THE LARGE, MAGNIFICENTLY UNIFORMED ASANTE ARMY BOWDICH saw in Kumase in 1817 had just returned from another successful campaign against the Fante. As noted in chapter 1, the devastating military defeat the Asante inflicted on the Fante in 1807 did nothing to resolve the trade route dispute between the two states. The Fante had pledged allegiance to the Asante on several prior occasions, only to forget their oaths as soon as the Asante troops had withdrawn. When disease and hunger forced the Asante to leave the devastated Fante coastal area later in 1807, the Fante immediately boasted to all who would listen, particularly the British merchants, that they had forced the Asante to flee. Predictably, they again closed off the trade routes through their territory, forcing the Asante to trade with the more distant forts at Accra or Elmina. Determined to control trade even outside their kingdom, the Fante next besieged Accra, and although they could not take the fort, they succeeded in blocking Asante trade to the British and Danish ports there. The Asante king was given no choice but to yet again send an army to the coast where, after unexpectedly hard fighting, it drove the Fante and their allies away from Accra.
Despite the victory at Accra, the more direct trade roads through Fante itself to Cape Coast remained closed until 1814, when King Osei Bonsu again sent a large army to make war against the rearmed and defiant Fante. Led by an aggressive general named Amankwatia IV, the great-grandson of the original general Amankwatia, the Asante won a series of battles that led them close to the coastal forts of the British and Dutch. Amankwatia was under orders not to attack the European traders, but they were sufficiently alarmed by the approach of the Asante army to propose a peace treaty that for a brief period reopened coastal trade. It was after this war scare that the Dutch sent Huydecoper to Kumase, followed shortly after by the British expedition described by Bowdich. On behalf of the African Company of Merchants, Bowdich signed a treaty with King Osei Bonsu that guaranteed peace and free trade. The signing ceremony was conducted with the utmost gravity. Accompanied by the most important men in the realm, Osei Bonsu led the British negotiators to an inner square of the palace where some three hundred of his wives sat “in all the magnificence which a profusion of gold and silk could furnish.”1 After asking Bowdich and the other British officers to stand and swear on their swords that they had told the truth, the king’s councillors swore their oaths of agreement to the treaty on their gold-hiked swords before Osei Bonsu himself swore with the utmost solemnity that if he did not keep the treaty, God should kill him. He then declared that anyone violating the treaty would be punished with the utmost severity.2 For the Asante king, this treaty, like all treaties, was a sacred agreement that everything about his understanding of diplomacy made him feel lawfully bound to follow. For the British governor, John Hope Smith, the treaty was only a means of buying time. This treaty promised peace, but it actually set the stage for war against the British.
Not surprisingly, it was the Fante who precipitated the slide toward conflict. In 1818, one year after the Bowdich treaty had been signed, a rumor circulated along the coast that an Asante army had suffered a terrible defeat in the north and that King Osei Bonsu had died in battle. While the Fante were raucously celebrating this long-awaited event, Asante emissaries arrived at the coast with the unwelcome news that there had been a great Asante victory, not a defeat. They were greeted by the Fante with derision, denied drinking water, and even pelted with stones. When the infuriated diplomats moved on to Cape Coast to complain about their treatment, Governor Hope Smith refused to listen to them, even though the newly signed treaty clearly required him to defend Asante trade interests at the coast by taking action against this kind of mistreatment.3
In January 1819, while Osei Bonsu and his councillors were debating their best course of action, the first British official directly appointed to the Gold Coast by the British crown arrived at Cape Coast castle. Joseph Dupuis was to serve as the first British consul at Kumase, a position that was a clear threat to the authority of Hope Smith and the British merchants, who made no attempt to disguise their hostility to him. They were so determined to undermine Dupuis that they took every possible step to prevent him from traveling to Kumase. First, it seemed that supplies could not be assembled, then carriers could not be found, no translator was available, and finally the rains came. Dupuis also suffered several protracted bouts of malaria that further delayed his departure. Frustrated by the obstacles put in his way and furious about the interference with his royal authority, Dupuis freely expressed his contempt for the “servants of a mercantile board.”4 Dupuis’s keenly developed sense of self-importance did nothing to smooth relations with the merchants, and it would be twelve long months before he would finally begin his journey to Kumase.
In March 1819, while Dupuis was cooling his heels at Cape Coast, a high-ranking emissary from Osei Bonsu, bearing his golden sword of rank, arrived to ask for a meeting with Governor Smith, known to the king and his council as “Smitty.” In a mild and courteous manner the diplomat reminded Hope Smith of the Bowdich treaty provision that called for the king to seek redress from the governor in the event of any aggression against Asante traders by people living under British protection. He requested that the governor punish those responsible for the mistreatment of his messengers so that the king would not have to send a punitive expedition of his own. However, when this speech was translated by a man well-known to detest the Asante, it was given a menacing tone, and the merchants’ translator even fabricated an ultimatum to the effect that if nothing were done, the king would invade the coast in forty days. In fact, it was unlikely Smith was deceived by this translation because he actually knew the language well enough not to need a translator. Nevertheless, in his return message the governor not only refused to acceed to Osei Bonsu’s request, he sarcastically added that for all he cared, the king might come down to the coast “in forty days, or in twenty, or as soon as he thought proper.”5
For some time the king’s emissary remained at Cape Coast, terrified by the prospect of delivering this insulting reply to King Osei Bonsu. When the unfortunate man finally returned to Kumase with Hope Smith’s answer, Osei Bonsu refused to believe that the British governor had sent such an inflammatory message and ordered that the messenger be tortured to determine if he had told the truth. The torture apparently proved unsatisfactory, because in June the king sent another senior envoy to the coast to determine whether the first one had told the truth. He was dismissed by Hope Smith with the curt assurance that the message was correct.
The second envoy returned to Kumase with confirmation of Smith’s insult and, to make matters worse, reported that he had seen fortifications being constructed to defend Cape Coast in apparent anticipation of an Asante invasion. Osei Bonsu was bewildered and angered by this British treaty violation and troubled all the more because, although his armies were at war to the north, his inner council urged immediate war against the Fante and British. Despite their pressure he resisted precipitous action, insisting on sending yet another emissary to Cape Coast. It was a singular mission. This gold-sword messenger, a diplomat of the highest rank, reported to Hope Smith that the king denied having sent a menacing message to the governor and reaffirmed his sacred commitment to the treaty. He then added these authentically menacing points. The king, he said, could not make war against anyone with whom he had signed a treaty. He therefore sent back the treaty, the “book” as he called it, and asked frankly whether Hope Smith wanted peace or war. If peace, he demanded satisfaction for past insults. If war, then the treaty should be abrogated by the British so that he would be free to attack, no longer restrained by the principles stated by the treaty he had signed and considered binding.
Now properly alarmed, Governor Smith stalled for time, and before war could explode, Dupuis finally found his way to Kumase, carrying among other gifts one hundred kegs of gunpowder, one hundred muskets, and one hundred large kegs of rum.6 Thoroughly in agreement with Asante demands, Dupuis rewrote Bowdich’s treaty to make it more favorable to the Asante and ingratiated himself with Osei Bonsu and his court, with whom he got along famously. The king was in particularly good spirits because his two-year-long war against the rebellious district of Gyaman to the north had just been brought to a triumphant conclusion. Osei Bonsu had personally led an army of perhaps eighty thousand men against Gyaman. Many thousands of rebels were killed, twenty thousand war captives were taken to Kumase as slaves, and enormous amounts of gold were seized. Osei Bonsu used some of it to make a cast of the dead king of Gyaman’s head.
Dupuis’s treaty explicitly stated that all of Fante land belonged to the Asante Empire by right of prior conquest, a fine point that delighted Osei Bonsu. Unlike Bowdich, who was in such a hurry to get away from Kumase that he left in the middle of the night, became lost in the forest, and very nearly died, Dupuis found himself much in sympathy with the Asante point of view and came very close to championing their cause. He left Kumase not because he was unhappy with the king, although he did find the city squalid, but because he needed to have his treaty ratified. When he left, Osei Bonsu gave him two young leopards in a cage and fifty Asante children. Dupuis accepted the leopards (which the British called tigers) but politely declined the gift of children.
When Dupuis arrived at Cape Coast after a hurried journey, he discovered to his surprise and great distress that Governor Hope Smith and his council of merchants flatly refused to ratify this new treaty, even though it had been negotiated by an appointee of the crown. That was only one of the rebuffs Dupuis encountered. He had returned to the coast with several high-level Asante ambassadors, whom he had invited to accompany him to England for the formal treaty ratification. He had also invited them to present themselves to King George and deliver gifts to him from King Osei Bonsu. The Asante government was delighted by the opportunity to establish direct relations with the British sovereign, and had such a meeting taken place, it might well have opened the door to a lasting peace. But to Dupuis’s horror and outrage, neither Governor Smith nor the British naval officer in command at Cape Coast would hear of any such mission, and Dupuis was forced to sail by himself, leaving the embittered Asante ambassadors and their gifts behind, an insult that greatly strengthened the hand of the war party in Kumase.7
The British merchants had clearly overstepped themselves. No sooner had Dupuis returned to London than the British Parliament passed a bill abolishing the African Company of Merchants and transferring all its assets to the crown under the control of Sir Charles MacCarthy, the former governor of Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, this change in governance would not improve British-Asante relations. Sir Charles would soon lead his forces into an embarrassing defeat in which the British would lose prestige and he would lose his head.
MacCarthy arrived at Cape Coast in March of 1822 to a gala reception by the local people grandly accompanied by a royal salute fired from the fort. Sir Charles had been a competent governor in Sierra Leone, and before leaving London to take up his new duties, he had met with Dupuis, who did everything he could to impress upon him the urgency of creating friendly relations with the Asante. But once MacCarthy settled in at Cape Coast, what he heard from the Fante and the merchants who still remained there was decidedly at odds with Dupuis’s views. MacCarthy quickly came around to the local opinion that the Asante were untrustworthy, bloodthirsty savages whose power had to be destroyed as soon as possible. Without even sending a courtesy message to King Osei Bonsu informing him that he had succeeded Hope Smith as governor, much less the gifts that custom required, MacCarthy prepared for war.
While Osei Bonsu attempted to restrain the more bellicose members of his inner council, MacCarthy sent a clear signal of his own intentions. He began to fortify Cape Coast, convinced Accra to stop selling powder to the Asante, and began a troop buildup. He was soon able to assemble three companies of British army troops and also had available three companies of the 2nd West India Regiment, former African slaves led by British officers. In addition to these regular troops he began to recruit and arm an African militia officered by some of the British merchants.
Faced with this dramatic evidence of British hostility, Osei Bonsu could hardly have held out much hope for peace, but he nevertheless continued to take extraordinary steps to avoid war, until an unforeseen event overtook him. In May 1822 an African sergeant stationed near Cape Coast quarrelled with an Asante trader so vehemently that he hurled verbal abuse at the Asante king, a capital crime under Asante law. Sometime later, a small detachment of Asante troops captured the sergeant and took him fifteen miles inland to a village friendly to the Asante. Still searching for peace, Osei Bonsu granted a pardon to the man, but members of the war party in his inner council issued orders for his execution, apparently without Osei Bonsu’s knowledge.8 When Governor MacCarthy learned of the execution, he led a force of British regulars and militia to attack the Asante who remained in the village where the execution had taken place. Whether due to treachery, fear of the Asante, or simple ignorance, their guide led the British force away from the village and into a well-prepared ambush. The British troops were forced to retreat with ten dead, thirty-nine wounded, and nothing accomplished.
Even after this armed clash, which he had not ordered, King Osei Bonsu sent out another appeal for peace by offering to negotiate all differences between the Asante and the British. His offer was contemptuously rejected. Only then, in June 1823, did the king allow his army to advance toward the British along several routes. For reasons that remain unclear, their progress was unusually slow, and they did not actually threaten the British at Cape Coast until early January 1824. Governor MacCarthy responded to the Asante advance by dividing his regular troops and now well-armed militia into two columns that marched toward the Asante. Unfortunately for the British, Sir Charles ordered the columns to march so widely separated from one another that they could not possibly coordinate their actions. Then, in a decision that would prove to be even less wise, he personally led a small force of five hundred men detached from his larger column of two thousand five hundred men directly into the main Asante battle force of between ten thousand and twenty thousand men commanded by the redoubtable veteran Amankwatia. Against this powerful army Sir Charles mustered a handful of British army officers all wearing scarlet and white dress uniforms, a regimental brass band, two hundred fifty semitrained Fante militia led by some of the British traders (also in scarlet uniforms), and an equal number of completely undisciplined Fante under their own chiefs, the most senior of whom was so feeble that he had to be carried the entire way. Each man carried only twenty rounds of ammunition, although they were followed by carriers bringing more.
After marching through driving rain and mud, Sir Charles camped on the banks of a small tributary of the river Pra, where he was joined by his chief of staff, Major H. J. Ricketts, and a few men who had marched all night through mud that was often waist deep. Ricketts expressed concern about the exhaustion of the troops and their small numbers, but Sir Charles was sublimely confident, saying that “he was determined to see how the Ashantees liked our balls.”9(Presumably he was referring to musket balls.) The next day the Asante could be heard moving toward them through the dense forest with drums pounding and elephant horns blaring. MacCarthy’s splendid scarlet uniform was splattered with mud, but as a very stout man who stood well over six feet tall even without his plumed hat, he was still an imposing figure. As the Asante came closer, Sir Charles ordered his own brass band to play “God Save the King,” and they loudly set themselves to it while he stood at attention. He was under the singularly misguided impression that many of the Asante were eager to surrender to him. To the surprise of no one except Sir Charles, none did, and their drums and horns sounded even more loudly in reply. After several exchanges of martial music with each side attempting to drown out the other, the Asante tired of the musical prelude and unceremoniously opened fire.
Luckily for MacCarthy and his men, the Asante were separated from the British force by a sixty-foot-wide stream that was in flood. The Asante attempted to cross it by felling trees to use as bridges, but leaving themselves completely exposed, they were repeatedly shot down. However, after an hour or so of firing, the British were virtually out of ammunition. Sir Charles had earlier sent for the reserve supply that should have long since arrived. Now quite alarmed by his situation, he was delighted by the arrival of a man named Brandon, who was in command of the ammunition carriers. His joy soon vanished. Unused to the tricks of West African warfare, Brandon had not driven on his Fante carriers from the rear; he had dashed on ahead of them with a couple of men and a few cases of ammunition. Once free of Brandon, the remaining Fante promptly set down their loads and fled. Sir Charles was so appalled that he threatened to have Brandon hanged, but there was no time to waste in hanging poor Brandon; some men were sent back after the abandoned ammunition while others tore open the four cases Brandon had delivered. The ammunition from the first case was distributed while the other cases were being opened. In what was an unforgettably absurd moment, the cases were found to contain not bullets but macaroni.
By now the river had subsided somewhat, and this, combined with the slackened British fire, allowed groups of Asante to cross over. Most of the armed Fante promptly fled, but other groups of MacCarthy’s men fought with bayonets, knives, and clubbed muskets. Despite the desperate fighting the battle was quickly over. Taking advantage of the deep underbrush, Major Ricketts and a few of the men were able to escape, but the other British officers were killed or captured, and except for Williams, the colonial secretary (mentioned in chapter 2), who was saved by an Asante officer who knew him, all were beheaded. MacCarthy, or “Mankato” as his name was mispronounced by the Asante, could not have impressed anyone by his leadership in taking such a small force against an Asante army; but he had fought with great courage and, badly wounded, had shot himself rather than be taken alive. In respect for his bravery, after beheading him, Asante commanders cut his heart out and ate it.10
In all, 9 British officers were killed along with 178 men. Three officers and 89 men were wounded, some later to die. How many prisoners were taken is not known. Williams was held for some months but then released in reasonably good health despite the well-meant efforts of Asante doctors to extract a bullet from his thigh by squeezing it out with ligatures tied around the leg, one above and one below the wound. The procedure was as excruciating as it was unsuccessful.Another officer named Raydon was killed on the return march because he could not keep up. A merchant named Jones, who was serving as an officer of the Fante militia was also captured after suffering five wounds. The Asante believed that anyone with five wounds was so defiled that he endangered others and must be sacrificed, and he was.11 A few weeks later, another large British force, including white troops supported by native militia, fought to a standoff against the same Asante army. On the British side 176 men were killed and 677 wounded. Two white soldiers were known to have been taken prisoner. It seems that three British soldiers had made off with enough rum to make themselves almost insensible when Asante troops found them in the bush. One man drunkenly charged at the Asante with his bayonet and was decapitated. The other two were taken to Kumase where they were well treated by the king. One died of disease after a year. The other, a private named Riley of the Royal African Corps, was released in good health after four years of captivity and returned to Britain.12 It is not known why these men were taken prisoner instead of being killed or why there was no demand for ransom.
After this battle, the main British forces, complete with their regular troops, withdrew to the coast, and the Asante army made no attempt to interfere. Their inaction was probably due to the death of Osei Bonsu. For many years historians had delighted in reporting the delicious historical irony that he had died on the same day as Governor MacCarthy, but it now seems almost certain that he died sometime earlier.13 Probably not yet fifty when he died, Osei Bonsu had devoted his reign to peace. The Europeans who came to know him praised the king for his honorable character and his good intentions toward the British. Even some of the British merchants eventually came to respect him highly. John Swanzy, who fought in battles against Asante troops, expressed this opinion before a select committee of the House of Commons: “I think, of all the native sovereigns of Africa that I have either read or heard of, he is the man most likely to act with good faith.”14
With Osei Bonsu’s death the long-frustrated war faction of the inner council succeeded in electing his younger brother to the Golden Stool. There were other possible successors but none as warlike or hostile to the British as Osei Yaw, also known as Okotu (orange) because of the light color of his skin.15 One of his first proclamations was that he would use the blood of the British to “water” (consecrate) the grave of his brother.16 By the time Osei Yaw had been “enstooled” in Kumase, the surviving British forces had retreated to the protection of the cannon and the stone walls of Cape Coast castle. It was fortunate for them that they did so, because no sooner had Osei Yaw taken power than he marched south with a large new army to join General Amankwatia’s smaller force, which was still in the coastal region. The combined forces, now under direct command of the new king, numbered nearly thirty thousand men.
Demonstrating immediately how different he was from his peace-loving late brother, Osei Yaw sent a messenger to the fort advising the British to build the fort’s walls higher and take every available cannon and man from the warships off the coast because he, King Osei Yaw, would soon throw every stone from the fort into the sea.17 For three nerve-wracking weeks the British forces strengthened their defenses while the Asante army made menacing feints toward Cape Coast.From the fort, smoke from their fires could be seen rising along a line three miles in length, and for two days Asante troops maneuvered grandly just out of range of the fort’s guns. The following night Osei Yaw planned to burn the town that lay just outside the fort’s walls and in the ensuing confusion storm the fort in the darkness. The plan was betrayed to the British, who preemptively burned the town to the ground during the day.18 Thwarted, the Asante attempted a weak frontal attack against the town, which was broken off after a stray British cannonball grazed the palanquin in which the king was being carried. Thoroughly intimidated by this evidence of the British ability to locate him despite the thick jungle foliage, the suddenly timid new king ordered his army to return to Kumase. Despite a worrisome outbreak of smallpox among the soldiers, his officers protested this order, and a high-ranking woman member of the royal family sent Osei Yaw a musical instrument, one played only by women, with the message that in exchange for his sword, which he had dishonored, she was giving him a more appropriate implement.19 This ridicule was too much for the new king, who agreed to continue the campaign until the countryside was completely destroyed, and his army ravaged Fante villages until late in 1824, when disease and hunger again forced the Asante army to withdraw to Kumase.
After a year of peace, the still-combative Osei Yaw again mobilized his army in December 1825. He was determined to punish his former Accra allies, who had been turned against him by Governor MacCarthy. Following the traditional religious preparations he ordered his army south in early January 1826. Once again he took personal command. For seven months he devastated the countryside, meeting no serious opposition. His losses were principally to disease, and he made these up by enlisting the aid of soldiers from the Akim and Assin people, groups whose loyalty was split between the Asante and a newly forged British alliance of coastal peoples. Early in August, his army was camped at Katamanso, just south of a village named Dodowa, a little more than twenty miles north of the seaport of Accra, the target of his campaign. He planned to attack his British-led African enemies on the following Monday, a propitious day for the Asante to give battle—as his opponents knew, and they prepared their defenses accordingly. The day may have been lucky, but the circumstances were hardly ideal for the Asante king. He also chose to attack with only a part of his army. Perhaps not over ten thousand men joined in the attack. His men would be outnumbered by the British force, although some of latter were Akim or Assin soldiers of unknown loyalty. The terrain also favored the British alliance. It was open grassland, and the Asante king’s men would be exposed to British cannon fire long before they could charge into their ranks. To the king’s advantage was the disciplined courage of his men; how well the British coalition would stand against them was uncertain, but experience must have convinced the king that they would not stand very well at all.
The British-led force of over eleven thousand men consisted of Africans from several tribes, including a contingent of Fante. Sixty British officers and noncommissioned officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Purdon coordinated the defense.Two years earlier the British government had sent three hundred British soldiers to Governor MacCarthy, but their susceptibility to disease proved to be devastating. (The first company of one hundred British troops arrived at Cape Coast in April 1823; eight months later only one man was still alive. The second company of one hundred men arrived in November 1823; one year later only eight men were alive. Most of the third company died within three months! During the same period fifteen white officers also died of disease. Forty-two wives and sixty-seven children accompanied the men, and they died in similar numbers.)20 The British government was understandably reluctant to commit more white soldiers or their families to Gold Coast graves. As a result, Colonel Purdon had to depend on the ability of his British officers to train African militia to defend the coastal populations. One of these officers was the same Major Ricketts who had survived the wounds he suffered in the MacCarthy battle to return to the Gold Coast.
Throughout the preceding seven months, while the Asante army was rampaging through the coastal countryside, Purdon and his officers were frantically recruiting, arming, and training men from their African allies. By August Purdon had a reasonably well armed force that, for the moment at least, appeared willing to fight. In addition to the African soldiers’ muskets and knives, Colonel Purdon had several cannon and an ample supply of the newly invented Congreve rockets.He also had excellent intelligence about the movements of the Asante, who were uncharacteristically open about their intentions. Purdon took up a defensive position some eight miles south of Dodowa on an open plain. If the Asante meant to attack, as Asante prisoners said would soon happen, they would have to charge across flat and open grasslands. Purdon positioned his men along a line that stretched over four miles. His best trained militia were in the center, backed up by British officers and sixty Royal Marines who had just disembarked with their own artillery and rockets. Large tribal contingents were on each flank under the command of their kings.
It was a colorful army by any standard. Each contingent camped under the battle flag of the European nation to which it felt allegiance: many British, Dutch, and Danish flags waved in the slight breeze. Each man wore white sea shells or a strip of white calico to distinguish himself from the Asante; some tied the calico to the barrels of their muskets. There was much singing, dancing, and drumming, but there was still no certainty that this coalition would stand and fight. The Asante army was in position by Sunday, but on that day everyone knew they would never attack. Hoping that the Asante king would not outflank him tomorrow and that the kings of his coalition would not decamp overnight (something that would almost certainly have occurred if the squabbling kings had been given another day to quarrel among themselves), Colonel Purdon waited for Monday morning to arrive.
He need not have worried about being outflanked. King Osei Yaw’s scouts had informed him that the strongest African coalition forces were in the center, reinforced by the British officers and marines. He decided that his honor called for him to attack the center because it was the strongest part of the British line. He rejected the urgings of his advance guard’s commander, Yaw Opense, to attack at night under torchlight, insisting instead that he would defiantly show himself to his enemies in the morning light. He also asked his commanders to give up their hammocks and lead from the front rather than push from the rear, an altogether unconventional idea. But then, this would be an unconventional battle. After his men painted their bodies with white stripes, the attack came on Monday morning, at the gentlemanly hour of 9:30 A.M. The Asante moved forward in disciplined ranks, also waving British, Dutch, and Danish flags along with many others of their own design. With drums pounding and horns playing, the Asante charged through heavy cannon fire toward the British center. Many men fell before the front rank drew near enough to kneel and fire a return volley. The British forces returned fire, and before either side could reload their long muzzle-loading muskets, the two shouting and screaming armies were tangled up together in a savage hand-to-hand knife fight that lasted for over two hours. The British militia fought courageously but were being forced back when the British left and right flanks overcame initial defeats and began to drive the Asante flanks back.
Despite these reverses miles away on either flank, the Asante troops in the center appeared to be on the verge of victory. The situation was so serious that several of the African kings made plans to blow themselves up, and one British officer prepared to blow up his gunpowder to keep it out of Asante hands. At this critical point in the battle, Colonel Purdon ordered his Congreve rockets into use and dozens of these new weapons began to arch deafeningly through the sky trailing red sparks and smoke before they landed with tremendous explosions that sent jagged shards of metal in all directions. The Asante might have stood their ground despite the terrible wounds the rockets’ fragments produced, but the red flashes followed by the sound of explosions convinced them that the British had called down the force of nature’s thunder and lightning against them. This was too much.21 Slowly, and in reasonably good order, the Asante center fell back.
As the British-led African militia pursued, they ripped open the bellies of wounded Asante and tore out their hearts. They also clubbed their own wounded to death to end their suffering. As it became obvious that the battle was lost, several Asante commanders ignited kegs of gunpowder and blew themselves up, in one instance slightly wounding some nearby British officers. The once faint-of-heart king, Osei Yaw, had been in the thick of the battle, and suffering from seven wounds, he was sitting quietly, preparing to die, because in the confusion of the retreat, the man responsible for guarding his stool had lost it. Several brave Asante officers dashed back into the thick of the battle and returned with it in triumph. Despite his wounds the king would survive the battle.
The Asante rear guard now moved up to protect the army’s retreat, but the British-led forces were far more interested in collecting the spoils of war than they were in pursuing the still-dangerous Asante. About two million dollars worth of gold, including one nugget weighing twenty thousand ounces, and other valuables were gathered up along with many prisoners.22 By now the long, dry grass was on fire, and although it is impossible to recapture the scene of the battle or its sounds adequately, Ricketts recalled the day this way: “the explosion of Asante captains, who at intervals blew themselves up in despair, which was known by the smoke that arose over the trees; the shouts and groans of the combatants, with the burning grass, and the battle raging all around, formed no bad idea of the infernal regions.”23
At around one in the afternoon, the severed heads of prominent and even royal Asantes were brought into the British camp. A great stir was caused when what was thought to be the skull of Sir Charles MacCarthy was discovered. Carried in a leopard-skin cover, the skull was wrapped in paper covered with Arabic characters and a silk cloth. Ricketts reported that before the battle King Osei Yaw had poured rum on it and invoked it to cause all the heads of the whites to lie beside it on the battlefield. Delighted to have recovered MacCarthy’s skull, Lieutenant Colonel Purdon had it sent to England. Embarrassingly, the skull proved not to be that of Sir Charles MacCarthy at all, but that of the late King Osei Bonsu. His younger brother had taken it into battle with him in the hope that it would offset the effect of an omen that had warned the king not to launch the campaign.24 All that night the wails of Asante women searching for the bodies of their loved ones could be heard in the British camp.25
Probably because they fought in front of their men instead of in the rear, at least seventy Asante divisional commanders and princes were killed or committed suicide. Several thousand Asante soldiers died with them, and many others, like the king, had grievous wounds. Despite these dreadful losses the army retreated in order, ferrying its men across the flooded Pra River without incident. There were many reasons for the Asante defeat. Their army was outnumbered by men with better arms, and they attacked the strength of the British line. The British rockets were a terrifying and deadly weapon that they did not understand. Also, smoke from the grass fires and the musketry was so thick that one of the two divisions of the Asante center mistook the other for the enemy and fired on it throughout the battle. Their Akin and Assim allies also fled at the first sign of fighting, leaving the Asante left flank vulnerable. Not least important, the British-trained African militia fought with unexpected resolve. It was a humiliating loss for Osei Yaw, especially because as a result of the defeat, he was forced to renounce his sovereignty over six southern states, including his most detested enemy, the Fante.
Though it was clear that Osei Yaw had lost an important battle at Katamanso, Asante military power had not been seriously compromised. As the new British governor, Sir Neil Campbell, wrote after visiting the battleground and talking to some of the officers who took part in it, the extent of the Asante defeat had been “grossly exaggerated.” In his view, despite the size and stalwart defense of the British-led coalition forces, the Asante had “repulsed” them and were on the verge of victory; only the rocket fire saved the day.26 Sir Neil also chided the British officers and the kings of the alliance for allowing their African allies to cut open the chests of the dead and wounded Asante to eat their hearts. The well-intentioned new governor had much to learn about warfare on the Gold Coast.
Not everyone in Kumase was as willing to minimize the Asante defeat as Sir Neil did. So many men and women of influence in Kumase were openly hostile to him that Osei Yaw stayed out of the city and had to arrange to have many of his enemies killed. Believing that Muslim clerics had used magic to ensure his defeat, the king had many of these men arrested, and he banned all Muslims from entering the palace, a step that did much to destroy their influence with the court.27Even so, he could not avoid an impeachment contest, and Kwadwo Adusei, a leader of the peace faction in the inner council, began proceedings to have the king removed from his stool. Osei Yaw responded by accusing Kwadwo Adusei of a series of offenses from giving bad advice on strategy to outright treason. After a long and divisive contest Kwadwo Adusei was found guilty and was humiliatingly executed by being pounded to death in a mortar by an elephant’s tusk.28
But in the political maneuvering that led to the king’s exoneration and the execution of his main adversary, Osei Yaw was forced to make major concessions to the peace faction. In addition to agreeing not to launch any more military expeditions to the south, he even authorized a diplomat to approach the British about peace terms. The envoy wore a monkey-skin cap bearing a five-inch by two-inch gold plate on which gold weighing scales were beautifully etched. As he approached the British governor, he laid the cap at his feet as a symbol of submission to the king of England.29 Even though the Asante king offered an apology and reparations, the coastal chiefs and kings remained skeptical.
Nevertheless, after extensive negotiations a draft of a treaty was formulated, and the Asante peace mission that had taken it to the coast returned to Kumase to be received by two hundred thirty senior chiefs. The treaty called for the king to renounce all warlike acts against the south, as well as the right to tribute from the maritime states under British protection. The king was required to deliver to the British governor four thousand ounces of gold and two members of the royal family as hostages to guarantee the treaty. In return the British guaranteed to restrain the coastal states from all acts of aggression against the Asante state and its traders. The Asante government was disposed to accept the terms of this treaty, but before all of its terms could be worked out, various chiefs of the British protectorate attacked and blockaded Elmina, the Dutch coastal station where the Asante had traditionally conducted trade. When the British could do nothing to lift the blockade, the treaty was left unsigned. In a series of meetings with British envoys in metropolitan Asante in 1828, Osei Yaw made it plain that he did not believe the British were negotiating in good faith. He emphasized his desire for peace but declared that the next move must come from the British.30
That move was taken in 1829—the same year that Sir Robert Peel introduced “bobbies” to cope with London’s crime—when the British government, frustrated by the futility of its efforts to rule the Gold Coast, gave the administration of the area back to the merchants. The first president of the newly formed merchants’ council did nothing even to attempt a peace settlement and was asked to step down from his office. Nothing further happened until February 1830, when Captain George Maclean of the Royal African Colonial Corps became the second president of the newly established merchant council in Cape Coast. Unlike his predecessors, Governor Maclean immediately opened negotiations with Osei Yaw, while he used everything in his power—which at that time consisted more of the force of his personality than military assets—to intimidate the Fante. While Charles Darwin sailed along the coast of South America in the Beagle, a treaty consisting of the same terms proposed two years earlier was signed in 1831. Maclean would not change the world the way Darwin did, but he would change the Gold Coast, giving it sixteen years of welcome peace and free trade.
Maclean is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of British colonial relations in Africa. He ruled at a time when the British government had almost no interest in the Gold Coast. He possessed a pitifully small police force of one hundred twenty men to control all of the maritime people of the Gold Coast, and yet he managed to control them with what very soon amounted to absolute authority. He was not only the ultimate policeman, but without any official judicial authority, he quickly became the judge to whom everyone brought the most difficult cases. Known for his scrupulous impartiality, his judgments were obeyed. He was patient, courteous, and wise, the rare British official of that time who actually respected and liked Africans. He was also utterly fearless, often facing down truculent opponents at great risk to his own life. When one local chief defied him, Maclean led his one hundred twenty policemen on all-night marches to surround the offending village. Just before dawn broke, the sleeping offenders were easily taken into custody. Without legal authority over the peoples of the Gold Coast because no official protectorate had been declared by the British government, Maclean nevertheless established his authority over a large and populous area along the coast, and his positive influence was felt throughout the inland area controlled by the Asante and their tributary states. So grateful were the Asante for Maclean’s ability to enforce peace that they gave him a nickname that meant “the white man in whose time all slept soundly.”31 The king was so grateful to Maclean for protecting Asante trade interests that he regularly prayed and conducted sacrifices to assure his good health.32 His good health lasted until 1847 when he died of dysentery.
His remarkable successes on the Gold Coast notwithstanding, Maclean was vilified in some circles in England because his wife, a well-liked poet, died suddenly only a few months after joining him at Cape Coast castle. It was rumored that she committed suicide due to his mistreatment of her or his philandering with African women. A British merchant who was there when she died disputes this, insisting that she was perfectly happy the evening before she died and that she died of a congenital heart defect for which she was taking medication.33
Osei Yaw died in 1834 and was succeeded by his nephew, Kwaku Dua I. As much as Maclean was respected in Kumase, he was not the only representative of a European power to receive a favorable hearing there. The Dutch had always been sympathetic to Asante interests, and in 1836 they became so impressed by the success Britain had achieved in recruiting West Indians into their army that they decided to emulate them by recruiting Asante men into the Dutch Army to serve in Dutch colonial possessions in the East Indies.34 They asked King Kwaku Dua I to receive a high-ranking emissary, Major General Jan Vermeer, who hoped to establish a permanent army recruiting station in Kumase. In return General Vermeer would promise the delivery of firearms. The request was accepted, and Vermeer arrived in Kumase in January 1837 with one thousand men and a military brass band. He reported that he was greeted by a crowd of sixty-seven thousand people, a suspiciously precise number, but the crowd was clearly a large one. Vermeer gave the Asante king two thousand guns in advance, and the king gave Vermeer two of his nephews to accompany him to Holland, apparently as collateral. One of these boys had an unhappy life and committed suicide, but the other became a successful engineer and never returned to the Gold Coast.35
The king also sent a few recruits to Elmina who were described as good and strong men, but he asked the Dutch for more muskets and some cannon as well as all manner of presents, including fine silverwork. General Vermeer, now back in Holland, had established as Dutch resident in Kumase the same W. Huydecoper who had visited in 1816. Huydecoper found himself sandwiched between the king, who demanded more and more from the Dutch while he produced fewer and fewer recruits, and Vermeer, who angrily demanded that matters be set straight. Huydecoper was also horrified by the numbers of people who were beheaded, as well as some who were hanged and, Huydecoper wrote, partially eaten. By the time the recruitment station was closed in 1842, largely due to British protests, just under two thousand Asante, almost all of whom were war prisoners, had been recruited and sent to the East Indies. Many of these men later returned and settled around Elmina.36
Although there were many threats of war during the reign of Kwaku Dua I, he was devoted to peace and managed, although sometimes with difficulty, to avoid open warfare with the British despite their vacillating policies after the death of Maclean in 1847. Although he did nothing to reduce the numbers of humans who were executed or sacrificed, Kwaku Dua was a wise and prudent king, who continued Osei Bonsu’s policy of trade and peace. He even went so far as to consider allowing British missionaries to open a mission in Kumase. In response the Reverend Thomas B. Freeman was the first European missionary to visit the capital. After a preliminary visit in 1839, when he preached the gospel despite his sense of horror at the headless bodies he so often reported seeing in the dirt along the roads, he returned with a large entourage in 1841, bringing with him a carriage similar to the ones used by European aristocracy. Even though the roads were remarkably well maintained, getting the carriage across the two hundred or so streams and rivers was no small achievement, and Freeman was delighted that King Kwaku Dua I was pleased by the gift. So pleased, as it turned out, that he maintained the carriage in immaculate condition for at least five years, although in the absence of horses, it was pulled by men.
The carriage was only one example of a dramatic pattern of gift exchange between Europeans and the Asante kings. Gift exchanges were not present in many parts of Africa, but for the Asante and their European suitors they were obligatory. Early in the eighteenth century the Dutch and English were sending gifts as diverse as plumed hats, gilt mirrors, general’s truncheons, four-poster beds, flags, magic lanterns, clocks, silverware, silver-topped canes, all manner of garish uniforms, and, not least, a glass coffin. Much of the material given to Asante kings was little better than junk and was of so little use to them that they stored hundreds of items away in the stone palace, a kind of museum for European exotica. In return Asante kings often presented gifts of far greater value to the Europeans. For example, former Royal Navy Commander Governor Sir William Winniett, who replaced Maclean in 1848, gave King Kwaka Dua I £300 worth of gifts in return for which the king sent 550 men to him bringing bullocks, sheep, pigs, fowls of various sorts, and all manner of food. Winniett characterized the gifts as “magnificent.”37
Kwaku Dua invited the missionary Freeman to a sumptuous dinner, to which the king wore an elegant European brown velvet suit with silver lace, a white linen shirt, white satin trousers, and a silk sash around his waist. Two golden knives were suspended from a chain around his neck, and another large gold chain coiled six to eight times around his neck before hanging down to his waist.38 A middle-sized man of about thirty-six who, unlike most wealthy Asante, neither smoke nor drank, the king was courteous to Freeman and was satisfied about the missionary’s good intentions. Freeman returned to the coast convinced that a mission would be established, but in his absence conservative Asante resistance to Christian influence grew, and it would be more than a half century before a Christian mission actually opened in Kumase.
During Governor Winniett’s visit to Kumase in 1848, King Kwaku Dua took him to task for British newspaper accounts that characterized the Asante as bloodthirsty savages addicted to human sacrifice. Winniett was surprised that the King knew anything about the British press and was not able to appease Kwaku Dua.39 From this time on, relations grew more troubled, but no serious rift took place until 1862 when an elderly and wealthy Asante citizen was accused of hoarding gold nuggets rather than conveying them to the king, their rightful owner. Rather than risk facing trial in Kumase, this man fled to the British protected territory along with many of his retainers. King Kwaku Dua requested his extradition, as he had a treaty right to do, but Richard Pine, the new governor, was convinced of the man’s innocence. A lawyer himself, Pine was torn between the treaty, which required extradition, and his conscience. Pine refused extradition, and Asante pleas went unanswered.
That there had been no armed conflict between the Asante and the British since 1826 is truly extraordinary. During this thirty-six year period the world was hardly a peaceful place. America fought a war against Mexico and began its terrible civil war, much of West Africa was torn by tribal wars, and Britain fought colonial wars in Canada, Aden, Afghanistan, Lebanon, India, South Africa, Burma, Persia, China, New Zealand, Bhutan, and Ethiopia, as well as the horrible Crimean war against the Russians. The Asante fought states to the north during this period, including a three-year war against the Gonja that was raging while Freeman and Winniett were in Kumase. The Asante and the British were anything but unwilling to wage war, but until Pine’s fateful decision, they had lived in peace with one another for over three decades.
Reluctantly, King Kwaku Dua I, fundamentally a man of peace, felt obliged to assert his treaty rights. Over the objection of his councillors, who recommended further negotiation, the king uncharacteristically called for mobilization, and the inner council finally agreed. An army of as many as sixty thousand men commanded by Owusu Koko, the son of King Osei Bonsu, moved south with little opposition. After brushing aside some troops from a rival state, advance units of the Asante army came up against a native army bolstered by four hundred disciplined troops led by a British major named Cochrane. Instead of facing the Asante as his men urged, Cochrane ordered a retreat, leaving behind a rear guard that was easily overrun. This shameful performance left the Asante with a clear path to the coast. But before launching a major invasion of the south, General Owusu Koko offered Governor Pine another choice—extradition of the wanted man or war.Pine chose war, declaring that he would fight “until the Kingdom of Ashantee should be prostrated before the English Government.”40 For someone with very little military force, this was an incautious threat. But before the Asante general could make up his mind to order an attack, the rains came, and he withdrew his army to Kumase. The king was so angry that he ordered a court of inquiry into the conduct of Owusu Koko and his senior commanders, at least one of whom was executed for dereliction of duty.41
Pine was aware that his luck could run out if he did not establish a strong military force. The cost of maintaining a large native militia was beyond his means, and Britain rejected his appeal for two thousand regular white troops. Still, Pine was determined to show the flag, and he eventually decided to march the troops he had—men from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th West India Regiments, six hundred in all—to the Pra River. The troops marched during the dry season and built a fortified camp well supplied with arms, ammunition, and food; but even during the dry season neither the West Indian troops nor their white officers had great enthusiasm for their role. A force of this size could not possibly cross the Pra to invade Asante territory, nor could it hope to stand very long against a determined Asante attack. More likely, an Asante army would simply bypass their position and sweep on to the coast. When the rains returned, the health of the men quickly deteriorated, and soon many were down with malaria and dysentery. As soon as the rains abated enough to allow travel, the entire force straggled back to the coast, leaving behind their only partially destroyed supplies, cannon, and stores of ammunition. Not a shot had been fired. King Kwaku Dua was amused, remarking that “the white men bring cannon to the bush, but the bush is stronger than the cannon.”42 Pine’s failed gamble left British prestige at a new low. A noted Gold Coast historian wrote, “Never did any enterprise end in such utter failure.”43
It was a costly failure for the British, and it left them in a politically precarious position, to be sure, but it was to have tragic consequences for the Asante as well. It led them to doubt the willingness of the British government to send white soldiers to the Gold Coast, and when a powerful British force threatened to invade the Asante homeland a decade later, the Asante rulers under-estimated the killing power of British weapons and the resolve of their leaders.
Pine’s war was such a failure that the British government was at a loss as to how to proceed. Simply to withdraw from the Gold Coast was an unacceptable alternative, but the Asante and British were still technically at war, and there was little hope that their differences could easily be reconciled. Trade was disrupted everywhere, the Asante war faction was stronger than ever, and the entire Gold Coast was on the verge of war when in April 1867, at the age of seventy, King Kwaku Dua I died suddenly in his sleep. While various political factions struggled to enstool their respective favorites as king, many people, including some members of royal family, had to be sacrificed to accompany Kwaka Dua to the next world. One of those killed was the nephew of Asante’s most powerful general, Amasoa Nkwanta, who had reorganized larger Asante units into twenty-man platoons and had invented the rapid reloading procedures for muskets by using slaves.Nkwanta was so outraged that he threatened to raise an army and march on Kumase. He finally agreed not to do so after a close relative of the man who had killed his nephew had been executed in retaliation, but he refused to have anything further to do with the army for almost six years.44
After three months of bitter infighting, a successor to the kingship was chosen—Kofi Kakari, Kwaka Dua’s sister’s daughter’s son, a legitimate heir but hardly the only contender. Deciding on a new king always brought powerful factions into competition, but in the end the new Asante king was chosen by an electoral majority, if not a consensus. This time the second most powerful man in the kingdom, General Owusu Koko, was in no mood for democracy. He arranged to have Kofi Kakari kidnapped and held in seclusion while he pressed his own claim to the stool. Koko was found out, convicted by a court, and sent into exile.45 Only then did Kofi Kakari become king. Known to the British as “King Coffee,” Kofi Kakari was thirty years old when he was enstooled. He was of medium height, had a full beard, and was said to be handsome except for some smallpox marks on his face. He was typically pleasant, courteous, and considerate to his European prisoners, who came to know him well. But the Asante court was no place for a pleasant young man with no military experience. His predecessor Kwaku Dua I was a much older, widely respected sovereign, who was gifted at the palace intrigue necessary to control the aggressive and competitive generals and war hawks who sought to control policy. When necessary, he could dominate them by the force of his personality and authority. Kakari was incapable of controlling his “elders,” as he called them, and he was fearful that he would appear weak before the generals who had chosen him to be their king. Puzzled and intimidated by the intrigues of the royal family and the great men who elected him to office, he told the captive missionaries, Ramseyer and Kühne, that his ascendancy to the throne “was like a dream to him.”46 He was also dominated by his priests and Muslim advisers, whose insistence on divination, human sacrifice, and religious ceremonies was usually repugnant to the men of the inner council, who much preferred secular political decision making.
The new king soon made more enemies through his wanton sexual debauchery. He not only collected a huge harem of legitimate wives, he often made sexual advances to the wives of powerful men. To secure the favors of these women, he lavished so much gold on them that the previously vast treasury was quickly depleted. His uncomplimentary nickname was Osape, “one who scatters gold.”47 When he was enstooled, it is said that he promised his people, “My business shall be war.” Whether he actually said this is not certain, but he did wear a cap covered with flints, a traditional symbol of war, and war would in fact prove to be his business.
Kofi Kakari’s first crisis was the Fante blockade of the Elmina people who lived in the area surrounding the Dutch fort of the same name. The Elmina were ancient allies of the Asante who had long provided them with military protection in return for tribute and free trading access to the Dutch. In 1868 the new king sent two large armies, one of which he commanded in person, along with a smaller one to relieve the Elmina and destroy the Fante coalition of allies. Fante resistance was unexpectedly resolute, and desultory fighting dragged on into 1869. In the course of events, one of several Asante forces took two mission stations, capturing a French trader and two European missionaries, one of whom had a wife and infant. Once these people arrived in Kumase, Kofi Kakari treated the hostages well, but although the Asante soldiers who escorted them proved to be quite kind, the officer who commanded their escort to Kumase was so harsh that all the adults suffered badly and the baby boy died. Asante villagers were kind to the white captives throughout their long and hard march, and when the Ramseyer’s son died, they somberly placed flowers in his hands. These Europeans were valuable pawns for Asante diplomacy, and while the war was bogged down in inconclusive battles, the king attempted to trade their freedom to the British for an end to the Fante blockade of Elmina. The British felt great concern for the hostages’ welfare, but these people were not British subjects, nor were they captured in British protected territory. As a result, the British were uncertain about what steps they should take. Before negotiations could advance very far, the situation took a dramatic change. The Danes had sold their fort at Accra to the British in 1851, and now in late 1869 the Dutch decided to sell them their fort at Elmina.
The unending warfare near Elmina had completely disrupted Dutch trade, and it was now threatening Dutch authority altogether. The Dutch government decided to cut its losses and leave the Gold Coast to the British, who despite the turmoil, were interested in the Dutch proposal. When the Asante government learned of the negotiations between the Dutch and English, it quickly protested, pointing out that the Elmina fort was the king’s possession and the Elmina people were his subjects. In support of his position was the fact that the Dutch had paid rent to the Asante every year since 1702, and the Elmina people recognized the Asante state as their protector. Indeed, the original treaty signed by Bowdich and the Asante in 1817 explicitly acknowledged Asante sovereignty over the Elmina people. Undaunted, Dutch authorities permitted the Fante to seize and deport the senior Asante representative to Elmina along with his large staff, all of whom were forced to leave their possessions behind. The Dutch handed the job of over-seeing the deportation of the Asante mission to a British Royal Marine colonel, whose men treated them roughly. When they later told their story in Kumase, the Asante government was furious.48
British negotiators were concerned about the Asante claims of dominion over Elmina, but the Dutch airily dismissed them, asserting that the money paid annually to the king was not rent but wages, because he was their employee. The British disingenuously accepted this patently absurd Dutch explanation, and the treaty was signed. In response Kofi Kakari sent another message to the Dutch protesting the treaty and reasserting his rights to Elmina. In what was scarcely better than an insult, the Dutch sent a young, semiliterate African clerk named Henry Flange to Kumase to induce the king to waive his rights to Elmina. We know from the European hostages in Kumase that Flange did arrive in Kumase and meet with the king on more than one occasion. He also left a crudely written journal purporting to describe his negotiations. However, when he returned to Elmina, what he presented to the Dutch was anything but crudely written. It was an elegantly phrased “certificate of apology” in which Kofi Kakari waived all rights to Elmina. The certificate was a preposterous forgery, but it was happily accepted by the Dutch and British, who ratified the treaty early in 1872.49Shortly thereafter, the British took over Elmina fort, and after 274 years of continuous residence, the Dutch left the Gold Coast. The seeds of war had been sown.
The Asante had been stockpiling muskets, gunpowder, and lead in earnest since 1870, and there could have been few people in the Asante government who did not believe that war was near.50 One of the many reasons why some Asante wanted war was the senior generals’ jealousy of a somewhat junior commander, Adu Bofo, who had achieved a signal success in a relatively small campaign to the east. The Ewe people of what is now Togo to the east of the Gold Coast had been openly rebellious toward the Asante, and their discontent was threatening to spread to other districts closer to Kumase. With an army of fifteen thousand men, Adu Bofo crossed the Volta River, utterly smashed several Ewe armies, andreturned to Kumase with tons of booty and thousands of prisoners, including the French merchant Marie-Joseph Bonnat and missionaries Johannes Kühne, Friedrich Ramseyer, his wife Rose, and their infant son.51 When the Europeans protested that they had nothing to do with the war, Adu Bofo disingenuously replied, “I am the slave of my King. I must send you to them.”52
The power of the Asante state had declined since the visits of Huydecoper, Bowdich, Dupuis, and the others earlier in the century, but the pomp of the king and his court was as majestic as ever. Soon after their arrival in Kumase, the ragged European prisoners were led toward the king by an officer carrying a gold-hilted sword in a leopard-skin scabbard and wearing a magnificent fan-shaped tuft of eagle feathers in his cap. After bowing to the king and removing their hats, the prisoners were allowed to sit while a seemingly endless procession of notables passed before them. The loud, clear tones of elephant-tusk horns vied with flutes and drums as the silk-robed, gold-bejeweled chiefs passed by. Heralded by eighty men—each wearing a monkey-skin cap adorned with gold—dwarfs, buffoons in red flannel shirts, and sixty boys—each wearing a Koranic charm sewn into leopard skin—King Kofi Kakari arrived, carried in his throne chair under a rust silk umbrella as pages fanned him. His arrival was marked by even louder music, including thirty boys who kept time by shaking calabashes filled with pebbles. He was followed by hundreds of executioners of all ages, each with two knives slung around his neck, who danced along behind him to the dismal three beats of a drum that signified death.
Boys with swords, fans, and elephant tails danced around the king, shouting at the tops of their voices, “He is coming, he is coming. His majesty the lord of all the earth approaches!35 The king wore golden sandals, a richly jeweled turban, a yellow silk toga, and dozens of golden bracelets and pendants. Six pages guided him along, crying out, “Look before thee, O lion! Take care, the ground is not even here.”53 King Kakari stood staring at the Europeans, apparently the first whites he had seen, before dismissing them with a kindly expression and moving on. This panoply of regal power was nothing out of the ordinary. King Kofi Kakari was not personally fond of pomp, but such processions were common-place in Kumase where there always seemed to be an occasion to reaffirm the king’s supremacy. This was often done by displaying an assortment of European clothing and musical instruments. On one procession there was a fife-and-drum corps dressed in Danish and Dutch uniforms, a band playing cymbals, clarinets, and European snare drums, while various dignitaries marched along wearing fragments of European clothing. According to the captive missionaries, “… one had a scarlet coat, but no trousers; another wore a long dressing gown, reminding one of a German university professor; one of the generals was in a brown velvet dress and sash, another had proudly donned a field marshal’s hat and white cockade, while to the lot of a third had fallen a woman’s undergarment, in which he found it somewhat difficult to walk.”54 One supposes that the impression made on the Asante audience was rather more favorable than that made on these Europeans.
Wearing a cap with bull horns and falcon feathers, the general, Adu Bofo, soon after returned to a huge welcoming celebration in Kumase that lasted five days. The shaggy-haired returning soldiers, dressed in oddments of Asante and European clothing, followed their officers, who wore battle-soiled red and yellow coats covered with amulets and antelope-skin caps decorated with feathers, gold emblems, and religious charms, past a huge throng of people who overflowed the vast marketplace. As each unit passed before the king, the men stopped and fired a salute. As usual, the onlookers were streaked with red paint to symbolize the blood of the men who had died, and as the magnitude of the losses became clear, many sobbed and shrieked in mourning. The next day was spent in mourning. The red painted men and women of Kumase fasted, cried, and drank large amounts of brandy provided by the king.55 Although 136 senior officers had died in the campaign, Kofi Kakari rewarded General Adu Bofo with gold, many slaves, and large tracts of land.
Generals senior to Adu Bofo furiously demanded the opportunity to demonstrate their own military genius and to achieve the same honors and wealth. The British at Elmina were an obvious target. They made their case to the king and inner council by assuring one and all that the British were incapable of opposing them.56 With the help of many well-placed friends, Amankwatia IV, the son of general Amankwatia III, lobbied successfully for his own command to reoccupy the British protected southern states lost after the defeat of 1826. For the Asante inner council the decision for war was not difficult. Their economic interests were at stake, the coastal people were too weak to resist, and the British did not seem to have the resources or the will to intervene.57 Governor Pine’s humiliating defeat was to have a terrible legacy. Even so, it was not until October 1872 that the national assembly called for war and the generals announced that they would march to the coast. The king grandly replied, “If you go, I shall go with you.”58 After prolonged ritual preparations an Asante army that may have numbered eighty thousand men marched south in December 1872. Despite his pledge the king did not accompany them. In fact, he was personally opposed to the war and was angry when his council overrode him. By September this huge force was encamped only five miles from Cape Coast. Led, as expected, by General Amankwatia IV, the army was so well established that it had replanted abandoned Fante farms and built huge camps. At that time there was no food shortage.
They soon began to launch a series of small-scale forays toward Cape Coast itself. Newly arrived troops of the 2nd West India Regiment, along with British marines and sailors led by a valiant and intelligent Royal Marine lieutenant colonel named Festing, did what they could to oppose them, but Festing had such limited troop strength that he could do little more than defend the fort and Elmina town. Later, some hot skirmishing developed, and the Asante learned a deeply troubling truth: while they were still armed with their cumbersome, inaccurate, and short-range muskets, the British marines and West Indian soldiers now had powerful artillery and carried rapid-firing, breech-loading rifles that could kill at long range. One senior Asante general was so appalled by the disparity between the weapons of the two armies that he urged peace. Asante soldiers complained that the new British rifles could kill five men at long distance with a single bullet, while their own flintlocks were worthless beyond point-blank range. Nevertheless, other officers and men were more than willing to fight and were frustrated because no general attack had been ordered against Elmina.59While Amankwatia hesitated, the food supply gradually became exhausted, and by October disease was again ravaging the army. According to one Asante prisoner, their situation had become desperate.60 Their major camp at Mampon was a mile square and probably held twenty thousand men. Supplying that many men for a long period was a logistical impossibility. For a while crops could be stolen, purchased, or even grown, but all too soon food would run out. Eventually, too, large camps would breed disease. Amankwatia’s son died of smallpox shortly before the general finally agreed to retreat.61
Amankwatia had long refused to attack Elmina, and now he appealed to Kumase for permission to withdraw his sick and dissension-ridden army from the coast. King Kakari rebuked him with this harsh reply: “You wished for war, and you have it; you swore you would not return till you could bring me the walls of Cape Coast, and now you want me to recall you because many chiefs have fallen and you are suffering. It was not I; it was you who wished it.” 62 The king also insisted that he would not recall his disgraced general until the many chiefs who advocated war agreed to repay him for the costs of outfitting the army. They finally agreed, but when Amankwatia heard the king’s message, he drank himself into a stupor and had to be carried to his quarters. Nevertheless, despite being harassed by small British forces that initiated several sharp skirmishes, the orderly withdrawal was carried out with such skill that a British officer wrote that any European army would have been proud of the accomplishment.63 By early December 1873 the entire army had crossed the Pra Biver into metropolitan Asante.
The Asante army had not suffered defeat, but neither had it accomplished anything of note, and King Kakari now faced a dangerous political climate. His dispirited generals and soldiers were demobilized and some were so rebellious that they openly threatened not to go to war again. Members of die peace faction were again listened to in the inner council. And although the king did not yet know it, while his troops had been threatening the coast, officials in the British government had decided not to negotiate peace with the Asante in good faith but to destroy their power once and for all.