THAT NIGHT PASSED QUIETLY, AND EARLY MORNING PATROLS REported no Asante activity near the fort. The stench of decaying human flesh was overwhelming in the still morning air, and while four hundred men began to tear down the stockade they had attacked yesterday, the rest of Willcocks’s men hurriedly attempted to bury the bodies that lay in the long grass around the fort. But there were so many hundreds of dead that the idea of burial had to be abandoned. Tearing down the nearby huts, the men set huge fires and cremated the bodies. The job of tossing the decomposing bodies onto these pyres was given to the African troops, but everyone was assailed all that night by the unbearable smell of burning flesh. An officer found some fragrant roses in bloom at the Ramseyers’ abandoned mission station, but their sweet scent seemed to make the stench of burning flesh even more terrible. Despite their exhaustion, few of Willcocks’s men were able to sleep that night.
The following morning, July 17, the air was fresh, and there was still no sign of Asante forces. The fort’s new garrison would consist of 150 African troops, some British sergeants, a doctor, and three officers including the commander, Captain Eden. Willcocks left them enough food for almost two months plus large stores of ammunition and other supplies, but he gave himself barely enough food to sustain his column on the return march to the relative safety of Bekwai. In addition to the fort’s old garrison, many of whom would have to be carried, he had over thirty wounded of his own to tend to. Willcocks could not afford to delay his return march to Bekwai, so that morning, without ceremony, he wished Captain Eden and the others well and marched away, fervently hoping that his vulnerable force would not be attacked. Soon after Willcocks’s column moved off, a large group of Asante troops left their stockades and casually walked toward the fort, obviously believing that it had been abandoned. Captain Eden waited for them to near the fort before cutting down many of them with machine-gun fire. Remarkably, this was the second time the Asante had made this grim mistake.Willcocks’s men heard the firing and picked up the pace of their march. They need not have worried; the Asante commanders were too dispirited and divided to organize an attack.
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 tow 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 cost. 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.
Burroughs was already concerned about his losses, and he knew that a conventional attack on this stockade would cost him many more casualties. He also needed to conserve ammunition in case he was attacked on the march back to Kokofu. Anyone who had seen the “gouty little colonel” when he first arrived in the Gold Coast would have been amazed at what he ordered done next. Audaciously deciding to test the willingness of the Asante troops to stand up to a bayonet attack at night, he sent a company out in daylight to scout their position. Based on the information obtained, Burroughs decided to attack at around nine that same night. He would take only five hundred men, plus some two thousand unarmed carriers to help with the stockade’s destruction. No shots would be fired; the men would rely entirely on bayonets and swords. After the colonel’s orders were explained, all the men had a meal, Biss and Melliss sharing a pint bottle of champagne with their dinner on the very good grounds that they might not live to have another.7
They moved out after dinner as planned under a clear, moonlit sky. As the troops approached the stockade, officers whispered orders that were passed quietly back down the column: “No smoking, no talking, no noise, no firing, bayonet only, follow me.”8 Everything possible had been done to silence the men’s equipment, and it appeared that everything was now ready for a stealthy approach to the stockade. But as the tense soldiers crept silently toward the stockade, the Mende carriers from Sierra Leone burst forth into a wild crescendo of song meant to encourage the troops to victory. Horrified, the troops froze, expecting an answering volley from the Asante, while the British officers rushed back to whack the Mende carriers with the flats of their swords. Eventually, but by no means easily, the officers succeeded in quieting them. Hoping to cover up the racket, the fort bugler played “last post” as if it were just another ordinary night.
The troops crept closer to the stockade, hoping against all reason for a complete surprise until, in what sounded like a thunder-clap, two sentry signal guns exploded with seemingly deafening roars. Immediately, a volley came out of the stockade’s loopholes, and a British lieutenant fell mortally wounded. The African troops were stunned and began to waver, but as the young officer lay dying, he waved his sword, indicating the charge, and all the British officers shouted the word “charge.” Everyone went forward, scaling the stockade with an ease they later could not understand. The Asante troops were caught so unaware that they rushed out of their huts in the war camp just in time to be impaled by a bayonet or sword. One officer was so tired by his exertions with his sword that he had to put it down and disobey orders by firing away with his pistol. Captain Biss recalled that only exhaustion on the part of the British officers and men allowed most of the Asante to escape.9 As the war camp was being set fire and the stockade pulled down, a child was found and taken back to the fort. Remarkably, the entire force was back in bed by 11 P.M.
The next day, after leaving reinforcements behind in the fort, Burroughs marched his men back toward Bekwai, picking up on the way a young Asante woman who reported that the night attack had so distressed Yaa Asantewaa that she had called various commanders together to discuss this new tactic. While the Asante were considering their options, the British wounded were being conveyed to the coast, and those who remained in Bekwai were delighting in listening to news of the world, which the newly strung telegraph brought them. For a week the troops at Bekwai enjoyed a badly needed rest, and the officers had time to shave with hot water, drink cocoa and tea (which, unfortunately, often contained a dead fly or two), and read mail from home.
No one needed rest more than Willcocks, who suffered from a severe sore throat, a badly abscessed ear, a sprained knee that refused to improve, and bouts of nausea and diarrhea. His chief surgeon strongly advised him to return to England, but he refused, saying that he could not honorably leave until the Asante war had ended. He also believed that the climate at Kumase was much healthier and that once his headquarters was moved there, he would improve. This was a forlorn hope because neither Willcocks nor his surgeon understood malaria. Although both British and Italian pioneers in tropical medicine had shown several years earlier that malaria was transmitted by anopheles mosquitos, British officers on this campaign continued to believe that fever, as they still called it, was a product of the vile vapors of swamp land. They recommended five grains of quinine per day as a preventive dose and ten if fever actually struck. Whiskey, too, was still thought to be helpful, but not until evening.
During this period of rest, several Asante prisoners were brought in charged with murder, mutilation, or both. Willcocks convened a military court, but because he was concerned that these men might have behaved in ways that were permitted by their own laws, he asked the king of Bekwai to join the court, an offer the elderly monarch gladly accepted. Before the trial began, Willcocks gave the king’s interpreter a copy of the charges against the two men so that the king could prepare for the trial. Willcocks was surprised when, half an hour later, the interpreter “returned, beaming with smiles, and said, ‘I am glad to inform you that the King has already found both prisoners entirely guilty.’ Considering that he had never seen either of them, nor heard a single word of evidence, I came to the conclusion that future prisoners under trial would stand a rather better chance without the presence of one of their own Chiefs on the tribunal.”10
About this time, Lieutenant Colonel R. A. Brake, a highly decorated officer, arrived in Bekwai with a battalion of the Central African Regiment, a well-disciplined unit fresh from fighting in Somaliland (now Somalia). Brake’s troops quickly proved that their reputation was well earned by carrying out several successful small-scale attacks. In one raid, in the direction of Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa’s headquarters at Edweso, his men surprised a force of Asante, killing their leader and driving them out of their war camp, where they found a remarkable collection of valuables including £100 in bank notes, bags of gold dust, books, parts of machine guns, and sundry flags, chairs, and umbrellas.
Before Willcocks was ready to move his headquarters to the now partially pacified city of Kumase, he sent two columns to the east to despoil the area around the large lake called Bosumtwi that covered at least forty square miles. Its many fish were the property of the Asante king, and under ordinary circumstances fresh deliveries were made to Kumase every day.11 The only hostility the British troops encountered was produced by a lone Asante man, who decided to fight a one-man war. Sitting astride a large log in the lake and paddling with his hands until he was more or less in range of the incredulous British forces on the shore, he somehow managed to fire his Dane gun without knocking himself off his perch.Having made his point, he unhurriedly turned his awkward conveyance around and paddled away. The British officers who witnessed his attack were amused and impressed by what one of them referred to as a “most absurd mixture of dignity and comedy.”12 There was no other Asante resistance, but the British troops caught immense numbers offish, violating all the royal proscriptions against fishing as they did so, and burned many of the fertile fields in the area before marching back again, the unruly locusts who followed them happily destroying everything in sight and capturing unwary women and children.
Toward the end of August, Willcocks decided to move toward Kumase in two powerful columns, leaving only a token force at Bekwai to pacify its still-skittish king. With one thousand infantry and four guns Willcocks marched north through Pekki, reaching Kumase on August 30 with no serious opposition. At the same time, Colonel Brake, with over seven hundred infantry and two guns, moved northeast to attack Edweso, where Yaa Asantewaa’s army was said to be camped. He was to be supported by a large force of untrained African soldiers moving toward Edweso from the east, led by Captain Benson of the Shropshire Light Infantry, with a handful of British officers and noncommissioned officers.Benson’s orders were to block the retreat of Asante forces, not to attack them with his ill-disciplined, nearly mutinous mob of men. For some reason Benson advanced anyway, was attacked, and saw his men flee in wild disorder while the Asante pursued and killed many of them. Benson and his British officers fought their way to safety, but shamed by his failure, suffering from malaria, and aware that he had disobeyed orders, he shot himself to death the next day.
On the morning of August 31, Brake attacked the Asante stockade at Edweso, where he met with tremendous fire, much of it from captured British rifles. In by-now-standard fashion he sent troops into the brush to flank the stockades and wheeled up artillery to blast away at it. For the first time these cannon, commanded by a lieutenant named Halfpenny, fired eighteen-pound shells called “double common”7 (the usual shell weighed twelve pounds), which blew great chunks out of the log-and-dirt barrier. These quick-firing cannon blasted away at the stockade for two interminable hours, killing and maiming hundreds of defenders, but other Asante resolutely maintained a heavy fire until the British finally fought around their flank through log barriers, rifle pits, and brush entanglements and made a bayonet charge that successfully ended the battle. Colonel Brake was wounded in the chest, another officer was killed, and two more wounded. Thirty-four soldiers were hit, many severely. The dead Asante had been so terribly mangled by shell fire that one British officer described the sight of them as “sickening.”13 Yaa Asantewaa was said to have been in the thick of the battle, but hers was not one of the many bodies, including those of prominent commanders, that were identified. If the sixty-year-old queen mother was present at this battle, it was only because she lived in Edweso. She wore a leather belt and a sword to symbolize her defiance of the British, but despite her size (five-foot ten and about two hundred pounds) neither she nor any other Asante woman was known actually to have fought in battle.
Within days the British forces were consolidated in Kumase, which quickly became a major camp and supply depot, thanks to the efforts of some eight thousand carriers, the best of whom were two thousand experienced men shipped in from Zanzibar and Mombasa in East Africa. In addition to tons of rice and tinned meat, even luxuries such as butter, jam, milk, various sauces, and wine were now becoming plentiful. Whiskey and sparkling water began to replace the earlier staple for officers, a concoction known as “a doctor,” made from rum, tinned milk, and water stirred together. A bakery was opened, officers began to invite each other to impromptu dinners, and on the seventh of September, the telegraph line to Kumase was reopened. Officers were now able to discuss the latest news from Reuters over an evening whiskey. The African troops, carriers, and locusts soon enjoyed a thriving market filled with local food products. They also sang, danced, drank palm wine, and enjoyed the women who came to the market with their wares. The only troops accused of raping women, however, were some from Sierra Leone.
The best evidence that Kumase was no longer besieged was the daily occurrence of a cricket game on the parade ground in front of the fort. British officers used hand-carved cricket bats to smack homemade India rubber balls far into the outfield where long grass concealed various parts of dead human beings that disconcerted the fielders when they stepped on them. Some of the African soldiers had seen cricket played by their officers before, but the carriers and Asante market women watched in fascinated bafflement. There were also endless card games. Despite continuing bouts of malaria and dysentery, Kumase was beginning to resemble a peace-time garrison.
The war was over in the town of Kumase, but the district outside Kumase was still defiant, and so was much of northern metropolitan Asante. Willcocks soon sent various columns of troops followed by the inevitable carriers and locusts to crisscross Kumase district, burning villages and chopping down anything that still grew in the fields. Some Asante began to surrender, and those not charged with being war leaders or murderers of British subjects were sent back to their villages with a pass indicating their surrender and told to fly a white flag. Some war leaders were captured and hanged, and it was becoming clear that most Asante had lost their enthusiasm for war. Late in September even Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa sent envoys to Kumase to discuss peace terms, but some of the locusts intercepted them, insulting them so profoundly in the process that they left in a rage without ever meeting with British authorities.14
To encourage more surrenders, on September 15 Willcocks invited every Asante who could be persuaded to come to Kumase to witness a display of British military might. As a large crowd of Asante looked on, a trio of 75-mm cannon fired double-common shells into a stout stockade, tearing it to bits. It may have been this demonstration that convinced Asante commanders to abandon their stockades for the duration of the war. Willcocks also paraded 1,750 infantry and nine 75-mm artillery pieces in another display of British power that was said to have impressed many of the Asante who looked on. Some important chiefs began to inquire about peace terms, but even though it was obvious to everyone that the remaining Asante armies could not defend themselves against a British attack, the area north of Kumase nevertheless remained defiant.
Determined to end all resistance, Willcocks decided to send two columns north. The first of these marched over two hundred miles without encountering any serious fighting, but it did accept the surrender of a king and eleven important chiefs. Many villages and crops were also destroyed, weapons were captured, and the area thoroughly terrorized. The second column was led by a veteran commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur F. Montanaro of the Royal Artillery. It was Montanaro who first devised the use of the double-common shells to cope with stockades, and now, fittingly, he would be the first to lead troops in a battle that would take place in the open. He led 950 infantry, two cannon, many carriers, and about one thousand locusts north to attack the still defiant Kofi Kofia and his army of several thousand men. Some dozen miles north of Kumase at a village named Dinassi, Montanaro’s advance guard, once again led by the indestructible Major Charles Melliss, learned that there were indeed Asante still willing to contest British power. Returning fire with everything his troops had, Montanaro was surprised to see that instead of firing from behind a stockade, the Asante troops were fanning out on both flanks, attempting to envelop his column. Recognizing this as the classic Asante tactic from the Wolseley war, Montanaro ordered the favorite response of the British—another bayonet charge. For a few minutes the fighting was hand to hand, and one British officer was killed, but Melliss, though slightly wounded again, killed two more men with his saber. The Asante force, which was not very large, then withdrew in reasonably good order, leaving thirty-four dead bodies behind but taking many others with them.
These men were an advance guard of Kofi Kofia’s army, but he would choose another place for his showdown with the British. Montanaro marched on to the town of Ofinsu where five major chiefs surrendered along with 320 muskets and other war supplies. Montanaro returned to Kumase on September 26. Willcocks had planned to send Montanaro back into the field to punish Atchuma villages to the northwest, an expedition that the Asante quickly learned about, but before troops could march, some scouts returned with a challenge from Kofi Kofia. He wanted the British commander to know that he had gathered five thousand men and he invited the British to fight him in the open. With a well-calculated sneer he added that he was certain the British would not dare to do so.15 Sensing a chance to end the war by answering this challenge, Willcocks mustered every able-bodied man in Kumase—one thousand two hundred infantry with five cannon—and on September 29, followed by thousands of carriers, he marched out to accept Kofi Kofia’s invitation to battle. Montanaro was with the force but, bad leg and all, Willcocks would command. Near nightfall they met an Asante patrol that withdrew, and Willcocks’s column settled down to spend the night in the open under a drenching rain. After a dinner of tinned beef, rain-sodden biscuits, and a dose of quinine washed down with whiskey and rainwater, the officers tried to sleep under banana leaves but with no success. The sun warmed the sleepless men as they marched forward at daybreak on the following day, the thirtieth. It was Sunday, to the Asante a dangerous day when they would try to avoid warfare, but so far a lucky day for the British, who had won several major battles on their Sabbath. By 8 A.M. the advance guard under Montanaro ran into Asante fire, beginning what the veteran Captain Harold Biss called “one of the fiercest encounters ever fought in West African warfare.”16
Montanaro found his advance guard under heavy fire from captured British rifles as well as Dane guns in the hands of a long line of Asante lying in a shallow ditch with open ground in front of them. Without waiting for Melliss, who was behind him with three hundred men, Montanaro positioned a machine gun on his flank to cover the advance and sent his four companies forward in a flanking maneuver. When he thought he saw signs of wavering on the part of the Asante, he immediately ordered a charge. Four hundred men with fixed bayonets ran forward toward the Asante line. For the first time in such a major battle, the Asante did not quaver at the sight of bayonets. Instead, they delivered such a steady fire that if they had not fired high, the British line would have been shot to pieces. Even though few were hit by the lead whistling over their heads, Montanaro’s men slowed, then hit the ground. Unable to urge his men forward, Montanaro sent word to Melliss to come up. By now the Asante held an eight hundred-yard-long front with wings drawn back to prevent flank attacks. The pinned-down British forces were still firing, but like most infantry the world over, once they had been forced to take cover, it was difficult to get them going again. The remarkable Melliss ordered his three hundred men to charge over them, and though they did so with great verve, they too were soon forced to take cover to avoid the hailstorm of lead that the Asante fired at them. In perfect order the Asante then withdrew a short distance to a crest, which gave them an even stronger position.
No Asante army had stood so resolutely against a British bayonet charge before, and these men had now done so twice. Nevertheless, they had been continuously exposed to machine-gun and cannon fire along their extended line and were taking many casualties. After the second charge Willcocks arrived at the front with his staff and a unit of Sikhs under Captain Godfrey. These bearded veterans with their tall turbans were such champions of the bayonet charge that Willcocks thought they might be able to inspire the seven hundred pinned-down African soldiers to follow them. Willcocks ordered the heaviest fire possible all along the front while Godfrey extended the Sikhs into a line, preparing for the charge.Unable to resist the lure of battle, Willcocks’s staff officers again left him alone as they ran to join the Sikhs. Major Melliss had seen the Sikhs’ maneuver, and before Godfrey could give the order to charge, with the inspirational help of massed bugles and drums, he was somehow able to drive his men to their feet. His Africans charged before the Sikhs did, closely followed by the English officers just ahead of the now-sprinting Sikhs.
As this frontal charge was bearing down on the Asante line, two African companies turned the Asante left flank. At this point of danger in all previous battles, the Asante had broken and run, almost every man for himself. But these men of Kofi Kofia’s army were different—they stood and fought, sometimes with their bare hands. As Melliss was slashing at Asante soldiers with his saber, he found himself in single combat with a man who shot at him at point-blank range but missed. Melliss wounded the man with his sword but was immediately thereafter shot through the foot, leaving it paralyzed. The wounded Asante flung himself on Melliss, and the two men wrestled each other to the ground. Just as the Asante appeared to be getting free to unsheath his knife, Captain Godfrey rushed up and shot the man in the head.
The bayonets of the British troops slowly prevailed but not without cost. Fully half of the Sikhs were wounded, many seriously. But the Asante left flank now caved in just as more British troops, behind heavy cannon fire, burst into the Asante rear. Only then did these Asante soldiers run from battle, leaving their wounded and many rifles behind. Sixty-two Asante dead were counted in the hand-to-hand fight alone, with hundreds of other bodies found elsewhere. Willcocks came upon seventeen men lying dead together in a pile who “were literally riddled” with machine-gun bullets. In another pile he saw seven or eight men jumbled together in death. He wrote that they were “splendid-looking fellows, far superior in physique to any I had seen before.”17 So much blood had been shed in the grass that officers’ legs were stained red to the knee. Many hundreds of Asante wounded were acknowledged, but no one who participated in the battle reported their fate.
A British column pursued Kofi Kofia’s fleeing Atchumas, finding guns, baggage, and a few wounded men alongside the road. They met an old woman who assured a British officer that the Asante were moving far too fast to be caught. She was right. Even though they were carrying many wounded, the Asante outdistanced their British pursuers. On the long march back to Kumase, the British column encountered an elaborate log fort built into several trees that commanded the road. Montanaro tried to destroy it with eighteen-pound shells, but after a dozen shots it was still undamaged. Willcocks was relieved that it had not been defended.18 The force returned to Kumase on October 3, trailed by the locusts, who carried large numbers of Asante heads slung from long poles. How they came by these trophies is not recorded.
With no large body of hostile troops still at large, Willcocks gave his men some time to rest and refit. Melliss was among the first to be placed in a hammock for the long trip to the coast and evacuation to England, where his foot required surgery. He would receive the Victoria Cross for his actions, the first man to do so from newly crowned King Edward VII, the eldest son of Queen Victoria. When Melliss left Kumase, the entire garrison enthusiastically turned out to honor him. Melliss recovered fully from his wounds, but three years later he was badly mauled by a lion while campaigning in Somaliland. Once again he recovered.
Of the British officers who began the campaign, all were either dead or invalided home as a result of disease or wounds except for Hall and Willcocks. Hall somehow never contracted malaria, and although he refused to take quinine, neither did Willcocks. Of course, malaria was just about the only malady Willcocks did not suffer from. The Sikhs who had not been wounded were quite healthy, but the African troops were in poor condition. Due to the rain and cold nights, most had bronchial infections, and the continual marching through mud left their always bare feet badly cut and their legs ulcerated. Dysentery was a continuing problem for them, too, and smallpox outbreaks were common as well. Their uniforms, like those of the long-serving officers, were torn and faded. They looked terrible and felt even worse, but their discipline was always excellent. Carriers and locusts were flogged and sometimes given long prison sentences, but the fighting troops seldom required punishment.
The fleeing Asante troops had taken refuge in the northwestern corner of Asante where Willcocks feared they would once again come together under either Kofi Kofia, who survived the last battle, or Kobina Cherri, a leader notorious for mutilating his enemies, some seventy-six of whom he was alleged to have killed. He was a favorite of Yaa Asantewaa, who was still free and quite defiant. On the first of November, long after many in the Colonial Office believed the war had ended, Willcocks sent Major Montanaro with seven hundred men, five machine guns, and several 75-mm cannon northwest toward Berekum to find and punish the remaining hostile Asante. They were to rendezvous with another, only slightly smaller, force on the way. With over one thousand two hundred infantry, two thousand five hundred carriers, and numerous locusts this was a major expedition. On November six they received an insolent message from Kobina Cherri that he would fight. As Montanaro pressed forward, his troops mistook some of their locusts for the enemy and opened fire, killing six. Their faded and dirty shoulder sashes could not be seen at a distance. The families of the six men were compensated for their deaths, but the rest of their fellow tribesmen left the column and returned to Kumase, refusing to participate any longer in the campaign.19 Soon after these men left, a tremendous storm struck, nearly blinding everyone with lightning and knocking down huge trees, one of which barely missed killing Montanaro and his staff.
Despite these misfortunes, Montanaro continued his march northwest to confront Kobina Cherri. Several Asante kings and war leaders surrendered, including the man who had commanded the stockade at Bantama. Through an interpreter he told Montanaro that his men had been determined to defend their position at all costs, but when a white man with a sword charged straight at them all by himself, they were so unnerved by what they took to be a madman that they fled.20 The lone man was Melliss, and he may have owed his survival to Asante law, which forbade the killing of madmen. Another Asante commander who surrendered complained that it was unfair of the British to use swords and bayonets when the Asante had neither.
The British continued the march through open grasslands, where at first they enjoyed the sun but soon wilted in the heat. It became increasingly apparent that Kobina Cherri had been unable to raise an army. There was no resistance, but the British listened to stories of the terror Kobina Cherri had rained on the rubber traders in the area. It was said that some seventy-six men who either could not or would not pay the amounts of money he demanded were tortured to death.On the thirteenth the column arrived in Berekum, whose king had remained loyal to the British throughout the war. He was delighted to see so many British troops. The next day they began the return march, and thanks to information provided by a girl whose father had been killed by Kobina Cherri, a small British force captured the fugitive. Montanaro described him as defiant and insolent but could not help admiring his courage.21 On the twenty fourth the troops returned to Kumase with thirty-one kings and chiefs as prisoners, nine hundred guns, and five thousand pounds of rubber. They also laid waste much of the countryside along their route.
In a monument to timely justice, Kobina Cherri was tried by military tribunal the next day, charged with murdering over fifty British subjects. It was testified that after torturing these people, he cut off their hands and drove them into the forest to die. He was found guilty, and Willcocks, who headed the tribunal, sentenced him to be hanged the following morning. Later that night Kobina Cherri asked to see Willcocks. When the colonel went to the guardroom to see the handcuffed prisoner, he was told that if he pardoned the Asante war leader, Kobina Cherri would reveal the hiding place of a large sum of gold and the Golden Stool. Willcocks urged him to do both as a last good deed but said that the death sentence was final. An unknown number of Asante had already been hanged, and some had been tied to trees and executed by firing squad.22
Early the next morning the prisoner again sent for Willcocks and asked if there were any possibility of a pardon. Told no, he then offered to reveal the name of the man who actually committed the murders, a close friend of his as it turned out. These negotiations, which were not inappropriate for a high-ranking Asante, did nothing to diminish his dignity. Indeed, when Kobina Cherri was marched to the gallows, he did so with imposing courage, pausing only to spit at two African traders whose testimony had helped to convict him. Once he mounted the bamboo scaffold, he stood as erect as any soldier and glared defiance.23 When he fell to his death, “an involuntary murmur of admiration arose.”24
Colonel Willcocks left Kumase on December 3, passing down a two-mile-long avenue of troops and Asante chiefs, who fired their Dane guns exuberantly. The war was over, and authority would now be exercised by a British resident, Captain Donald Stewart (the son of a field marshal), who had campaigned with the troops during the latter stages of the hostilities and served as Colonel Scott’s political officer in 1896. No significant number of armed Asante were still hostile to British rule; but even though an amnesty for all but those accused of murder had been in effect since October, a substantial number of people who had played prominent roles in the war were still at large. Stewart let it be known that unless these people surrendered, he would use his remaining 1,225 troops under Colonel Burroughs and twenty-three other British officers to devastate even more of the Asante countryside. In no time several hundred Asante, including many women, surrounded a forested area and seized two wanted men. Within two weeks all of the prominent leaders had surrendered. One of the last to do so was Yaa Asantewaa. Most of these last leaders to surrender were deported to Sierra Leone, but the queen mother was sent to the Seychelles to join her son and King Prempe in exile.
A sad footnote to the campaign was written by the men of the West African Regiment from Sierra Leone. Like the other African soldiers under British command, they had fought bravely and well throughout the long and savage war.However, when they were told that they would remain in Asante indefinitely, they rebelled, insisting that they had been promised that they would return home as soon as the fighting ended. All the old British officers whom they had known and trusted had been killed or invalided home and their replacements knew nothing about any past promises. Taking matters into their own hands, the frustrated men seized an ample supply of food and ammunition and marched off to Cape Coast in perfect order under their own Sierra Leone sergeant. Unwilling to start a blood bath, Colonel Burroughs let them go. When they arrived at Cape Coast, the new governor attempted to reason with the men, explaining the seriousness of mutiny, but they refused to listen and set off on the thousand-mile walk back to Sierra Leone. Pursued by Hausas and fired at by a gunboat, some were killed and a few were captured, including the man most responsible for organizing the mutiny. He was found guilty and shot. The great majority disappeared into the jungle and were not seen again. Perhaps they were able to return to their homes. If they did, the British government did not attempt to track them down.
British losses since the beginning of the war in April were comparatively slight. Only 16 officers had been killed, but 52 had been wounded, and another 54 had to be sent home in hospital ships. Of the various African and Sikh troops only 113 had been killed in action, although another 102 died from disease, and 41 were missing and presumed dead. Nearly 700 had been wounded, and almost 5,000 had to be admitted to hospital at one time or another.25 Although only 1 carrier was officially considered to have been killed in action, it is likely that at least 500 were killed and an equal number probably died of disease, because of the 15,000 carriers who served, over 5,000 had been admitted to hospitals. It was also reported that 50 locusts had been killed, although the actual number must have been larger.26
Many of the surviving British officers went on to distinguished careers. Willcocks became a major general and commanded the Indian Corps in France in 1914. Surprisingly, given his reckless courage, Melliss lived to be a Lieutenant General. Several others reached general rank or became colonial governors. Hodgson became the governor of Barbados and British Guiana, Montanaro became the governor of Sierra Leone, and after World War I Willcocks served as the governor of Bermuda, a plum post for an aging hero. Some, of course, died in later wars. Godfrey was killed in Somaliland while saving the life of another officer, as he had earlier saved Melliss. Sergeant Mackenzie, who won a VC, was killed in World War I, where he served as a major in the Black Watch. Hall eventually lost his sight from a wound he later suffered in Nigeria. A medal was issued to all who served in the war, and England feted its returning heroes.
How many Asante died in the war can never be known, but shells, bullets, and bayonets must have slain several thousand; many others must have died of their wounds, and still others of disease. Opoku Mensa, who as much as anyone had led the Asante resistance, died in captivity in the fort at Kumase, apparently from natural causes. While Willcocks was receiving a gold Sword of Honor from the city of London, the Asante kingdom was in ruins, its golden swords of diplomacy of no further use. Villages had been burned, fields devastated, and its leaders dead or in exile. Except for the limited powers of local chiefs, all authority now rested with the British. They divided the former area of metropolitan Asante into four districts, each with its own British-appointed commissioner. The traditional districts such as Kumase, Mampon, and Dwaben ceased to have political significance.
In 1903 the railroad that Wolseley had hoped for was actually opened, when a track was completed that connected Kumase to the coast at Sekondi, west of Elmina. The ravaged city of Kumase received new life, rapidly becoming a trading and administrative center. Government offices were built, and men were once again making a profit from rubber, timber, gold, and especially cocoa. The economic recovery was so rapid and the political climate so tranquil that when the chiefs petitioned for King Prempe’s return in 1910, the British governor gave it some consideration before rejecting it, and he pointedly did not repeat Hodgson’s declaration that Prempe would never return.
Peace and prosperity continued until 1921 when once again the fate of the Golden Stool threatened to lead to armed conflict. The British-led Gold Coast government had undertaken an extensive program of road building, and one of the proposed roads was to pass directly over the still-secret hiding place of the Golden Stool. By the time that word of this was passed to the handful of men who knew where the hiding place was, the laborers were on the verge of digging up the sacred area. By inventing a story about dangerous supernatural forces in the area, the laborers were induced to flee, and the roadwork was delayed long enough to permit the Golden Stool to be removed. But the damage had been done. The Asante remembered Hodgson’s heavy-handed attempts to find the stool, and they assumed that the road-building activity was simply another ruse by the government to seize the it. Rumors spread all over Asante, and preparations were made for war.
However, before the stool had been reburied, one of the men entrusted with its protection secretly removed some of the gold from it. Just before hostilities seemed ready to break out, an Asante woman recognized the golden ornaments from the stool as they were being offered for sale. Thanks to the research of a government anthropologist, R. S. Rattray, the British now understood the significance of the Golden Stool and took immediate steps to arrest fourteen Asante men accused of desecrating it. They also allowed the accused to be tried by the Kumase council of chiefs. Six of the accused were sentenced to death, and seven were given life prison terms. Although all these sentences were commuted by the British, usually to exile, the Asante were favorably impressed by the trial and by British assurances that the Golden Stool would forever remain in Asante hands.
Shortly after the trial the principal spokesman for the chiefs of Kumase referred to the stool and its meaning for the Asante with the same sentiments that had led to the uprising of 1900: “The Golden Stool is very great. It contains the soul of the nation. We honor it so much that if it had been tampered with by anyone from outside we would have risen in arms, and it would not have mattered to us if we all perished the same day.”.27
In November 1924, only three years after the peaceful resolution of this crisis, King Prempe was allowed to return to Kumase. He and his relatives had been well treated in the Seychelles, where they were paid a monthly allowance, adequately housed, treated with respect, and allowed the freedom of the island. Some of the king’s children married Seychelles islanders. British education was also made available, and so was Christianity King Prempe eventually became an enthusiastic convert but was unsure which denomination to declare as his own until he asked a British official which church the British monarch belonged to. He then quickly declared that he too would join the Church of England, and he became a devout Anglican who attended church every Sunday and preached Christian values.
Prempe was not above having a drink, or even several, but he was not given to any of the excesses of many of his royal ancestors.28 He enjoyed lively conversation and was skilled at many games, including bridge, and while sailing from the Seychelles to Accra on his return home, he defeated everyone who played against him at checkers.29 Much had changed in the twenty-eight years since his humiliating and illegal arrest. British officials met him with appropriate ceremony when he left the ship, and a special train took him to Kumase, where he was met by a huge throng of Asante wearing white clothes, their faces painted with white stripes as a sign of joy. When he stepped off the train, there were loud cheers, and many people wept with joy. He was dressed in a European suit, and despite the heat, he wore a wool overcoat. As they greeted him, he smiled and lifted his black-felt homburg to them. He then stepped into a waiting automobile, which took him to a house that had been prepared for him.
Prempe was recognized only as the king of Kumase by the British although he was clearly king of Asante to his people. He certainly comported himself as if he were king, and his political activities became meddlesome enough at times that Governor Maxwell was convinced he was planning to usurp British power.30 The shrewd Prempe always stopped short of sedition, however, and lived a rewarding seven years until his death in 1931. In 1935 he was succeeded by the son of his eldest sister, who like Prempe I was light-skinned and a Christian. Nana Osei Agyeman Prempeh II was installed by the British as the king of Asante, and the Asante state was reborn as a confederacy. For the first time since 1896, the Golden Stool was displayed in public. Every Asante present honored it by standing.31