THIS BOOK DESCRIBES THE MILITARY CONFLICT BETWEEN THE Asante and British that filled the nineteenth century. In the mid-1980s, when my long-standing interest in this subject was piqued enough to start this project, all of those people who had firsthand knowledge of the events had passed on, and although searches of the Public Record Office in London, the Balme Library at the University of Ghana, the Basel Missionary Archives, the British Museum, and many other libraries and archives yielded much, I discovered nothing of major significance that previous scholars had missed.
Instead of continuing my frustrated search for something original, I found myself relying heavily on the published work of scholars, missionaries, soldiers, travelers, and newspaper correspondents. To modern-day scholars who find themselves cited in the bibliography, I extend my thanks for their marvelous work, as I do to all of those earlier merchants, missionaries, soldiers, colonial officers, and newsmen who braved inclement weather, deadly diseases, and bullets to record their experiences of that tumultuous century.
This book, like my two earlier books for The Free Press on African resistance to colonial rule—Like Lions They Fought and Mau Mau—is meant mainly for the general reading public rather than scholars. To make the book as accessible as possible to these readers I have avoided the use of technical anthropological terms for various aspects of Asante society and culture, and I have held the use of Asante terms to an absolute minimum. For example, I have referred to the Asante monarch as “king” rather than Asantehene, the Asante term, which is routinely used by most scholars when referring to the holder of this office. I have also tried to reduce the number of place-names for villages, rivers, districts, and the like as well as the personal names of men and women whose roles were not central to the events being described. For this I apologize to the Asante people, but I hope that they will understand that my purpose is to make their history more easily understood to outsiders.
I would like to thank John McLeod of the British Museum for helping me to get started long ago, Merrick Posnansky for good advice about sources, various people at the University of London for helping me track down fugitive unpublished materials, and many of my students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), for critically reviewing earlier versions of the manuscript. Doran Ross, Associate Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, has my gratitude for so generously helping me locate illustrations. I thank John Olmsted for skillfully and good-naturedly making the manuscript ready for the light of day, and Sharon Belkin for drawing the maps. I am especially grateful to my editor, Adam Bellow, for giving me his continuing support and for his enduring interest in the African experience.
My greatest debt is to my wife, Karen Ito, for her astute anthropological criticism of the manuscript and, even more, for making everything worthwhile.