by Jan Morris
These were armies that clashed in ignorance, like Arnold’s armies of the night. Neither side remotely understood each other. The Ashanti pagan culture on the one hand, the European Christian civilization on the other, were both movements of immense aggressive assurance, armoured in faith. The Ashanti thought the British perfidious cowards, the British considered the Ashanti superstitious savages. The Ashanti, having little conception of the strength of the forces opposing them, still thought they might drive the white men into the sea. The British, impelled by interests mercantile, evangelical and plain expansionist, were reaching the conclusion that Ashanti must be shackled. The Europeans brooded and bided their time: the Ashantis brooded too, and marched here and there in inconclusive petty wars.
In 1872 the belligerent young Asantahene Kofi Karikari precipitated the issue. The Dutch then decided to withdraw from the Gold Coast, and sold their fort at Elmina to the British. This the Ashanti resented, because they claimed to own the fort themselves, and they accordingly crossed the River Prah, the traditional frontier of Ashanti proper, to besiege both Elmina and Cape Coast Castle. They were driven off, taking with them European missionaries as hostages; and the British seized the pretext for a crash campaign to settle the fractious Ashanti once and for all, and achieve an imperial stability upon the Gold Coast.
5
Of all the colonial wars of the Victorian era, this was the most classically perfect, a metaphor of the genre. At its head was Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, KCMG, CB, now emerging as the very archetype of the imperial soldier—or as W. S. Gilbert had it, ‘the very model of a modern major-general’. He was invited to take complete civil and military charge of the operation, and ‘Heavens’, he later recalled, ‘with what internal joy I did so!’ At 40 he was the youngest general in the army, and he now gathered around him the ‘Wolseley Ring’, that coterie of clever, reformist and socially desirable officers which was to play so large a part in British military affairs for the rest of the century. ‘I felt’, he wrote, ‘that ordinary men could not be good enough for the war I had undertaken’, and among the young men who formed his staff were nine who would later become generals themselves, and one future Field-Marshal. Buller was there, from Red River, and William Butler, and a brilliant newcomer, Colonel George Colley, who had just written the article ‘Army’, sixty pages long, for the ninth edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica.1 They sailed off to the Gold Coast in a spirit of elevated purpose, whiling away the voyage in a careful study of the geography and history of Ashanti. Wolseley himself thought of their mission as a crusade. He intended, he said, to inflict ‘such a heavy punishment upon King Koffee, to show him, his people, and all neighbouring nations that no extent of deadly forest could protect them from the British Army’. Right was on his side. To be British was enough. ‘Remember’, he told his soldiers, ‘that the black men hold you in superstitious awe: be cool; fire low, fire slow and charge home.’
The black men did not hold them in superstitious awe. On the contrary, it was an old Ashanti dictum that the bush was stronger than the white man’s cannon: also they had plenty of firearms themselves, thoughtfully supplied by British traders through French West African ports. The Asantahene was confident in his cause, his traditional tactics, his knowledge of terrain, his jujus and his Golden Stool, and when Wolseley sent him an ultimatum he took no notice. This was a sad rebuff to the Empire and the nineteenth century, for the ultimatum was lordly in its style and was sent by traction engine.1 The Queen of England had heard with profound concern, it declared, of the Asantahene’s recent conduct, but she had sent Sir Garnet to Africa to arrange a lasting peace. Before negotiations could open the Ashanti must withdraw from British protected territories, release all captives, and guarantee compensation. If these terms were satisfied Sir Garnet was ready to meet the Asantahene in a friendly spirit. If not, ‘I hereby warn you to expect the full punishment your deeds had merited…. Rest assured that power will not be wanting to that end’.
By November, 1873, the power was on the spot: 4,000 first-class British regulars, from the Black Watch and the Rifle Brigade, with a detachment of native artillery, and reserve companies from the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the West India Regiment, fresh from Jamaica. They wore specially-made uniforms of grey homespun, and they were equipped with all the latest devices for tropical warfare—respirators against the heat, veils against the insects, cholera belts and quinine. Three hospital ships lay off Cape Coast Castle, waiting to receive the wounded, and a second army of some 8,500 porters was recruited in support. Diversionary attacks were mounted north and south, but the main force was to advance across the Prah direct to Kumasi, building its own road as it went, and accompanied by a corps of war correspondents that included Henry Stanley the explorer. Sir Garnet was quite certain of victory, but was resigned to the possibility of casualties, soldiers being made to die in action—‘and oh! how fortunate they are who do so!’1
6
It went like clockwork. The Ashanti fought courageously, using their traditional tactics of envelopment, and sometimes halting the action to make a propitiatory sacrifice: but the shots of their muzzle-loaders as often as not bounced harmlessly off the British, their effective range being about forty yards, and all their magic spells and incantations proved ineffective. Over the wide and soupy Prah the British steadily advanced, into the unmapped forests of Ashanti, with their engineers, their seven-pounders, their rocket projectors, their eager newspapermen and their apprehensive army of porters. They laid their own telegraph as they went, built 237 bridges, and literally cut a path through the monotonous and suffocating foliage of the rain-forest, frondy, brambly, tangled and dense, squelchy underfoot and pendulous overhead. There were frequent skirmishes along the way, as the Highlanders of the advance guard swore and sweated through, and the light-footed Ashanti fell upon them out of the shadows, but the one decisive action of the advance occurred at Ejinasi, a village about half-way to the capital.
There the main body of the Ashanti army lay in wait, deployed along a ridge in horse-shoe formation. There were scouts on each wing, and assembled behind the central force were the stately chiefs with their ceremonial umbrellas, their gold-headed knobkerries and their stools of state. The British were attacked on both flanks as they approached Ejinasi, and there ensued the first major engagement between the British Army and an organized army of Africans. It was a theatrical kind of battle, made vivid for us by the drawings of the war artists. The Ashanti were mostly invisible, being hidden in the thick forest, so that only the flash and smoke of their muskets showed, with an occasional glimpse of shining black, or nodding finery among the foliage. The British, on the other hand, in their pith-helmets and grey cotton, made little attempt at concealment, and within the hollow square of their formation, look in the pictures as though they are fighting some kind of demonstration battle.
There stands the bugler, blowing his commands. There are the orderlies, standing by for messages. There the quartermaster keeps his ammunition tally, the doctors bandage their wounded in the shade of the great mahoganies, the prisoners squat huddled in their corral. All around the perimeter the moustachioed soldiers crouch watchfully at their rifles, sometimes firing through the scrub, and in the very centre of the scene a war correspondent interviews Sir Garnet Wolseley himself, KCMG, chain-smoking cigars as he paces between his soldiers, his staff officers at his heels, receiving messages from the firing line and coolly commenting upon the course of the action. To complete the exhibition effect, through the crash of the rifles and the hiss of the rockets two mysterious sounds answer each other through the forest: from the Ashanti the unnerving howl of a war-cry, from the British the swirl of the Black Watch pipes.
In the end the Ashanti broke, faced by vastly superior fire-power, unshakeable discipline and a confidence equal to their own. On February 3, 1874, the Black Watch, sweeping aside successive Ashanti pickets and ambushes, and once interrupting the act of a human sacrifice, entered the city of Kumasi. For t
he first time the Ashanti saw a foreign force within the walls of their sacred city: for the first time the British, so used to storming the citadels of Asia, marched as conquerors into a black African capital. It proved a curious denouement. Kofi had abandoned his palace, retreating into the bush beyond, but the people of Kumasi poured unafraid into the streets, shaking hands with the soldiers, and murmuring ‘Thank you’, the only English words they knew.
Nevertheless the British wandered through Kumasi in a horrified frisson, up and down the wide streets, in and out of the palace, and spending longest of all in the purlieus of Death Grove, where they inspected the remains of the 120,000 victims supposedly sacrificed there. The whole area stank, we are told, from the human blood that saturated the ground, and Wolseley himself did not venture into it, ‘hating all horrors’, and feeling sickened indeed by the descriptions he could not prevent his colleagues passing on. He did examine however, with indescribable loathing of course, the great Death Drum, ornamented with human bones, and the sacred stool kept permanently wet with the blood of victims.
He had his own ideas about the fate of Kumasi. ‘In my heart,’ he later wrote, ‘I believed that the absolute destruction of Koomassie with its great palace, the wonder of Western Africa, would be a much more striking and effective end to the war than any paper treaty.’ He had been at Peking in 1861, when the incomparable Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperors had been burnt by Lord Elgin’s British force: ‘a well-placed blow to Tartar pride’, he had thought it, as the smoke from the great fire drifted over Peking, and he evidently believed the destruction of the Asantahene’s elegant compound, with its steep thatched roofs and its gilded ornaments, would be equally salutary to the Ashanti. He wanted to be out of Kumasi as soon as possible, to save his soldiers from fever, but he sent a last ultimatum to the Asantahene advising him to come to terms at once. When no reply came, on February 6, 1874 the old city of Kumasi was destroyed. Its houses were stacked with tinder, its Death Grove was cleared for burning, and the engineers placed mines all around the walls of the royal palace. At seven in the morning the main body of troops marched out of the city; at eight the fuses were lit by the rearguard; at nine the last men of the Black Watch, hastening away through the forest to the coast and the waiting troopships, looked back to see the sacred city disintegrating into rubble.
Kofi took the point, and sent his messengers of peace hurrying after the British. At a village called Fomena they submitted, agreeing to pay an indemnity of impossible value, to release their hostages, to renounce their claim to Elmina, to recognize the independence of several vassal tribes, and to do their best to end human sacrifice. They remembered the war ever after as the Sagrenti War, after its British commander, and Sir Garnet went home once more in glory. He was nicknamed ‘Britain’s Only General’, and when people wanted to describe something supremely well done, neatly wrapped up like the Ashanti War, they called it ‘All Sir Garnet’.
7
The soldiers left Ashanti thoughtfully. It had been their first experience of modern war in Africa, and it had been full of surprises. Wolseley himself thought it a horrible experience, but was impressed by the discipline, courage and high morale of the Ashanti, under their tyrannical militarism, compared with the feckless depravity of the coastal tribes under British suzerainty. He was not, he hastily added in his memoirs, an apostle of military despotism, but the Ashantis had taught him that national pride and contentment came naturally to a people which placed the greatness of the State above the interest of the individual. William Butler, a more subtle observer, found the war a lesson in historical determinism: Africa was the ‘real bed-rock school of human nature’. The poor black savages of west Africa had many good traits—patience, honesty, fidelity—and much of what was bad in them was the fault of the British Empire. ‘It was our drink, our trade, our greed which had hopelessly demoralized the native African. We had drugged him with our drink; we shot him with our guns; we sold him powder and lead, so that he might shoot and enslave his fellow-black. Those castles along his coast were the monuments of our savage injustice to him.’
Reactions at home were simpler. There the Ashanti War powerfully stoked the fires of imperialism, and excited the public imagination with visions of African glory. At least eight books were written about the campaign: it was the first of the colonial wars to take the popular fancy, and gave to the imperial idea a new aspect of boyish adventure. Wolseley was made a Grand Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, and given £20,000 by a grateful Parliament, and the Queen herself reviewed his little army on its return, assembled in hollow square in Windsor Great Park. Even Gladstone spoke warmly of the Ashanti triumph in the House of Commons, and the Press was ecstatic.
Yet it was a triumph of ignorance. The causes of the war remained obscure to the British public, its purposes were cloudy, and nobody made any attempt to understand the Ashanti case, to master the baffling Ashanti culture or explore the national history. The real meaning of the campaign, its underlying emotions, its catalytic quality as a clash of convictions—all went unremarked, and it seemed that the war was an end in itself, and that Sir Garnet’s masterly little campaign had, like successful surgery, simply cut out a canker once and for all.
This was to be characteristic of the imperial activities in Africa, where the British armies, returning time and again to the attack against the scattered black kingdoms of the continent, seldom understood the nature of their opponents, or reasoned out the significance of their actions. Africa was a brutalizing influence upon the Empire: not because the black peoples were more brutal than others, but because the British thought them so, and behaved accordingly. It was not long before the imperial armies were obliged to return to Kumasi, this time to annexe the Ashanti kingdom to the British Empire: but by then war in Africa was a commonplace, and the Golden Stool of the Ashanti no longer seemed even a mystery to the British, only a tiresome childish geegaw.
1 It was based upon the pattern of Elmina Castle, to the north, which was built by the Portuguese in 1482 and was the oldest European building in the tropics. Cape Coast itself, begun in 1682, became the prototype of fortified trading ‘factories’ in many parts of the British Empire, and was a principal point of call, so my guide there assured me in 1971, during Queen Victoria’s well-remembered visit to the Gold Coast.
1 Dropped alas, for reasons which will presently appear, from the tenth.
1 In the hands of an Ashanti captive, who chugged off into the forest in a hiss of steam, but upon whom, an eye-witness wrote, the experience had little visible effect—‘he seems to have regarded the whole operation as a ponderous prelude to his own execution’.
1 In the event only eighteen had the good luck to be killed, though fifty-five enjoyed the consolation of dying from disease.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
By the Sword
THE Ashanti War was a popular success partly because it was a reassurance. The British had been taken aback by the spectacle of the Prussian armies sweeping so brilliantly into Paris three years before, and they needed to know that British armies too could move with swift decision and efficiency. It was a militarist age in Europe, as the vast standing armies of the continental Powers girded themselves for new struggles, and the British were infected too. A new note of belligerence entered the imperial oratory. What was won by the sword must be kept by the sword. Seldom a martial people, as the century proceeded the British acquired a new, flushed pride in their fleets and armies, now seen not simply as bulwarks against the plots of hostile autocrats, but as instruments of world supremacy. The Indian Mutiny had clearly demonstrated that a sizeable number of Victoria’s subjects detested the presence of the Raj, but the British were neither depressed nor disillusioned by this disclosure. It merely confirmed a growing national suspicion that they had been called to terrible but noble duties. They were not made to be loved: they were made to rule the world for its own good.
For the rest of the century this sense of vocation, backed by
commercial opportunism and patriotic fervour, was to be based frankly upon military power, and the record of the Empire’s progress is all too largely a record of war. The British fleets and armies emerged everywhere as true imperial forces, geared to the requirements and convictions of Empire, and they bore themselves uninhibited. This is how a British subaltern once put down an incipient mutiny among a force of Sikhs and Gurkhas under his command. He knocked down the first mutineer with a blow on the head from his pistol. He broke his pistol-butt on the head of the second, flooring him with a blow from a second pistol when he tried to resist. He seized a third and gave him 500 lashes there and then. The mutiny failed.
2
The British Army was the striking force of the imperial mission. Though in the second half of the century Indian forces were often used in campaigns overseas, still the Queen’s regiments provided the strategic reserve, and it is said that there were only two years during Victoria’s reign when the British Army was not somewhere fighting a skirmish—‘what in our little army’, as Wolseley mock-modestly said, ‘we call a battle’. It was all done by volunteers—there was no conscription in Victoria’s Empire—and casualties were a running drain upon the nation’s young manhood, as though some great catastrophe were to strike the British every year. The cost was enormous too. In the 1860s the Imperial Government withdrew many garrisons from self-governing possessions overseas—‘the withdrawal of the legions’, as imperial romantics called the process—in the hope of inducing the colonists to assume more of the burden themselves, but the price of imperial defence was still overwhelmingly borne by the British at home, and their soldiers remained scattered in garrisons, fortresses and islands across the world. The army’s range of experience was unrivalled. When the Queen elevated to the peerage General Sir Hugh Gough, who had commanded in more general actions than any British officer except Wellington, he adopted, to commemorate highlights of his career, the title Baron Gough of Chingkeang-foo, Maharajpore and the Sutlej.1
