The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  There were many reasons why Asante morale was low. The successful relief of the fort’s garrison had shown once again that British weapons and tactics were difficult to overcome. Also, the lack of overall leadership was increasingly a problem. Opoku Mensa was a political leader, not a military man, and he had none of the Asante king’s cachet as commander in chief. Yaa Asantewaa was a vital force, but her powers were largely symbolic. Kofi Kofia was a regional commander from the Atchuma district to the north of Kumase, and he soon left the capital to rejoin his own people. Most difficult of all to overcome, the Asante were trapped by their defensive role. They had built nearly impregnable stockades complete with comfortable war camps (as the French were to build the Maginot Line some thirty years later), and it was difficult to motivate them to take offensive action. Finally, because the war camps were in such close proximity to one another, when a stockade’s garrison was defeated—as happened at Kumase—other garrisons shared their sense of demoralization.

  Without their king and without an overall military commander, Asante forces were more like the private armies of rebellious warlords than the unified national army that had opposed Wolseley. Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa was an inspirational voice, but even she could not bring the various leaders into common cause. For the most part, each leader’s troops remained in war camps in their own district, ready to defend themselves against a British attack should one come but unwilling to unite in a large force to attack either the British troops or their long and temptingly vulnerable supply lines. And when a district army like the one in Kumase suffered defeat, the survivors’ memories of British machine-gun and cannon fire followed by a bayonet charge were long and painful. Although the Asante troops in their war camps around Kumase had not given up—they would fight again when attacked—they had seen too much of British firepower to think of an attack against Willcocks just then. The greatest danger to the British column as it marched away from Kumase was posed by an occasional booby trap on the path, like the one that almost killed Captain Hall. As Hall bent down to remove a wooden “idol” that had been placed in the middle of the path, two African sergeants quickly pulled him back. As Hall watched, they carefully disconnected the figure from a cord that led to the trigger of a loaded Dane gun buried in the ground. It would have blown him to pieces.

  By the nineteenth Willcocks’s column was safely camped in Bekwai, much to the relief of the old king, who had lived in dread of an attack by the Asante army at Kokofu. Wilkocks was relieved, too. His troops and carriers were exhausted, and all had coughs, sore throats, and fever. They needed a rest, and Willcocks ordered no new operations for some days. After sending the wounded and the worst of the sick to the coast, he began to plan the next stage of his campaign—the destruction of several large Asante armies that were still prepared to oppose British rule and the punishment of those villagers who continued to support the insurrection. To achieve success in what promised to be an arduous campaign during the rainy season, he needed more troops and carriers. These men arrived in frustratingly small numbers, partly due to Governor Hodgson’s infuriating refusal to use any of the now healthy and mostly idle Hausa soldiers that had escaped from the fort with him to guard the road from Cape Coast to Bekwai. Hodgson’s widespread local reputation as a selfish boor was confirmed once again. Willcocks had to use his own troops to guard the road. He also had to suffer in silence as accusations flew that he could have relieved the fort much earlier if he had only chosen to do so. It was said and written that his dramatic arrival on the last possible day was a crass attempt at self-aggrandizement. (No less a figure than Lady Hodgson made this claim, doing nothing to improve relations between Willcocks and the governor.) These accusations were unfair. Willcocks had faced enormous difficulties, and if he had not been lucky enough to find an undefended path, he probably would not have made it to Kumase by the fifteenth. With no staff and few troops when he arrived, he had made it to Kumase in fifty days during the height of the rainy season. It took Wolseley 120 days during the dry season to do the same thing.

  Willcocks’s plan for the defeat and punishment of the rebels called for British officers to recruit large numbers of untrained and undisciplined Africans, officially referred to as “levies.” Some of these men would be armed with old muskets, but they were not expected to serve in combat. Unofficially called “locusts,” they would straggle along behind Willcocks’s troops, burning Asante villages and destroying their crops. Given the opportunity, they would also murder, rape, and with the knowledge of British officers, enslave any Asante women and children they were able to capture. Colonel A. E Montanaro wrote approvingly of this policy of allowing traditional enemies of the Asante to enslave their women and children, noting that it was especially “galling” to them.1 (One wonders what the British public would have thought of this practice had word of it leaked out. Unlike Wolseley, Willcocks was fortunate to have no newspaper correspondents with him to spread the news of unsavory forms of warfare; hence, there was no public furor.) To distinguish the locusts from Asante, they were made to wear a red-and-white-cloth sash draped over the right shoulder and tied under the left armpit. As Willcocks candidly put it, the job of these men was to make themselves “as unpleasant as possible,” and they did so with a vengeance.2

  While Willcocks was recruiting his locusts to wage a war of terror and waiting for more troops to arrive, several senior officers recently arrived from England made themselves thoroughly unpopular by trying to impose parade-ground discipline on the sick and battle-weary troops and junior officers. The veterans’ annoyance about this unnecessary drilling and button polishing was temporarily suspended by the seemingly miraculous arrival in camp of a Hausa soldier who had marched out of the fort with Hodgson. Left behind after being wounded, the man had hidden in the bush for six weeks, slowly crawling south by night. He survived, although just barely, by eating roots. It had taken the poor man all that time to cover just eleven miles.

  Willcocks’s first target would be Kokofu, the stronghold that had twice before beaten off British attacks. Close to eight hundred men with five artillery pieces would be led by a newly arrived officer, Lieutenant Colonel Morland. Morland knew nothing about forest warfare and was quite ill with fever to boot, but Willcocks believed that every senior officer should be given the opportunity to command. Fortunately for Morland, he had the good sense to consult Captain Hall, whose men at Esumeja had been faced off against nearby Kokofu for months. Hall recommended that Morland’s troops make a long halt at Esumeja to convince the Asante scouts—who watched all military movements from treetop perches—that the force was meant only as a reinforcement or replacement for Hall’s men. Arriving at Esumeja in mid-morning, Morland’s men stacked their weapons and appeared to make themselves comfortable. Hall’s men began to pack their gear as if they were being relieved. At midday the Asante sentries returned to their war camp for a meal, convinced that there was no immediate threat. As they did so, the British troops, led by Melliss, moved unseen toward the main stockade. When they reached it still unseen, bugles sounded attack, and Melliss clambered over the unmanned stockade followed by his company.

  The Asante army leapt up from its meal almost as one man, and seeing only a small force advancing, the troops formed up to charge, just as several hundred soldiers hurtled over the stockade, firing as they came. At the sight of so many swords and bayonets, most of the Asante fled in disorder, leaving many of their weapons behind. One of the Asante turned to fight and was clubbed over the head with a rifle butt. Several were bayoneted in the back as they ran, and Captain Biss recalled seeing one man turn a complete somersault when he was shot through the back as he tried to escape.3 Once again, Major Melliss killed several Asante with his sword.

  In addition to two hundred Dane guns and large amounts of powder, the British troops found several British rifles and carbines, fourteen kegs of gunpowder, dumdum bullets, and some .303-caliber ammunition, intended for modern British rifles, that had been cleverly wrapped with to
w to make it fit the older, larger, .470-caliber Martini-Henry rifles that some of the Asante had. There were also hundreds of large wooden bowls filled with steaming hot food, and many of the Hausas began to help themselves. While the camp was being searched, some of the triumphant Hausas danced ecstatically to the beat of captured Asante war drums. One man put on an Asante war-dance costume that looked like a straw kilt with a straw cock’s comb headdress. He led the others in the dance as they pirouetted, waved their carbines overhead, and slashed at the air with their bayonets. They worked themselves into such a frenzy that the British officers finally had to intervene to prevent them from injuring themselves.4

  There were five separate war camps at Kokofu, each capable of housing at least three thousand men. From the amount of unconsumed food left behind, it appeared that the camps had been fully manned. While the troops systematically looted the huts before burning them, Captain Biss inspected the stockade. It was three hundred yards long, six feet high, and six feet thick with entrenchments on each flank. Behind the stockade there were numerous small grass-roofed huts to protect the Asante troops manning it from the sun and rain. The Asante had also hidden kegs of gun-powder in the roofs of the huts so that anyone setting fire to them would be killed, and in fact, when the British did set fire to them, several men and one officer were injured. Sharpened stakes planted in the ground protected the center portion of the stockade. The British officers were surprised to discover that there was an inviting gap near the center of stockade, but any man who had attempted to run through it would have fallen into a deep pit and impaled himself on sharpened stakes in the pit’s bottom.5

  After burning the camp and destroying the stockade, Morland’s men gleefully marched back through Esumeja to Bekwae carrying incredible amounts of booty. When they arrived, they were delighted to find the entire garrison standing at attention under torchlight to honor them. Willcocks was so elated by their victory that he ordered a sizable issue of “medical comforts”—rum, champagne, and whiskey—and spent hours listening to accounts of this unbelievably easy victory over the previously impregnable Kokofu. Morland’s men had captured one Asante prisoner, a well-built young man in apparently fine health. However, when his hands were bound that night to prevent him from escaping, he fell dead. Fear of the torture he had expected was apparently too much for him.

  A few days later a force half the size of Morland’s was sent to find and destroy the Adansi army that was thought to be located to the east of Dompoase. Thanks to the cooperation of a prisoner who agreed to show them the way in return for his life, the column knew where the Asante war camp was, but after a march of several days through largely open and beautifully scenic terrain, it nevertheless walked into an ambush, and its commander, Major Beddoes, was wounded. Captain Greer continued to lead the British forces forward until heavy fire from hills on both flanks stopped them. Only a well-led bayonet counterattack drove the Asante back. After two hours of heavy fighting, the British force tried to advance to destroy the war camp they knew lay ahead. But the Asante troops from Adansi district formed into lines and, urged on by a priest dressed in leopard skin, charged at the British troops, yelling and firing their Dane guns and rifles from the hip as they ran forward.

  Greer was amazed by the audacity of the Asante attack because it came across open ground into the teeth of British artillery, machine-gun, and massed rifle fire. Despite the deadly British fire, some of the Asante troops came to within ten yards of the British line before they were shot down. As more and more men were killed at close range, the Asante slowly withdrew until another British bayonet charge, led by sword-waving officers including Captain Hall, finally forced them to run. Greer ordered his artillery to shell the war camp as the Asante retreated through it, and these explosive shells devastated the retreating Asante, tearing men to pieces. Greer’s men counted three hundred dead Asante, including the leopard-skin priest; blood stains indicated that other bodies had been carried away.

  This was yet another striking victory. With a force of only four hundred men, the British had routed an Asante force that numbered over three thousand. Led by Opoku Mensa, the surrogate king, the Asante had fought gallantly beyond anything that rational men could have expected, but as usual, once they began to run they did not stop. The camp was burned, and Greer returned to Bekwai with only one dead and forty wounded. One of the invalids was Hall, who had collapsed from exhaustion after running into the war camp, brandishing his sword at the fleeing Asante.6

  After the unexpected victories at Kokofu and Dompoase, the southern portion of Asante was relatively quiet; so early in August, after learning that he had been both promoted and knighted, Willcocks decided to clear away the forces defending stockades at Kumase. He had received reports that the Asante might attempt to capture the fort, and while that prospect did not worry the colonel, he wanted to break Asante power around Kumase and move his headquarters there. He sent close to one thousand men, three cannon, several machine guns, and thousands of carriers to Kumase under the command of the same Colonel Burroughs of whom so little had been expected when he first arrived and who had annoyed Willcocks when he retreated from Kokofu. Willcocks was a forgiving commander, and this time Burroughs would repay his kindness. On the march Burroughs’s column was joined by Major Melliss and his Nigerians. The Asante sniped at the long column as it meandered through the jungle, sometimes panicking the carriers, but little damage was done. The Asante had cut paths parallel to the main path taken by Burroughs’s men, and every few hundred yards they had cut the brush away to allow them to fire into the unarmed carriers. Once the British began to spray machine-gun fire into the jungle on each side of the path, this practice ended. Burroughs’s men reached the fort without a serious fight and found the garrison well and delighted to have visitors to enliven their boring confinement.

  The next morning two armed columns left the fort to begin the job of stockade smashing around Kumase. The Asante had made no attempt to consolidate their forces. They still remained in their war camps behind the same large stockades. Melliss led the first column toward the stockade at Bantama, where they came under rapid fire from loopholes in the stockade and nearby trees. There was also heavy fire from both flanks. The British answered with volleys of rifle fire, machine guns, and cannon, but the Asante fire only grew heavier. Every officer in the leading company was hit, and so were many of the soldiers. With more men falling all the time and his cannon fire having no effect, Melliss tried to outflank the stockade, but the brush was so thick around the position that Melliss’s three companies of Nigerians could not cut their way through it. A machine gun eventually killed the Asante who were firing from the trees, but shells from the 75-mm cannon did little damage to the heavy stockade.

  Although a frontal charge seemed suicidal, Melliss nevertheless ordered his badly wounded teenaged bugler to sound charge, and despite blood in his eyes, the boy not only sounded the call but joined the charge himself. Melliss led his men directly into the teeth of the Asante fire. Barely ahead of his men, Melliss climbed over the wall, but this time many of the Asante stood to fight. After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, bayonets and swords were again too much for the Asante, who began to run. Once again Melliss killed a man, this time by running him down and driving his sword through his back. Many others fell to bayonets. After destroying that stockade and another undefended one nearby, Melliss returned his column to the fort. Many of his men—including a British sergeant, Captain Biss, as well as Melliss himself—had been wounded. The bugler survived his wounds to receive a medal.

  That same morning a column of troops from the Central African Regiment, joined by fifty veteran Sikhs and a company of the West African Regiment, encountered heavy fire from the Kintampo stockade near the Wesleyan mission. The stockade was over three hundred yards long and so well defended on its flanks that it took two hours for the British troops finally to outflank it and rout the defenders. The war camp was burned and the stockade destroyed, but not without cos
t. The British commander, Major Cobbe, was badly wounded, as was his colour sergeant. One Sikh was killed and seventeen wounded, seven of them seriously. Another twentysix African soldiers were also wounded. Burroughs had a right to be proud of these attacks, but they were far more costly than he had expected. Willcocks had expected the Asante opposition to be so weak that he ordered Burroughs’s men to carry only three hundred rounds per man. The two long battles had used up most of that, but several important and heavily defended stockades remained. The most important of these blocked the direct road from Kumase to Kokofu. Anticipating correctly that this would be the next British target, the Asante reinforced it.