2
The Empire of Gold

THE CAPITAL CITY OF DWABEN DISTRICT WAS BOTH LARGER AND than Kumase, having perhaps forty thousand residents, but the Asante kingdom was centered in Kumase, a city built on the side of a rocky hill. In the early nineteenth century it ordinarily held some twenty-five thousand people, but it was large enough to accommodate a hundred thousand on important ceremonial occasions. In addition to the Kumase division or district, which contained several other sizable villages, the districts of Bekwai, Dwaben, Kokofu, Mampon, and Nsuta made up metropolitan Asante, where probably just under one million Akan-speaking people lived in the four thousand-square-mile core of the kingdom. To put these populations in perspective, in 1801 Glasgow had only seventy-seven thousand inhabitants and Manchester ninety thousand, while New York and Philadelphia, America’s largest cities, each had fewer than forty-five thousand inhabitants.¹

The Asante government in Kumase exacted tribute primarily in slaves and gold from the forty neighboring kingdoms that Asante armies had defeated in battle or intimidated into submission. So dominant was the Asante state in the early nineteenth century that all the European powers maintaining forts along the coast paid rent to the Asante king,² and whenever an Asante envoy visited the Dutch trading center at Elmina on the coast, he was honored by a sevengun salute—European traders were not usually given to such deferential behavior.³ Much of the credit for the ascendancy of the Asante Empire must go to the wise and inspirational leadership of generations of kings, councillors, and priests, especially King Osei Tutu, who was instrumental in founding the Asante state. But it is unlikely that even the wisest of leaders could have achieved such political dominance if they had not possessed the enormous wealth in gold that allowed them to acquire European firearms, that gave their large and highly organized army a decisive advantage over its neighbors.

As early as 800 A.D. the ancient state of Ghana to the northwest was known to Arabs as “the land of gold,” even though its deposits were far less rich than those of the Asante.⁴ In 1471, the Portuguese, newly arrived on the coast at Elmina, south of the Asante kingdom, were so impressed by the flecks of gold that sparkled in the streams as they emptied into the sea that they called the area the Gold Coast. The name stuck.⁵ The sixteenth-century West African gold production has been estimated at nine tons a year, and the total amount mined from early times to 1900 was at least seven thousand tons.⁶ Many millions of dollars’ worth of gold dust were maintained in the Asante treasury in Kumase, but private individuals also held huge sums. One government official who died in 1814 left an estimated $500,000 in gold dust, and another a few years later left over $300,000.⁷ Gold dust had long been the official medium of exchange throughout the region, and the weighing and appraising (and adulterating) of gold was a major industry. In Kumase alone, one hundred men worked as full-time specialists converting gold ingots into gold dust.⁸

The European traders who sailed to West Africa from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Brandenburg (as Prussia was then known) in search of gold, ivory, and slaves built trade forts, or “castles,” along the coast, but they did not bring enough armed men to permit them to establish their power beyond the walls of their forts. They were able to carry on trade on the coast of West Africa only because the Africans found them useful, not because they were feared or even terribly much respected. One of these trading enterprises was known as the African Company of Merchants; it had replaced the original British Royal African Company in 1750. This trading company was chartered by Parliament, which paid it an annual allowance to maintain its principal fort at Cape Coast. At the start of the nineteenth century, this British company shared the Gold Coast trade with a comparable Dutch company located farther west at Elmina and a Danish one to the east at Accra.

The existence of the Asante kingdom was apparently not known to Portuguese traders until 1698, when its war with the Denkyira began, but its prosperity and power became generally known to Europeans soon after. Arab traders and dignitaries also knew of Asante by this time and some had almost certainly visited Kumase, but the first person to leave a written record of such a visit was the director-general of the Dutch trading company, J. P. T Huydecoper, in 1816.Huydecoper, the son of a Dutch trader and an African mother, was able to speak Asante well enough to have intricate political conversations with the king, Osei Bonsu, and he wrote about these talks in some detail. He did not, however, have an eye for Asante life and seldom recorded anything of interest about what he saw in the capital, despite spending an entire year there. He was followed to Kumase the next year by four Britons, one of whom, a twenty-six-year-old named Thomas Edward Bowdich, wrote a fascinating and largely accurate account of his five-month residence in the Asante capital.⁹

Bowdich traveled to Kumase because John Hope Smith, the new British governor of the African Company of Merchants at Cape Coast, decided to send a mission to the Asante to negotiate a treaty and to establish a resident merchant among them before Britain’s Dutch competitors could fully capitalize on Huydecoper’s visit. Smith gave command of the mission to Frederick James, a veteran officer of the company, who would be accompanied by Bowdich (who happened to be Smith’s nephew) as its scientific observer, William Hutchinson, who would become the British resident in the Asante capital, and Henry Tedlie, a young physician.¹⁰ In addition to three interpreters, Smith also sent an African carpenter, bricklayer, and cooper to build Hutchinson a house that would serve as the company’s embassy and over one hundred Africans to carry the mission’s supplies. Governor Smith instructed his men to learn everything possible about the Asante kingdom, its power, trade relationships, and anything else that might be useful to the British merchants.

The Bowdich expedition left Cape Coast in late April 1817 to begin the 140-mile journey to Kumase. It was an unfortunate time for such a trip because the spring rains were due in May, and once they struck, the travelers would have hard going with slippery mud and flooded rivers. The best route followed a war-ravaged path through the seemingly impenetrable jungle that lay between the pounding surf of the coast and the Asante capital. White men, who were usually unable to walk any great distance in the West African heat and humidity, were typically transported in large, canopied, hammocklike contraptions carried by four Africans. It would take the British caravan almost a month to reach Kumase, an average progression of only five miles per day.

Near the coast the going was relatively easy as the single-file column pressed its way along a pulverized quartz path; but soon the sea breezes of the coast were left behind, and the heavily laden carriers entered the tropical rain forest that would envelop them for the next month. Although the forest’s lofty canopy of trees, some of which soared to over two hundred feet, created a relatively cool shade, the midday temperature still reached 90°F, and at night it did not drop below the mid-seventies. Much of the way was through mangrove swamps, where putrefying vegetation and dark stagnant water gave off a suffocatingly vile odor. There were few flowers to brighten the way at that time of year, but large butterflies and dainty hummingbirds darted around the men, and there were flocks of larger birds such as hornbills, crown birds, parrots, toucans, warblers, and cranes, not to mention numerous crows, hawks, and vultures. At night leopards could be heard coughing, lions roaring, and beetles chirping loudly like crickets, but nothing made as much noise as the little rabbit-sized pothos, a kind of lemur that sometimes screeched so piercingly that sleep was impossible. The tropical rain forest was inhabited by all manner of animals, including miniature zebra and full-sized elephants, with large numbers of civet cats, wild hogs, anteaters, antelope, sloths, monkeys, and even chimpanzees, but the dense unbroken underbrush of vines, ferns, and creepers usually kept man and animals apart from one another. Snakes—including a fourteen-foot-long python—and scorpions came into closer contact, as did voracious ants that would attack sleeping humans. Mosquito bites also annoyed the men, although no one then realized that the result could be a deadly bout of malaria. In 1817 and for the remainder of the century, it was believed that “fever,” as it was known, was caused by poisonous air, particularly the decaying and malodorous effluvia of swamps. In fact, the word malaria was a contraction of the Italian words for bad air, “mal aria.”

At first the Europeans were impressed by the magnificence of the rain forest’s immense trees, but soon they felt depressed by the solid walls and ceiling of dark green, which seemed to entrap and suffocate them. For most of the journey they could not see more than a few feet on either side of the path. Increasingly claustrophobic, they longed for clearings or rises that would permit them to escape from the jungle even for a short while. Eventually they came to a few open places where the land had once been cultivated, and there were occasional ridges, one of which rose to one thousand five hundred feet. When it was possible for the Britons to look out over the forest beneath them, all agreed that the spectacle was truly magnificent. After passing through a dark, trackless stretch of jungle near the border between the coastal Fante people, bitter enemies of their Asante overlords, and metropolitan Asante, they encountered abandoned villages where the ground was littered with human skulls, relics of an earlier Asante invasion of the south. When the column soon after reached a small clearing, Bowdich, undaunted by the earlier grisly sight, wrote that

Nothing could be more beautiful than its scenery … light and shade were most happily blended … trees towering in the shrubbery, waved to the most gentle air a rich foliage of dark green … the tamarind and smaller mimosas heightening its effect by their livelier tint … the cotton trees overtopped the whole, enwreathed in convolvuli, and several elegant little trees, unknown to me, rose in the background, intermixed with palms, and made the coup d’oeil enchanting.¹¹

As the British mission crossed the Pra Bdver and entered metropolitan Asante, it began to encounter inhabited villages. Some of them were small, with their thatched-roof mud houses somewhat the worse for wear, but even these places had one wide main street, and most villages struck the visitors as being surprisingly clean. Coastal villages had never made this impression. The members of the mission also commented favorably on the lush fields that lay outside the villages.The Asante inhabitants of these towns, whom Bowdich described as clean and cheerful, were also friendly and respectful, a sharp contrast to the sullen Fante the column had previously endured.

On the nineteenth of May, the column came to a halt one mile south of Kumase. Messengers were sent to announce the arrival to the Asante king, who sent word to the British mission to wait in a nearby village until he finished his bathing (high-ranking Asante bathed at least once a day, using imported Portuguese soap, and none among them was more fastidious than King Osei Bonsu). At two o’clock the expedition was invited to enter Kumase. The first thing the men saw was an offering of a dead sheep wrapped in red silk, suspended over their pathway by two tall poles. Before they had time to speculate about the possible meaning of this sacrifice, they were greeted—or, more accurately, engulfed—by more than five thousand people, most of them warriors, firing their muskets in the air so often that it soon became difficult for the English visitors to see their welcomers through the smoke. But they could not fail to hear the deafening cacophony of the drums, elephant-tusk horns, reed flutes, wooden rattles, and iron gongs played with what Bowdich called “a zeal bordering on phrensy.”¹² When the air cleared enough for the white men to see, Bowdich and his comrades found themselves encircled by warriors and their officers who bounded about passionately waving Danish, Dutch, and British flags, some of which had been set on fire by discharges from their muskets.

For half an hour the throng continued its welcoming dance, led by military officers whose dress excited the wonder of the white men. Each officer wore an immense cap topped by three-foot-long plumes of eagle feathers, with gilded ram’s horns thrusting out to the front. On their chests they wore red cloth vests covered with amulets of gold and silver, as well as various small brass bells, shells, and knives that jangled as they moved. Three or four animals’ tails hung down from each arm, and long leopards’ tails dangled down their backs, covering a small bow. A quiver of poisoned arrows hung from their right wrists, and each man brandished a small spear covered with red cloth and silk tassels in his left hand. They wore loose cotton trousers that were stuffed into soft, red leather boots reaching to mid-thigh, where they were attached by small chains to cartridge belts worn around the waist. Finally, each man held between his teeth a two-foot-long iron chain that had a scrap of paper covered with Arabic writing attached to the end. Although the British officers were dressed in imposing scarlet and white uniforms and carried swords, they must have felt underdressed.

When the welcoming ceased, the British-led column moved on to deposit their supplies and gifts in a large house that had been assigned to them. As they did, they were serenaded by various bands that this time melodiously played drums, horns, and flutes in concert. The visitors were soon ordered to walk toward the king’s palace while much of the population of Kumase gathered around to stare at the white men. As they made their way through the throng, they were exposed to the spectacle of a man being led along to his execution. He was made to walk with his hands tied behind his back, a knife passed through his cheeks to prevent him from uttering a curse that could endanger the king. One ear had been cut off and was carried by a man who walked ahead; the other ear hung by a small strip of skin. His bare back was gashed and bleeding, and small knives had been thrust up under each shoulder blade. The wretched man was being led along by a cord that had been passed through his nose. It is likely that he was paraded before the British visitors as an object warning of what would happen to malefactors.

After this unfortunate man had been led away, the four Englishman and their interpreters were led down a very broad street toward the marketplace, where they were stunned by the “magnificence and novelty” of the next scene that “burst” upon them, as Bowdich put it.¹³ As they entered the market area, which Bowdich estimated to be a mile in circumference, they were confronted by an enormous throng of people, and they had to avert their eyes to escape the blinding glare produced by the sun reflecting off masses of gold ornaments worn and carried by the king, his court, various attendants, and thousands of soldiers. As the British visitors were staring in frank amazement at the display of gold, no fewer than one hundred bands began to play, alternating between drum and horn motifs and softer, more melodic tunes featuring long flutes and instruments that resembled bagpipes. As the music continued, scores of huge silk umbrellas, each large enough to provide shade for thirty people, sprung open, adding bright splashes of scarlet and yellow to the scene.

The Britons were invited to come forward to take the hand of each military officer, chief, noble, and important figure in the king’s entourage. Most of these men wore heavy silks thrown over the left shoulder like a Roman toga, and they displayed so much gold and silver that the British visitors continued to be dazzled. Some wore ornamental lumps of gold attached to their wrists that were so heavy they had to be supported by boy attendants. Others had solid gold, life-size wolves’ or rams’ heads suspended from their gold-handled swords. Bowdich noted that these swords were apparently not reserved for ceremonies: their blades were rusted in blood. Large numbers of young officers bedecked in leopard skins, equipped with elephant-hide cartridge boxes encrusted with gold, silver, blue agate, and shells, and carrying gold-handled swords and long Danish muskets, also ornamented with gold, sat on the ground. Next, the Britons were startled to find themselves facing seventeen men of apparently superior rank who were dressed as Arabs. As the Englishmen passed by, these men, whom the British interpreters called Moors, glared at them with undisguised hostility. As the visitors passed by the master of the bands, the keeper of the royal burial ground, the gold horn blower, and many other dignitaries, there was a prolonged clamor of horns and drums announcing the presence of King Osei Bonsu.

Before they could approach the king, the white visitors met the royal executioner, a huge, heavily muscled man wearing a gold breastplate and holding before him the execution stool, which was clotted in blood and nearly covered by a thick deposit of human fat. He shook the stool in a clear warning of what awaited anyone who violated Asante law.¹⁴ Four of the king’s spokesmen came next, then finally the keeper of the treasury, who ostentatiously displayed the boxes, scales, and weights of his office, all made of solid gold. Finally, the white men reached the king, who courteously extended his hand. About forty to forty-five years old, the heavyset Osei Bonsu was every inch a monarch. His dress was magnificent but restrained. He wore a rich green silk toga, and his golden ornaments were of the finest workmanship. Even his white leather sandals were delicately ornamented with gold and silver. There were gold castanets on his finger and thumb, which he clapped to enforce silence. His head was shaved except for a quarter-sized tuft of hair on his temple, and he had a three-inch-long beard. ¹⁵ All the European visitors characterized him as handsome, friendly, and dignified. When another English visitor was introduced to him four years later, he was too drunk to carry on a dignified conversation, but he was nevertheless courteous and his bearing was regal.

After the king greeted the Englishmen, they were passed on to meet beautiful female attendants, small boys holding elephant tails whose job it was to clean up the king’s spit, and obese eunuchs who oversaw his hundreds of wives.Prominently displayed under a protective umbrella was a stool, entirely encased in gold, whose significance the Englishmen did not understand. This was the Golden Stool, the most powerful and sacred symbol in Asante culture. The Asante believed it had been conjured down from the skies during the reign of Osei Tutu, over one hundred years earlier. The stool not only symbolized the king’s authority to rule, but it was thought to contain the soul of the Asante people and to assure their well-being. As the English visitors moved farther from the king and his retinue, they were greeted by numerous older men of high rank who were carried by their slaves, as well as the children of chiefs and nobleman who were so weighed down by their golden jewelry that they too had to be carried. Finally, as the white men were escorted to their quarters, they were entertained by royal dancers, dwarfs, mimics, and buffoons.

At eight that evening, his way lighted by hundreds of torches, the king paid a visit to the Englishmen, asked their names for a second time, and wished them a good night. Bowdich and his colleagues could not agree on how many people they had seen in Kumase, but they all estimated the number of soldiers alone at thirty thousand. When Huydecoper visited a year earlier, he estimated that he had been greeted by fifty thousand people and had been introduced to sixty generals in a single day. Still astonished by the power and pomp of the Asante court but exhausted by the excitement of the day, the four Britons slept for the first time in Kumase.

In the ensuing days the visitors exchanged gifts and pleasantries with the king, to whom they had been instructed to give pledges of harmony, friendship, and goodwill. Surrounded by his councilors, interpreters and large retinue, Osei Bonsu met his visitors in any one of the many round rooms that made up a five-acre palace complex dominated by a large European-style two-story building made of stone. Despite the intimidating ambience Bowdich did his best to convince the Asante King that British motives were wholly altruistic, consisting of nothing more than a desire to share the benefits of British civilization with the Asante. King Osei Bonsu readily acknowledged the superiority of British technology, but wryly observing that one of the northern provinces that the Asante had conquered was as inferior to the Asante as the Asante were to the British, he assured Bowdich that there was not a single person in his kingdom who would go there solely to share Asante art and technology. This being so, the king pointedly asked, “Now, how do you wish to persuade me that it is only for so flimsy a motive that you have left this fine and happy England …?” The next day an Asante prince asked Bowdich why, if Britain were so selfless, it had behaved so differently in India.¹⁶ Bowdich was astonished that the Asante had heard anything about India and was at a loss for words. Events would soon confirm the Asante suspicion that altruism was not Governor Smith’s motive for sending his representatives to Kumase.

As the days passed, the British visitors continued to be impressed by the size of Kumase, the complexity of its court and government, and the novelty of Asante life, but initially they were severely limited in their ability to learn much about the Asante state because, unless they were summoned to meet the king, they were usually restricted to their residences. Even so, there were memorable experiences. When they were invited to dine with the king and members of his court, they were first served what they referred to as a “relish … sufficient for an army” consisting of soups, stews, plantains, yams, rice, wine, spirits, oranges, and “every fruit.” Next, dinner was served on a large table under four scarlet umbrellas. The plates were gold, the knives, forks, and spoons were silver. The table held an entire roast pig, roasted ducks, chickens, stews, vegetables, and fruit, accompanied by port and Madeira wine, gin, and Dutch cordials served in glasses. Bowdich was an educated Englishman from the port city of Bristol who read Latin, Greek and French, but he wrote that “we never saw a dinner more handsomely served, and never ate a better.”¹⁷ Two decades later, when another English visitor was received in Kumase, he was served an equally impressive dinner while being serenaded by a Dutch-trained brass band wearing blue dress uniforms trimmed in red.¹⁸ Osei Bonsu sometimes wore European clothing to dinners like these, a custom that some of his successors continued.

Bowdich was much impressed by Osei Bonsu’s good nature and by his shrewd, inquiring mind. Huydecoper wrote that though he could “argue like a lawyer” and had a quick temper, he usually was in good humor and fond of joking.¹⁹Bowdich was also quite taken by the Asante upper classes, or, as he referred to them, the “higher orders.” They were not only wealthy—some owned vast estates and thousands of slaves and lent huge sums to the government from time to time—they were courteous, well-mannered, dignified, and proud of their honor to such an extent that a social disgrace, including something as unintended as public flatulence, could drive a man to commit suicide. While Bowdich was in Kumase, the king publicly reproved one of his many sons for minor misconduct. The ten-year-old boy’s pride was so wounded that he promptly killed himself by putting a blunderbuss in his mouth and firing it with his foot.²⁰

Bowdich was struck by the physical stature of men among the “higher orders.” Many were over six feet tall and powerfully built. He was also taken by the beauty of the women of this class, whom he described as having the “finest figures,” elaborately shaved heads (with a single tuft of hair surrounded by several concentric circles on the left side), and beautiful clothes. A British visitor four years later also commented on their beauty and gentility.²¹ Other observers attributed the size, strength, and physical beauty of the upper classes (known as sikapo, “people of wealth”) to the ability of wealthy Asante men to choose only the most beautiful women as wives.²² Although he did not say so directly, Bowdich seemed disappointed that these elegant women were so aloof to the English visitors. When Bowdich described the social freedoms enjoyed by Englishwomen of his class, the Asante women were delighted, but the husbands of these higher-order women were so horrified that they ordered their wives away. He also wrote approvingly of the grace of upper-class Asante men and women as they danced, not wildly as “primitive” Africans were expected to do, but in a stately, even staid, fashion that resembled a waltz. More than two decades later another British visitor made almost identical observations about the beauty, elegance, and grace of the king’s wives, whom he was allowed to watch parade past, a sight no Asante man except the king could witness.²³

The king’s wives were even more remote than women of the higher orders. In fact, no one other than the king and his harem eunuchs was permitted to see the six or so wives who lived in the vast royal palace at any given time. His two or three hundred other wives lived in seclusion away from the palace. Bowdich did report that there were many prostitutes in Kumase, that many lower-ranking Asante women made open sexual advances toward the British visitors, and that several nobles offered them women as well. He did not, as one might expect of an Englishman of that era, indicate whether any of these offers were accepted. Huydecoper was much more open in his journal. Although his Christian wife and children were waiting in Elmina, when an Asante general offered him a “very young girl for my wife,” he accepted with the “greatest pleasure.”²⁴

Men and women of the higher orders bathed every morning with soap and warm water, wore scrupulously clean clothes, and ornamented themselves profusely. They cleaned their teeth several times every day with a brushing stick (chewed on the end until it was furred) and shaved their armpits to reduce body odor, which they found repellent. They also regarded belching and flatulence as disgusting.²⁵ The lower orders (known as ahiato), on the other hand, were said to be small in stature, filthy, ungrateful, insolent, and licentious, an opinion strongly expressed by Osei Bonsu. Bowdich had little contact with these poorer members of Asante society, and he did not fully understand that, while some poor people were free, most were slaves, of which there were at least five different categories.²⁶

In the 1840s Asante king Kwaku Dua described slaves to a British visitor as “stupid and little better than beasts.”²⁷ He was no doubt referring to newly captured people from northern tribes who circumcised their men, cicatrized marks on the faces and bodies of both men and women, spoke non-Akan languages, and came from less complex social systems. Over time some became incorporated into Asante society as freemen and even achieved wealth and high social rank. Slaves were usually reasonably well treated, but escape from a cruel master was permitted if the slave swore a powerful oath that bound him to another man. Slaves could also achieve sanctuary from a tyrannical master by claiming sanctuary at a temple.²⁸ Even so, most slaves could be sent away as human sacrifices by their masters at any time, and many were compelled to perform onerous labor clearing fields or mining gold, while others were forced into military service. When slaves died, all but a few were thought unworthy of burial. Instead they were thrown into a nearby river where their bodies were eaten by large fish.²⁹ In addition to slaves there were “pawns,” free men and women sold into servitude as collateral for a loan. When the loan was paid off, they were freed. The impact of class and slave distinctions in Asante was mitigated somewhat by an law that forbade anyone to discuss another’s social origins, and this proscription was taken so seriously that Akan-speaking slaves easily became valued members of Asante families.

The Asante could not mine their gold, cultivate their fields, or man their army without the slaves (and some poor free men), who made up the lower orders, but the presence of large numbers of foreign-born slaves in Asante posed a difficult problem for the government. In 1841 King Kwaku Dua told a British visitor that military detachments often had to be sent throughout the empire to bring these people under control.³⁰ The British decision in 1807 to terminate the maritime slave trade had made it difficult for the Asante to dispose of surplus slaves, and the Asante government was well aware of the threat these unruly people posed to public order.³¹ Bowdich and his companions learned about this threat at first hand when they were assaulted by a crowd of people in Kumase and had to use their swords to escape serious injury. The sharp division between upper and lower classes that was so noticeable in the early nineteenth century diminished somewhat over time as fewer new slaves were brought into metropolitan Asante and previously enslaved people became more fully incorporated into Asante society.

The English visitors were favorably impressed by Kumase. Built on open land, it was relatively large—over four miles in circumference—was divided into seventy-seven wards, and had twenty-seven main streets, one of which was one hundred yards wide. The banyan tree-shaded streets were swept every day, and the city was remarkably clean. Trash too was collected and burned every day. While many houses were small, single-story huts (often used for military prisoners), many others, especially those near the king’s two-story stone palace, were large, neat, two-story buildings that were scrupulously clean, nicely decorated with polished-clay red bas-relief designs, and well-maintained. Bowdich was surprised to discover that most of these major structures had indoor toilets that were flushed by pouring gallons of boiling water down them. Several hundred buildings near the king’s palace were open to the street in front. Elevated above the street by several feet, they were accessible by polished clay steps that led into a large room with a similarly polished floor and glistening whitewashed walls that extended to a bamboo roof, neatly thatched with palm leaves. These rooms were the offices of the many government officials who conducted the business of the state. Behind these public rooms another thirty to forty rooms served as living quarters for the bureaucrats’ many relatives.

The work of Kumase’s potters, goldsmiths, weavers, painters, and craftsman also pleased Bowdich. He admired their tasteful treatment of gold, iron, leather, shells, feathers, and cloth. These craftsmen lived in the suburbs of Kumase, but their work was to be seen everywhere, especially in the markets, several of which were open every day from eight A.M. to sunset, crowded with people from hundreds of miles distant, speaking dozens of dialects and languages. Items typically available for sale included beef, mutton, wild hog, antelope, monkey’s flesh, chickens, ducks, yams, plantains, maize, sugarcane, rice, various vegetables and fruit, huge smoked land snails, salted fish from the coast, and eggs. There were also supplies of tobacco, smoking pipes (many of which were three feet long), beads, looking glasses, sandals, beads, silk and cotton cloth, pillows, thread, calabashes, and gunpowder.³² Beer, palm wine, rum, and gin were readily available, too.³³Many a small English or American city of that time was less well provisioned.

The complexity of court life justifiably intrigued the European visitor. In addition to the “Moors” who served the King, other Arab visitors came from as far away as Baghdad. There may have been as many as one thousand Muslim men, their wives, and children in Kumase, and some men had considerable religious influence But despite determined efforts they were never able to achieve a major voice in Asante politics.³⁴ There were also government officials of all ranks, and an ongoing parade of chiefs, military officers, nobles, and members of the royal clan from outlying districts. The titles of these people confused European visitors, who tried, mostly inappropriately, to apply familiar terms to them. They were known by many titles in Asante, but genetically they were referred to as amradofo, “those responsible for maintaining the law.”³⁵

Even an outsider like Bowdich could easily appreciate the unceasing and dangerous intrigues that swirled around the palace. Kumase was the center of Asante power; everyone there talked about politics as they vied for favor and position, but one’s words had to be carefully measured. An Asante proverb said that “words are like vomit, they cannot be taken back.”³⁶ Men of talent could rise quickly in Kumase, but they could fall even faster. Someone who had overplayed his hand was liable to arrest and possible execution. Despite the danger some people took great risks in the political rough and tumble, and men and women alike risked their lives in forbidden sexual liaisons. Only a few people were largely above the law. Several noble families were exempt from capital punishment, and the king’s sisters were free to pursue open sexual liaisons with any ranking man of their fancy.

Daily life in the royal palace was fascinating. State business was a serious and continuous feature of court life, often lasting well into the night under torchlight, but there were lighter moments, too. The king retained a troop of small boys, who performed as “royal pickpockets” by purloining sundry valuables from people at the market. If the victim was able to catch one of these nimble thieves, he could beat him as severely as he wished, short of inflicting a mortal blow; but this rarely happened, and most boys escaped to the palace to enjoy their spoils. The king was also surrounded by gifted mimics, able to repeat, for example, a long English sentence with perfect accent, even though they did not know a word of the language. Often their mimicry was at the considerable expense of some unlucky visitor to the court. And as at European courts, there was the inevitable buffoon, whose antics were said to be hilarious. A good deal less amusing were some one hundred sullen albinos, whose function in the court was obscure. Finally, the king lavished his personal affection on dozens of pet cats that imperiously had the run of the palace, including the king’s lap, which several typically sat upon.

In early September Bowdich witnessed the annual yam festival (odwira), which dramatized the power of the state and reinforced bonds of loyalty and patriotism. When the yams were ready for harvest, all the district chiefs and military leaders of the empire, including all the many tributary districts, were required to attend the festival with their retainers. Bowdich found the “number, splendor and variety” of the arrivals “as astonishing as entertaining,” but he was distressed to discover that as each of these important men arrived, one of his slaves was sacrificed at each quarter of Kumase. As the arrivals paraded by King Osei Bonsu, two parties of executioners, each one hundred strong, slowly danced past, displaying the skulls of all the kings and chiefs who had been conquered by Asante armies or executed for subsequent treachery or rebellion. They drummed on the skulls with their knives, conveying an unmistakable message of menace to the arriving notables, some of whom would in fact be executed for past offenses before the festival ended. Even though their crimes, usually some form of treason, might have been committed in the previous year, these men were not executed until this dramatic annual festival took place. Usually taken by surprise, the accused was seized, tried publicly, and if found guilty, executed as an object lesson to all. Those notables who had been loyal would be presented with honors and valuable gifts by the king.

Group after group of great men passed by, each preceded by its band of men playing drums and horns, followed by retainers, who repeatedly fired their muskets into the air. Darkness fell, but the procession continued, now illuminated by hundreds of huge torches. As they approached the king, they passed by Moors, royal servants, and messengers of all sorts, court criers, military commanders with their gold swords, ostrich fans, and huge gold ornaments, girls bearing silver bowls filled with palm wine, children of the nobility, and various other dignitaries. Finally, as each great man reached the king, he raised his sword and swore an oath of allegiance. The festivities, accompanied by a growing display of sexual license, continued until 4 A.M.

The next morning the King ordered a large quantity of rum to be poured into brass pans, in various parts of the town; the crowd pressing around, and drinking like hogs; freemen and slaves, women and children, shrieking, kicking, and trampling each other under foot, pushed head foremost into the pans, and spilling much more than they drank. In less than an hour, excepting the principal men, not a sober person was to be seen, parties of four reeling and rolling under the weight of another, whom they affected to be carrying home; strings of women covered in red paint, hand in hand, falling down like rows of cards; the commonest mechanics and slaves declaiming on state palavers (formal discussions); the most discordant music, the most obscene songs, children of both sexes prostrate in insensibility. All wore their handsomest cloths, which they trailed after them to a great length, in a drunken emulation of extravagance and dirtiness.³⁷

Perhaps one hundred criminals were executed during the festival that Bowdich witnessed, and a large number of slaves were sacrificed so that their blood, poured into the holes left when the yams were dug up, would create continued fertility. However, the climax to the festival was not human sacrifice, but the spectacle of melting down the royal gold ornaments while the populace and the visiting tributary chiefs looked on, presumably suitably impressed. Soon the gold would be reworked into wonderfully new and novel creations.

The tributary states in the Asante Empire were controlled by their own chiefs or kings, backed by the threat and the actuality of Asante punitive expeditions. But in metropolitan Asante, especially in Kumase, order was maintained by various police forces. The highly visible executioners were constant reminders that Asante law must be obeyed, and anyone tempted to break a law knew that a police spy, or simply an indignant Asante, would be likely to turn them in for punishment. As a result, Asante justice could be remarkably efficient. When a British visitor lost a valuable gold seal in 1820, he informed the king, who matter-of-factly assured him that it would promptly be found and returned. A gong was sounded, and the resulting search turned up the gold within an hour.³⁸ There were also uniformed police in Kumase who maintained order and made certain that no one entered or left the city without the permission of the government.These men, distinguished by their long hair, carried whips, knives, and muskets. There were also highway police stationed at various points up and down the highway, system of metropolitan Asante. Sometimes as many as six hundred police would man checkpoints on the Asante frontier, where they interrogated all travelers about their business, inspected their goods for contraband, enforced trade embargoes, and collected toll fees. Smugglers or escaped criminals were arrested.No one passed these police posts without careful scrutiny; indeed, there was an Asante saying about their notorious efficiency: “If you leave a crime behind you on a journey, you will meet it ahead of you.”³⁹ At a time when England was plagued by riots, metropolitan Asante was remarkably orderly.

Nothing impressed European visitors more than public executions. Huydecoper was made aware of many executions during his stay. He wrote that he had “certain knowledge” of the deaths of eighty Fante. He also reported that a rebellious chief was tortured for some time before he was put to death. After pepper had been rubbed into innumerable cuts on his body, the man’s ears, nose, and arms were cut off before he was finally decapitated. Huydecoper wrote that when he witnessed the execution of a young man in the company of Osei Bonsu, “The King asked me if I was not afraid. I said I was not, but that the sight distressed me. ‘Oh,’ said the King, This is nothing. It happens here quite frequently.’|”⁴⁰European visitors, especially missionaries, tended to exaggerate the frequency of human executions, but there can be little doubt that the king spoke the truth. Two decades later, one of many executioners in Kumase, a young man who appeared to be not yet eighteen, told a European visitor that he had personally executed eighty people.⁴¹

Like Huydecoper and other Europeans who would visit Kumase in the ensuing years, Bowdich was appalled by the human executions. They were impossible to ignore. On various occasions when large crowds were assembled in Kumase and could be suitably impressed, criminals were executed. After being convicted by a court, these men (like the man Bowdich saw when he first arrived in Kumase) were usually marched to their execution with large knives driven through their cheeks so that they could not utter magically dangerous curses against their accusers or the king. Bowdich was surprised that their expressions were so apathetic. On one occasion Bowdich saw thirteen victims surrounded by their executioners, who were dressed in shaggy black vests and hats that made them resemble bears. Men and women, chanting in a dirgelike fashion, encircled the condemned. Rum and palm wine was poured copiously while horns played and muskets were fired into the air. Finally, an executioner cut off a condemned man’s hand with his sword, then threw the man on the ground before he patiently hacked his head off in a sawing motion with a small knife that was intentionally not very sharp.

Bowdich and the other Britons could not bear to witness any more executions, but they were told that all thirteen men died in a similar way and that numerous people, including women, had later been sacrificed for religious reasons.Hutchinson wrote that he had once come upon the headless bodies of two women lying in the market as vultures pecked at them. Vultures were sacred birds that could not be killed, and a woman who accidentally caught one in her basket was executed.⁴² Hutchinson also wrote about another execution scene that the king personally witnessed. Osei Bonsu sat drinking palm wine from a silver goblet while the executions proceeded. As each head was severed, the king, still seated, imitated a dancing motion, which apparently signified his pleasure.⁴³ The Asante practice of execution, whether of criminals or for religious purposes, would plague the British conscience for the remainder of the century.

Bowdich was a gifted and reliable observer, but there was much about Asante culture that he could neither see nor readily comprehend.⁴⁴ For one thing, he thought that King Osei Bonsu was an autocrat, a natural conclusion for someone who only saw the king on public occasions, when his role as absolute monarch was acted out to the fullest. It was true that many lesser officeholders displeased the king at their peril. One provincial administrator, who lived in Kumase in great luxury, traveled in such pomp that whenever he went anywhere, even a short distance, he insisted on being carried in his taffeta hammock, protected by a huge silk umbrella and accompanied by a troop of sycophants who constantly praised him. Some actually swept the ground he would walk on before he stepped out of his hammock. Yet when he overstepped his orders in trying to settle a provincial dispute, the king stripped him of all his property, leaving him a beggar.⁴⁵

The king was the government’s chief executive, the commander in chief of its army, and the judge of its highest court. According to the Asante constitution, only he could order executions. In actuality, however, the king’s powers were greatly circumscribed, as some European visitors understood as early as 1819.⁴⁶ Osei Bonsu was at pains to act as if his whim were law when in public, but where matters of significant import for the Asante state were at issue, he shared power with a national assembly of some two hundred men, representing all regions of the empire, that regularly managed the affairs of government and decided all disputes as a supreme tribunal. Its members were the senior chiefs of the traditional districts of the state. In addition, the king was advised—and sometimes dominated—by an inner council of eighteen nobles: powerful military commanders, some princes, major government officials such as the treasurer, some ceremonial officers, two of the king’s chamberlains, the head physician, a senior priest, and often most influential of all, the queen mother. The council—known as the Asante Kotoko, meaning the Asante porcupine (“no one dares touch them”)—ordinarily met every day with considerable pomp, attended by servants, court criers, soldiers, and the seemingly ever-present executioners. Frequently their deliberations continued under torchlight until late at night. Like the British privy council, the inner council was both a court of law and a legislature. In addition to the public deliberations of this body, these and other powerful people often had access to the king’s ear, and no prudent king would wisely offend the wealthiest and most powerful people in his realm. For example, the king once apologized to Joseph Dupuis, who visited Kumase in 1820, for a decision he had made, saying, “Don’t be angry … I must do what the old men say; I cantricts help it.”⁴⁷ In every sense the king served at the pleasure of his most influential subjects and could be removed for misconduct, as would happen later in the century.

An Asante king owed his throne—his stool—to the political faction that put him in power. He had to retain their favor to survive, while doing as little as possible not to offend other powerful factions, some of which were led by aristocrats and members of the royal family.⁴⁸ Four noble families wielded great power. Until recently they had not been subject to capital punishment, and one of these men ruled over the government when the king was out of Kumase. A wise king would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid offending these nobles. For example, when one of Osei Bonsu’s wives was accused of having sexual relations with another man, the king ordered her executed as Asante law permitted him to do.However, when he was informed that this particular wife was the daughter of a powerful noble and military commander, he quickly spared her and even offered her a gift of gold if she were to remarry.⁴⁹

Despite these limitations on their power, Asante kings lived majestically. The palace staff was elaborate, and it did much to create an aura of majesty. Among the more than a score of separate departments established to serve the king were spokesmen, stool carriers, drummers, umbrella carriers, bathroom attendants, elephant-tail switchers, fan bearers, cooks, heralds, sword bearers, gun bearers, ministers, eunuchs, and the ubiquitous executioners.⁵⁰ At several points around the city, particularly the great market, there were six-to eight-foot-high circular platforms of polished clay painted red, where the king sat under his great umbrella, greeting his subjects and sipping palm wine, which he ceremoniously allowed to drip through his beard to the ground. Palm wine was to be quaffed in a single gulp, and etiquette called for much of it to run down through a man’s beard.

Some fifty to one hundred of his attendants sat below him on steps cut into the platform. The chief of each district also occupied a stool and was supported by a similarly large and diverse staff of officials and retainers. This panoply of power served the king and his loyal chiefs well, but the actual governance of the nation was carried out by hundreds of bureaucrats concerned with such essentials as diplomacy, trade, and taxation. For example, because a central concern of the government was the prevention of the emergence of a powerful merchant class that might challenge royal power, laws were established restricting the accumulation of gold and slaves, the principal forms of wealth. Hundreds of government tax collectors belonging to the treasury department enforced a harsh estate tax by quickly descending on the house of anyone of substance who died. A very small percentage of his wealth was awarded to his heir, but the greater portion was confiscated and became the property of the king.⁵¹

Even though these taxes prevented the inheritance of wealth, nothing was more important to most Asante than its accumulation during their lifetime. A famous Asante proverb said that “one becomes famous not by being noble born but by being wealthy.”⁵² Another said, “If power is for sale, sell your mother to obtain it. Once you have the power there are several ways of getting her back.” For a people who so revered their parents, this was the ultimate sacrifice.⁵³ Wealth was not only its own reward, it brought great social prestige and formal honors.

Some men, and a few women as well, became sufficiently wealthy through entrepreneurial activities that they were honored by the king as belonging to a kind of nobility, which was symbolized by the right to be preceded in public by troops of well-born boys, known as asikofo, who carried elephants’ tails. Such honor was done to such a distinguished person (the king, after all, would inherit his wealth) that the king would delegate some of his own sons to serve him and to carry the elephants’ tails.⁵⁴ This honor was so coveted that at least one man was tempted to claim it fraudulently. During the reign of Osei Yaw (1824-1833), this man claimed to possess a great fortune that he willed to the King. Duly honored as a result, the man enjoyed the benefits of nobility, but when his large pots of gold were opened after his funeral, they were found to contain worthless brass filings. His disinterred corpse was tried, found guilty, and beheaded, depriving his soul of everlasting life.⁵⁵

Given this national fascination with wealth, it is not surprising that there was a government department of the treasury that was greatly concerned with maintaining accurate weights and measures for gold and for assessing its purity.Assuring the safety and purity of the state’s gold called for many locked chests and gimlet-eyed guardians, and locks and keys were both necessary and a mark of personal prestige. There was also a need for careful accountants who were, needless to say, closely watched. Although some literate persons were recruited to Kumase to enhance Asante diplomatic relations and some written records were kept, Asante was essentially a preliterate state. As a consequence, the Asante treasury featured overlapping responsibilities and many cross-checks against dishonesty.⁵⁶ In 1819, desiring even tighter control over the treasury, Osei Bonsu eagerly sought to have his children receive a British education. British Resident Hutchinson was happy to oblige, and arrangements were well under way for some of his sons to go to Cape Coast and, perhaps, later to England. However, the “Aristocracy and Great Chiefs” opposed this innovation, and the king was forced to abandon the idea. The head of the exchequer, Opoku Frere, the second most powerful man in Asante, later confided to Hutchinson that the opposition arose because he and other wealthy men were accustomed to cheating the king “a little,” and they feared that they would be unable to continue this practice if the king’s relatives acquired a European education.⁵⁷

Another source of power in the state was religion. The British referred to all Asante religious objects and activities as “fetish,” borrowing a Portuguese term that was used disparagingly to reduce them to a superstitious idolatry or a magical dread of certain objects. In reality the Asante had a complicated religion that recognized a supreme creator as well as numerous lesser gods, who took a more active interest in human affairs. The most powerful of these was the river god, Tano.Most houses contained a shrine to a particular god, who was propitiated in various ways. There were many religious ceremonies, too, along with beliefs in divination, evil spirits, magic, and witchcraft. It is not altogether clear how much power Asante priests (many of whom were women) had, but they did play a vital role in helping people deal with misfortune, sickness, and death. It is clear though that at times they opposed the king on certain issues and that there was an inherent tension beness, the priests and the monarch.⁵⁸ Priests derived much of their power from the supernatural assistance of mmoatia, forest dwarfs who resembled small human beings except that they communicated only by whistling and their feet pointed backwards. Human sacrifice and small objects thought to have supernatural power were a part of Asante religious life, but they were hardly the totality of it.

Asante religion was centered around the belief that every person had an immortal soul. After death the soul became a spirit for a time, and if the person died prematurely or at the hands of another, that spirit could bring harm to the living.Most ancestral spirits, however, went quietly to the underworld, where life was lived much as it had been on earth. (This was one of the reasons why slaves were sacrificed to serve their masters and why a wife sometimes demanded to be sacrificed after her husband’s death.) These ancestors were thought to join with other supernatural forces to reward people who adhered to Asante values and laws and to punish offenders, keeping all on their best behavior. Sometimes these spirits took corporeal form as, for example, a huge bird with great talons that would swoop down on offenders at night. There were also red-haired albinos with flowing beards and very tall women with enormously pendulous breasts that could frighten wrongdoers to death.⁵⁹ It was thought that eventually a person’s soul would be reborn through a woman of its own lineage.

One of Bowdich’s misconceptions that would be shared by almost all British political and military leaders who followed him to the Gold Coast was that the Asante “lived for war.” It is true that their army was a formidable instrument of power that must receive the credit for the success of the Asante expansion and nineteenth-century dominance over such a large area. It is also true that many senior Asante military commanders were, like British army officers, men who longed for the military action that could bring them glory, wealth, and power. Yet there had long been powerful proponents of peace in Asante who favored diplomacy and trade relationships over military conquest. Indeed, the Asante invested an inordinate amount of money and energy in the development of diplomacy. The government stressed the training of diplomats, who were instructed in the arts of negotiation and taught to respect the sanctity of treaties, a view that British officials often did not reciprocate in their treaty negotiations with the Asante.⁶⁰ They made regular use of envoys and diplomatic missions in the search for peace. The highest-ranking diplomatic officers carried gold-hilted swords and a golden axe on their missions to symbolize their willingness to cut through any difficulty to achieve their purpose.⁶¹ The British misunderstanding of these symbols—that is, as threatening martial action—led them to dismiss several important Asante missions, and they would never understand the subtlety and allusiveness of the Asante negotiating style nor the fact that for many powerful Asante the greatest good was not war but peace, open roads, and trade.⁶² As a result, they consistently miscalculated Asante intentions—not surprising, given their contempt for Asante culture and their belief that the Asante sought only war.

War, indeed, had built the Asante Empire, but peace was necessary to maintain it because the Asante depended on tribute and trade. Except for the six districts that made up metropolitan Asante, all of the conquered districts paid an annual tribute. A relatively poor northern district that lacked gold might pay only five hundred slaves, two hundred cattle, four hundred sheep, and several hundred cotton and silk cloths to Kumase, but richer districts were assessed two thousand slaves as well as gold and other valuables.⁶³ Tribute also included skilled labor such as doctors, potters, smiths, and leather workers and goods such as sandals, leather pouches, elephant tails, fly whisks, and musical instruments.⁶⁴Because the amount and kind of tribute a district could reasonably pay was subject to changing circumstances, a special court was established in Kumase to adjudicate such matters. The need to pay annual tribute was softened somewhat for tributary chiefs because the Asante king usually returned a portion of it as gifts.

In addition to tribute the Asante relied on trade, sending gold, ivory, and slaves south to the coast for firearms, gunpowder, and other European goods. To do so, they had to pass through the territory of sometimes hostile tributary people, such as the Fante, or use them as middlemen. Without a modicum of peace, the Asante could not obtain the weapons and gunpowder needed to maintain their army and control their subject states. They also required peace to continue their profitable trade to the north. In return for sea salt obtained at the coast and kola nuts that helped to suppress thirst in these arid lands, the Asante received the slaves they needed both to trade to the Europeans at the coast and to fuel their own economy. Salt was so valuable that a handful of it would often bring as many as two slaves in return. The trade in gold, ivory, and slaves was monopolized by the wealthy, but the commoners participated widely in the salt and kola nut exchange.⁶⁵ Trade to the west and east was less important but it also took place.

To maintain these trade relationships, the Asante built and maintained a system of roads. At least five roads led north toward their tributary states, and an equal number fanned out to the south. Only two roads, both relatively unimportant, ran to the west or the east. Even when located in the relatively more open territory of the north, these roads required enormous manpower to build and more to maintain. Cutting roads through the dense tropical rain forest to the south required herculean efforts, as British military engineers discovered during their invasion of 1873/74. And preventing millions of rapidly growing roots, vines, and creepers from growing back called for continuous labor by thousands of men and women, most of whom were slaves. It also called for numerous detachments of highway police to assure the safe passage of goods up and down these roadways. The Asante government took great care to maintain a network of police and military depots to assure that trade would proceed peaceably and that taxes and tribute would flow to Kumase.

The Asante possessed more gold and used more of it as ornaments and symbols of rank than any other West African people. Much of the gold lay within metropolitan Asante, but many more rich deposits lay in districts that were tributary to them. The Portuguese were so impressed by the quantity of gold the Asante brought to the coast that they named their principal trading fort Elmina—“the mine.” Some gold was obtained by panning in streams—work almost entirely done by women and children—but much of the region was dotted with small mine pits dug a few yards into the earth. There were deep shafts as well, several dug one hundred feet deep before sending out tunnels several hundred feet in length. One mine had a timber-shored tunnel three hundred yards long with numerous large galleries where the gold was worked.⁶⁶ To reach a vein of gold, miners had to chop their way through hard rock such as feldspar or granite, work that could onlybe done by men, and in some mines gunpowder was used to blast the rock away. The diggers gave the chunks of ore to women who carried it to crushing areas where men put it on granite slabs and pounded it to bits with hammers before women milled it to powder and washed it to separate the gold. The work was usually done by slaves supervised by the family they belonged to, but sometimes thousands of men, women, and children worked together to mine a rich reef of gold.⁶⁷ In peak years as many as forty thousand mines were being worked.⁶⁸

In law all gold belonged to the king, and some mines were directly managed by the treasury, but others were under local control. When a nugget was found, it was supposed to be taken to the local chief, who sent it on to the king, who in return sent the chief some gold dust as his commission. There were tight controls, and the chiefs’ spies were willing to report misconduct in anticipation of sharing a reward. Still there was cheating, especially after the gold had been reduced to dust when it could be adulterated with silver, copper, or coral.⁶⁹ Gold may originally have been mined by the Asante themselves, but at least by the seventeenth century, slave labor was used almost exclusively, perhaps because shafts collapsed by heavy rains and rising groundwater made mining such a dangerous activity. Much gold was extracted by having a slave dig into the soil above a known reef, then handing the earth up for panning until he hit the water table. Slaves slept and ate in these pits, being fed by the freemen who panned the gold on the surface.⁷⁰ So great was the Asante demand for slaves in these times that the Portuguese actually imported slaves to the Asante from as far away as Angola!⁷¹

Well before Bowdich’s visit slaves were also essential for Asante food production. Originally, Asante farmers practiced shifting cultivation to exploit the fertile but shallow, easily exhausted forest soil. Fields were cleared by chopping and burning the undergrowth, leaving a layer of ash as fertilizer. Yams and plantains were probably the main crop until the sixteenth century, when along with iron hoes many new crops were introduced by Europeans. Cassava, peanuts, maize, oranges, avocados, tomatoes, and pineapples thrived, and productivity grew.⁷² As villages and towns multiplied, the need for more food led to the development of large plantations to supply the urban dwellers. The labor needed to clear the forest and cultivate the fields of these plantations was increasingly provided by slaves.

Confined to Kumase, the earlier European visitors were able to learn little about country life. In addition to Kumase and Dwaben there were several towns of five thousand to seven thousand people. Salaga, a market town to the north, was twice as large as Kumase, but the great majority of the people in metropolitan Asante lived in villages of a few hundred to a thousand people. The key to Asante village life was the relationship between a mother and her children. In addition to natural ties of affection, the role of the mother was central because the Asante reckoned both descent and inheritance through the female line. A mother’s brother was the legal guardian of her children; her husband had few legal responsibilities for them, except the obligations to see that they were well cared for and well behaved and to find and pay for a suitable wife for his son.⁷³ A husband had some legal rights over his wife, including the right to cut off her nose for adultery, her lips for betraying a secret, or her ears for listening to his private conversation. Women mutilated in these ways were not an uncommon sight, especially in Kumase.⁷⁴ However, women had relative equality with men in many ways, including the right to initiate divorce. Every Asante belonged to a group of people related through women, and it was this group—the ntoro, or “lineage” in English—that gave them legitimacy in the world of living Asante and ties to their ancestors, to whom animal and human sacrifices had to be made on special occasions. These various lineages belonged to one of eight clans, one of which was the royal Okoyo clan. Lineage ties were so strong that wherever a man might live, the village where his lineage was centered was his home, and it was there that he would want to be buried to be close to his ancestors.⁷⁵

Veneration of ancestors and respect for authority were combined in the office of chief. Each lineage had its head, who occupied a stool and served as a councillor to the village chief. Each village had a formally acknowledged leader, or chief, chosen by a council of elders representing the various lineages and clans in the village. The chief had the power to resolve minor disputes and to collect taxes, but like the king he was bound by a sworn oath to consult the elders on all matters of importance and to follow their advice. Although the Asante system has been likened to English feudalism, the Asante chiefs ruled not because of a contractual relationship with their people, or vassals, but because various kin groups chose them to lead—elected them in fact—and because religious authority cemented their power. Only the chief had the authority to serve as an intermediary between the people and the ancestors. Each chief had a stool, as the king did, that represented the soul of his people while linking them to ancestors whose blessings on the living were essential to their well-being. Approximately every three weeks the chief was responsible for directing a religious ceremony—theAdae—during which the ancestors were praised, their great deeds recounted, and their favors beseeched. Assured that all was well with their world, everyone joined in drinking palm wine and joyously dancing to the rhythm of dozens of drums.⁷⁶

Unlike the excitement and danger of life in Kumase, life in these rural villages was usually routine and tranquil. There were some specialized village settlements of artisans, religious specialists, gold-smiths, and slaves, but most villages consisted of families, free and slave, that lived by cultivation. A village usually had only one street, but like those in Kumase, it too was wide, often over fifty yards, and it was swept clean every day. The rectangular houses with high-pitched thatched roofs were small and simple, as were their furnishings, but they were uniformly clean. Because dirt, trash, and refuse were thought to be dangerous, women and children had the daily chore of gathering up all trash and depositing it in a midden outside the village. Because menstruation was dangerous, too, women were secluded in huts during their menses, and a woman who touched her husband at this time could be killed. Latrines were situated far away from the houses of the village, which were built on both sides of the single long wide road that also served as the village meeting place. The village was surrounded by its fields and domestic animals—mostly chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, and dogs.Shaded by huge trees, people promenaded along this street and sat in the shade, chatting or playing a complicated board game called ware that resembled pachisi.

The king and wealthy people wore elegant sandals decorated with gold, but common people went barefooted, except during the rainy season when they wore wooden clogs to keep their feet out of the mud. Prominent people often wore silk, but ordinary Asante wore cotton, and slaves dressed in barkcloth. Garments signaled the wearer’s rank, and their color expressed various meanings. Lighter colors could express innocence or rejoicing. White was worn by chiefs after making a sacrifice or by ordinary people after winning a court case. Dark colors were worn for funerals or mourning. Usually worn like a toga thrown over the shoulder but also worn tied around the waist, most clothes bore intricate designs that carried various meanings.⁷⁷ Some women wore kente-cloth dresses made by stitching together numerous handwoven strips of cotton or silk. Silk threads were laboriously pulled out of imported silk cloth before being rewoven into an Asante design.Many kente-cloth designs are so beautiful that they are displayed in museums throughout the world. There were also sumptuary laws that restricted certain kente designs to various great men and women as exclusive symbols of their prestige.Many cotton or silk patterns were designed expressly for the king and could only be worn with his permission.

Each day of the week had special significance for the Asante, who like other Akan-speaking people named their children after the day of the week on which they were born (“Wednesday’s child,” etc.). Warfare should be avoided on Sunday, although certain Sundays called for joyous celebration, and no one throughout the kingdom was permitted to work the fields on Thursday, thought to be a day of great danger because a powerful earthquake once struck on that day.⁷⁸ With the day of the week always in mind, village life revolved around the agricultural cycle, as villagers weeded, planted, harvested, and carried their crops to market. Men cut down trees and prepared the land for cultivation, but women did most of the daily work. Men also traded, fished, and hunted, while women collected the huge snails that played a major part in Asante cuisine. Children worked in the fields, cared for domestic animals, and watched over their younger siblings. They also found time to play, to listen to storytellers, and to overhear adults gossiping, a favorite pastime in most Asante communities. Most families ate only two meals, a large breakfast in late morning, followed by rest, then dinner late in the afternoon. The intense political intrigue of the capital was largely absent, but people were always concerned about taxes, military call-ups, the coming and going of traders, and of course the weather. They were also concerned with the health of their animals and supernatural threats to their well-being. For all but the most intrepid, the forest world outside the village was dangerous, even evil. Safety lay in the village world and its fields where, for the most part, Asante people had the same joys and sorrows as rural villagers in most parts of the world. Economic chores varied depending on the season and on ceremonial occasions, but ordinarily, everyone was in bed by 9 P.M. and up the next morning before dawn broke at 6 A.M.

For all the complexity of Asante life, nothing was more fundamental for the people than their reverence for the land. This message was sent to the spirit of the earth on the morning of each Adae ceremony:

Spirit of the Earth, sorrow is yours, Spirit of the Earth, woe is yours, Earth with its dust.

Earth, if I am about to die, It is upon you that I depend; Earth, while I am yet alive, It is upon you that I put my trust: Earth, who receives my body.

We are addressing you and you will understand.

We are addressing you and you will understand.⁷⁹

As a rule, village life was placid and predictable without the pageantry, thrill, or menace of Kumase, but now and then life could be disrupted by heavy rains, epidemics, or crop failure and sometimes by mobilization for war, and each village chief had to decide which men were to answer the call of mobilization. The British were wrong in thinking that the Asante lived only for war. For much of the nineteenth century they were able to live in peace. But despite Asante desires to maintain peace with the British, they found themselves at war with British forces on several occasions during the century. The first clash was in 1807. The last and climactic battles were fought in 1900.