THE ASANTE ARMY, WHOSE SIZE AND MARTIAL ZEAL SO IMPRESSED the early English visitors when they first entered Kumase, had every reason to be triumphant. Fourteen years earlier, in 1803, an Asante army of perhaps fifty thousand men had driven their northern enemies into open ground, where they were defeated with huge losses by a decisive charge ordered by the Asante general Amankwatia III. Asante muskets proved much superior to the spears and arrows of the northerners, and thousands were killed. Another district then rebelled, and its army, too, was crushed. By now thoroughly intimidated, neighboring districts hurriedly sent delegations bearing gifts and pledges of peaceful relations to the new Asante king, Osei Bonsu, who had been elected to the stool in 1800.
To the north the Asante were now at the pinnacle of their power, but some of the coastal districts were still rebellious, and others had never been conquered. In order to reach the various fortified trading posts that the white men had built along the coast, Asante traders had to travel through the territory of various groups of coastal people who, though nominally tributary, were far enough away from Kumase to flaunt their independence. Unlike armies that quartered troops in their conquered territory, the Asante army marched away after a victory, confident that indirect rule could be maintained without the need to station troops in every conquered state.
One of the largest coastal societies was the Fante, an Akan-speaking people, who were perhaps 400,000 in number. They were implacably hostile to the Asante. Unless an Asante army was nearby to threaten them, they blocked Asante access to the British trading center at Cape Coast, due south of Kumase. The Fante as middlemen were greedy and insolent not only to the Asante but equally so to the British, whom they cheated at every opportunity. Soon after King Osei Bonsu came to power, the Fante government declared it unlawful for the white men to trade guns, gunpowder, lead, or iron to the Asante. To meet their growing need for firearms and to dispose of their surplus slaves, the Asante were compelled to trade with the Danes farther to the east at Accra or with the Dutch to the west at Elmina. Dutch traders, who respected Asante power and wanted to curry their favor, did their best to circumvent the Fante and to accommodate the Asante trading needs; but the British, who by the start of the nineteenth century had become the dominant trading power on the Gold Coast, opposed Asante trade, fearing that it would only benefit their Dutch competitors. Also, the British officers of the African Company had chosen to make an alliance with the Fante, who surrounded them at Cape Coast. Their London superiors urged them to be more receptive to Asante interests, but the British merchants in the Gold Coast ignored their advice and continued to support the Fante, whose actions towards Asante traders not surprisingly became even more insolent and obstructive.1
Soon after, a seemingly minor event brought the Asante into conflict with the British for the first time. It began in 1806, one year after Lord Nelson won the battle of Trafalgar, among three Assin chiefdoms to the south of metropolitan Asante. They had been conquered by the Asante and were tributary to Kumase. A relative of an Assin chief named Aputai rifled the grave of a prominent man in another district, stealing many valuables including gold. The offended chief could not receive satisfaction on his own, so he judiciously appealed to the Asante king to adjudicate the dispute according to Asante law. After due deliberation King Osei Bonsu ordered Aputai to pay restitution, since his relative had despoiled the grave. Not only did Chief Aputai refuse to do so, he ordered his armed men to attack the aggrieved chief. Alarmed by such an outrageous breach of the law, King Osei Bonsu dispatched two envoys, who bore the golden regalia that assured the diplomats’ personal inviolability wherever they traveled, to demand that Aputai cease hostilities and pay restitution. In an unthinkable affront Aputai killed the emissaries and suspended their mutilated bodies from trees on the Asante frontier. By Asante law this was an act of war, and King Osei Bonsu promptly marched against Aputai with a large army, routing his forces after killing large numbers of them. Together with another rebellious Assin chief, Aputai now fled farther to the south, where he sought sanctuary with the Fante.
Although the Asante king’s army was quite capable of crushing the numerous but militarily inept Fante, Osei Bonsu again exercised extraordinary restraint, sending more royal diplomats to the offending Fante chief to demand the surrender of the fugitive chiefs and a pledge of good wishes toward Kumase. He even sent a handsome gift of gold, a glorious state silk umbrella, and fifteen slaves. Before the Fante chief could decide what to do, Aputai and his fellow fugitive fled even farther south into Fante territory. Osei Bonsu again sent royal messengers with gifts, and as before, they were killed and decapitated. Their heads, the mouths stuffed with feces, were placed on the path the Asante troops would have to take to invade Fante land. It was an insult of unimaginable magnitude.
By now thoroughly outraged, King Osei Bonsu ordered his army forward. As the Fante melted away, the fugitives fled to Cape Coast, where they next asked the British governor, one Colonel Torrane, for asylum. Magnanimously, Colonel Torrane (whose rank was an honorary title, not a military one) promised to protect the men, even against what he called “force of arms” but when he learned that a large Asante army was on the march, he became decidedly less sure of himself and sent a flag of truce to the Asante king. Although the British fort at Cape Castle was old, having been built in 1652 by Swedes, it was strongly constructed, with twelve cannon mounted behind high stone walls. Torrane, however, had only a score of white men to defend it and no confidence that the notoriously feckless Fante could defend themselves, much less help him. Despite their military weakness, Torrane’s Fante allies arrogantly refused to allow Torrane’s flag of truce to go forward, and the Asante attacked, scattering the Fante soldiers, who, according to a British observer, “fled like sheep.”2 Two thousand Fante refugees, many of them terrified women and children from nearby villages, were allowed into the fort, but thousands of others were overtaken by the Asantes and slaughtered on the beach. Many others huddled against the walls, hoping that the Asante soldiers would not dare to approach the fort’s deadly cannon and musket fire. They did dare, and although British fire killed them by the hundreds, the Asante slaughtered these refugees, too.
Furious that the white men were firing on his troops, the Asante commander ordered that the fort be taken. Twice the Asante charged to the fort’s main gate but were unable to batter it open. Despite horrific casualties (the British fired so often that the white men’s shoulders were painfully bruised), the Asante charged again, this time led by a man who carried a huge flaming torch. Near the gate he was shot dead. He fell on the torch, extinguishing it, and the attack failed.
When the Asante withdrew at sunset, they had fought against the British guns for six bloody hours. Several of the British defenders had fired their muskets three hundred times, and at such close range, it was almost impossible to miss. For fully one mile the beach was littered with thousands of Fante and Asante bodies, and the sand above the high-tide line was stained red. The Asante had attacked in such dense formations that every charge of grapeshot from British cannons had killed twenty or thirty men. King Osei Bonsu said that he lost three thousand men.3 Later, a shaken Colonel Torrane wrote that the Asante had “fought with a bravery not to be exceeded.”4
Following a brief truce, during which the Asante generously allowed the British to reinforce the fort by sea, Torrane sent soldiers to the Asante king under a flag of truce. Osei Bonsu received them courteously and sent them back to the fort along with messengers of his own. The king insisted that nothing could be settled until Torrane met him face-to-face. The Asante king further demanded that Torrane come to him, and Torrane meekly agreed. In order to impress the Asante king, Governor Torrane took it upon himself to seize the two Assin fugitive chiefs whom he had promised his protection and deliver them to Osei Bonsu. Somehow the remarkable Aputai managed to escape, but the other chief, named Chibu, was delivered to the Asante.
Dressed in their sweat-stained scarlet uniforms, Torrane and the handful of British officers who accompanied him to King Osei Bonsu’s camp were cowed by the size and grandeur of the Asante delegation. In a scene reminiscent of Bowdich’s reception in Kumase, Torrane was received by many guards, elegantly dressed in silk and ornamented with gold, who were seated under large umbrellas and attended by hundreds of servants. One of these men was a tall, athletic Arab officer from somewhere to the north of Timbuktu. His men fought with bows and arrows as well as muskets, and several of their arrows with barbed iron heads were found in the fort.5 Why he and his men were fighting beside the Asante is not known.
Although most of the British officers felt dishonored by Torrane’s treachery in handing over a man to whom he had promised sanctuary, Osei Bonsu was pleased, later saying to a British visitor, “From the hour Torrane delivered up Cheboo (Chibu), … I took the English for my friends, because I saw their object was trade only and they did not care for the people. Torrane was a man of sense, and he pleased me much.”6 As if to prove the king’s point, when Osei Bonsu demanded that all two thousand Fante refugees in the fort be handed over to him as slaves, Torrane did not refuse, as might have been expected of an Englishman whose country would ban the international trade in slaves only a few months later.Instead, Torrane bargained to be allowed to keep one thousand of these refugees for himself. The king agreed, and to the amazement and horror of the other British officers, Torrane did not protect these people. Instead, Torrane, who was in debt, sold them to a slave dealer, who shipped them to America. When John Swanzy, a member of the garrison that had fought so valiantly against the Asante, heard about this outrage, he angrily pulled himself out of a serious attack of malaria and sailed by canoe from Fort James at Accra (some one hundred kilometers away), where he had just become commander, to Cape Coast in an attempt to help the refugees. He arrived too late to do anything but save a handful ofpeople whose ship had not yet sailed and express his contempt for Torrane. Exhausted, Swanzy died a few days later.
Torrane’s actions were seen by the coastal people and the Asante alike as a British admission of Asante military supremacy. The British later learned that just before the truce was agreed upon, the Asante commander had issued orders for several thousand men to maintain musket fire on the fort’s defenders while several thousand more brought forward enough gunpowder to breach the fort’s gate. Had this attack been carried out, it almost certainly would have succeeded, something both the Asante and the British understood quite well.7 Nothing happened between 1807, the time of this battle, and 1817, when Bowdich arrived in Kumase, to alter the Asante conviction that they were the supreme military power in the Gold Coast.
Hoping that the British would now encourage the Fante to allow Asante traders to pass peacefully through their territory to the coast, Osei Bonsu withdrew his army from the coast. It had been a long campaign, there had been many casualties (especially those inflicted by British guns at Cape Coast), and many of the surviving soldiers were suffering from smallpox and dysentery. As soon as the Asante army was gone, the Fante once again denied Asante traders free access to the coast, and once again the British did not intervene to protect them. Four years later, in 1811, the king sent another army to the coast to punish the Fante, and after the by now predictably overwhelming victory, the Asante army withdrew. But the Fante restricted trade again and again the British stood by. In 1814 an even larger Asante army dealt the Fante an even more decisive defeat, scattering their army, destroying many villages, and leaving large areas depopulated. Even then the British traders took no steps to restrain their Fante allies or to provide the Asante with the friendship and trade they asked for. In neither of these campaigns did the Asante make any hostile gesture toward the British.
Late in 1816 Captain Sir James Yeo, the senior Royal Navy officer assigned to West Africa and a veteran of the War of 1812 against the United States, expressed his view of the situation in a report that the Admiralty took seriously enough to forward to the Colonial Office:
The people of the coast called Fantees have done everything in their power to prevent the Ashantees, natives of the interior, from having any communication with it [the coast]; as by excluding them from the trade, they act as brokers between the Ashantees and the European merchants. They are a vile, abandoned set of people who rob both one and the other; and what is more extraordinary, we have countenanced them in it, although it is both unjust to the Ashantees and in direct opposition to our commercial interests, as a free trade with the natives of the interior would be of great national importance, and which the King of the Ashantees is most anxious to establish.8
What Captain Yeo and others saw so clearly, the merchants of the African Company were now reluctantly forced to acknowledge as well. They knew that the Asante were preparing another invasion of the coast to devastate the Fante yet again, and perpetual war was decidedly bad for business. Ten years earlier, King Osei Bonsu had suggested to the merchants that they send one of their officers to the Asante capital as their resident representative. Not until ten years had passed and the British fear of a Dutch trade monopoly with the Asante had grown did the Bowdich mission to Kumase in 1817 set forth.
The Asante Army
The Asante army that devastated the Fante and could have taken the British fort at Cape Coast was large by any standard and was far larger than any of its West African opponents. Bowdich estimated its strength in full mobilization at 200,000, and this may not have been an overestimate.9 But even if its actual size were only half this, it was still larger than that of its most formidable foe, the kingdom of Dahomey to the east, whose women warriors—the so-called Amazons—would later so capture the fancy of European visitors, including Sir Richard Burton. The large size of the Asante army was only one reason for its military prowess, however, and not the most important one. Its great successes against other African armies came in part from its advantage in firearms, but more important was its remarkable organization and the exceptional discipline and bravery of its officers and men.
Because the availability of Asante gold enabled them to acquire large numbers of muskets before their northern neighbors could (they were farther from the coastal trading routes), the Asante were able to defeat them and make them tributary states. Part of this tribute would be paid in able-bodied male slaves to serve in the Asante army, helping to increase its size even further. In fact, although all officers in the army were metropolitan Asantes and the high-ranking commanders were usually aristocrats, the great majority of the common soldiers were slaves.10 Slaves not needed for the army or the Asante economy were traded to the coast for more muskets and gunpowder. Success in batde also heightened Asante esprit and confirmed the belief that bravery would bring victories, not to mention the spoils of war. Success bred arrogance, an attitude the Asante were well known for.
Much like the president of the United States, the Asante king was the commander in chief of the army, and it was for him to appoint its field commanders. But the decision to go to war lay with the inner council and the national assembly, much as it does with the U.S. Congress. The field commander and all of his high-ranking officers were much like feudatory lords in Europe. Most were aristocrats or royal leaders of large districts during peacetime but took prescribed roles in the national army in times of war. Though these leaders were referred to as chiefs by the British, the title understates their role and power. They were, more accurately, “priest-chiefs” (Obene Okomofo), whose stool gave them powers that were established equally by Asante law and religion. In many respects they closely resembled the lord lieutenants of an English county in their ability to retain the loyalty of men in their district, as well as the legal right to call them to war when needed. Unlike many African armies, the Asante did not call up men in regiments based on age or the date on which they were circumcised. In fact, the Asante did not practice circumcision at all, believing that the body should be kept intact, a belief that put them very much at odds with their Islamicized northern neighbors, many of whom would fight against them later in the century. The foundation of the Asante army was territorial: men from the same district owed allegiance to their leader.
Beginning early in the nineteenth century, the king maintained a small force of several hundred regular soldiers to serve as a kind of royal guards unit. Later in the century, other full-time guards units were established, and there was also a full-time medical corps, a drum company, and about one thousand regular war messengers, or couriers, whose ability rapidly to communicate information over a considerable distance in battle was vital.11 Like British bugle calls, Asante “talking drums” could convey certain kinds of standardized information over considerable distances. So too could traditional melodies played on elephant-tusk horns, but for complicated messages to be conveyed in the noise and confusion of battle, messengers were vital. The remainder of the army, and by far its largest part, consisted of slaves, retainers, or freemen owing obedience to their chief or district king, who had the right to summon them to war. These chiefs were given quotas to fill depending on the extent of the mobilization and the seasonal needs for agricultural labor or other activities. The largest of these quotas were given to the kings of Dwaben or Bekwai, either of which could easily mobilize over ten thousand men. These part-time soldiers were expected to own their own muskets and other weapons; the king was required to provide them with gunpowder and shot. Sometimes these locally raised armies marched directly to battle after assembling in their own districts and being joined by senior Asante commanders, but on those occasions when a major campaign had been ordered, they marched to Kumase where the entire army came together to prepare for war.
Chiefs or district kings who failed to respond to the Asante king’s request for soldiers risked royal displeasure that could easily take the extreme form of a punitive expedition against them. But it was not only fear that led to cooperation. A successful campaign could lead to great amounts of booty in the form of gold, guns, gunpowder, captives, and land. In principle all war booty belonged to the king, but he usually returned at least two thirds of it to his commanders, who in turn shared it with those loyal to them. For many powerful men war was the royal road to glory and riches. The victorious General Amankwatia III, for example, who had triumphed in 1803, was given the town of Sreso, seven miles from Kumase, with nearly all of its eight thousand inhabitants as his personal soldiers, slaves, or retainers. When he visited the court in Kumase, the flourish his horn players loudly trumpeted meant “no one dares trouble me.”12 Other generals had equally boastful airs. These men might fall out of favor and lose their wealth or be killed in batde, but there were always others eager to lead an army to glory and riches.
The organization and tactics of the Asante army on the march were highly standardized. Originally modeled after ants, who march in several columns before joining at the crucial moment, the army in a traditional fully-mobilized campaign was led by two or three thousand scouts (akwansrafo) who marched well in advance of the regular troops, often at night to avoid detection. Most of these scouts were professional hunters who, when detected, used their skill as marksmen to snipe at their enemy’s advanced forces, often from a perch high in a tree. To draw the enemy’s fire and force them to reveal their positions in the jungle foliage, they carried long wooden sticks with hooks on the end to shake trees as if someone were in them. Because it was considered unlucky for a scout to be killed, these men were not expected to become involved in any prolonged fighting. After exchanging a few shots with the enemy, the scouts typically withdrew through the next wave of troops, the advance guard (twafo).
When the forest was open enough to permit maneuvers, a condition common in the north of Kumase but rare in the south, this guard advanced in two or three long lines. After the men in the first line fired their muskets, the next line advanced through them while they reloaded. Then the rear line advanced, and the entire process was repeated or the advance was halted. No one was permitted to retreat. To assure that no one did, the advance guard was backed up by a line of trusted metropolitan Asante freemen known as sword bearers (afonasoato). Armed with hippopotamus-hide whips and heavy swords, these men flogged or slashed anyone who attempted to flee. The same practice, though not often publicized, was common in European armies during the nineteenth century and on both sides during the American Civil War. Behind the brave Confederate soldiers who charged to their deaths at Gettysburg were others with bayonets (they were called “file closers”) to make certain they did not change their minds. All of these armies understood the importance of making it as dangerous for its troops to retreat as it was for them to advance. Asante soldiers were taught to repeat this saying: “If I go forward, I die; if I flee, I die; better to go forward and die in the mouth of battle.”13
Behind these sword bearers would come the main body (adonten), which could consist of twenty thousand men or more. An equally large force marched on each flank with orders to surround the enemy. The commander of the army followed the main body, surrounded by his retainers and bodyguard. In each of these large forces, there were hundreds of men who were armed only with knives to dispatch the enemy’s wounded. Behind the main body marched many thousands of slaves who carried supplies on their heads and all manner of camp followers, including many women.14 Finally, there was a smaller rear guard (kyidom) that always faced the rear during an engagement in case the enemy attempted to encircle the army.15 Each of the flank units as well as the rear guard had its own senior commanders in addition to many lower-ranking officers. Men from the various Asante districts had traditional places in the flank units, the rear guard, or the main body that marched forward in every campaign. They understood the tactics necessary for them to succeed in battle. Of course, some battles did not develop as planned, and these formations became jumbled together.
Before marching toward battle, the fully mobilized army assembled in Kumase, where gunpowder and shot from the king’s apparently huge armory (no European is known actually to have seen it), located three miles outside of the city, were distributed to the men. Much of the gunpowder was of inferior quality, having been adulterated by European traders or damaged in transit, and their ammunition was inferior, too. Unlike contemporaneous European armies, whose men usually fired lead bullets that more or less fitted the bore of their muskets, the Asante typically fired an assortment of nails or slugs cut from the lead or iron bars that European traders sold to them. Their guns were six-foot-long muskets known as “Long Danes,” after the Danish traders who introduced them to the region. These heavy, flintlock weapons were often shoddily manufactured (many of them in Birmingham, England), but they could be deadly at short range.Difficult and time-consuming to reload (it took seven distinct movements and up to a minute to do so), rifles as long and heavy (nearly twenty pounds) as these were hardly ideal for jungle warfare.16 Yet they were the only firearms then available on the Gold Coast, and they were well cared for and lavishly decorated, often with patterns of red shells attached to the stocks. Very early in the nineteenth century some soldiers carried poisoned arrows and javelins, while officers and sword bearers carried heavy swords, but after 1807 these weapons were not used against the British. Horses were known to have survived in Kumase, but because they could not survive in the tsetse fly-infested forest zone to the south, there was no cavalry. Although high-ranking officers sometimes rode horses in Kumase with all the hauteur of a European guards officer, they did not ride to battle. Instead, they were carried in ornate hammocks.
On ceremonial occasions both officers and common soldiers were elaborately uniformed. In addition to the officers described by Bowdich (see chapter 1), these same British visitors to Kumase came upon hundreds of what appeared to be junior officers wearing leopard-skin tunics covered with cockleshells. Several small blue-handled knives in silver and gold sheaths were fastened to the front of their tunics, and similarly ornamented elephant-hide cartridge belts were worn around their waists. Each man carried a gold-handled sword in a scabbard behind his left shoulder, and half a dozen brighdy colored silk scarves and white horse’s tails streamed from their arms, which cradled their long Danish muskets, richly ornamented with gold and red shells. When Bowdich and his companions passed by these men, they then came upon thousands of soldiers who sat so closely together that the British visitors could not pass through them without stepping on their feet, “to which they were perfectly indifferent,” Bowdich wrote.17 Each man wore a cap made of anteater and leopard skin, carried a cluster of small knives on his shoulders and hips, and wore cartridge pouches embossed with red shells and brass bells. The stocks of their muskets were covered with leopard skin. Their faces and arms were painted with long white stripes. A few wore iron chain collars that signified their exceptional bravery in past batdes.Bowdich wrote that they were prouder of these collars “than of gold.”18
Once the army was on the march, they simplified their uniforms. The ordinary troops went barefoot; most wore only a cotton cloth tied around the waist like a girdle and carried gourds of gunpowder and pouches of shot as well as their weapons. Many officers and soldiers wore cotton shirts covered with Muslim amulets intended to ward off harm. Most of these men carried maize flour, dried beans, cassava, ground nuts, and other provisions in a large skin bag slung over the shoulder, but some had food carried for them by their younger brothers or unarmed slaves. When close to their enemy, they ate only maize meal mixed with water and ground nuts in order not to reveal their position by lighting fires.Consistent with their high social rank, officers were accompanied by slaves who carried their food; some of their wives accompanied them, too. High-ranking officers were carried in palanquins under vast umbrellas. Officers and men alike let their beards grow on the march, and soldiers let their hair grow as well, often tying it up in a dozen or so foot-long spikes. Specialists joined the march as well: priests with shrines to various gods, physicians, Muslim religious advisers, diplomats, and councillors. Of special importance were medical orderlies, who treated the wounded on the field or carried them to the rear and also carried away the dead. It was important to the Asante that their dead not fall into enemy hands where they would be decapitated, leaving their souls defiled. Throughout their wars of the entire nineteenth century, the British were amazed by the ability of the Asante to remove their dead despite being under devastating fire.
At an imposing ceremony conducted before an assemblage of as many of the men of the army as could congregate in Kumase’s marketplace, the king appointed a general to the command of the army by three times tapping him lightly on the head with a gold-handled sword, then handing it to him. As thousands watched, the general swore to return it encrusted with the blood of the king’s enemies.19 All Asante soldiers had already taken a sacred oath to the chief of their district pledging their obedience to him, and when the army was assembled in Kumase, these commanders in turn swore their obedience to the king. As members of the court and inner council looked on, each commander approached the king and in a solemn ceremony removed his golden sandals before he unsheathed a ceremonial sword, raised its point to the sky, then lowered it to the earth, and prostrated himself. The king placed his left foot on the commander’s head and declared, “If you ever become my enemy, may the gods slay you.” Rising and gesticulating with his sword, the commander then repeated the following oath: “I speak the forbidden name of Thursday, I mention the great forbidden name that if I do not help you to rule this nation; that if I ever bear false witness against you; that if I ever make war upon you; that if you summon me by night, if you summon me by day, and I do not come, then I have incurred the penalty of speaking the great forbidden word and of speaking the forbidden name of Thursday.”20 The penalty for breaking this oath was death. The king now thanked the general and shook his hand. Next, sandal bearers returned the golden sandals to the commander, who would no longer be required to walk barefoot like a slave, and there was joyous cheering, drumming and horn blowing.
One of these newly sworn commanders was a man named Apokoo, a descendant of one of the four original noble families that founded the state. Apokoo was so charming, courteous, and humorous that Bowdich was thoroughly taken by him during his visit to Kumase in 1817. His jokes were apparently as funny as they were frequent, because Bowdich commented on his excellent sense of humor. He owned many books in English, French, and Dutch, wanted to learn how to read and write, and even wanted Bowdich to teach him to box and play tennis, something the British visitors apparendy spoke about in Kumase. Apokoo was fascinated by British history, especially military campaigns, and could never hear Bowdich’s tales of the victorious British campaign in Spain often enough. He visited Bowdich almost daily and often invited him to dinner, occasions that the sensitive Englishman enjoyed. Yet Apokoo was first and foremost a general who had won many great victories, and he had reputation for ferocity in batde along with a taste for cruelty. His trademark was to order his prisoners’ arms cut off before telling them they were free to go. (Another general was famous for cutting off his prisoners’ legs before leaving them to die, and a third senior general killed his prisoners outright by crushing their skulls with rocks.)21
Very much like the British army they would so often confront, this was an army led by men of high social class and, often, of great wealth. The high-ranking commanders who led the Asante went to war with their stools—the embodiment of their honor, their entitlement to rule, the souls of their family and their ancestors—and these they publicly swore to defend with their lives. They were every bit as serious about this vow as their British adversaries were about swearing to die rather than allow their regimental or queen’s batde flags (colours, as they were called) to fall to their enemies. British annals of war attest to the sacrifices of many officers and men who gave up their lives to save these batde flags. The Asante felt every bit as strongly about their stools, and many commanders chose to die when their stools were imperiled.
Before finally leaving for batde, Asante officers repeated an oath that they would choose death over dishonor, and after several losing batdes Asante officers did kill themselves rather than live in shame after suffering defeat by the British.Others killed themselves rather than surrender. The common soldiers were usually astonishingly brave, but the Asante army sometimes suffered such severe reverses that these men broke from their disciplined formations despite the sword-wielding “military police” who tried to stop them. But Asante officers almost never fled. They stood by their stools and fought to the death or sometimes swallowed the poison they carried in small pouches or blew themselves up with gunpowder when defeat was unavoidable. One defeated officer tied heavy gold ornaments around his neck and dived into a river.22 Despite the common soldiers’ great bravery, it was the Asante officers who were the driving force behind the army. They were known as “pushers” (dompiato), because they literally drove their men from behind, exhorting their junior officers to push the slave soldiers forward to victory. The penalty for cowardice in batde was usually death, quickly inflicted by sword. Occasionally, a coward’s life might be spared in return for a large monetary payment, but such a man would be forced to wear women’s waist beads, his eyebrows were shaved off, his hair cut to signify cowardice, and his wife became legally available for seduction by anyone, without her disgraced husband having any right to claim damages.23
The most senior of the Asante officers usually remained well back from the actual combat though the batde sometimes engulfed them, and it was not unheard of for senior commanders to be killed. Usually, however, the commander sat serenely under his huge umbrella, surrounded by his retinue of priests, wives, and bodyguards. While his personal band provided lighthearted music, the commander played a board game with one dignitary or another to display his utter indifference to danger and his confidence in victory. As the batde progressed, the heads of slain enemies were brought to him to serve as footrests. The hearts of high-ranking enemies were cut out by priests and eaten by the king (if he accompanied the army, as he often did on major campaigns) or by senior officers in order to partake of the bravery the enemy had shown. After a victorious batde, the fingers, bones, and teeth of distinguished enemies would be worn as symbols of conquest.24
As brave and loyal as most Asante generals were, there were occasional exceptions. Several high-ranking officers were tried and executed for cowardice, and others were found guilty of stealing from the king.25 In 1817, for example, two generals were accused by other officers of selling prisoners as slaves for their private profit as well as stealing gold that also rightfully belonged to the king. One of these men, a senior commander, was dethroned from his stool, and all his gold, land, and slaves were confiscated along with twenty-nine of his thirty wives. He was publicly humiliated by having his legs shackled to a large log for three days.26
Before the army could march out of Kumase on a major campaign, every religious precaution was taken to assure its invincibility. At least twelve days of ritual preparation were needed before the army could be declared ready for war. Men were provided with new talismans, especially bits of paper inscribed with Koranic verses, or strips of cured flesh taken from brave enemies. Some of their weapons were loaded with potent magical materials thought capable of weakening their enemies, and numerous dramatic protective rituals were carried out. On the eve of one great battle, the king had the bones of his recently deceased mother and sister disinterred from the royal tomb of Bantama. After they were carefully washed in a mixture of rum and water, numerous executions were carried out, including those of some prominent men, to obtain the blood needed to wash these bones and assure victory in the coming war. After the bones had been immersed in human blood, they were cleaned and wrapped in silk, strings of gold, and other valuable cloths before being reburied.27
Most important of all, priests were required to determine the most propitious day for the army to march. The Asante calendar was marked by perhaps as many as two hundred “evil” days during the year when no serious government business could be undertaken and the army could not march or engage in combat unless attacked.28 Sunday was a particularly unlucky day for battle, but as events unfolded, several crucial British attacks against the Asante came on that day.September was the most favorable month for war, but few battles against the British took place during this month because it was the rainy season and the Europeans usually avoided battle during the rains.29
As the army made its preparations to march, women throughout metropolitan Asante stripped themselves naked, decorated their bodies with white clay, and marched through the streets beating drums. If they came upon a man who had failed to join the army, they beat him as well. They also sang songs of ridicule so wounding that war shirkers might be driven to suicide.30 While the army was away, these women, brandishing wooden swords and guns, danced war pantomimes in the main streets of their villages to assure the safety and success of the absent men. A European witness called these women “ferocious.”31 Some wives even followed their husbands to war, where they cooked for them and, during battle, provided them with water and reserves of powder. They also encouraged them by singing songs of heroism.
The army was also accompanied by carpenters to build shelters, blacksmiths to repair weapons, and sutlers to sell food and drink. There were even moneylenders who would lend men gold dust at high interest rates so that they could make purchases from the sutlers.32 There were also many thousands of slaves who carried supplies of all sorts from gin to gunpowder, with the value of the former being nearly as great as the latter. During battle these men waited behind the firing line, making a sound like the whistling of bullets by tapping the straw porter’s pillows they wore on their heads with their fingers. These sounds were so realistic that when some European captives passed by them in 1873, they ducked their heads in fear.33
When the ritual preparations had been completed and a propitious day was finally identified, the army left Kumase in narrow columns of men who slowly wound their way out of the city. The size of a fully mobilized Asante army is difficult to exaggerate, and its impression on onlookers must have been profound. The one that marched out of Kumase early in 1874 to meet the invading British troops began to march by the palace at 8 A.M. The last troops did not clear the city until eleven hours later, shortly after dark at 7 P.M. (This army was more than twice as large as the Confederate army Robert E. Lee had led north from Virginia to fight at Gettysburg ten years before. An even larger army had marched to the coast in 1806.) Once the army left Kumase, it typically split into several divisions that took different routes in order to deceive the enemy about its true destination and to avoid exhausting its food supplies.
As the army marched, bands played, their horns trumpeting the power and menace of one great man after another, and “talking” drums batted out standardized messages such as one that meant, “Tomorrow we shall kill you, very, very early in the morning.”34 The horns also played well-known flourishes. One went like this:
The hero loves a fight, The hero loves a, fight, You love a good fight, a good fight, Fighting is good, yes … Fighting is good, yes …35
In addition to these martial airs, there was good-natured bantering among the men, but discipline was ordinarily nearly as strict as it was in the tightly controlled British army. The army usually marched slowly with many halts. Some halts were made as a show of force in a tributary state, some because the rains were too heavy, and many because the day was not thought to be propitious for travel. When a large river had to be crossed, and there were many, canoes had to be found or bridges constructed by pounding four large forked tree trunks into the stream bed, placing beams along these forked pillars, then positioning cross-beams that were finally covered with four to six inches of dirt.36 Although the army seldom chose to move rapidly, it could move at great speed when called on to do so. European prisoners who marched with an Asante army unit in 1873 wrote that they were “able to march day after day at a quick, steady pace, with short intervals of rest, and a modicum of food. They lie down to sound sleep at night, after a light supper of corn, waking refreshed and strengthened to resume their way at sunrise.”37
Highway police maintained order along the line of march, cooking fires were prohibited when the enemy was nearby, and officers’ orders were obeyed at all times, even in the heat of battle. For example, during a battle in 1824, a British officer was wounded and lost consciousness. He suddenly regained consciousness when an Asante soldier began to cut his head off. Too weak to resist, he expected to die and was amazed when an Asante officer, whom he recognized as a man he had once done a small kindness while the man was on a trading mission to the coast, ordered the soldier to stop. Despite the heat of the moment, the man immediately obeyed the order. This was only one example of Asante discipline. In battle after battle, Asante troops marched in perfect order, their guns carried at exactly the same angle, before they turned toward the enemy and fired volleys on command, the only African army that was known to do so. A European army could hardly have been better drilled, as several British officers who saw them in action observed.
Sometimes weeks at a time were spent in huge encampments where the men slept on latticelike beds with backrests and carried out camp duties such as preparing food and maintaining their weapons with great care.38 One notable and puzzling failing was the lack of sanitation. The Asante were meticulous about disposing of human waste in their towns and villages, but the army on campaign did not dig latrines, and when it was camped in one area for any length of time, diseases such as dysentery and smallpox regularly took a huge toll of lives. Another problem was sexuality. The army might remain in a camp for weeks and even months at a time. Many officers and other men of high social rank had their wives with them, as did some of lesser rank, and they did not abstain from sexual relations at night, but most men had no women of their own, and most women in neighboring villages had either fled or were carefully guarded. Any female captives belonged to the king, who would later give them to deserving commanders, and ordinary soldiers were kept away from them on pain of death. As campaigns dragged on, tensions grew. The sounds of officers having sexual relations in their huts were not music to the ears of their sexually deprived soldiers.
As an Asante army neared its enemy, omens became especially important. If necessary, the Asante would spend days hidden in forest camps while they awaited more information, avoided “evil” days, or heeded the omens sent by dreams, flights of birds or beetles, and the advice offered by the Muslim and Asante diviners and prophets who always accompanied the army on campaign. Long before an Asante army neared its enemy, spies had usually provided its commanders with precise information about everything of military importance. These spies were sometimes in place so long that it was said that the Asante “cooked their wars” for years before they attacked the enemy.39 For example, well in advance of a planned campaign, some Asante traders who visited a potentially hostile kingdom would publicly criticize their king and complain about Asante life to the enemy, hoping to be seen as disaffected malcontents. To reinforce their charade, some married local women and settled down to farm. When they had learned all they could about the local terrain, its defenses, and the enemy’s army, they returned home to serve as guides for the Asante army.40
On his way to Kumase in 1816, Dutch envoy Huydecoper spent several days living in an Asante military camp. He said it was so large that a man could not walk all the way through it in a single day. While this immense army waited for orders from Kumase, the soldiers spent their time foraging for food, something they did so thoroughly that the surrounding area was soon plunged into famine. The officers had a well-developed interest in alcohol, especially the gin that Huydecoper carried with him in large quantities. A similar fondness for alcohol was shared by the dignitaries in Kumase. A large portion of the palace was used to store bottles of wine, and British visitors were served gin and brandy in such huge tumblers that they could do no more than sip while observing the Asante down theirs with no difficulty.41 It was with difficulty that Huydecoper was able to save any of his supply of gin to present to the king—or for himself as “solace” on the journey, as he put it.42 The camp was not disorderly, thanks partly to the use of elephanthide whips by the officers, but the soldiers sang a great deal and became boisterous at times. Even the otherwise austere officers allowed themselves some pleasure on propitious days. Huydecoper witnessed what he referred to as “general jollification” on a “good Sunday” (an Adae ceremony) when the officers danced to the music of drums, flutes, and horns all night and into the following midday.43
In battle the Asante were so brave that they were universally feared by other West African states and well respected by the British. They could also be brutal. They often killed women and children, and enemy chiefs were sometimes tortured to death, their bodies dismembered before being apportioned, much as an animal killed by a hunter would be. As evidence of Asante victory, the jaws of the slain enemies were taken back to Kumase where they were displayed in the palace.But sometimes they treated prisoners with kindness, as some British captives were to learn. They were also greatly concerned about their own dead and wounded. When possible, for example, they smoked the bodies of their own slain commanders over a slow fire to preserve them until they could be returned to their families for burial.44
Even when Asante military campaigns were successful, as most of them were, the army often suffered great losses from disease or starvation after the food resources of the conquered area had been exhausted. Nevertheless, the army’s return march to Kumase was typically conducted with great discipline. A starving army can easily become mutinous, particularly when so many of the soldiers were slaves taken from other ethnic groups, but the Asante commanders were able to maintain control. Even when a campaign had not been successful, it concluded with a rousing ceremony at the royal palace. The army camped outside Kumase until the time was propitious for it to receive the acclaim of the many thousands who gathered to honor it. When the soldiers marched into the city, they were preceded by their senior officers, who carried hundreds of jaws taken from their high-ranking enemies. On one occasion when the army returned with too few jaws to properly proclaim victory, jaws taken in earlier campaigns were smuggled to them from Kumase so that their entry would appear to be sufficiently triumphant.
When the troops entered the city, they marched through the marketplace, which was filled with not only many thousands of people but every important person in the court, including the king. The soldiers were dirty and disheveled, their hair tied up in long spikes and coils, their beards unkempt—even the officers were much the worse for wear—but they were received with great applause. They fired their muskets in salute to the king, then circled around and repeated the salute. A day of mourning followed, complete with fasting, while the inhabitants of Kumase painted their faces and upper bodies red to symbolize the blood that had been spilled. The following day, rum was available everywhere, as it was during the yam festival, and many people became quite drunk but not too inebriated to be enthralled by the human sacrifices that then took place to expiate the deaths of the great men who had died in battle. Many slaves were required to die for each of the fallen senior commanders.45 A kernel of corn representing every soldier who died was dropped into a large urn by each senior commander while the king looked on sadly, sometimes feeling a personal loss because among the dead were usually members of the aristocracy or even the royal family. He did not grieve for dead slaves, but he worried nonetheless because slave soldiers would have to be replaced, and heavy losses would invariably strengthen the power of those members of the inner council who regularly opposed the use of force as an instrument of state policy.
Britain and Asante: The Balance of Forces
As the Asante and the British marched toward battle, the Asante had a great advantage in numbers. The British were sometimes able to recruit African allies from coastal peoples, but these soldiers, however numerous, were rarely a match for the Asante in bravery or discipline. The Asante also had an advantage in jungle fighting where it was difficult for the British forces to see their enemy, much less use their usual infantry tactics, such as their famous square formation, or deploy their artillery effectively. Also, the Asante were relatively immune to the malaria that so quickly struck down all but a few Europeans.
British forces were reasonably secure in their stone forts, although not completely so as we have seen, and they were at a distinct advantage when combat took place in open country where they could deliver well-aimed musket fire at far longer range than the Asante could and were able to bring their cannon and rockets to bear long before the short-ranged Asante muskets could take a toll. These weapons would make the difference in a large battle in open terrain in 1826. As time passed, the British advantage in weapons became even more decisive. By 1853 the Enfield rifle, accurate up to eight hundred yards, was available to British troops, and in 1866 the .577-caliber Snider rifle (that strangely enough had been invented by a New York wine merchant) was adopted. It was this weapon, along with artillery, that gave them success in the great battles of 1874.46 When the final round of fighting took place in 1900, British forces had still more accurate and longer-ranged rifles, along with Maxim machine guns (like their precursors, the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns, also invented by Americans) and modern 75-mm artillery—weapons that with little modification were used throughout World War I to deadly effect. Most of the Asante were still armed with muzzle-loading, smooth-bore flintlock muskets.
But early in the nineteenth century when the Asante and British first clashed, their arms were relatively similar. Muskets were abundant, at least along the West African coast. The British sold guns along the coast as early as 1646, and in 1829 alone, British traders in West Africa sold 52,540 muskets and pistols and nearly two million pounds of gunpowder.47 The Dutch sold nearly as many guns and perhaps even more powder. In 1833 alone, the Asante placed an order for ten thousand guns with the Dutch.48 From 1870 to 1872, as the Asante prepared for impending war with the British, they purchased over eighteen thousand muskets and twenty-nine thousand kegs of gunpowder. The Asante problem was not the availability of guns and gunpowder but their poor quality.
Typically, the muskets sold to the Asante and other West Africans were shoddily made. Their stocks split easily, and their barrels were likely to burst, leading to the development of gun-repair shops operated by Asante blacksmiths to repair them. Most of the gunpowder was low in saltpeter, partly because it had been adulterated by European traders and partly because the Asante preferred weaker powder that was less likely to make the poorly made barrels of their guns explode.However, the low saltpeter content often reduced the explosive power of the powder so much that the Asante had to increase the amount they used in order to give their guns a range of even as much as forty or fifty yards. What is more, they had few bullets, relying instead on the much cheaper slugs of lead, pewter, or iron, but these had such limited penetrating power that they were only lethal at very close range.
European armies loaded their flintlock muskets in several stages. First, powder was poured down the barrel, then wadding was pushed down behind it with a ramrod; finally, a bullet that fit the barrel snugly was rammed in. Later in the century the wadding and the bullet were rammed down as a single unit. The high-quality muskets used by the British before the introduction of rifled barrels—the famous .75 caliber “Brown Bess”—had a deadly range of up to 150 yards. The Asante did not use wadding to compact the powder, nor did they have bullets that matched the size of their musket barrels. They simply poured a huge charge of powder down the barrel, then poured an assortment of lead slugs, nails, and even stones into the barrel. When they fired, this array of projectiles fanned out erratically. The first volley the Asante fired was typically the most deadly because their Dane guns had been carefully loaded before the battle. Reloading was often done by slaves, who hunched down in shelter trenches out of the line of fire and poured powder and shot down the gun barrels as rapidly as they could. The extra powder the Asante used typically caused such an enormous explosion that rather than risk bruising their shoulders, soldiers usually fired from the hip, more or less without aiming. The powerful recoil typically guaranteed that their fire would fly high over the heads of their enemies.
The inability of most Asante soldiers to deliver accurate fire was decisive in almost every battle. When British officers led trained West African or West Indian troops against the Asante, these men too sometimes fired wildly, and when they tried to rely on coastal allies like the Fante, disaster was a common result. But some of their West Indian regiments and virtually all British regiments were so thoroughly drilled in musketry that they fired as accurately as any troops in the world. In battle officers constantly reminded them to aim carefully and fire low. If Asante troops were drilled in musketry at all, there is no record of it. The closest example of target practice was recorded by the young princes of a tributary state who learned how to fire their muskets by using the nipples of young women as targets.49 In battle after battle, the British were stunned by the volume of fire that harmlessly tore through the leaves above their heads. The Asante did fire volleys on their officers’ command, but their marksmanship was dreadful.50
Another disadvantage for the Asante was their failure to purchase or manufacture bayonets. Bayonets were not needed against their weaker African opponents, but they could have made a crucial difference against the British. Time and again the British would save the day only by a bayonet charge. The ponderous Dane guns the Asante relied on usually took close to one minute to reload and could never be reloaded in less than thirty seconds. After the Asante fired a volley, they would usually be defenseless against a bayonet charge for a full minute. Lacking bayonets of their own, the Asante often fled. In most nineteenth century wars bayonets seldom played a major role in the outcome of battles, but the British valued them so much against the Asante that they issued a newly designed bayonet for their 1895 campaign. This weapon had a saw-toothed back for cutting jungle foliage and a broad, oval spear tip that resembled a canoe paddle and was capable of inflicting a huge wound.51 The Asante not only had no bayonets, they did not even use swords or knives in combat, although every man carried at least one knife, mostly to cut off the heads of fallen enemies.
Despite its remarkable discipline the Asante army was anything but uniform in its dress. Officers and men alike dressed quite idiosyncratically in the field. Some wore dramatic feathers, leopard skins, and buffalo horn caps, but others wore nothing but a kind of loincloth. Hair styles varied, too, from long spikes tied up like horns to shaggy braids. The slaves spoke dozens of different dialects of Akan and other West African languages. Some were devout Muslims, and some were teenagers, while others were in their forties. What they all shared was bravery and endurance. At the start of the century this was an offensive army. Its enemies did not attack the Asante; the Asante attacked them. Surprise was much to be desired, but with such large armies, it was rarely possible. Instead, the various units of the army slowly assembled, making ready for a grand assault that would attempt to envelop and crush their enemy. Often they would shout taunts and threats against their opponents for days before the final assault came. When it came, it was signaled by thousands of voices singing defiantly, accompanied by drums and horns. Suddenly there would be a deafening roar as thousands of muskets were fired. If the enemy withstood this fire long enough, the Asante flanking forces would eventually close in and there would be a charge. The Asante army was large, well disciplined, resourceful, and above all, brave. It was more than a match for any West African army, and early in the nineteenth century, fighting in the thick forest its men knew so well, it could also be a match for the British.