The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  The cost to the British in men was regarded by the War Office and the public as quite low. Still, sixty-nine had been killed and some four hundred wounded, 135 of these from the Black Watch. Over one thousand men had to be invalided home due to wounds or disease. Seventy-one percent of the army units had suffered some form of severe illness, and 95 percent of the Naval Brigade had done so. Of the thirty officers who sailed to the Gold Coast with Wolseley, seven were dead and seven others wounded. The only one who had not been incapacitated by fever or diarrhea at least once was Lord Gifford, who had not been sick at all. For conspicuous bravery Wolseley recommended him, along with five others, for the Victoria Cross.50 One so decorated was Lance Sergeant Samuel McGaw of the Black Watch, who had led the charge at Amoafo, and Captain Sartorius (the son, incidentally, of a prominent admiral), whose brother had been awarded a Victoria Cross in an earlier battle.

  The first troops to return home to a tumultuous welcome were the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Through no fault of their own, they had seen little combat but had suffered a greater percentage of casualties from disease than any other battalion. Next to return were the 42nd Highlanders, who were delighted to be wearing their bonnets, kilts, and green coats once again. They were received with even greater enthusiasm. 51 When the Rifle Brigade arrived, there were feasts, balls, and honors all over the country. Every officer was decorated and almost all were promoted.

  One member of Parliament was not impressed by Wolseley’s campaign, saying that it reminded him of the famous rhyme,

  The King of France with twenty thousand men

  Marched up a hill and then marched down again.52

  However, most in the government could not be happier that their faith in Wolseley had been vindicated. Disraeli and Gladstone competed with each other in search of ever more extravagant words of praise for their general, and the country joined in. Queen Victoria reviewed those troops able to leave the hospital in Windsor Park and bestowed the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George and a Knight Commander of the Bath on General Wolseley. He was also offered a baronetcy, which he contemptuously refused; he expected soon to be offered a peerage and become known as Lord Wolseley of Kumase.53 The lord mayor of London presented him with a sword of honor, both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge awarded him honorary degrees, and the House of Commons made him a personal grant of £25,000, a phenomenal sum at a time when a fine riding horse could be purchased for £20. When Captain Glover returned to England some weeks later, all he received was a word of thanks from Parliament.

  “So ended,” Wolseley was later to write, “the most horrible war I ever took part in.” So ended, too, by far the luckiest of his many campaigns. If the disgruntled King of Dwabin had not withdrawn his ten thousand men from the battle of Amoafo, Wolseley could have been stopped cold or, at the very least, accumulated so many more casualties that he could not have carried them. If the Asante had attacked as he marched back to the coast, he would have had the same problem; and if the king and his inner council had not panicked at the forward movement of Glover’s almost starved force by unnecessarily sending gold dust to Wolseley and signing a treaty, it is likely that Wolseley’s campaign would have been reckoned a failure. As British correspondents and members of his own staff acknowledged, despite his many brilliant preparations for the campaign, Wolseley’s utter failure to anticipate the need for more African laborers delayed his march inland by a full month, putting him into the drenching start of the rainy season, when despite the great bravery of his officers and men and the luck of Glover’s advance, he was within an ace of defeat.54

  7

  “Britannia Waives the Rules”

  WOLSELEY WENT ON TO LEAD BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL ARMIES TO MORE victories, including an undeniably brilliant campaign in Egypt in 1882. He was later promoted to Field Marshal, raised to the peer-age, and made commander in chief of the British army. However, his memory now largely lost, the last twelve years of life were lived in obscurity. On the eve of World War I, at the age of eighty, he died in bed, not the soldier’s death he had longed for. His country did not forget him. A grateful War Office conducted his funeral with the utmost ceremony. Troops from all the regiments he had served with or commanded were there to honor him, and he was buried close to his hero, Wellington, something he would probably have considered his greatest honor.

  King Kakari’s fortunes took a very different course. Kumase was in ruins, his palace was looted and destroyed, his reputation badly tarnished, and his empire on the verge of dissolving into the chaos of secession and civil war. His militaristic councillors, who had so long dominated him and had led him into the calamitous war, were only too willing to blame him for everything. When the increasingly hostile kings and chiefs of the empire refused to pay any portion of the indemnity of fifty thousand ounces of gold demanded by the British, Kakari had to dip into his own greatly depleted resources to pay small installments in May and June 1874. His hopes that these payments would influence the British to support him were not fulfilled. By the middle of June, his enemies made his position so precarious that he considered leaving Kumase to escape them.1

  King Kakari had long offended some in the kingdom by his insatiable appetite for women. In addition to his hundreds of wives, he seduced many other women, including the wives of many powerful men. Neither his charm nor his power were enough to guarantee such conquests, however, so he relied on gold taken from the state treasury to captivate women, publicly handing out handfuls of gold dust and nuggets to women who caught his fancy. As a result, he was known among members of Asante’s elite as osape (scatter of gold) and axyempo (he who gives away nuggets).2 Now, desperate for money to pay Wolseley’s indemnity and to support his appetite for women, the embattled king did the unthinkable. He rifled the tombs of his grandmother and other close relatives buried in the royal mausoleum at Bantama. The right to remove this buried gold, part of the national treasure, could only be granted by a vote of the national assembly. To open these tombs like a thief was not only unconstitutional, it was sacrilegious. To compound this reckless behavior with stunning stupidity, Kakari actually gave some of the beautiful old jewelry to various of his wives and girlfriends.

  When the queen mother learned of her son’s utter folly, she led the chorus of voices calling for his destoolment—largely, it would seem, because she knew he could no longer be king and in the hope that by doing so, she could preserve the line of succession for her lineage. Before the king could destroy the Golden Stool and kill himself by blowing up a keg of gunpowder, the Golden Stool was seized and Kakari was charged with bringing the kingdom to its ruinous state. Despite his quite reasonable rejoinder that it was not he who wanted war but the militaristic oligarchy, after five days of intense negotiation, he was forced to abdicate on October 21, 1874. Accompanied by sixty of his wives and five hundred of his closest followers, he was allowed to live in state in a small village though in very modest circumstances. He was succeeded by his younger brother, thirty-five-year-old Mensa Bonsu, whom his supporters hoped would restore Asante to the glorious past of his grandfather, Osei Bonsu. Instead, he ruled over a steadily diminishing empire torn to bits by civil wars.

  The Civil Wars

  In 1873 Royal Navy Captain Glover was commissioned to lead a military expedition up the Volta River valley. Wolseley suspected that its purpose was not primarily to aid his invasion of the Asante kingdom. He was right. The British government had hoped that Glover would be able to open up trade with the interior by circumventing Asante control, an economic vision that the British Government had long endorsed and that even Wolseley could appreciate. British lust for the wealth of the Asante kingdom was often expressed in the starkest imperialistic terms. Before Wolseley’s invasion, Henry Stanley wrote that “King Coffee [Kofi Kakari] is too rich a neighbor to be left alone with his riches, with his tons of gold dust and accumulations of wealth to himself.”3 He added that the gold that a Wolseley victory would yield could pay the cost of the British mil
itary expedition “twenty times over.” At the same time the African Times, usually a reliable voice of merchant interests, published an article under the caption “The Ashanti War—Gold, Gold, Gold,” claiming that victory would bring thirty or forty million pounds of gold per year to Britain for years to come. It added almost breathlessly that the British troops were marching “into one of the richest gold fields in the world.”4

  It was a grand vision, but many doubted that it would ever be realized. Wolseley’s inability to crush Asante resistance and the alarming effects of disease on his troops led many in Britain to despair of ever turning the Gold Coast into a profitable colony. To benefit from Asante gold, an army would have to occupy a very large area—an obvious impossibility in the face of disease and Asante truculence—or some new trading scheme would have to be devised. But as government officers fretted and merchants schemed, the conditions within the Asante kingdom became so desperate that it began to appear that Asante gold might well be Britain’s after all. The Asante economy had collapsed, Kumase was a burned-out ghost town, and all the tributary states were seeking, or in some cases already declaring, their independence from the central government in Kumase. The district of Adanse was the original Akan-speaking state in the union and was considered by most Asante to be the birth-place of Greater Asante. It also had the richest gold deposits of any of the metropolitan states, and its high hills, left unprotected against Wolseley, were a great barrier to invasion from the south. Adanse was not powerful militarily, usually being able to muster only one thousand soldiers, but it nevertheless declared its independence from Kumase. The state of Dwaben, enormously wealthy from its dominance over the kola nut trade to the north, also left the union, taking with it its large army of up to twenty thousand men. Only Kumase itself might be able to mobilize as many. In 1869 European visitors had found the Dwaben capital larger and grander than Kumase had been before Wolseley destroyed it.5

  Faced by impending chaos, King Mensa Bonsu appealed to the new British government at Cape Coast for “peace, trade and open roads,” none of which the Kumase government could then provide for itself.6 Instead of backing Kumase, the British sided with Dwaben as their new and preferred entry point into the interior of the Gold Coast. Emboldened by the open support of the new British governor, G. E. Strahan, and European missionaries and adventurers, such as the ever-entrepreneurial former French prisoner, Marie-Joseph Bonnat, and by the weakness of Kumase, the Dwaben king, Asafo Agyei, claimed not only independence from Kumase but supremacy over it. He began by declaring that he would block Kumase’s trade routes to the north, cutting off its only remaining source of income. Despite Kumase’s weakness, he overplayed his hand. His position was weak because he had no legitimate claim to the Dwaben stool, having been appointed to it by King Kwaku Dua I, who had executed a more legitimate claimant. The Kumase government now used Asafo’s illegitimate claim to his stool against him, and his own excessive use of terror drove some former supporters into the Kumase camp. Opposition to Asafo Agyei soon became so heated that a council of kings from still-loyal states authorized Mensa Bonsu to depose him by force if need be.

  Beginning at the end of August 1875, it took only two months to mobilize and ritually prepare an army of fifteen thousand men led by five veteran generals, including Adu Bofo, the hero of the Volta River campaign of 1869-1872, and Asamoa Nkwanta, still Asante’s most beloved commander. On the thirty-first of October, the Asante army marched into the Dwaben capital where it was met by tenacious defenders who first stopped them cold, then surrounded and threatened to annihilate them. The situation appeared so hopeless that many senior officers, including the gray-haired, seventy-year-old Asamoa Nkwanta, blew themselves up with gunpowder.7 When the battle seemed to be lost, the young general Adu Bofo sat on his golden stool and threatened to die then and there unless his demoralized troops fought to defend him. Somehow they rallied and drove the Dwaben army back in flight.

  Dismayed by the prospect of a Dwaben defeat, Governor Strahan sent Dr. V S. Gouldsbury to Dwaben to negotiate peace with Kumase. Even before he could reach Dwaben, he found King Asafo Agyei and his followers in flight, “helpless and terror-stricken.”8 Gouldsbury could do nothing while the Kumase forces punished Dwaben relentlessly. Virtually the entire population was killed, captured, or driven away to the British protectorate—which since 1874 had been called the Gold Coast Colony—where some fifteen thousand refugees settled. Every town and village in the formerly large and rich kingdom was burned to the ground.9 Governor Strahan was dismayed by the Kumase victory He informed London that he had hoped the Dwaben forces would hold out long enough to make his intervention “not only possible but even agreeable.” The Colonial Office agreed that the surprising success of the Kumase troops was “unfortunate.” The power of this Asante army in defeating an elite Dwaben army again emphasizes Wolseley’s good fortune that it did not attack him as he withdrew to the coast.

  The shattering defeat of Dwaben did not end rebellion within the teetering Asante Empire. Encouraged by Governor Strahan, state after state broke away from Kumase in search of its own economic autonomy. British policy was centered on the isolation and destruction of Kumase as the center of trade in the Gold Coast, and with the help of long-disaffected chiefs and kings, it was successful. Kumase no longer controlled its great roads or the traders that used them. Highway police were replaced by brigands. The once great market at Kumase that had so impressed Bowdich a half century earlier was now empty, and famine was reported in many areas. The British were unabashedly delighted by the results of their policy The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberly, called for continuing efforts to encourage the independence of states now in rebellion against Kumase, and his undersecretary, the acerbic Evelyn Ashley, wrote, “It is their turn to be bullied—and, till they have changed their nature, it is better for us that they should be ‘down’ and not ‘up.’”10

  To the surprise and dismay of the British, the success of the Dwaben war reunified part of the Asante kingdom, and King Mensa Bonsu used the newfound spirit of hope and confidence to institute a number of reforms. Much of the impetus for change came from his brother, Prince John Owusu Ansa. Ansa had been educated in England and was a true believer in the principles of Western democracy, a devout Christian, and a caricature of an English gentleman. When one British visitor to Kumase encountered him on the street, he was so startled by his appearance that he “stood still and stared open-mouthed at this amazing apparition…. He wore a shapely ‘bowler,’ and a well-fitting, fashionably cut suit of clothes; his cuffs, shirt-front and high collar were faultlessly got up; his patent leather boots were a miracle of polish, and in one of his kid-gloved hands he carried a modish walking cane. But the most astonishing thing was that he wore his clothes and carried his cane with the unmistakable air of a man who was accustomed to them….”11

  Mensa Bonsu accepted Ansa’s radical idea that European civil servants be hired on a contract basis to take important roles in the government. Unfortunately for the new king, there were no trained civil servants available; so he was forced to make do with a collection of shady European expatriates and adventurers, including Marie-Joseph Bonnat, and various Danish, Canadian, and Scottish gold prospectors. These men were more interested in becoming wealthy than they were in governmental reform, but even if they had been devoted civil servants, there was little that they could have accomplished in the face of conservative Asante opposition. Prince Ansa had been away too long, and he did not understand how dangerously his innovative ideas would clash with Asante culture. Prince Ansa’s cherished dream of the establishment of Christian missions and schools in Asante was rejected out of hand. Ansa’s ideas threatened the traditional balance of power in Kumase, a reality he consistently failed to grasp. He also did not anticipate that his own brother, General Owusu Koko, would become his most outspoken opponent.

  A few important changes were made, among them a change in the law making homicide the only crime punishable by death, but Mensa Bonsu was
never able to overcome the opposition of the senior members of the military oligarchy that had put him in power and that, he well understood, could depose him just as easily.12 Instead of presiding over a reformed government, as he and Prince Ansa had hoped, Mensa Bonsu found himself largely ignored by his inner council. The great men of the kingdom still had power, including private armies as large as two thousand five hundred men. Like the king’s own army of six hundred men, some of them were armed with Sniders. These powerful men, many of whom were members of the royal family eager for more power, continually vied with each other for control of the king and the government.

  In 1879 a conservative religious cult dedicated to the restoration of the power and glory of the Asante past tried to influence the ever-buffeted king to become even more traditional. When Mensa Bonsu showed too little interest in their demands, a large group of the cult’s followers broke into the royal palace, destroying property and violating some of the king’s wives. One man even shot at Mensa Bonsu, who barely escaped, thanks to the intervention of his royal guards, whose Sniders killed many of the extremists. As a result of this attack and other palace coup attempts, the embattled king began to use his guards to purge his enemies, and he did so with a terrible vengeance. Now more a warlord than a constitutional monarch, he used his palace guards as he wished, to flout custom, law, and decency. Not only did he have his real or imagined enemies killed, he took pleasure in raping their wives.13 Like his predecessor, King Kakari, he also indulged in an orgy of debauchery. When drunk, as he often was at this time, he ordered his guards to bring him any beautiful woman who caught his fancy. If her husband complained, the man was killed. In 1882 he began to eye the wives of some of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Ignoring judicial process, he ordered his guards to beat or even kill any who objected, and unless their private armies were stronger than his, he did so with impunity. A British visitor to Kumase in 1882 reported that the situation had become so serious that no one could be certain that “he may not be summoned to appear before the King at any moment, fined for some imaginary offense, a sum he cannot pay, and in the end lose his head.”14