The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  Despite their exhaustion few among the British invaders, including General Wolseley, slept more than a couple of hours that night. The exciting strangeness of Kumase and the uncertainty about what tomorrow would bring preyed on their minds. Their sleep was also disturbed by the nauseating smell of putrefying human flesh that came from the nearby “place of the vultures” where the headless torsos of executed Asante were left to rot. The smell was so offensive to the British that they lit fires hoping to cleanse the air, but to no avail. In this predeodorant age these men had not bathed or changed their filthy, sweat-encrusted uniforms for many days; still, this new odor was too much for them.

  Everyone was awake before daybreak, eager to see more of the exotic city. Though Wolseley still hoped that the king might return to Kumase and agree to peace terms, he feared that the fires set last night had made Kofi Kakari even less inclined to trust him than before, and he was right.40 Wolseley was only too aware that if the king did not return to Kumase soon, the heavy rains and the lack of food would compel him to march back to the coast the following day. It was not yet clear what the valor of his men had won for him.

  Wolseley began the next day by issuing an order praising his troops for their courage and devotion, which, he said, had “been rewarded with complete success.”41 As his officers well knew, success was far from being complete. Wolseley had enough food for his men to remain in Kumase for at most two days; but as he looked at the leaden, drizzly sky, he could not avoid worrying about the swollen rivers in his rear. More heavy rain seemed to be on the way, and he feared that his army could be trapped.42 He was also greatly troubled by a shortage of hammocks for carrying his sick and wounded. If he had to fight another battle, he would not be able to carry them all. His only option was to find some way to lure King Kofi Kakari back to Kumase to sign a peace treaty in a day or two at most or withdraw without a fight and without a treaty.

  While he waited for word of the king’s intentions, the general and some of his staff officers visited the still-unguarded palace. It was obvious at a glance that much of value, including the gold dust, had been removed during the night. They nevertheless noticed boxes and crates filled with silks, gold and silver treasures, leopard skins, and many curiosities of European manufacture, including a music box that played “O rest thee babe” and “Adeste Fideles.” They also found many enormous umbrellas, some of the king’s pet cats (a passion that Asante kings had maintained throughout the century), and his huge four-poster bed, covered in silk. Offended by some ritual objects and a number of executioner’s stools covered with clotted blood, Wolseley stayed only long enough to glance around. Belatedly he ordered that a guard be placed around the large building. It took one hundred men to guard all the entrances.43

  As the clouds darkened ominously, some of the newspaper correspondents explored the deserted city, which was so large that one of them believed it would ordinarily have held forty thousand people.44 Yet anyone who had seen it in Bowdich’s time would have found it badly down at the heel. All of metropolitan Asante had suffered a population decline, and Kumase was no longer the imposing capital that had dazzled earlier European visitors. While these men were exploring the empty city, various Asante messengers arrived bringing word that the king was on his way. Wolseley was cautiously delighted, but time passed and the king was nowhere to be seen. However, two of these high-ranking messengers were later discovered gathering guns and ammunition to be carried out of the city. They were placed under arrest. Frederick Boyle, special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, recorded the following anecdote about one of these messengers:

  One of them is a prince, whom we call Bosomnogo, the most courteous and charming of savages. Tied to him is a captain, Cocoforo…. Both of them were captured in the act of removing guns and powder from the palace, after bringing to the General a message from the King. The prince has an excellent face, very good-looking and intelligent. There is something quite high-bred about his manner, but the Ashantees especially pride themselves upon their courtesy. When taken, he wore a bracelet of strung nuggets, sandals heavily plated with gold, and in his hand a bag of dust worth nearly £500; so, at least, he complained to Monsieur Bonnat. Both he and the captain were dressed in clothes of native manufacture, strikingly clean, and arranged like an ancient toga. They were white, handsomely marked with a blue pattern. The prince showed himself particularly indignant at the manner in which he was carried down. “Here am I,” said he to Monsieur Bonnat, “a prince of Ashantee, tied like a slave to one of my captains. That third man is only a warrior! It is infamous!” Monsieur Bonnat reminded him that the Ashantees had kept their prisoners, whites and one a woman, seven weeks in irons, without any cause at all. But an Ashantee prince could not see the parallel.45

  More messengers arrived to declare the king to be on his way, but by then even the ever-hopeful Wolseley knew that the game was up. Shortly after noon the city had been inundated by thunderstorms that knocked over the troops’ newly arrived canvas tents like houses of cards and left everyone thoroughly intimidated by the fury of tropical rain and wind. By mid-afternoon the general made his decision. He sent so-called prize-agents to the palace to remove everything they could that was of value. Led by intelligence officer Captain Redvers Buller, these men spent all night removing valuables while nursing the only four candles they had. They found pure gold masks, one weighing forty-one ounces that represented a ram’s head and other smaller ones representing men and other animals. There were necklaces and bracelets of beads, gold and silver, silverplate, swords, gold- and silver-embossed cartridge belts, caps mounted in solid gold, stools mounted in silver, calabashes covered with silver and gold, silks, and all manner of European gifts from earlier times. The prize-agents worked throughout the night, and although it took thirty Africans to carry away the loot, they were still unable to remove everything of value.

  While these exhausted officers robbed the palace, Royal Engineers obeyed Wolseley’s orders by mining the building so that it could be completely destroyed. While these destructive steps were being put in place, the rain continued to pour, and the British troops sought shelter without much success. As the day passed, it became obvious to everyone that the king had no intention of negotiating with General Wolseley, and it was not only those closest to the general who realized how much this refusal compromised the complete victory Wolseley had announced. Winwood Reade reported that every officer he spoke to expressed disappointment because the king had not capitulated or paid even an ounce of gold. They were also concerned that if the Asante army attacked them as they withdrew from Kumase, it would appear that they had been driven out.46 It was a cold, wet night spent in largely sleepless despondency by the British staff officers. They had won Kumase but not the peace. Unless there was a miracle, tomorrow the general would order the destruction of Kumase, and they would all march back to the coast, possessors of a Pyrrhic victory at best. If they were attacked, there might be no victory at all.

  At daybreak Wolseley ordered the mines to be fired, and they went off in a spectacular eruption. Unfortunately, the walls of the palace were still standing, but engineers confidently said that they were too badly damaged to do so for long. At the same time troops were ordered to deploy throughout the city with firebrands, torching the tinder-dry undersides of the houses’ roofs. Within minutes the city was an inferno. Wolseley believed that destroying the palace and the city would demonstrate British might and Asante weakness. Brutal as these actions were, they would prove to have the desired effect. The Asante were appalled by the destruction of the city. While Kumase was being burned and the palace destroyed, many high-ranking British officers paid a visit to the place of the vultures. Holding their noses, they found an area at least an acre in size filled with bodies in various stages of decay. On top of uncountable numbers of skeletons and partially decomposed bodies, lay fourteen bloated bodies, including at least one woman and a child, all writhing with worms. Disgusted, the white men quickly left.

  By 8
A.M. the troops began to move out of Kumase toward the coast, and by nine the rear guard of Highlanders had left the burning city. The first obstacle they came to was an expanse of water two hundred yards wide that had been a narrow stream only three feet deep when they crossed it three days earlier. With the help of a large tree used as a bridge, the troops managed to wade across. The river Ordah, which they came to next, was even more difficult to cross, as Wolseley had feared. Remarkably, the bridge the British engineers had built was still standing, even though the flood waters were two feet above it and still rising. Most men made it across the bridge, but it collapsed before the 42nd Highlanders reached it, and they had to strip naked and swim across, with their clothes and equipment being carried by Africans. It was nightfall before all the men were safely on the south bank of the river. With fires blazing, they spent the night in relative comfort in a large, well-fortified camp that had been constructed while they were in Kumase.

  The troops that marched south the next day were happy to be headed home, but in addition to the hundreds of sick and wounded who had to be carried, many had minor but painful wounds, and others suffered from fever and dysentery. The rough joking that had earlier taken place around the subject of men suddenly plunging off the road to empty their bowels had long since ceased. Some men openly wondered what they had accomplished by their gallantry and suffering. They were a victorious army, but when they camped at the end of the day’s march, there was no singing. To the Asante, who could not understand why the British were retreating, the long column of tired, filthy, and increasingly glum men looked more like a vanquished army than a victorious one. Wolseley could not help worrying about the reception he would receive in England if many more of his exhausted men fell ill on the return march.

  But on the nineth of February, Wolseley was blessed by an apparent miracle. To everyone’s surprise a messenger from King Kofi Kakari arrived in camp with an offer to accept Wolseley’s peace terms. He begged the general to halt Captain Glover’s forces, which he said were advancing toward Kumase from the east. Wolseley, who had all but forgotten the seemingly inert force that Glover was attempting to lead, was astonished but somehow managed to maintain his imperious poker face. He agreed to remain in camp at Fomena until the night of the twelfth, and if the king sent him a down payment on the indemnity of fifty thousand ounces of gold dust, he would sign a treaty of peace and order Captain Glover to halt. The messenger returned in haste while Wolseley and his staff were left to wonder what on earth was happening. To the best of Wolseley’s knowledge, none of the three British officers who had attempted to mount diversionary attacks had been able to achieve anything. A captain named Dalrymple had run into a stone wall of fear and indifference as he tried to raise an army and had long since been written off as a threat to Kumase. Glover’s dispatches had been promising great things, but so far his activities were largely unknown. And much more had been expected of an African force raised by Captain W P. Butler.

  Butler was a physically powerful, adventurous man who had served with Wolseley in Canada and was one of the general’s most trusted officers. In 1873 he had crossed Canada from east to west by dogsled and foot, then hiked down the Pacific coast to San Francisco, where he learned of the impending Asante expedition and rushed by train to New York and by ship to London in order to join Wolseley again. Wolseley gave him the unenviable task of raising an African army from the people to the east of Cape Coast and marching this force northwest toward Kumase on a path parallel to the one taken by Wolseley. Despite his gifts of rum and gunpowder, his promises of plunder, and the force of his personality, it was only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to assemble some one thousand four hundred armed men like the one he described as follows:

  He was a large powerful negro, armed with a flintgun; he was utterly destitute of clothing, unless a square black Dutch bottle could be construed into a garment…. The gun was balanced upon his head; the bottle was worn after the manner of the Old Hussar jacket, suspended from the left shoulder. His whole appearance fulfilled the requirements of what is termed “an Irregular.” He was, I think, the most irregular-looking soldier I had ever seen.47

  By January 30, as the battle of Amoafo was about to begin, Butler managed to cajole his irregular army to a position only a few miles southeast of the town, when suddenly “a complete panic” took place and the entire force fled, leaving Butler alone and completely unable to support Wolseley.48

  While the sick and wounded continued to be carried to the coast, Wolseley remained at Fomena, hoping that the king’s latest peace offer was not another delaying tactic to allow the Asante army to regroup and attack. The tenth was spent in growing anxiety as no word came from the king. The eleventh was equally silent and even more nerve-wracking. Though there was no messenger from the king, Wolseley could take some comfort from the reports of his scouts that they could find no sign of the Asante army; so perhaps the king’s message was not a ruse to hold the British in place until they could be attacked. The morning of the twelveth passed without event until noon when, as Wolseley’s staff sat down to lunch, an exhausted British officer on an emaciated horse staggered into camp at the head of twenty Hausa soldiers, who somehow had kept up with his pony on foot! The officer was Captain Reginald Sartorius of the 6th Bengal Lancers, whose previous reputation for great bravery would not be diminished by his amazing ride.

  It seems that Captain Glover’s force had been thoroughly blocked by an Asante army of between five thousand and ten thousand men under the king of Dwaben. The loss of this powerful army against Wolseley’s advance was critical, but the men from Dwaben had nevertheless managed to play an important role in the war by preventing Glover’s advance. Several small battles took place without success for Glover, whose men took some serious losses. On February 2 Dwaben scouts discovered that the body of Glover’s army, which was only then ready to attack, consisted of men from the Akyem Abuakwa kingdom, with which Dwaben had a reciprocal peace treaty that forbade them to fight each other. The troops from Dwaben promptly withdrew, and so did Glover’s Akyem men despite Glover’s best efforts to restrain them. Left with his surviving Hausas and a couple of thousand Africans from other tribes, Glover cautiously moved ten miles closer to Kumase before camping on February 10 at a place he estimated to be seven miles east of Kumase. Deeply concerned about the condition of his nearly starving troops, he sent Sartorius to Wolseley with a message that he would remain where he was until he received further orders. He added that his men had been given only one ounce of salt meat a day since the eighteenth of January and that Captain Sartorius had done “excellent and hard service.” Leaving without provisions, Sartorius and his Hausa escort set out for Kumase, finding that it was not seven miles away but eighteen. He was fired on but pressed ahead and slept that night in the bush four miles from Kumase. The next day, the eleventh of February, he entered Kumase, finding it deserted except for a few apparent looters, who fled when he approached. Moving on, he met an Asante woman who told him that the king and his soldiers had entered Kumase and were anxious for revenge. He reached Amoafo that night to find that it too was deserted. The next day, having traveled fifty five miles without food and very little water, he found Wolseley.

  Wolseley and his staff fed the famished Sartorius and his men, but after the excitement of his arrival wore off, they still waited impatiently for the king’s messenger. What they did not know was that at 1 P.M., as they were eating, Glover’s force had entered Kumase. Horrified by this new invasion, the distraught King Kofi Kakari and his councillors decided that further delay was impossible, and they sent messengers to Wolseley with some gold dust. It was dark before two gold-breastplated envoys accompanied by a suite of carriers arrived at Wolseley’s camp. There followed one of the least dignified treaty signings on record.

  First, the envoys blithely declared that they had only one thousand ounces of gold with them and that no more was available. They then asked to see Joseph Dawson, who first pocketed some of the go
ld, then oversaw what followed. The Asante envoys had brought not only gold dust—which was carefully scrutinized and weighed by a gold tester from Cape Coast who somehow happened to be with the general—but many solid gold masks, ornaments, and nuggets as well. The British gold tester weighed and inspected everything while Dawson, the ever-present former hostage Bonnat, and various Fante assistants kept up a spirited dialogue worthy of the most raucous fish market in East London. What little dignity remained to either side was lost when the British inspected the folds of the Asante envoys’ garments in a search for more gold dust. In fact, they found an additional forty ounces.

  Finally convinced that there was no more gold to be had, Wolseley called these demeaning proceedings to a halt and sent back a draft of his treaty to King Kakari for his signature. Amazingly, the signed treaty was quickly returned, and Wolseley was triumphant. The Asante king had made his submission and the general could not be happier. When Glover received Wolseley’s dispatch telling him that a peace treaty had been signed and to halt hostilities, he was only too happy to march south where food was waiting. Wolseley, wasting no time waiting for Glover or smoothing his way, marched off toward the coast as rapidly as possible, leaving Glover’s wretched men to their own devices. Glover’s eleventh hour actions had saved Wolseley’s campaign, but sharing the glory with Glover was not one of the general’s priorities. Not only did Wolseley do nothing to thank Glover at the time, his memoirs pointedly ignored Glover’s vital role in the peace process. As one of Wolseley’s biographers later observed, they were not the best of friends.49

  Wolseley was convinced that by signing this treaty, the Asante would lose their ascendancy. That indeed appeared to be the result, as it soon became apparent that the coastal people were greatly encouraged. Of course, their confidence was likely to be fragile at best. As the British forces crossed the Pra River, they met a Russian prince, well known in London, who was hoping to participate in great events. He was, as he put it, “just in time to be too late.” The returning British troops, on the other hand, were just in time to receive a glorious welcome at Cape Coast, complete with a triumphal arch of flowers, townspeople singing hymns, and a salute from the ships offshore. While the troops were ferried out to waiting ships, the valuables taken from the king’s palace were sold at public auction. Wolseley personally bought the king’s crown and orb, which his daughter later used as a rattle, and a Georgian silver coffeepot. All told, the palace’s treasures sold for less than £5,000, a trifling amount compared to what could have been raised if the sale had been held in Britain or Europe and a tiny fraction of the cost of the campaign, about £900,000.