The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  In July 1873, as General Amankwatia’s army was crossing the Pra on its march to the south, life in Kumase continued as before. Despite the absence of as many as eighty thousand people—officers, soldiers, sutlers, carriers, wives, priests, and others—large festivals still took place. In one the son of King Kwaku Dua I organized a festival to thank Kofi Kakari and others for their many gifts and human sacrifices given to celebrate the deaths of his mother and brother some years earlier. A large party of his soldiers, painted red to symbolize the blood that had been shed, fired salutes to the king for at least fifteen minutes before more gifts were exchanged and several men were sacrificed. One of these victims had managed to hide a knife on his person and made an attempt to fight back before he was disarmed and executed. Ramseyer was appalled to see many Asante standing near the headless bodies “laughing and joking.”46

  In September a far grander and more terrifying funeral took place to celebrate the death of a sixteen-year-old crown prince. Executioners rushed through the city seizing slave victims for sacrifice, some 150 in all. With their cheeks pierced and their arms bound behind their backs, they were taken away to await their turn to die. The king sent word to the Europeans not to worry for their own safety, but he warned that the sacrifices would not be pleasant. As various chiefs presented the king with gifts of silk cushions, clothing, gold ornaments, sheep, and slaves, the prince’s pages, who had attended the coffin, were beheaded as muskets fired to signal their doom. They had known what their fate would be since the prince had died three days earlier. The sacrifices continued for ten days, and several members of the royal clan were slain by the king himself. Their bodies were left exposed to the royal vultures.

  Following another funeral during which over two hundred people were executed—several by the king himself, who ordered that the victims be made to stand so that he would not have to stoop as he beheaded them—Kofi Kakari stopped before the horrified missionaries, performed a ritual dance, then offered each of them his hand as a public display of his friendship. He then asked them to draft letters for him to British authorities. The king continued to display great affection for the Ramseyer’s daughter, but when their son was born, he and all other Asante ignored the boy, because it was an evil omen for captives to give birth to a son on Asante soil. There were evil omens aplenty in Kumase as 1873 drew to a close.

  In December, as Amankwatia’s shattered army was returning from the coast, a yam festival even grander than the one described by Bowdich took place. Great chiefs and their wives—the women’s bodies painted with green powder and all wearing dozens of gold ornaments—passed along the streets. Executioners, painted red, danced with long chains of jawbones clattering around their necks. On the following day, everyone except the most powerful drank themselves insensible and were permitted to break most rules of decorum, to have virtually indiscriminant sexual relations, and even to mock authority. But on the day after that, those designated for death by the king and his councillors were suddenly seized and beheaded.

  The executioners danced ecstatically with the severed heads, painting the foreheads white and red, kissing the mouths, and mocking one dead man for his alleged treachery. One executioner roasted a victim’s heart, then ate it along with his maize bread as if it were his ordinary breakfast. The display of wealth by the king was dazzling. The European captives had no idea that the Asante possessed so much gold. That evening the skulls of their most famous enemies were taken from the mausoleum at Bantama and placed before Kofi Kakari, who solemnly enquired about the state of their health. Among the skulls was that of Sir Charles MacCarthy, killed a half century earlier. On the final day of the festival, the queen mother led hundreds of richly gowned women, including 250 or so of the king’s wives, on a promenade that Asante men were not permitted to watch. Between each group of women of all ages walked obese eunuchs and small children carrying small boxes of toys.47

  In November and December Kumase was alive with reports from the coast about British activities, including their attacks against Amankwatia’s retreating army, but it was difficult for the king and his council to form any clear picture of British intentions. Wolseley’s demands that they leave the protectorate were known, and Amankwatia was already moving out of British territory as he and his officers glumly swallowed their pride and prepared to make the payment to the king that he had demanded. When Wolseley’s note demanding the release of prisoners and the payment of indemnification arrived in Kumase, the issue was hotly debated, and the king was under intense pressure from all quarters. As early as February 1873 one of the king’s senior Muslim advisers had consulted his oracle, which informed him that the Asante must release the European prisoners. The king and inner council ignored this warning, but to the annoyance of many of his councillors, he continued to seek out religious and magical solutions to the growing British threat.48 He also took the extraordinary step of sending a message to the king of Dahomey, a traditional enemy, asking him to join the Asante in the coming war against the British. The king of Dahomey sent a message back declining the request because his “great fetish” had indicated that the Asante were sure to be beaten.49

  On November 20, 1873, before the first British troops had arrived, King Kakari and his inner council had begun a series of conferences to assess the impending crisis. The king began by arguing for war, insisting that Kumase had never been invaded and never could be. Many of his councillors disagreed, pointing out that British weapons were so superior to those of the Asante that there could be litde hope of victory.50 The queen mother, then fifty-five, was a shrewd and energetic woman who exercised great influence. In the past she had often counseled war, but now she was so certain that war would be ruinous that she made an impassioned plea for peace. Saying that she was old and did not want younger generations to blame her son for plunging the Asante people into a calamitous war, she argued that “from olden times it has been seen that God fights for the Asante if the war is a just one. This one is unjust.”51 She argued that the European prisoners be released and the indemnity paid. The queen mother was a powerful person, but there were other powerful councillors who were unwilling to make these concessions, and it was these men, a militaristic oligarchy, who dominated the Asante government. One of the most outspoken was Adu Bofo, the newly victorious general whose successes had driven Amankwatia IV to demand the right to lead the current campaign to the coast. Adu Bofo was the son of the former powerful treasury minister and noted general Opoku Frefe, whom he had succeeded in both roles. He passionately declared that he would never countenance the release of the European captives. His voice carried weight under ordinary circumstances, and in this instance it was particularly persuasive because it was Adu Bofo who had captured them.52

  As usual, the king stalled for time. His councillors had decided that the prisoners would remain in Kumase and there would be no payment to the British, but Kofi Kakari did send messengers permitting Amankwatia’s army to return to Kumase. Worried by reports that were circulating in Kumase about the army’s failures, he declared it a capital offense for anyone even to hint that the army had achieved nothing.53 When the army returned to Kumase on December 22, the extent of their losses could not be hidden. Only about half the army had survived, and 280 senior officers had died.54 Disgruntled soldiers described the destructive power of the new British rifles. Some of these men said vehemently that they would not fight again “as we are sick of it. The white men have guns which hit five Ashantees at once. Many great men have fallen.”55 Hoping to put the best possible face on the matter, the king sent messengers throughout Asante land to announce a great victory, but the demobilized soldiers told a different story. At the same time that he declared victory, the king continued to demand that the officers who had insisted that the campaign take place pay huge sums to offset the cost of the war. One officer had to sell not only his slaves to pay the debt but his wife and a young son as well, who were said to have cried bitterly. The European missionaries who were witness to these eve
nts in Kumase wrote feelingly that “there were many upright, quiet men who had wished for peace and free trade, who lost half their families by the war, and were afterwards obliged to sell the other half to pay for it.”56 The king’s hold over his country and his army had never been so tenuous.

  Exasperated by Kumase’s failure to respond to his ultimatum, Wolseley sent a letter from Prahsu camp to Kumase on the second of January that not only repeated his peace demands but increased the indemnification to the immense sum of fifty thousand ounces of gold. He declared further that he intended to march his army into Kumase to sign the peace accord. Wolseley bluntly added that the Asante were powerless to stop him. Several councillors now joined the queen mother and Prince Ansa, who had recendy returned from a stay in England and was well aware of British power, in urging compliance with Wolseley’s terms; but many senior councillors, or elders, as they were also known, continued to resist. These insular old men had no knowledge of British firepower and continued to think of Kumase as the center of the universe.57 King Kofi Kakari lacked the support to openly challenge the elders, most of whom indignantly insisted that to yield to threats of force would violate Asante honor.58 The king feared that his weakened and rebellious army would be unable to stop Wolseley, but he also knew that if he yielded to the threat of force, his councillors were very likely to depose him in disgrace. Wolseley did not realize it, but his threat to use force left the Asante with no honorable alternative but to fight.

  On the same day that Wolseley’s ultimatum arrived in Kumase, a ferocious windstorm knocked down the sacred tree in the central square that symbolized the well-being of the nation. Kofi Kakari called his priests together to ask what this ominous happening portended. They instructed that two men should be bound to trees in the nearby forest, their cheeks pierced with knives. If they died quickly, the Asante would have victory. The portent was not good: one man lived five days, the other nine.59 The king attempted to appease his war party by ordering that ammunition be stockpiled, and he began courting favor with some of his senior army commanders. But at the same time he surreptitiously released one of the European missionaries, the German Johannes Kühne. Fearful that members of his war party would learn of Kühne’s release and see it as an act of weakness, he ordered Kühne to leave unobtrusively during the night. Before Kühne left, the king told him to tell Wolseley of his desire for peace, and he had a letter sent to Wolseley, signed by six Asante dignitaries, expressing the same wish. Kühne did quite the opposite. He told the general that the king could not be trusted and that his army was too demoralized to offer any serious resistance. Wolseley, needless to say, was gready encouraged.

  Kofi Kakari once again turned to his Muslim religious advisers for help in preventing the British invasion. Although he had not acted on their earlier warning to release the European prisoners, he now paid considerable sums to several Muslims to conjure up magical means of turning back the invaders.60 One of these men, the scholar-priest Sulayman Kumatay, actually confronted Gifford’s scouts with solemn curses designed to drive them off When Gifford’s men responded with gunfire, he disappeared but left behind a manifesto written in Arabic: “This is a prayer to God, and a wish that the white men would fight among themselves, and return to their own country. May pestilence and disease seize them! The writer of this is the great High Priest, who invokes God to do these things. Europeans never possessed any land in this country, and all the angels of heaven are invoked to drive them out.”61 The British were amused.62

  Kofi Kakari was not the only Asante to place his faith in Muslim charms. All officers and most soldiers purchased Koranic charms and talismans consisting of pieces of paper containing protective incantations and tied together with colored threads. Many officers wore hundreds of these so-called saphi on the chest to ward off harm. Some of the charms were outrageously fraudulent. One was found to contain a page from the Bible, and another was torn from a British governor’s proclamation made at Cape Coast.63

  Despite the growing crisis the king was sometimes preoccupied with ceremonial or private duties, leaving the affairs of state to others. He spent one full day attending to the legal matters involved in elevating one of his three hundred or so wives to the status of paramount wife, a transaction that called for her to be given autocratic powers over at least six villages and six hundred people. This extremely important event cost the king one hundred ounces of gold dust.64 But Kofi Kakari could not afford to be distracted for long: he had to put his army back together or face destruction. As people all over Kumase busied themselves making bullets of lead and iron and drying corn and cassava for provisions—the record about how this was done is vague—the king managed to convince the king of Mampon, the traditional commander of the Asante army, and another famous nobleman, the long-disgrunded General Asamoa Nkwanta, to lead the army of resistance. Nkwanta, who was known to the troops as their guardian spirit, was probably the only man who could have inspired the footsore, sick, and demoralized soldiers to shoulder their arms again.65 There were severe shortages of food and salt in Kumase, and so many men were without muskets that two or three often had to share a weapon; but in an act of supreme patriotism, the sick, wounded, and dispirited Asante soldiers came together again, ready to defend their nation’s borders and their own honor, this time with litde hope of plunder or success.

  The king also chose to make a last-minute gesture to the advancing British army. On the twenty-first of January, he released the Swiss missionary Friedrich Ramseyer, his wife, and their two children, along with the French merchant Marie-Joseph Bonnat. Their release was mediated by Joseph Dawson, whom Wolseley’s predecessor had sent to Kumase some months earlier. The son of an English father and Fante mother, Dawson spoke Asante and English and was in regular contact with the king and his inner council. He continually pressed the king to release the prisoners, even saying that he himself would remain behind as a hostage if this were done. After much haranguing and to the surprise of the Europeans who also served him as interpreters, the king one day fell silent, “gazed vacantly before him, then suddenly turned and said, ‘Go, go, and tell my good friend the governor [Wolseley] that I did not march against him. Amankwatia attacked the fort [at Elmina] contrary to my commands [something that was apparently true], I have nothing against the white men, go and speak a good word with the governor.’”66

  Dawson then demanded to know whether the Fante and other African prisoners were to be released, as Wolseley insisted, or only the Europeans. “‘What’, the King angrily exclaimed, ‘Is it not enough if I send you, am I to give up the Fantees too?’” The queen mother also was excited, and the entire council rose in consternation, “swearing and shouting in the wildest confusion.”67 In a rage the king shouted that no one would be set free. Terrified, the Europeans sat meekly, praying for deliverance. To their great surprise it came. After some time Kofi Kakari softened and said, “Oh, I have nothing against you…. Go speak a good word, I have now done what I can. If the governor will not wait, I must leave the matter with God.”68

  As the Europeans prepared to leave, they were surprised and pleased to receive valuable gifts from the king, including an Asante silk dress for Ramseyer’s wife. After 9 P.M. they were summoned to the palace, where they feared the worst but found a deeply depressed King Kofi Kakari, who appeared as if their liberation had cost him dearly. He looked at Ramseyer’s wife and, addressing her by her Asante nickname, complimented her on her new silk dress: “Well, Susse, you know how to wear the national dress.”69 Reverend Ramseyer and the French merchant Bonnat both felt such sympathy for the king at this moment of parting that they again promised to do everything in their power to bring about peace. “He smiled and dismissed us with the words, ‘Yes; it is alright, go, do as you say.’”70

  The Ramseyers and Bonnat were escorted toward the British troops, now only a few miles away. When they came to a town called Dompoase, only three miles from the British advance guard, they found it swarming with Asante soldiers under the command o
f a middle-level commander named Obeng—by coincidence the same man who had treated them so badly on the way to Kumase after their original capture that they had suffered gready and their infant son had died. Though they feared for the worst, they were pleasandy surprised at being greeted politely. They assured Obeng that they would urge Wolseley to seek peace. The Asante officer asked that a good word for his men be expressed as well, saying that he, like the king, had “no quarrel with white men,” adding that war was an altogether bad thing. “Look at this village, it is quite deserted; does it not make one’s heart ache?”71

  6

  “The Most Horrible War”

  AS THE EUROPEAN CAPTIVES WERE BEING WARMLY WELCOMED BY some of Wolseley’s junior officers, the king was desperately attempting to muster enough troops to confront the British force. While urging his men to mobilize, he tried to buy time and perhaps to forestall an invasion altogether by sending Wolseley another appeal to halt and negotiate. Wolseley had already planned to halt on January 24 for four days at a town named Fomena because he wanted to build up a ten-day supply of food and ammunition before attacking, but he deceitfully wrote to the king that he would agree to make a peace gesture by halting. Thirty years later Wolseley confessed his lie, writing “may God forgive me that fib—the halts were absolutely necessary.”1 However, before he would agree to negotiate, he demanded that he be sent six of the highest-ranking men and women of the Asante royal family, including the queen mother, as hostages, be paid a huge down payment on the fifty thousand ounces of gold indemnity, and be promised safe passage to Kumase for his staff and five hundred troops, where he would sign a peace treaty. Once again he declared that it was his intention to march to Kumase and it was for the king to decide whether he did so peacefully or not. He also specified the routes that he, Glover, and Butler would follow in their advance, hoping to force the Asante to divide their forces. In reality, he had little confidence that either Glover or Butler would advance at all, as both forces were stalemated to the east and southeast of Kumase.