WHILE GENERAL AMANKWATIA IV WAS CONSIDERING WHETHER HE should withdraw his army to Kumase and the king and his inner council were debating their options for peace or war, the British government had been implacably preparing for war. In late July 1873 the colonial secretary, the Earl of Kimberly, received a letter from a former Royal Navy captain, John Glover, recently an active entrepreneur on the Gold Coast, offering to raise an army of Africans and lead them up the Volta River to the east of the Asante and eventually attack Kumase from the northeast. Glover had earlier demonstrated his ability to raise and lead native troops in the area, and Lord Kimberly eagerly accepted his plan, agreeing to supply arms, money, and a few British officers to serve under the captain. But before Glover’s expedition could get underway, the government decided to appoint a British army officer to command all British armed forces in the Gold Coast, including those led by Glover, and to serve as civil governor as well. The man chosen was Colonel Sir Garnet Wolseley, who, while in the Gold Coast, would hold the rank of major general and the title of governor.
Wolseley’s selection came as no surprise. As early as August 1873 he had been asking everyone he could in London for information about the Asante, and he soon became convinced that Asante imperialism badly needed a stern lesson in the folly of opposing British military might. He proposed the idea of leading a punitive expedition to Kumase to his patron Sir Edward Cardwell, Prime Minister Gladstone’s secretary of state for war. Colonel Wolseley had been CardweLL’s principal adviser as he pushed through far-reaching reforms in the British army after its many weaknesses had been exposed in the Crimean War, where, incidentally, Wolseley had been blinded in one eye by a shell fragment. Cardwell convinced Lord Kimberly that the expedition was needed and that Wolseley was the man to lead it. The decision was a fait accompli. Remarkably, there was no cabinet discussion of the expedition until two months later, and Parliament was not consulted at all.
Many in the army were less than thrilled by Wolseley’s selection. He was seen by many of his superiors as too young at forty (King Kofi Kakari was thirty-seven) for this rank, too brash, and worst of all, largely responsible for the reforms that most older officers detested. Yet no one could deny that he had fought bravely in four campaigns, had been heavily decorated, and had been wounded many times as well. In addition to his blind eye, he still occasionally suffered great pain from a leg wound, received in Burma, that had never fully healed. Short, slight, with a receding chin, he did not look the part of a distinguished general, but those officers who had served with him earlier could not wait to volunteer for this campaign, and hundreds of other officers applied for temporary leave from their regiments to serve as special-service officers under the young general. Wolseley handpicked his officers from candidates representing the most distinguished regiments in the British army. Those he finally selected were mostly young men he already knew well, and he proved himself a great judge of talent. Without exception the men who served with Wolseley proved to be energetic and brave, often astonishingly so. Many were also notably intelligent, a trait less common among British officers of that time than bravery; it was a common joke among European armies to refer to the British army as “lions led by donkeys.” Most of the officers who survived the Asante war went on to perform with great distinction in Zululand, the Sudan, South Africa, and World War I, and almost all of those who survived achieved high rank.
Wolseley and his “ring,” as his young special-service officers were known to sneering senior officers, immediately attempted to learn everything they could about the Gold Coast and the Asante. They discovered precious little. Asante—or Ashanti as it was then known—was hardly a household word in Britain, even among highly educated people. When one of Wolseley’s officers mentioned to a civilian shipmate that he was on his way to fight the Asante, the man, who had been educated at Rugby and Cambridge, asked “What part of India is Asante in?”1 It was especially irksome to Wolseley’s officers that there were no decent maps of the Gold Coast available, and although they read Bowdich’s, Dupuis’s and Hutton’s accounts of their trips to Kumase a half century earlier, they somehow missed their description of hills and rolling terrain near the coast. As a result, Wolseley intended to build a railway inland from Cape Coast and actually had many tons of rails shipped there from England. It was to prove a comic and costly misadventure. However, Wolseley’s men did learn that during the rainy seasons no European army could hope to campaign effectively on the Gold Coast and that disease was a terrible threat.
Perhaps no military commander before or since has given disease so prominent a role in planning his campaign. Wolseley was well aware that the Gold Coast was known as the “white man’s grave,” and as he went forward with planning his campaign, he was seldom allowed to forget it. For example, when he asked an old West African hand what he should take to the Gold Coast, the answer was “a coffin, you won’t need anything else.” 2 He also learned to his dismay that earlier in the nineteenth century the surgeon general of the British army estimated that the life expectancy of a British soldier on the Gold Coast was one month! Elephantiasis and Guinea worm were endemic at the coast, and both smallpox and yellow fever were common. Many died of dysentery, but the greatest killer of Europeans was malaria, or fever as it was simply called. At the time, no one knew that malaria was carried by anopheles mosquitos, but the disease’s association with rainy weather, swamps, and tropical vegetation was widely observed. Most contemporary physicians believed that it was caused by poisonous vapors exuded by swamps and rotting vegetation, but others believed it to be the result of a lack of ozone in moist and fetid tropical air. Some seriously recommended the use of a Rube Goldberg-like instrument called an ozonometer to measure the ozone content of Gold Coast air.3
Mosquito-repellent oils and lotions were available to the British army, but only a few officers used them. Some officers carried mosquito nets, and one officer wore a brown veil during the campaign, but the veil was intended to filter out poisonous vapors, not defend against mosquitos. There were no nets, veils, or repellant oils for the soldiers. Wolseley’s ignorance about the role of mosquitos in the transmission of malaria can hardly be held against him since the scientific community did not become aware of it until more than twenty years after this campaign.4 What is more, Wolseley’s personal experience gave him good reason not to suspect mosquitos as disease vectors. A few years earlier he had led the British troops on a summer campaign in the mosquito-infested forests of Canada without a single man falling victim to fever.5
It had been known for centuries that quinine offered some protection against malaria, and Wolseley would order all his white troops to take quinine under supervision every morning. It is not clear how large a dosage they took (probably one grain), but it would prove not to be enough. Wolseley also planned his invasion for the dry season when fever was said to be less common, and he arranged that his troops would spend the shortest time possible in the Gold Coast. He also made elaborate preparations to provide healthy campsites for his men. Every night on the march the men would sleep in roofed huts on bamboo beds raised off the ground so that they would not become wet or chilled (both were thought to bring on fever), and each camp was provided with a huge supply of logs so that immense fires could be kept burning throughout the night to dry the air and keep the deadly vapors at bay.
Captain Huyshe, an otherwise healthy young officer who had served with Wolseley in Canada, believed in the prophylactic powers of cold tea. He died of malaria. Captain Maurice, an intellectual officer who survived the campaign to write a book about it, believed that the key to avoiding fever lay in not drinking too much alcohol—or too little.6 Maurice also recognized the value of quinine but, like many other officers, stopped taking it because of its side effects, which included dizziness, deafness, loss of memory, and a pounding sensation in the head.
When malaria struck, it did so suddenly, almost without warning. One moment a man was capable of performing his duties, the next he was incapable of any activity except writhing in his bed with a fever of 105° or 106°, followed by agonizing chills that no number of blankets could assuage. Sleep was impossible for days at a time, and those who recovered commonly referred to their bout with fever as the most painful experience of their lives. Too weak to care for any of their needs, unable to eat or sleep, they experienced terrifying delusions of being attacked and devoured by horrific demons or beasts. They also became obsessed with the need to carry out some trivial task that they were too weak to perform.When the fever finally abated and the delirium was replaced by sleep, men were so grateful that they often wept. Wolseley himself had a severe case of malaria. After terrible suffering he returned to duty, but not until two weeks had passed.He had been delirious for six full days.7
Wolseley’s precautions undoubtedly saved many lives, but malaria remained a terrible enemy. Before he even left the coast, he had to leave two hundred men behind because they were too ill to march inland, and after the campaign’s last battle as many men had to be invalided to the coast for malaria as for battle wounds (12 percent in each category), and more men died of malaria than of their wounds. Fully 59 percent of the European troops contracted malaria, and 71 percent suffered from some debilitating illness.8 One who died of malaria was the popular Captain Alfred Charteris, the oldest son of Lord Elcho, who collapsed soon after making a heroic long run in great heat to deliver a message. Taken on board a hospital ship, he received the preferred therapy of having his head shaved and a huge blister raised on it to reduce the fever. He died soon after.9
In November 1873 Gladstone urged Wolseley to make peace without entering Kumase, but Wolseley had already decided in favor of destroying Asante power, not simply by defeating its army in a decisive battle, but by destroying Kumase, thereby “leaving our mark of victory stamped in the country.” 10 To accomplish his mission, Wolseley was not prepared to rely on African soldiers, as Glover proposed to do; he wanted “English” troops, as British battalions were typically called in those days. He asked the government for two battalions of British infantry (one thousand three hundred men), sixty men of the Royal Artillery with four mobile mountain howitzers, and forty Royal Engineers to join his fifty volunteer special-service administrative officers from various regiments.
Wolseley’s request for British troops alarmed the government, which was all too aware of the dangers of disease. But he did not stop there. Instead of asking for two regular battalions, he made the extraordinary request for handpicked officers and men, that is, those best suited for combat in the tropical rain forest of the Gold Coast. In many armies this would have been a reasonable request, but not in the British army, which had always been organized by battalions (two to a regiment), each of which had long traditions, enormous pride, and the belief that it was the finest fighting force on earth. The idea of breaking up the regiment, much less the battalion, was akin to breaking up a family. Wolseley’s scheme was rejected. If he was to receive British troops at all, and this issue was still in doubt, they would fight as battalions.
In the end the government was unwilling to commit British troops to Wolseley at all, and the general was told that he and his ring were to sail to the Gold Coast alone. If Wolseley found that he could not defeat the Asante with the troops available at Cape Coast, he could again request British troops, but only with a compelling justification of why they were needed, how their health would be safeguarded, and how victory would be assured. Before sailing, Wolseley drew up a remarkable list of supplies to be shipped to Cape Coast. In addition to 6 howitzers, 1,000 Congreve rockets, 4,000 Snider rifles, and 3,200,000 rounds of Snider ammunition, he asked for 30 foghorns and 100 railway guard whistles. The abortive railroad plan explained the whistles, but the foghorns remain a mystery.
Instead of their scarlet tunics or their kilts, Wolseley wisely decided that all officers and men (if any were to be sent) would wear uniforms of drab gray homespun, cork sun helmets, and long hobnailed boots. This was the sort of break with tradition that infuriated many senior officers. Officers were also to leave their swords behind, carrying sword bayonets instead, weapons that could also be used to hack away jungle vegetation. No officer could bring more than fifty pounds of gear, the maximum that Wolseley believed a native carrier could manage, but Wolseley and his officers did not impose any such limit on themselves. A reporter who sailed with them wrote that “no equal number of men ever started upon a warlike expedition with so immense a train of impedimenta,” including generous supplies of whiskey, champagne, and wine.11 He did not note, however, that they were denied the right to a soldier servant, an unusually spartan way to go to war.
Wolseley’s orders were to demand that King Kakari withdraw his forces from the British protectorate, make reparations to the Fante and other coastal peoples for injuries and losses, and give securities for lasting peace. If diplomacy should fail, Wolseley was to threaten war, secure in his government’s promise of sufficient force to compel the Asante to agree to British terms. Wolseley was given discretion to negotiate peace terms as he saw fit, and he was given permission to ask the Asante for high-ranking hostages to be held until their promises were kept. He was also told to do what he could to put an end to human sacrifice and the slave trade in the Asante kingdom (no mention was made of ending these practices in the British protectorate where they were also commonplace). There was no mention of marching on Kumase, much less destroying it, but that is what Wolseley was determined to do.12
Wolseley, his officers, and several newspaper reporters, including the famous Henry Stanley who had found Dr. Livingston, sailed from Liverpool on September 12th on board HMS Ambriz, a ship that disgusted even the most stalwart of these hardy souls. The berths had been painted with enamel only twelve hours earlier and smelled appallingly, there was foul-smelling bilge water several inches deep in the cabins, and the old ship tossed sickeningly. The voyage south was the most miserable any of them had ever experiWhile Wolseley and his shipmates were enjoying a welcomenced. stopover at Madeira, they learned of an incident that put the Gold Coast on the front pages of newspapers all over Britain. In July Royal Navy Commodore Commerell arrived at Cape Coast aboard HMS Rattlesnake, the first of several ships to arrive with fresh Royal Marines and West Indian troops. Early in August it was rumored that Amankwatia was moving troops close to the Pra River near the coast and was planning to cross the river in force. Unable to obtain any useful intelligence from Fante spies, who were terrified at the thought of approaching closely enough to Amankwatia’s army to learn anything of significance, Commerell decided to make a reconnaissance up the river in small boats. Hugging the right bank of the river to stay as far away as possible from Asante scouts thought to be on the left bank, Commerell’s boats were about a mile and half upriver when a fusillade of shots erupted from the right bank at a range of only ten yards. Four men were killed and six officers and fourteen men wounded, Commodore Commerell among them. British public opinion blamed the Asante for this ambush, but in fact the shots were fired by men of a coastal people sympathetic to the Asante.13
When the Ambriz finally arrived in Sierra Leone, several officers were sent off to recruit African soldiers and supply carriers. Wolseley had his first contact with Africans there, and it confirmed his prejudices. He wrote to his wife that “the Negroes are like so many monkeys; they are a lazy, good-for-nothing race.” 14 Soon after arriving at Cape Coast, he declared that “the African” was an “objectionable animal” who was intended to be “the white man’s servant.” 15
Wolseley and his men had arrived at Cape Coast on October 2nd to find it in a state of panic. The Asante army had crossed the Pra Biver and was encamped nearby, and there were no more than one hundred West Indian soldiers to defend the town. Wolseley had counted on finding three hundred well-trained Hausa soldiers armed with powerful .57-caliber breech-loading Sniders at Cape Coast, but these men had been taken up the Volta River by Captain Glover, who had arrived there ahead of him. The general was not pleased. The one hundred men Wolseley did find belonged to the 2nd West India Regiment, small detachments of which were stationed elsewhere on the coast. These were well-armed and disciplined troops, even though their uniforms did much to belie it—they wore scarlet fezzes and jackets with yellow braid, baggy black pantaloons and yellow gaiters. These uniforms were so unsuited to tropical warfare that they were replaced by the same gray homespun and pith helmets to be worn by British troops. The West Indians were proud of their new uniforms. However, they continued to amuse British officers by their practice of carrying loads on their heads with their pith helmets perched precariously on top.
As might be imagined from his comments about Africans, Wolseley had little confidence in them or other black soldiers as fighting men. However, he did attempt in vain to recruit fighting men among the Fante, which is perhaps just as well, because he had few weapons to arm them with and they had no will to fight. When skirmishes did break out, they regularly fired at other British-led African militia rather than the Asante, and they were characterized by one British officer as “infinitely worse than useless.” 16 He rapidly sent word to the fleet offshore that he was in urgent need of men and weapons. Marines and sailors armed with Sniders came ashore, bringing with them artillery and rockets. Cape Coast was quickly entrenched, and General Wolseley soon felt secure enough about his defenses that he actually hoped the Asante would attack against his massed firepower.
Instead, without orders from Kumase, General Amankwatia decided to attack the fort at Elmina. He provided his men with at least one thousand boarding ladders to scale its walls but failed to understand how murderous British cannon and rifle fire could be. At least one thousand men died in the assault on Elmina castle, and many others died in several smaller battles that followed. Small numbers of Royal Marines, sailors, and West Indian soldiers engaged small units of Asante troops in battles that invariably began with the sounds of the Asante’s characteristic “singing cheer,” followed by the voices of their officers urging them on. When the firing ended, hundreds of Asante lay dead. The first of theAmbrizofficers to die was Lieutenant Eardley Wilmot, whose arm was so badly shattered that surgeons later said it would have had to be amputated had he lived. Yet he led his troops for a full hour with his arm dangling in excruciating pain until he was shot through the heart.17
After one of these battles, an incident took place that illustrates the favorable attitude that many Asante had toward the British at that time. A British officer came upon a half-dozen men from the British-led African soldier militia grappling with a short, powerful Asante soldier whom they had disarmed but could not quite kill. The Asante soldier fought them off with amazing strength as some men battered at his skull with their musket butts while others tried to hold him down.A uniformed Hausa soldier was so intent on finding an opportunity to slit the man’s throat that he did not notice a British officer’s arrival. The white man immediately punched the Hausa in the ear with such force that he toppled over, and the Asante took the opportunity to hurl himself at the British major and grasp his hand. The Asante thought that the white man would save him, and he was right. It was obvious that most Asante, at least, were sincere about not wishing to fight the white men, and British officers still believed in taking prisoners.
While Amankwatia negotiated with Kumase for permission to withdraw his sick and hungry army from the coast, many of his men conducted trade with their allies the Elmina and again threatened the small British garrison at Elmina fort.Wolseley boldly decided to disrupt their trade. Gathering 150 Royal Marines, 29 sailors, 126 Hausas (an ethnic group from northern Nigeria, but also the name the British applied to many Africans from that general area), and along with nearly 200 men of the 2nd West India Regiment accompanied by 300 African supply carriers, he marched his men twenty-one miles along the beach toward Elmina. The marines who had been on board ship under dreadful conditions quickly became exhausted, but a large case of red wine was sent ashore, and they were soon said to be “new men,” as a newspaper correspondent who marched with them wrote.18 This was not quite right. The sweat-soaked, dehydrated men were barely able to stagger into Elmina fort, and all of the officers with them soon fell ill.
The battle that followed was inconclusive, but it thrilled a veteran newspaper man who witnessed it:
It is difficult to describe that human tornado which raged for half an hour over half a mile of African bush. The enemy were on all sides, and the firing incessant. The air was all flame and smoke, and filled with various sounds—the booming of guns, the whizzing of rockets, the cracking of Sniders, shouts, groans, laughter, the whistling of slugs; Haussas chanting verses from the Koran, English hurrahing; and then, as the village began to burn, the roaring of flames, explosions of powder, and blazing of rum.19
Despite the heavy firing there were apparently few casualties on either side, although Wolseley’s chief of staff, Colonel John McNeil, suffered such a severely shattered wrist that he had to be invalided home. Wolseley was sickened by the sight of McNeil’s mangled wrist, but McNeil stoutly tried to stay in the fight. His only comment to Wolseley was, “An infernal scoundrel out there has shot me through the arm.”20 Wolseley used this encounter to confirm his convictions about the uselessness of African troops. The Hausas had fired wildly, and to some extent so had the West Indian troops, leading Wolseley to write to the secretary of state for war that he could not defeat the Asante without English troops. Insisting that their health would not be jeopardized, he asked that these troops be sent at once.
Wolseley could not estimate how long it would take for his message to reach London or, for that matter, what the response would be. As it happened, his dispatch sat at Cape Coast for two weeks before a ship arrived to carry it to Madeira where there were telegraphic facilities. While he waited, Wolseley encouraged his officers to intensify their attempts to recruit African soldiers and supply carriers. It was an unrewarding effort. One Fante chief’s response to a request for men was characteristic: “I have got smallpox today but will come tomorrow.” 21 He did not.
Early in October Wolseley wrote to King Kakari, demanding that he withdraw his army, release all captives, and guarantee indemnification. If he did not agree to do so within twenty days, Wolseley warned him to expect “full punishment.”22 He sent three copies of the letter, all of which were intercepted by Amankwatia’s men. Instead of forwarding this ultimatum to the king, the general wrote his own reply, in quaint English, asserting that his quarrel was not with the British but with four tributary states that had fled Asante rule to live under the protection of the British. He concluded by saying, “There is no any quarrel with you. I send my love to you.” 23 Wolseley wrote back, thanking the general for his friendly disposition, but reminded him that the original letter was meant for King Kakari.
As this confused correspondence passed back and forth, the British officers continued their efforts to interest coastal people in fighting the Asante. One officer’s comments typified the experience: “I had the greatest trouble with him as he is a true type of the lazy, palm-wine-drinking, good-for-nothing African, who, like all the other native petty princes, has got the idea into his head that the European officers are to do all the real hard work of running about all over the country collecting troops, while his majesty lies all day on his back smoking and drinking. Their total apathy, indifference, and want of energy, is almost maddening to me at times, for neither princes nor people appear at all anxious to go to war.” 24Despite this widespread lack of enthusiasm for war, some men, many of them Fante, began to arrive at Cape Coast to serve as supply carriers. Fante men were universally scorned for their indolence and cowardice; their most remarkable trait was said to be an ability to sleep so soundly that no amount of physical pummeling could rouse them.25 Fante women, on the other hand, were praised for their cheerfulness and their willingness to carry heavy loads. One Fante woman attracted special attention. Young officers persisted in visiting the newsman Winwood Reade to ogle his voluptuous next-door neighbor, a young woman named Jessie who proved to be frustratingly faithful to her absent husband.
Wolseley did not yet know whether an army would be sent from England, but he knew that he would have to prepare for one by collecting large numbers of Africans to carry supplies and make a road for the army to march along. Beginning as soon as they could, his engineering officers supervised several hundred men in widening and clearing the same road that Bowdich and Dupuis had used on their journeys to Kumase. Not only was the road badly overgrown, it had to be widened to allow four men to march abreast. There were few tools at first, few men as well, and heavy rains often slowed their work. No fewer than 237 streams and rivers had to be bridged if Wolseley was to reach Kumase, and the challenge of chopping down huge trees, then sawing them into usable lumber in 90° heat, put the British engineering officers to a life-threatening challenge. Exhausted, they nevertheless pushed ahead, never doubting that British soldiers would soon need the road they were building with their malaria-racked bodies. Many would die of the disease. Voracious biting ants sometimes interrupted the work, grunting leopards made men nervous at night, huge spiders spun webs that could envelope people as they slept, and slate-colored rats as large as rabbits scrabbled away at them in search of food. Their almost frantic efforts were not helped by African militiamen who tore down bridges for firewood as soon as they were built, defecated on the road, and left tree trunks lying across the road after felling them to no useful purpose.
General Wolseley’s hopes for a railroad had to be abandoned when it was discovered that the astonishing amount of six and a quarter miles of rails already delivered could not be laid because the land was far from being level. A railway engine was converted to use tractor tires, but it had only gone a few yards before it tumbled over into a muddy ditch and was abandoned. The railway was set aside, much to the derision of newspaper men who wondered why the idea had been entertained in the first place. That Bowdich, Hutton, and Dupuis had all noted the presence of valleys and hills was not lost on the newsmen, and the decision to build a railroad when time was so much of the essence and laborers were so difficult to obtain was also ridiculed.26 It was not one of Wolseley’s better ideas.
As the Asante army slowly withdrew to the north, Wolseley fumed in his dispatches to London that he lacked the troops to strike a serious blow at them. The best he could do was use men of his West India Regiment, supplemented by Royal Marines, sailors, and native recruits, to nip at their heels—to “keep them moving,” as he put it. Occasionally, the Asante rear guard stood to fight, and the two sides exchanged fire. Fortunately for the British, almost all of whom were solidly hit by Asante slugs, these were fired at such long range that, except for one sailor who was hit in the eye, they did no more than sting. The African allies the British had pressed into service had even less stomach for combat than the starving and dispirited Asante. British officers flogged men with sticks and umbrellas (which they actually carried into combat), but they would not advance. Many dead Asante were found, apparent victims of starvation, and numerous starving and diseased prisoners of the Asante were left behind to be taken by the British. They were described as living skeletons.27 As Captain Maurice was marching behind some Hausa soldiers under a Captain Gordon, he came upon “a poor little sick boy” who was apparently wounded and starving as well, lying by the side of the road. A Hausa “ran his spear in mere wantonness into the stomach of the poor little wretch. I don’t suppose I shall ever forget the look of agony with which the poor creature drew together his limbs and rolled himself over.” 28 Maurice could not identify the Hausa, and Gordon had no time to stop his column to investigate; so the troops moved on.
As General Amankwatia slowly withdrew toward Kumase, he decided that he would vent some of his rage on the rebellious king of Abra by attacking his capital, Abrakrampa. Amankwatia boasted so publicly about his intention to destroy the king of Abra that his plans became known to Wolseley, who reinforced the British garrison there. Some one thousand armed men, including Marines and Hausas, sited rocket launchers, built stockades, dug shelter trenches, loopholed houses, and converted the brick Wesleyan chapel into a fort. The brush was cleared away for one hundred yards in all directions. The force was commanded by Major Baker Russell, one of Wolseley’s favorites. A cavalryman from the 13th Hussars, Russell was an instinctively effective leader who loved battle. He was noted for reminding the men of the 13th Hussars, a famous regiment, that it was their duty to “look pretty in time of peace and get killed in war.” 29
Amankwatia’s decision “to plant his umbrella” in the Abra king’s capital caused widespread dissension among his junior officers and soldiers, who were hungry, sick, and tired of war. A threatened mutiny was barely averted by the senior officers, who reluctantly supported Amankwatia. Abrakrampa was so heavily fortified that, by the time the Asante attack finally took place on November 5, it was tantamount to suicide. Still, with their ivory horns blaring out martial music, their drums pounding heavily, and thousands and thousands of men chanting in unison, the Asante soldiers made a valiant charge. But they had to cover one hundred yards in the open and were shot down in such numbers that the charge was beaten back. Despite severe losses they continued to blaze away at the British position for thirty-six hours. When Wolseley was informed about the fighting, he decided to march to the rescue of the garrison with the few men he still had available. When his small force arrived, the Asante had withdrawn, and Baker Russell urged Wolseley to send the marines and Hausas after them to strike at their rear. Wolseley listened, but to Russell’s dismay he delayed for hours while he carefully sited his cannon to the south, not north toward the Asante, and stared in that direction with a fixed expression.30 Wolseley was in the grip of malaria. He gave no orders to the marines or Hausas, but he did finally send his undisciplined coastal allies after the Asante. The Asante badly mauled them, sending them scrambling back in disorder.
While the meager British forces tried to hurry the Asante withdrawal, work on the road was accelerated so that it would be twelve feet wide, free of roots, dry and level. Without skilled labor Major Home, the senior Royal Engineer, and his handful of Royal Engineers had to improvise at every step and do backbreaking work themselves. One crew of Africans cut back the brush, another dug out roots. A third group, more skilled and closely supervised, dug culverts and drains so that the troops would not have to march with wet feet. Another crew built bridges. Major Home reported with chagrin that it had taken twelve hours to bridge a stream that was only six feet across. Home’s men also had to set up supply depots. All of this had to be done while heavy rains fell and Home had only 220 laborers. Despairing, he asked for an additional one thousand men, but it was weeks before any could be found.
Wolseley, Home, and Surgeon Major Gore also had to prepare campsites for the troops along the line of march. Eight sites were chosen along the route of march to the Pra River. Each camp contained housing for at least 450 men. There were eight large huts with wattled walls and thatched roofs, each capable of sleeping fifty men on comfortable split bamboo or palm-stalk beds raised two feet above the ground. There were smaller huts to house officers and even smaller ones for senior commanders. Deep latrines were dug, one for officers and the rest for the other ranks. Each camp had a small hospital (the largest one bore a sign reading The Forlorn Hope), and some had post offices and telegraph facilities. Four of the camps even had bakeries. The campsites were placed on elevated, well-cleared land with a good water supply, but even if the water appeared to be uncontaminated, it was not drunk until it had been filtered through a large mobile filter tank. There was also a large commissary filled with food supplies, a roomy, open-sided mess hall, and a canteen that sold wine to officers.
Correspondent Winwood Reade was so impressed by these camps that he wrote, “In no campaign has the British soldier ever had such comforts and luxuries on the march. Each camp was like an hotel, and some were almost elegant, with neatly swept roads, and boards fixed up pointing the way to the Water, the Latrine, etc.” 31 Other correspondents agreed with Reade, but if they had seen these camps before the troops moved in, they would have received quite a different impression. Before the British troops arrived, African laborers were joined by people from nearby villages in making themselves very much at home in the camps. Some huts were used to slaughter sheep, and others as toilets. One of the larger huts had been converted into what one British observer discreetly referred to as a harem.32
Wolseley distributed information to his officers and men instructing them about means for preventing illness, the need for kindness to carriers, and various infantry tactics. Then he made this astonishing declaration: “It must never be forgotten by our soldiers that Providence has implanted in the heart of every native of Africa a superstitious awe and dread of the white man that prevents the negro from daring to meet us face to face in combat.” 33 Colonel Torrane, Sir Charles MacCarthy, Captain Ricketts, and Colonel Purdon, among many others, would have been surprised to learn this.
As ever, the health of the men Wolseley hoped to command was uppermost in his mind. He was determined to get his European troops to the point of battle as rapidly as possible and, of course, in a condition to fight. He ordered that every man take quinine daily, that they avoid chills at all costs, and that they be warm and dry when they slept. He also ordered, with the approval of his medical officers, that wherever the men slept, they protected themselves against malaria by burning huge fires to dry the poison-laden air. At each camp huge piles of logs were stacked up so that when the troops arrived, gigantic fires could be lighted to burn away the noxious vapors that were thought to threaten the men’s health.These fires certainly made the camps colorful, and they probably drove away mosquitos, thus perhaps inadvertently reducing the chances of malaria. The general was also greatly concerned that the troops he hoped to receive not overexert themselves, something that was thought to assure an attack of malaria and, in many instances, appeared to do so. This caution did not apply to his officers. They performed exhausting physical labor from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M. every day, and all except one contracted malaria.
Although officers were expected to run every risk, the troops were to be protected at all costs. Small hospital facilities were provided at each camp, and a major one hundred-bed hospital facility was built at the most advanced camp, where it was expected that casualties from the first battle would be treated. Even better facilities were available at the coast, where survivors would be cared for. There would be no fewer than sixty surgeons with the army It was also arranged that hospital ships would be offshore, ready to care for the sick and wounded and, when necessary, transport them to England.34 Incredibly detailed arrangements were also made for carriers to be provided with stretchers and hammocks to carry wounded from the battlefield to the nearest treatment center and, if need be, to the coast. Not surprisingly, these arrangements were calculated for European troops only. Sick or wounded African troops and carriers would be cared for as circumstances allowed.35 Despite the thought given to these matters, Wolseley did not provide enough hammocks for the sick and wounded, and his campaign was seriously jeopardized as a result.
Wounds and malaria were not the only concerns. When some Europeans aboard ship were found to be suffering from yellow fever, a strict quarantine was imposed on all ships. Even so, some naval officers died of the disease while these ships sailed home. Dysentery was a killer, too. Reade, the correspondent, suffered a terrible bout of dysentery but survived. He also wrote movingly about Captain Huyshe, one of Wolseley’s favorite officers, who had served with him so courageously in Canada. Sick with ghastly diarrhea almost from the moment he stepped ashore, he nevertheless found the strength to save a fourteen-year-old Asante boy from certain death at the hands of Africans allied to the British, and he then treated him gently. But Huyshe continued to suffer so terribly from dysentery that when newsman Reade stopped by his sickbed, he could barely manage these last words: “Goodbye, we shall meet at the front.” 36
Whatever the cost, Wolseley was determined that his men would be well provisioned. On the recommendation of the surgeon major, the soldiers’ daily ration would be enormous: each man was to receive 1 ½ pounds of biscuit or freshly baked bread, 1 ½ pounds of fresh beef or canned Australian beef without bone, two to four ounces of rice, potatoes, peas, or other vegetables, plus salt, pepper, tea, and three ounces of sugar. In addition to these prescribed rations, a large amount of sausage and cheese would also be available. Lime juice with sugar was to be provided four times a week. Preserved vegetables were so scanty and unappreciated by the men that a soldier’s diet effectively consisted of 1 ½ pounds of bread plus cheese or sausage and beef three times a day, washed down by very sugary tea. This was considered to be an ideal diet for troops marching and fighting in ninety-degrees heat and tropical humidity. Even well-filtered water tasted foul in the men’s wooden canteens, so they carried lukewarm tea, which proved to be a little more palatable.
Wolseley’s otherwise meticulous preparations all hinged on the availability of transport, and here his plans miscarried so badly that the outcome of the campaign was significantly affected. There were no navigable rivers that approached Kumase and no beasts of burden. Everything depended on African labor, and in making his plans, Wolseley ignored what past experience had taught earlier British officers—namely, that neither the Fante nor other coastal people were eager to carry loads, especially not into the heart of the Asante kingdom. When he sent his officers out to round up men to carry British supplies, they usually returned empty-handed.
Despite nearly three quarters of a century of experience on the Gold Coast, the British had somehow not yet understood that carrying heavy loads was not men’s work there, it was women’s. When they finally began to recruit women, they found that Fante women were not only willing but capable carriers. It soon became commonplace to see long lines of Fante women cheerfully chatting as they walked along, each with a sixty-six-pound box of Australian beef on her head and most with a baby on their back. For carrying this load over one hundred miles to the base camp at Prahsu, a woman would earn a maximum of ten shillings, the price of half a dozen chickens. A special correspondent to the Daily Telegraphwas touched when one of the slave women carrying his goods recognized her mother among another company of carriers and rushed over to embrace her. As mother and daughter embraced, they sobbed and laughed with such joy that all the other women stopped to watch. The two women had been enslaved by the Asante seven years earlier and had not seen each other since.
The British had reservations about relying on women as carriers. For one thing, they were reluctant to put women in the line of fire, and too many women in camp at night could lead to disruptive temptations, not only for African men, but for British soldiers, sailors, and marines who had been away from women for a dangerously long time. So British officers continued to search without success for more men to carry the masses of supplies that were piling up at Cape Coast.Desperate, Wolseley turned to a special-service officer, Colonel George Pomeroy Colley, perhaps the most brilliant staff officer then serving in the British army. Superbly organized and tireless, Colley saved the day.
When Colley took over, he found himself in command of 201 African carriers and 583 deserters, hardly a happy circumstance. There were several reasons for these mass desertions. Some British officers and African overseers were not disinclined to kick, beat, and even flog carriers. Moreover, relatively little food was available to carriers, and that was largely rice, a foreign food these men thoroughly disliked. Not least, their pay was late in coming. When a few men walked away in disgust, mass desertions followed. Colley first tried to use soldiers of the 2nd West India Regiment as carriers, but they were unable to carry the loads that Fante women could, and when one soldier actually collapsed under his load and died, Colley resorted to kidnapping.37
Colonel Colley asked Wolseley’s permission to hunt down the deserters and to capture new carriers by force. Wolseley quickly agreed, and British officers, including several from the fleet offshore, led dozens of expeditions that burned villages where deserters lived and carried off nearly the entire adult populations of others, leaving only grandmothers behind to care for the small children.38 Colley soon put these thousands of men, women, and children (who carried smaller loads) to work under close guard. Force was used when officers felt the need for it, but Colley favored persuasion and was wise enough to organize the carriers on a tribal basis, with each group having its own interpreter. He also paid them reasonably well and allowed them a day off for every four worked. Colley and his officers worked so hard that all came down with dysentery and malaria, but they soon had over two thousand carriers efficiently moving supplies up the road toward Kumase. By late December the number rose to six thousand, of whom one thousand six hundred were women. To command this large number of men and women, Colley never had more than sixteen officers, all of whom were dreadfully ill much of the time.
On December 9 Wolseley was surprised by the arrival of a large British troopship that anchored off Cape Coast. His telegram requesting British troops had reached London on the seventeenth of November, and later that same day the Cabinet approved his request. With an unaccustomed sense of urgency, orders went out that night, and two full-strength battalions sailed on the nineteenth. A third battalion that Wolseley had not asked for sailed a few days later. Wolseley knew nothing about the dispatch of these troops until the first ship arrived, and although he was delighted to have them, he was far from being ready for them. Fearful above all of needlessly exposing the men to disease, he sent the ship back to sea. It held 30 officers and 652 noncommissioned officers and men of the Rifle Brigade, including Prince Arthur, son of the queen; 4 officers and 68 men of the Royal Engineer; and 70 or so other officers and men, most of whom were medical personnel. There were two chaplains as well.
Three days later another ship arrived with the second battalion of the 23rd Regiment, the Royal Welch (then written “Welsh”) Fusiliers, half a battalion of Royal Artillery, and more medical officers and chaplains. Five days later, to Wolseley’s great surprise, yet a third battalion arrived, the 42nd Highlanders (the famous Black Watch), accompanied by several senior staff officers, another forty medical personnel, and supplemented by a draft of 169 Scots from the 79th Highlanders. Wolseley now had not two but three battalions of English troops, even if the Black Watch consisted of Scots, the Royal Welch were largely Welshmen, and the Rifle Brigade had many Irish. The Cabinet’s rapid response to Wolseley’s telegram would prove embarrassing to the general. Because there was nothing for the troops to do until the road had been completed, camps prepared, and supplies stockpiled, nearly two thousand men would cruise aimlessly in the sun until the end of December. Christmas passed almost as unnoticed aboard the ships as it did on shore,39 and the news that Charteris had died aboard ship and that Neill’s shattered arm would require surgery in Britain did nothing to raise the spirits of the men who were trying so hard to put a military campaign together.
By the time the British troops finally landed on New Year’s Day, Wolseley, despite his intense distaste for Africans, had assembled several large contingents of African soldiers. Wolseley’s views were widely shared. Captain Maurice, the same man who was horrified when a Hausa speared a helpless boy, wrote this comment about New Year’s Eve: “A nigger company, not requiring paint to make them look it, performed round a camp fire for our benefit, a small boy beating an old empty store box by way of castanet with wonderful skill.”40 It was a rare British officer who did not express racist views about Africans, yet a vital role in Wolseley’s campaign would be played by two large brigades of African militia that would be led by British officers. Baker Russell of the 13th Hussars would command one brigade and Colonel Evelyn Wood, who earned a Victoria Cross for bravery in the Crimean War, would command the other. In addition, Captain Glover had raised several thousand Africans to march on Kumase from the east, and Major W. F. Butler, one of Wolseley’s favorite officers, would attempt to raise an African army to drive toward Kumase from the southeast. Finally, there was a small unit of scouts commanded by Lieutenant Lord Giffbrd, a lean, handsome, recklessly brave twenty-three-year-old, who would spend the campaign scouting far in advance of the troops.
In late December, wearing their drab gray uniforms instead of their traditional kilts and green or scarlet tunics, the British troops came ashore in small boats rowed by Africans. The notoriously ill-tempered goat that served as the regimental mascot of the Royal Welch Fusiliers did not get very far. No sooner had the battalion formed up and begun to march across the beach than he fell dead. He was not a lovable mascot, but this was not a good omen. As soon as the battalions were assembled, British troops began their march north toward their base camp at Prahsu, just south of the Pra River, which marked the southern boundary of metropolitan Asante. The soldiers were joined by a naval brigade of 250 sailors and marines wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, who marched into Prahsu camp in perfect order, singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Newsman Henry Stanley, a veteran observer of military campaigns including the American Civil War, was gready impressed by the robust health of these men, their high spirits, and the athletic way in which they marched.41 The 2nd West Indian Regiment came next, slouching in a leaden careless walk, according to Stanley. Stanley did not realize that they were brave, disciplined soldiers who were devoted to their British colonel, a man appropriately named Bravo. Each force was followed by hundreds of carriers, at least one for each soldier.
When the entire British force assembled at Prahsu in January, the camp held 3,520 combat troops, about 2,500 of them British, over three thousand carriers, and hundreds of tons of supplies. Another five thousand carriers were at work bringing more supplies up from the coast. As might be imagined, a military camp this size was a lively place. Men of the Naval Brigade were inveterate pranksters, not only among themselves but with officers as well. During one inspection tour by General Wolseley, they convinced a small African boy whom they had made their mascot to wear a full naval uniform with a wooden sword, step forward, salute, and introduce himself as “Mixed Pickles, Sir.” This was apparently such a screamer that even Wolseley, who was not known for his sense of humor, admitted he was amused.42 The Naval Brigade also had many pets, including a young chimpanzee and a small crocodile who lived in a canvas bathtub.
The troops especially enjoyed watching an elephant bathing in the Pra River, a novel sight because the recent retreat of the massive Asante army had left the forest almost empty of animals. After dinner officers bathed in the river. At night sentries fretted about the exotic night sounds, but the camp itself was a picture of peace-time soldiering. Huge fires blazed everywhere, and the British units vied with one another in singing their favorite songs for Wolseley and his staff. The Naval Brigade was said to sing best, but they refused to do so until they had their nighdy ration of rum.43 The British army men were not pleased that the sailors and marines had rum because unlike most campaigns, where they received a daily ration of liquor, Wolseley had ordered this one to be dry (except for officers, of course, who were not without requisite bottles of whiskey and champagne). The African carriers gambled long after everyone else was asleep.44 Virtually all of the officers had already suffered at least one attack of malaria, and now some of the newly arrived troops began to fall victim, even though officers handed out quinine every morning and the men obeyed orders to avoid chills at all costs and to wear a hat whenever they were in the sun. Oddly, only one correspondent, who happened to sleep under a mosquito net, reported being troubled by mosquitos, and several newspapermen reported that they never saw a single one.45
Patrols that crossed the Pra reported no sign of Asante troops. The southernmost portion of metropolitan Asante was deserted. The events that took place in Kumase in 1873 and early 1874 have been chronicled by the missionaries Ramseyer and Kühne and the French businessman Bonnat. Although they were often away from the court, living on plantations a few miles outside of the city, they were in continual touch with influential Asante and could share experiences with J. S. Watts, a part-African catechist of the Wesleyan church who was also being held in Kumase. Besides, they were frequently in the company of the king, who needed their services as interpreters for the many notes that were delivered from concerned church groups and British authorities at Cape Coast. The Ramseyers were particularly welcome because King Kofi Kakari had grown fond of their daughter, who would run to him and sit on his leg while he played with her. He was also fascinated by Rose Ramseyer’s blond hair.
In July 1873, as General Amankwatia’s army was crossing the Pra on its march to the south, life in Kumase continued as before. Despite the absence of as many as eighty thousand people—officers, soldiers, sutlers, carriers, wives, priests, and others—large festivals still took place. In one the son of King Kwaku Dua I organized a festival to thank Kofi Kakari and others for their many gifts and human sacrifices given to celebrate the deaths of his mother and brother some years earlier. A large party of his soldiers, painted red to symbolize the blood that had been shed, fired salutes to the king for at least fifteen minutes before more gifts were exchanged and several men were sacrificed. One of these victims had managed to hide a knife on his person and made an attempt to fight back before he was disarmed and executed. Ramseyer was appalled to see many Asante standing near the headless bodies “laughing and joking.”46
In September a far grander and more terrifying funeral took place to celebrate the death of a sixteen-year-old crown prince. Executioners rushed through the city seizing slave victims for sacrifice, some 150 in all. With their cheeks pierced and their arms bound behind their backs, they were taken away to await their turn to die. The king sent word to the Europeans not to worry for their own safety, but he warned that the sacrifices would not be pleasant. As various chiefs presented the king with gifts of silk cushions, clothing, gold ornaments, sheep, and slaves, the prince’s pages, who had attended the coffin, were beheaded as muskets fired to signal their doom. They had known what their fate would be since the prince had died three days earlier. The sacrifices continued for ten days, and several members of the royal clan were slain by the king himself. Their bodies were left exposed to the royal vultures.
Following another funeral during which over two hundred people were executed—several by the king himself, who ordered that the victims be made to stand so that he would not have to stoop as he beheaded them—Kofi Kakari stopped before the horrified missionaries, performed a ritual dance, then offered each of them his hand as a public display of his friendship. He then asked them to draft letters for him to British authorities. The king continued to display great affection for the Ramseyer’s daughter, but when their son was born, he and all other Asante ignored the boy, because it was an evil omen for captives to give birth to a son on Asante soil. There were evil omens aplenty in Kumase as 1873 drew to a close.
In December, as Amankwatia’s shattered army was returning from the coast, a yam festival even grander than the one described by Bowdich took place. Great chiefs and their wives—the women’s bodies painted with green powder and all wearing dozens of gold ornaments—passed along the streets. Executioners, painted red, danced with long chains of jawbones clattering around their necks. On the following day, everyone except the most powerful drank themselves insensible and were permitted to break most rules of decorum, to have virtually indiscriminant sexual relations, and even to mock authority. But on the day after that, those designated for death by the king and his councillors were suddenly seized and beheaded.
The executioners danced ecstatically with the severed heads, painting the foreheads white and red, kissing the mouths, and mocking one dead man for his alleged treachery. One executioner roasted a victim’s heart, then ate it along with his maize bread as if it were his ordinary breakfast. The display of wealth by the king was dazzling. The European captives had no idea that the Asante possessed so much gold. That evening the skulls of their most famous enemies were taken from the mausoleum at Bantama and placed before Kofi Kakari, who solemnly enquired about the state of their health. Among the skulls was that of Sir Charles MacCarthy, killed a half century earlier. On the final day of the festival, the queen mother led hundreds of richly gowned women, including 250 or so of the king’s wives, on a promenade that Asante men were not permitted to watch. Between each group of women of all ages walked obese eunuchs and small children carrying small boxes of toys.47
In November and December Kumase was alive with reports from the coast about British activities, including their attacks against Amankwatia’s retreating army, but it was difficult for the king and his council to form any clear picture of British intentions. Wolseley’s demands that they leave the protectorate were known, and Amankwatia was already moving out of British territory as he and his officers glumly swallowed their pride and prepared to make the payment to the king that he had demanded. When Wolseley’s note demanding the release of prisoners and the payment of indemnification arrived in Kumase, the issue was hotly debated, and the king was under intense pressure from all quarters. As early as February 1873 one of the king’s senior Muslim advisers had consulted his oracle, which informed him that the Asante must release the European prisoners. The king and inner council ignored this warning, but to the annoyance of many of his councillors, he continued to seek out religious and magical solutions to the growing British threat.48 He also took the extraordinary step of sending a message to the king of Dahomey, a traditional enemy, asking him to join the Asante in the coming war against the British. The king of Dahomey sent a message back declining the request because his “great fetish” had indicated that the Asante were sure to be beaten.49
On November 20, 1873, before the first British troops had arrived, King Kakari and his inner council had begun a series of conferences to assess the impending crisis. The king began by arguing for war, insisting that Kumase had never been invaded and never could be. Many of his councillors disagreed, pointing out that British weapons were so superior to those of the Asante that there could be litde hope of victory.50 The queen mother, then fifty-five, was a shrewd and energetic woman who exercised great influence. In the past she had often counseled war, but now she was so certain that war would be ruinous that she made an impassioned plea for peace. Saying that she was old and did not want younger generations to blame her son for plunging the Asante people into a calamitous war, she argued that “from olden times it has been seen that God fights for the Asante if the war is a just one. This one is unjust.”51 She argued that the European prisoners be released and the indemnity paid. The queen mother was a powerful person, but there were other powerful councillors who were unwilling to make these concessions, and it was these men, a militaristic oligarchy, who dominated the Asante government. One of the most outspoken was Adu Bofo, the newly victorious general whose successes had driven Amankwatia IV to demand the right to lead the current campaign to the coast. Adu Bofo was the son of the former powerful treasury minister and noted general Opoku Frefe, whom he had succeeded in both roles. He passionately declared that he would never countenance the release of the European captives. His voice carried weight under ordinary circumstances, and in this instance it was particularly persuasive because it was Adu Bofo who had captured them.52
As usual, the king stalled for time. His councillors had decided that the prisoners would remain in Kumase and there would be no payment to the British, but Kofi Kakari did send messengers permitting Amankwatia’s army to return to Kumase. Worried by reports that were circulating in Kumase about the army’s failures, he declared it a capital offense for anyone even to hint that the army had achieved nothing.53 When the army returned to Kumase on December 22, the extent of their losses could not be hidden. Only about half the army had survived, and 280 senior officers had died.54 Disgruntled soldiers described the destructive power of the new British rifles. Some of these men said vehemently that they would not fight again “as we are sick of it. The white men have guns which hit five Ashantees at once. Many great men have fallen.”55 Hoping to put the best possible face on the matter, the king sent messengers throughout Asante land to announce a great victory, but the demobilized soldiers told a different story. At the same time that he declared victory, the king continued to demand that the officers who had insisted that the campaign take place pay huge sums to offset the cost of the war. One officer had to sell not only his slaves to pay the debt but his wife and a young son as well, who were said to have cried bitterly. The European missionaries who were witness to these events in Kumase wrote feelingly that “there were many upright, quiet men who had wished for peace and free trade, who lost half their families by the war, and were afterwards obliged to sell the other half to pay for it.”56 The king’s hold over his country and his army had never been so tenuous.
Exasperated by Kumase’s failure to respond to his ultimatum, Wolseley sent a letter from Prahsu camp to Kumase on the second of January that not only repeated his peace demands but increased the indemnification to the immense sum of fifty thousand ounces of gold. He declared further that he intended to march his army into Kumase to sign the peace accord. Wolseley bluntly added that the Asante were powerless to stop him. Several councillors now joined the queen mother and Prince Ansa, who had recendy returned from a stay in England and was well aware of British power, in urging compliance with Wolseley’s terms; but many senior councillors, or elders, as they were also known, continued to resist.These insular old men had no knowledge of British firepower and continued to think of Kumase as the center of the universe.57 King Kofi Kakari lacked the support to openly challenge the elders, most of whom indignantly insisted that to yield to threats of force would violate Asante honor.58 The king feared that his weakened and rebellious army would be unable to stop Wolseley, but he also knew that if he yielded to the threat of force, his councillors were very likely to depose him in disgrace. Wolseley did not realize it, but his threat to use force left the Asante with no honorable alternative but to fight.
On the same day that Wolseley’s ultimatum arrived in Kumase, a ferocious windstorm knocked down the sacred tree in the central square that symbolized the well-being of the nation. Kofi Kakari called his priests together to ask what this ominous happening portended. They instructed that two men should be bound to trees in the nearby forest, their cheeks pierced with knives. If they died quickly, the Asante would have victory. The portent was not good: one man lived five days, the other nine.59 The king attempted to appease his war party by ordering that ammunition be stockpiled, and he began courting favor with some of his senior army commanders. But at the same time he surreptitiously released one of the European missionaries, the German Johannes Kühne. Fearful that members of his war party would learn of Kühne’s release and see it as an act of weakness, he ordered Kühne to leave unobtrusively during the night. Before Kühne left, the king told him to tell Wolseley of his desire for peace, and he had a letter sent to Wolseley, signed by six Asante dignitaries, expressing the same wish. Kühne did quite the opposite. He told the general that the king could not be trusted and that his army was too demoralized to offer any serious resistance. Wolseley, needless to say, was gready encouraged.
Kofi Kakari once again turned to his Muslim religious advisers for help in preventing the British invasion. Although he had not acted on their earlier warning to release the European prisoners, he now paid considerable sums to several Muslims to conjure up magical means of turning back the invaders.60 One of these men, the scholar-priest Sulayman Kumatay, actually confronted Gifford’s scouts with solemn curses designed to drive them off When Gifford’s men responded with gunfire, he disappeared but left behind a manifesto written in Arabic: “This is a prayer to God, and a wish that the white men would fight among themselves, and return to their own country. May pestilence and disease seize them! The writer of this is the great High Priest, who invokes God to do these things. Europeans never possessed any land in this country, and all the angels of heaven are invoked to drive them out.”61 The British were amused.62
Kofi Kakari was not the only Asante to place his faith in Muslim charms. All officers and most soldiers purchased Koranic charms and talismans consisting of pieces of paper containing protective incantations and tied together with colored threads. Many officers wore hundreds of these so-called saphi on the chest to ward off harm. Some of the charms were outrageously fraudulent. One was found to contain a page from the Bible, and another was torn from a British governor’s proclamation made at Cape Coast.63
Despite the growing crisis the king was sometimes preoccupied with ceremonial or private duties, leaving the affairs of state to others. He spent one full day attending to the legal matters involved in elevating one of his three hundred or so wives to the status of paramount wife, a transaction that called for her to be given autocratic powers over at least six villages and six hundred people. This extremely important event cost the king one hundred ounces of gold dust.64 But Kofi Kakari could not afford to be distracted for long: he had to put his army back together or face destruction. As people all over Kumase busied themselves making bullets of lead and iron and drying corn and cassava for provisions—the record about how this was done is vague—the king managed to convince the king of Mampon, the traditional commander of the Asante army, and another famous nobleman, the long-disgrunded General Asamoa Nkwanta, to lead the army of resistance. Nkwanta, who was known to the troops as their guardian spirit, was probably the only man who could have inspired the footsore, sick, and demoralized soldiers to shoulder their arms again.65 There were severe shortages of food and salt in Kumase, and so many men were without muskets that two or three often had to share a weapon; but in an act of supreme patriotism, the sick, wounded, and dispirited Asante soldiers came together again, ready to defend their nation’s borders and their own honor, this time with litde hope of plunder or success.
The king also chose to make a last-minute gesture to the advancing British army. On the twenty-first of January, he released the Swiss missionary Friedrich Ramseyer, his wife, and their two children, along with the French merchant Marie-Joseph Bonnat. Their release was mediated by Joseph Dawson, whom Wolseley’s predecessor had sent to Kumase some months earlier. The son of an English father and Fante mother, Dawson spoke Asante and English and was in regular contact with the king and his inner council. He continually pressed the king to release the prisoners, even saying that he himself would remain behind as a hostage if this were done. After much haranguing and to the surprise of the Europeans who also served him as interpreters, the king one day fell silent, “gazed vacantly before him, then suddenly turned and said, ‘Go, go, and tell my good friend the governor [Wolseley] that I did not march against him. Amankwatia attacked the fort [at Elmina] contrary to my commands [something that was apparently true], I have nothing against the white men, go and speak a good word with the governor.’”66
Dawson then demanded to know whether the Fante and other African prisoners were to be released, as Wolseley insisted, or only the Europeans. “‘What’, the King angrily exclaimed, ‘Is it not enough if I send you, am I to give up the Fantees too?’” The queen mother also was excited, and the entire council rose in consternation, “swearing and shouting in the wildest confusion.”67 In a rage the king shouted that no one would be set free. Terrified, the Europeans sat meekly, praying for deliverance. To their great surprise it came. After some time Kofi Kakari softened and said, “Oh, I have nothing against you…. Go speak a good word, I have now done what I can. If the governor will not wait, I must leave the matter with God.”68
As the Europeans prepared to leave, they were surprised and pleased to receive valuable gifts from the king, including an Asante silk dress for Ramseyer’s wife. After 9 P.M. they were summoned to the palace, where they feared the worst but found a deeply depressed King Kofi Kakari, who appeared as if their liberation had cost him dearly. He looked at Ramseyer’s wife and, addressing her by her Asante nickname, complimented her on her new silk dress: “Well, Susse, you know how to wear the national dress.”69 Reverend Ramseyer and the French merchant Bonnat both felt such sympathy for the king at this moment of parting that they again promised to do everything in their power to bring about peace. “He smiled and dismissed us with the words, ‘Yes; it is alright, go, do as you say.’”70
The Ramseyers and Bonnat were escorted toward the British troops, now only a few miles away. When they came to a town called Dompoase, only three miles from the British advance guard, they found it swarming with Asante soldiers under the command of a middle-level commander named Obeng—by coincidence the same man who had treated them so badly on the way to Kumase after their original capture that they had suffered gready and their infant son had died.Though they feared for the worst, they were pleasandy surprised at being greeted politely. They assured Obeng that they would urge Wolseley to seek peace. The Asante officer asked that a good word for his men be expressed as well, saying that he, like the king, had “no quarrel with white men,” adding that war was an altogether bad thing. “Look at this village, it is quite deserted; does it not make one’s heart ache?”71