozen chickens. A special correspondent to the Daily Telegraph was touched when one of the slave women carrying his goods recognized her mother among another company of carriers and rushed over to embrace her. As mother and daughter embraced, they sobbed and laughed with such joy that all the other women stopped to watch. The two women had been enslaved by the Asante seven years earlier and had not seen each other since.

  The British had reservations about relying on women as carriers. For one thing, they were reluctant to put women in the line of fire, and too many women in camp at night could lead to disruptive temptations, n
ot only for African men, but for British soldiers, sailors, and marines who had been away from women for a dangerously long time. So British officers continued to search without success for more men to carry the masses of supplies that were piling up at Cape Coast. Desperate, Wolseley turned to a special-service officer, Colonel George Pomeroy Colley, perhaps the most brilliant staff officer then serving in the British army. Superbly organized and tireless, Colley saved the day.

  When Colley took over, he found himself in command of 201 African carriers and 583 deserters, hardly a happy circumstance. There were several reasons for these mass desertions. Some British officers and African overseers were not disinclined to kick, beat, and even flog carriers. Moreover, relatively little food was available to carriers, and that was largely rice, a foreign food these men thoroughly disliked. Not least, their pay was late in coming. When a few men walked away in disgust, mass desertions followed. Colley first tried to use soldiers of the 2nd West India Regiment as carriers, but they were unable to carry the loads that Fante women could, and when one soldier actually collapsed under his load and died, Colley resorted to kidnapping.37

  Colonel Colley asked Wolseley’s permission to hunt down the deserters and to capture new carriers by force. Wolseley quickly agreed, and British officers, including several from the fleet offshore, led dozens of expeditions that burned villages where deserters lived and carried off nearly the entire adult populations of others, leaving only grandmothers behind to care for the small children.38 Colley soon put these thousands of men, women, and children (who carried smaller loads) to work under close guard. Force was used when officers felt the need for it, but Colley favored persuasion and was wise enough to organize the carriers on a tribal basis, with each group having its own interpreter. He also paid them reasonably well and allowed them a day off for every four worked. Colley and his officers worked so hard that all came down with dysentery and malaria, but they soon had over two thousand carriers efficiently moving supplies up the road toward Kumase. By late December the number rose to six thousand, of whom one thousand six hundred were women. To command this large number of men and women, Colley never had more than sixteen officers, all of whom were dreadfully ill much of the time.

  On December 9 Wolseley was surprised by the arrival of a large British troopship that anchored off Cape Coast. His telegram requesting British troops had reached London on the seventeenth of November, and later that same day the Cabinet approved his request. With an unaccustomed sense of urgency, orders went out that night, and two full-strength battalions sailed on the nineteenth. A third battalion that Wolseley had not asked for sailed a few days later. Wolseley knew nothing about the dispatch of these troops until the first ship arrived, and although he was delighted to have them, he was far from being ready for them. Fearful above all of needlessly exposing the men to disease, he sent the ship back to sea. It held 30 officers and 652 noncommissioned officers and men of the Rifle Brigade, including Prince Arthur, son of the queen; 4 officers and 68 men of the Royal Engineer; and 70 or so other officers and men, most of whom were medical personnel. There were two chaplains as well.

  Three days later another ship arrived with the second battalion of the 23rd Regiment, the Royal Welch (then written “Welsh”) Fusiliers, half a battalion of Royal Artillery, and more medical officers and chaplains. Five days later, to Wolseley’s great surprise, yet a third battalion arrived, the 42nd Highlanders (the famous Black Watch), accompanied by several senior staff officers, another forty medical personnel, and supplemented by a draft of 169 Scots from the 79th Highlanders. Wolseley now had not two but three battalions of English troops, even if the Black Watch consisted of Scots, the Royal Welch were largely Welshmen, and the Rifle Brigade had many Irish. The Cabinet’s rapid response to Wolseley’s telegram would prove embarrassing to the general. Because there was nothing for the troops to do until the road had been completed, camps prepared, and supplies stockpiled, nearly two thousand men would cruise aimlessly in the sun until the end of December. Christmas passed almost as unnoticed aboard the ships as it did on shore,39 and the news that Charteris had died aboard ship and that Neill’s shattered arm would require surgery in Britain did nothing to raise the spirits of the men who were trying so hard to put a military campaign together.

  By the time the British troops finally landed on New Year’s Day, Wolseley, despite his intense distaste for Africans, had assembled several large contingents of African soldiers. Wolseley’s views were widely shared. Captain Maurice, the same man who was horrified when a Hausa speared a helpless boy, wrote this comment about New Year’s Eve: “A nigger company, not requiring paint to make them look it, performed round a camp fire for our benefit, a small boy beating an old empty store box by way of castanet with wonderful skill.”40 It was a rare British officer who did not express racist views about Africans, yet a vital role in Wolseley’s campaign would be played by two large brigades of African militia that would be led by British officers. Baker Russell of the 13th Hussars would command one brigade and Colonel Evelyn Wood, who earned a Victoria Cross for bravery in the Crimean War, would command the other. In addition, Captain Glover had raised several thousand Africans to march on Kumase from the east, and Major W. F. Butler, one of Wolseley’s favorite officers, would attempt to raise an African army to drive toward Kumase from the southeast. Finally, there was a small unit of scouts commanded by Lieutenant Lord Giffbrd, a lean, handsome, recklessly brave twenty-three-year-old, who would spend the campaign scouting far in advance of the troops.

  In late December, wearing their drab gray uniforms instead of their traditional kilts and green or scarlet tunics, the British troops came ashore in small boats rowed by Africans. The notoriously ill-tempered goat that served as the regimental mascot of the Royal Welch Fusiliers did not get very far. No sooner had the battalion formed up and begun to march across the beach than he fell dead. He was not a lovable mascot, but this was not a good omen. As soon as the battalions were assembled, British troops began their march north toward their base camp at Prahsu, just south of the Pra River, which marked the southern boundary of metropolitan Asante. The soldiers were joined by a naval brigade of 250 sailors and marines wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, who marched into Prahsu camp in perfect order, singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Newsman Henry Stanley, a veteran observer of military campaigns including the American Civil War, was gready impressed by the robust health of these men, their high spirits, and the athletic way in which they marched.41 The 2nd West Indian Regiment came next, slouching in a leaden careless walk, according to Stanley. Stanley did not realize that they were brave, disciplined soldiers who were devoted to their British colonel, a man appropriately named Bravo. Each force was followed by hundreds of carriers, at least one for each soldier.

  When the entire British force assembled at Prahsu in January, the camp held 3,520 combat troops, about 2,500 of them British, over three thousand carriers, and hundreds of tons of supplies. Another five thousand carriers were at work bringing more supplies up from the coast. As might be imagined, a military camp this size was a lively place. Men of the Naval Brigade were inveterate pranksters, not only among themselves but with officers as well. During one inspection tour by General Wolseley, they convinced a small African boy whom they had made their mascot to wear a full naval uniform with a wooden sword, step forward, salute, and introduce himself as “Mixed Pickles, Sir.” This was apparently such a screamer that even Wolseley, who was not known for his sense of humor, admitted he was amused.42 The Naval Brigade also had many pets, including a young chimpanzee and a small crocodile who lived in a canvas bathtub.

  The troops especially enjoyed watching an elephant bathing in the Pra River, a novel sight because the recent retreat of the massive Asante army had left the forest almost empty of animals. After dinner officers bathed in the river. At night sentries fretted about the exotic night sounds, but the camp itself was a picture of peace-time soldiering. Huge fires blazed everywhere, and the British units v
ied with one another in singing their favorite songs for Wolseley and his staff. The Naval Brigade was said to sing best, but they refused to do so until they had their nighdy ration of rum.43 The British army men were not pleased that the sailors and marines had rum because unlike most campaigns, where they received a daily ration of liquor, Wolseley had ordered this one to be dry (except for officers, of course, who were not without requisite bottles of whiskey and champagne). The African carriers gambled long after everyone else was asleep.44 Virtually all of the officers had already suffered at least one attack of malaria, and now some of the newly arrived troops began to fall victim, even though officers handed out quinine every morning and the men obeyed orders to avoid chills at all costs and to wear a hat whenever they were in the sun. Oddly, only one correspondent, who happened to sleep under a mosquito net, reported being troubled by mosquitos, and several newspapermen reported that they never saw a single one.45

  Patrols that crossed the Pra reported no sign of Asante troops. The southernmost portion of metropolitan Asante was deserted. The events that took place in Kumase in 1873 and early 1874 have been chronicled by the missionaries Ramseyer and Kühne and the French businessman Bonnat. Although they were often away from the court, living on plantations a few miles outside of the city, they were in continual touch with influential Asante and could share experiences with J. S. Watts, a part-African catechist of the Wesleyan church who was also being held in Kumase. Besides, they were frequently in the company of the king, who needed their services as interpreters for the many notes that were delivered from concerned church groups and British authorities at Cape Coast. The Ramseyers were particularly welcome because King Kofi Kakari had grown fond of their daughter, who would run to him and sit on his leg while he played with her. He was also fascinated by Rose Ramseyer’s blond hair.