WOLSELEY WENT ON TO LEAD BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL ARMIES TO MORE victories, including an undeniably brilliant campaign in Egypt in 1882. He was later promoted to Field Marshal, raised to the peer-age, and made commander in chief of the British army. However, his memory now largely lost, the last twelve years of life were lived in obscurity. On the eve of World War I, at the age of eighty, he died in bed, not the soldier’s death he had longed for. His country did not forget him. A grateful War Office conducted his funeral with the utmost ceremony. Troops from all the regiments he had served with or commanded were there to honor him, and he was buried close to his hero, Wellington, something he would probably have considered his greatest honor.
King Kakari’s fortunes took a very different course. Kumase was in ruins, his palace was looted and destroyed, his reputation badly tarnished, and his empire on the verge of dissolving into the chaos of secession and civil war. His militaristic councillors, who had so long dominated him and had led him into the calamitous war, were only too willing to blame him for everything. When the increasingly hostile kings and chiefs of the empire refused to pay any portion of the indemnity of fifty thousand ounces of gold demanded by the British, Kakari had to dip into his own greatly depleted resources to pay small installments in May and June 1874. His hopes that these payments would influence the British to support him were not fulfilled. By the middle of June, his enemies made his position so precarious that he considered leaving Kumase to escape them.1
King Kakari had long offended some in the kingdom by his insatiable appetite for women. In addition to his hundreds of wives, he seduced many other women, including the wives of many powerful men. Neither his charm nor his power were enough to guarantee such conquests, however, so he relied on gold taken from the state treasury to captivate women, publicly handing out handfuls of gold dust and nuggets to women who caught his fancy. As a result, he was known among members of Asante’s elite as osape (scatter of gold) and axyempo (he who gives away nuggets).2 Now, desperate for money to pay Wolseley’s indemnity and to support his appetite for women, the embattled king did the unthinkable.He rifled the tombs of his grandmother and other close relatives buried in the royal mausoleum at Bantama. The right to remove this buried gold, part of the national treasure, could only be granted by a vote of the national assembly. To open these tombs like a thief was not only unconstitutional, it was sacrilegious. To compound this reckless behavior with stunning stupidity, Kakari actually gave some of the beautiful old jewelry to various of his wives and girlfriends.
When the queen mother learned of her son’s utter folly, she led the chorus of voices calling for his destoolment—largely, it would seem, because she knew he could no longer be king and in the hope that by doing so, she could preserve the line of succession for her lineage. Before the king could destroy the Golden Stool and kill himself by blowing up a keg of gunpowder, the Golden Stool was seized and Kakari was charged with bringing the kingdom to its ruinous state. Despite his quite reasonable rejoinder that it was not he who wanted war but the militaristic oligarchy, after five days of intense negotiation, he was forced to abdicate on October 21, 1874. Accompanied by sixty of his wives and five hundred of his closest followers, he was allowed to live in state in a small village though in very modest circumstances. He was succeeded by his younger brother, thirty-five-year-old Mensa Bonsu, whom his supporters hoped would restore Asante to the glorious past of his grandfather, Osei Bonsu. Instead, he ruled over a steadily diminishing empire torn to bits by civil wars.
The Civil Wars
In 1873 Royal Navy Captain Glover was commissioned to lead a military expedition up the Volta River valley. Wolseley suspected that its purpose was not primarily to aid his invasion of the Asante kingdom. He was right. The British government had hoped that Glover would be able to open up trade with the interior by circumventing Asante control, an economic vision that the British Government had long endorsed and that even Wolseley could appreciate. British lust for the wealth of the Asante kingdom was often expressed in the starkest imperialistic terms. Before Wolseley’s invasion, Henry Stanley wrote that “King Coffee [Kofi Kakari] is too rich a neighbor to be left alone with his riches, with his tons of gold dust and accumulations of wealth to himself.”3 He added that the gold that a Wolseley victory would yield could pay the cost of the British military expedition “twenty times over.” At the same time the African Times, usually a reliable voice of merchant interests, published an article under the caption “The Ashanti War—Gold, Gold, Gold,” claiming that victory would bring thirty or forty million pounds of gold per year to Britain for years to come. It added almost breathlessly that the British troops were marching “into one of the richest gold fields in the world.”4
It was a grand vision, but many doubted that it would ever be realized. Wolseley’s inability to crush Asante resistance and the alarming effects of disease on his troops led many in Britain to despair of ever turning the Gold Coast into a profitable colony. To benefit from Asante gold, an army would have to occupy a very large area—an obvious impossibility in the face of disease and Asante truculence—or some new trading scheme would have to be devised. But as government officers fretted and merchants schemed, the conditions within the Asante kingdom became so desperate that it began to appear that Asante gold might well be Britain’s after all. The Asante economy had collapsed, Kumase was a burned-out ghost town, and all the tributary states were seeking, or in some cases already declaring, their independence from the central government in Kumase. The district of Adanse was the original Akan-speaking state in the union and was considered by most Asante to be the birth-place of Greater Asante. It also had the richest gold deposits of any of the metropolitan states, and its high hills, left unprotected against Wolseley, were a great barrier to invasion from the south.Adanse was not powerful militarily, usually being able to muster only one thousand soldiers, but it nevertheless declared its independence from Kumase. The state of Dwaben, enormously wealthy from its dominance over the kola nut trade to the north, also left the union, taking with it its large army of up to twenty thousand men. Only Kumase itself might be able to mobilize as many. In 1869 European visitors had found the Dwaben capital larger and grander than Kumase had been before Wolseley destroyed it.5
Faced by impending chaos, King Mensa Bonsu appealed to the new British government at Cape Coast for “peace, trade and open roads,” none of which the Kumase government could then provide for itself.6 Instead of backing Kumase, the British sided with Dwaben as their new and preferred entry point into the interior of the Gold Coast. Emboldened by the open support of the new British governor, G. E. Strahan, and European missionaries and adventurers, such as the ever-entrepreneurial former French prisoner, Marie-Joseph Bonnat, and by the weakness of Kumase, the Dwaben king, Asafo Agyei, claimed not only independence from Kumase but supremacy over it. He began by declaring that he would block Kumase’s trade routes to the north, cutting off its only remaining source of income. Despite Kumase’s weakness, he overplayed his hand. His position was weak because he had no legitimate claim to the Dwaben stool, having been appointed to it by King Kwaku Dua I, who had executed a more legitimate claimant. The Kumase government now used Asafo’s illegitimate claim to his stool against him, and his own excessive use of terror drove some former supporters into the Kumase camp. Opposition to Asafo Agyei soon became so heated that a council of kings from still-loyal states authorized Mensa Bonsu to depose him by force if need be.
Beginning at the end of August 1875, it took only two months to mobilize and ritually prepare an army of fifteen thousand men led by five veteran generals, including Adu Bofo, the hero of the Volta River campaign of 1869-1872, and Asamoa Nkwanta, still Asante’s most beloved commander. On the thirty-first of October, the Asante army marched into the Dwaben capital where it was met by tenacious defenders who first stopped them cold, then surrounded and threatened to annihilate them. The situation appeared so hopeless that many senior officers, including the gray-haired, seventy-year-old Asamoa Nkwanta, blew themselves up with gunpowder.7 When the battle seemed to be lost, the young general Adu Bofo sat on his golden stool and threatened to die then and there unless his demoralized troops fought to defend him. Somehow they rallied and drove the Dwaben army back in flight.
Dismayed by the prospect of a Dwaben defeat, Governor Strahan sent Dr. V S. Gouldsbury to Dwaben to negotiate peace with Kumase. Even before he could reach Dwaben, he found King Asafo Agyei and his followers in flight, “helpless and terror-stricken.”8 Gouldsbury could do nothing while the Kumase forces punished Dwaben relentlessly. Virtually the entire population was killed, captured, or driven away to the British protectorate—which since 1874 had been called the Gold Coast Colony—where some fifteen thousand refugees settled. Every town and village in the formerly large and rich kingdom was burned to the ground.9 Governor Strahan was dismayed by the Kumase victory He informed London that he had hoped the Dwaben forces would hold out long enough to make his intervention “not only possible but even agreeable.” The Colonial Office agreed that the surprising success of the Kumase troops was “unfortunate.” The power of this Asante army in defeating an elite Dwaben army again emphasizes Wolseley’s good fortune that it did not attack him as he withdrew to the coast.
The shattering defeat of Dwaben did not end rebellion within the teetering Asante Empire. Encouraged by Governor Strahan, state after state broke away from Kumase in search of its own economic autonomy. British policy was centered on the isolation and destruction of Kumase as the center of trade in the Gold Coast, and with the help of long-disaffected chiefs and kings, it was successful. Kumase no longer controlled its great roads or the traders that used them. Highway police were replaced by brigands. The once great market at Kumase that had so impressed Bowdich a half century earlier was now empty, and famine was reported in many areas. The British were unabashedly delighted by the results of their policy The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberly, called for continuing efforts to encourage the independence of states now in rebellion against Kumase, and his undersecretary, the acerbic Evelyn Ashley, wrote, “It is their turn to be bullied—and, till they have changed their nature, it is better for us that they should be ‘down’ and not ‘up.’”10
To the surprise and dismay of the British, the success of the Dwaben war reunified part of the Asante kingdom, and King Mensa Bonsu used the newfound spirit of hope and confidence to institute a number of reforms. Much of the impetus for change came from his brother, Prince John Owusu Ansa. Ansa had been educated in England and was a true believer in the principles of Western democracy, a devout Christian, and a caricature of an English gentleman. When one British visitor to Kumase encountered him on the street, he was so startled by his appearance that he “stood still and stared open-mouthed at this amazing apparition…. He wore a shapely ‘bowler,’ and a well-fitting, fashionably cut suit of clothes; his cuffs, shirt-front and high collar were faultlessly got up; his patent leather boots were a miracle of polish, and in one of his kid-gloved hands he carried a modish walking cane. But the most astonishing thing was that he wore his clothes and carried his cane with the unmistakable air of a man who was accustomed to them….”11
Mensa Bonsu accepted Ansa’s radical idea that European civil servants be hired on a contract basis to take important roles in the government. Unfortunately for the new king, there were no trained civil servants available; so he was forced to make do with a collection of shady European expatriates and adventurers, including Marie-Joseph Bonnat, and various Danish, Canadian, and Scottish gold prospectors. These men were more interested in becoming wealthy than they were in governmental reform, but even if they had been devoted civil servants, there was little that they could have accomplished in the face of conservative Asante opposition. Prince Ansa had been away too long, and he did not understand how dangerously his innovative ideas would clash with Asante culture. Prince Ansa’s cherished dream of the establishment of Christian missions and schools in Asante was rejected out of hand. Ansa’s ideas threatened the traditional balance of power in Kumase, a reality he consistently failed to grasp. He also did not anticipate that his own brother, General Owusu Koko, would become his most outspoken opponent.
A few important changes were made, among them a change in the law making homicide the only crime punishable by death, but Mensa Bonsu was never able to overcome the opposition of the senior members of the military oligarchy that had put him in power and that, he well understood, could depose him just as easily.12 Instead of presiding over a reformed government, as he and Prince Ansa had hoped, Mensa Bonsu found himself largely ignored by his inner council. The great men of the kingdom still had power, including private armies as large as two thousand five hundred men. Like the king’s own army of six hundred men, some of them were armed with Sniders. These powerful men, many of whom were members of the royal family eager for more power, continually vied with each other for control of the king and the government.
In 1879 a conservative religious cult dedicated to the restoration of the power and glory of the Asante past tried to influence the ever-buffeted king to become even more traditional. When Mensa Bonsu showed too little interest in their demands, a large group of the cult’s followers broke into the royal palace, destroying property and violating some of the king’s wives. One man even shot at Mensa Bonsu, who barely escaped, thanks to the intervention of his royal guards, whose Sniders killed many of the extremists. As a result of this attack and other palace coup attempts, the embattled king began to use his guards to purge his enemies, and he did so with a terrible vengeance. Now more a warlord than a constitutional monarch, he used his palace guards as he wished, to flout custom, law, and decency. Not only did he have his real or imagined enemies killed, he took pleasure in raping their wives.13 Like his predecessor, King Kakari, he also indulged in an orgy of debauchery. When drunk, as he often was at this time, he ordered his guards to bring him any beautiful woman who caught his fancy. If her husband complained, the man was killed. In 1882 he began to eye the wives of some of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Ignoring judicial process, he ordered his guards to beat or even kill any who objected, and unless their private armies were stronger than his, he did so with impunity. A British visitor to Kumase in 1882 reported that the situation had become so serious that no one could be certain that “he may not be summoned to appear before the King at any moment, fined for some imaginary offense, a sum he cannot pay, and in the end lose his head.”14
Later in the year his reign of terror even extended to his closest councillors, some of whom he had executed. So many people in Kumase fled that the city was almost empty. Many left metropolitan Asante for the coast where Snider-wielding palace guards could not reach them. By early March 1883 Mensa Bonsu had alienated every segment of Asante society. The opposition to the king, led by disgruntled young men of good families who saw no future for themselves, was joined by senior councillors who demanded that the king cease his tyranny, especially his rapacious abuse of the husbands and relatives of the women on whom he chose to impose his sexual desires. They also insisted that he no longer order executions without the consent of his chiefs and senior councillors and that he consult them before imposing immense fines on his subjects, as he had been doing. These were reasonable, constitutional demands, but the young men who led the opposition were so angry that some feared they would seize and flog the king. There was every reason to believe that these alienated young men would destroy the monarchy.15 Only the king’s guards prevented his destoolment, and even they finally failed to intercede when coup leaders, led by his brother, General Owusu Koko, seized the king and sent him into exile, where he lived under guard in a small village in miserable poverty.
Though former King Kakari had stayed apart from the political turmoil that had splintered the Asante state for seven long and tumultuous years, he still had powerful friends, and as time passed, many Asante came to remember him fondly for his genial and courteous manner. His adherents began to argue that his years of exile had given him the wisdom he lacked before, and they convinced him to seek the stool. With armed support he mounted a serious challenge to his contender, Kwaku Dua, who eventually invited him and his army to a peace conference in Kumase to discuss the troubled succession. It was a classic trap. When Kakari’s six thousand supporters entered the wretched city, Snider fire erupted from all sides. At least two thousand were killed, but Kakari somehow escaped. After wandering alone for two weeks, he was captured and returned to Kumase where, hungry and exhausted, he was imprisoned under heavy guard while Kwaku Dua II was enstooled. A few days after Kwaku Dua’s accession to the throne, he ruthlessly but prudently ordered the execution of some three hundred of Kakari’s closest relatives, including women and children. Small children were killed by men who held their legs and smashed their skulls against tree trunks.16 But only forty-four days into his reign, Kwaku Dua II died, apparently poisoned by the general who put him in power. Soon after, former King Kakari was executed. After being strangled with a leather thong, his neck was broken with an elephant’s tusk, a traditional way of executing someone of royal birth whose blood could not legally be spilled.17 The Asante political arena had never been a place for the faint of heart, but it had never been more dangerous than it was now.
The entire kingdom became engulfed in the most horrible civil war the Asante had ever known. States fought states, private armies fought private armies, and what used to be the Asante union burned. There were no safe havens. No large towns survived, and even most small villages were destroyed. Probably half the population fled or was killed. When the fighting finally ended in 1885, after two full years of war, all the formerly tributary states were independent. All that remained of the kingdom was a small area around Kumase, and the city itself was largely abandoned. Elephant grass grew over fifteen feet high in its once immaculate streets, and the palace, rebuilt with bamboo and grass thatch, was a mockery of its former grandeur.
In 1888 a royal faction led by Yaa Akyaa succeeded in putting her son, a fifteen-year-old boy named Agyemon Prempe, on the stool. The challenge before him could hardly have been greater: to reconstruct a kingdom splintered in all directions, most of whose people were either dead or refugees and whose resources had virtually ceased to exist. The national treasury was so depleted that the royal family was reduced to asking the British governor at Cape Castle for a loan of £320 to pay for the enstoolment ceremony. The Colonial Office decided it would be a good investment to lend the money to the “impecunious monarch.”18 However, the British attached so many conditions to the loan that if Prempe had accepted it, he would have yielded his sovereignty to the British crown. Prempe and his advisers refused to sell the kingdom for £320, but they could not restore the dominance of the government in Kumase. In return for their support of the new king, the district chiefs and kings reclaimed much of their lost power.19
Partly as a result of the issue of the loan, Prempe’s formal enstoolment did not take place until June 1894. But more significant was the matter of whom the new King would rule. If he had been enstooled in 1888, he would have been no more than the king of Kumase district and a very impoverished district at that. Yet thanks to remarkably skillful diplomacy, Prempe’s mother and councillors were able to reconcile many of the rebellious states. In fact, conciliatory promises from the new king-in-waiting were so successful in reestablishing the loyalty of the dissident chiefs and kings that by 1893 the Asante kingdom was very largely reunited. Prempe’s own qualities had much to do with the successful reunification. Although he was plump and appeared effeminate, he was modest, respectful of his elders, and brave when in danger.20 He also truly believed in Asante unity, had no personal ambition, never went back on a promise, and possessed what the Asante referred to as “the sweet tongue”—an ability to win people over with his words.21
Now that the rule of law had been reestablished, peaceful trade once again began to flourish. This new trade did not concentrate on guns and gunpowder, which were blocked by the British. In 1890 the nearly forty thousand Asante traders who traveled to the coast purchased only 1,312 guns and 2,091 kegs of gunpowder.22 Asante still controlled major sources of gold, and new trade in cocoa and rubber was flourishing. In 1893 three thousand two hundred pounds of rubber were carried to Cape Coast each day.23 In 1895 alone, over four million pounds of rubber were exported from the Gold Coast, two thirds of it from Asante.
British “forward policy,” as it was known, continued to call for the destruction of the Asante state as an economic power in order to place the increasingly lucrative Gold Coast trade under British control. In support of the goal British administrators at Cape Coast rarely missed an opportunity to characterize the Asante government and its people as unworthy possessors of their empire. In 1892 Governor Griffith wrote of the Asante that “their proper characteristics are deceit, falsehood, treachery. In fact there is hardly a bad quality that they have not got.”24 His successor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, was convinced that the Asante social and political system was nothing but a “blood-thirsty despotism” that must be destroyed at any price. The various missionaries in the Gold Coast agreed, and so did Joseph Chamberlain, new secretary of state for the colonies, who was an outspoken advocate of the use of imperial power in West Africa.
In the past, British foreign policy had given France more or less a free hand in West Africa, concentrating instead on the strategic Nile Valley Chamberlain, however, was willing to risk war with the French to secure the Gold Coast and the territories to its north. On June 28, 1895, he declared that Asante independence was “an intolerable nuisance.” To add to Chamberlain’s annoyance, reports began to accumulate that the French, increasingly active in the Ivory Coast just to the west of the Asante, were attempting to establish an alliance with the Asante and that King Prempe was actively negotiating with them. In fact, although he had some preliminary contact with representatives of Almani Samori, the brilliant African rebel against French rule, Prempe was not interested in an alliance with the French. What he wanted was British help in bringing peace and prosperity to his war-weary people. His pleas were communicated to Chamberlain, who dismissed them. The Asante were a “nuisance,” and on November 21, 1895, Chamberlain cabled Governor Maxwell that military force would be used to subdue the Asante and bring about their submission to British rule.25
This decision to use force was made after Chamberlain’s rejection of an extraordinary entreaty for peace from a six-man Asante delegation to the Court of St. James, a delegation led by Prince John Owusu Ansa and including his British-educated brother Albert. The delegation offered the British a large business concession and submission to the British crown. British authorities at Cape Coast, convinced that Ansa posed a danger to their interests, did everything they could to discredit him, even trying to deny him the right to travel to Britain.26 Chamberlain at first refused to hear from the Ansa delegation on the grounds that the ambassadors were not authorized by Prempe and therefore lacked legal standing. But Prince Ansa hired a British barrister, who informed Chamberlain that the Asante ambassadors’ credentials were authentic and presented their submission that, in addition to offering a huge business concession, King Prempe would accept a British resident in Kumase and faithfully conform to the dictates of the queen or her representatives. They promised that the practice of human sacrifice had been abandoned, as in fact it had been under King Prempe, and asked only for peace and trade.
Chamberlain agreed to consider the matter if the delegation returned at once to Cape Coast; he then traveled to Kumase with British representatives to reach an accord. The Asante sailed back to the Gold Coast, convinced that they had averted war and established a business connection that would benefit both the British and the Asante. But Chamberlain could not overcome his fears that the French were somehow conspiring to control the Asante and through them the Gold Coast. While the Asante envoys were still at sea, he told Governor Maxwell that the planned military expedition to Kumase would go forward. Ironically, Prince Ansa actually arrived at Cape Coast on a ship that was loaded with military supplies for the invasion of Kumase. Maxwell received the Asante diplomats coldly, telling them that a military force would proceed to Kumase but holding out hope of peace. The disillusioned Asante returned to Kumase, where they discovered that their countrymen were well aware of the impending British invasion.
As word spread of the gathering of British military force, the Golden Stool and other valuables were removed from Kumase and hidden. Some factions in Asante wanted to mobilize the army, but Prempe refused, saying, “I am not prepared to fight the British troops in spite I am to be captured by them [sic]; … I would rather surrender to secure the lives and tranquillity of my people and countrymen.”27 But disturbing the tranquillity of the Asante people was exactly what the British had in mind. When a delegation of Asante diplomats hurried to the coast with promises of payment of all verified debts, Governor Maxwell curtly rebuked them, saying that their promises were empty words and that words alone could not send away the thousands of British soldiers who had been brought to the Gold Coast. Words of peace were not wanted. A British army would march to Kumase.
Command of what was called the Ashantee Expeditionary Force was given to Colonel Sir Francis Scott, who in 1874 had been a young officer in the 42nd Highlanders during Wolseley’s march to Kumase. Scott’s contempt for Africans was extreme even for his time, and he was as confident of victory as he was eager to fight. He had served in the Gold Coast for some time and in 1893 had led an expeditionary force of four hundred Hausas equipped with a Maxim gun to the north of the Gold Coast to prevent Asante expansion. He was well aware that the Asante could not hope to mobilize more than a few thousand men to oppose him, but several hundred of those men would be armed with Sniders, and a few would have modern French rifles. Properly led, troops with these weapons could be dangerous.
If the Asante chose to fight, they would face a somewhat smaller but much better-armed force than Wolseley had commanded. The West India Regiment of 380 African troops commanded by 20 British officers and 1,000 Hausas led by 30 British officers, as well as perhaps 500 native levies, were joined by the West Yorkshire Regiment of 400 men and 20 officers, as well as a special-service corps of 12 volunteer officers and 254 picked men chosen from some of the most prestigious regiments in the British army, including the Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards, and Grenadier Guards. What is more, Wolseley’s radical idea of highly qualified volunteers finally had its day Each man had to be at least twenty-four years old, have four years of service, be a good rifle shot, and pass a stiff medical examination.28 Nevertheless, one of these men died of “heat apoplexy” on his first day in the Gold Coast.
Unlike Wolseley’s force, Scott’s army had no Naval Brigade. He did have various surgeons, engineers, supply and artillery officers, and thousands of carriers, perhaps ten thousand in all. The combat troops would have an even greater advantage in weapons than Wolseley’s troops did. The Snider rifle had been replaced by a lighter, faster-firing and longer-range carbine, the Martini-Henry. The cumbersome and unreliable Gatling gun, which had been of little use to Wolseley, had been replaced by another American invention, the Maxim gun, a reliable, rapid-firing machine gun much like those that turned World War I into a slaughterhouse.29 They also had newly issued 75-mm field pieces, capable of rapidly firing heavy explosive shells for great distances. And, of course, they still had bayonets.
The first troops arrived at Cape Coast in December 1895 on board a far nicer ship than the one Wolseley and his special-service officers so detested. There were few duties, the food was surprisingly good, and the men arranged concerts that mysteriously featured, among other songs, “Swanee River.”30 As it was for Wolseley two decades earlier, health was Scott’s constant concern. The senior medical officer posted orders that called for men to eat “immediately” after rising because early morning was the “time of lowest vitality.” A cup of soup, cocoa, or coffee was recommended along with bread and butter. Two grains of quinine were to be taken immediately after breakfast. All told, five grains per day were issued on the march. Everyone was ordered to avoid the sun, damp clothing, unboiled water, and any food not supplied by the government. Bowels were to be “open daily,” and all men were required to wear a flannel cummerbund at night, apparently to prevent the loss of vital body heat.31 Hospitals were set up as far into the interior as Wolseley’s old camp at Prahsu, and a large hospital ship was anchored off shore. Huge depots of food were established, and as it was in Wolseley’s campaign, the emphasis was on meat (once again each man was to receive 1 ½ pounds of meat each day) and freshly baked bread. Despite all precautions, fever quickly began to take its toll, and victims were rapidly invalided home. One of the first to fall was a robust thirty-one-year-old major named Ferguson, whose fever rose to 110° before he died. He was buried next to Captain Huyshe, who died on Wolseley’s campaign.32
On Christmas Day two ships arrived carrying the special-service troops and the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. The men came ashore much more easily than their unruly mules, which threatened to capsize the small boats, and the white troops immediately began their march inland. Units of the special-service corps, including a company from the same Rifle Brigade that fought in 1874, had no difficulty on the march, but the 2nd West Yorkshire, the Old West Yorks, had a terrible time. This battalion had been stationed in Aden before being ordered to the Gold Coast, and many were ill. They were also said to have consumed far too much beer and done too little marching. On the first day eighty men fell out and had to be carried. It was not until much later in the campaign that the men became reasonably fit.33 Later that same day Prince Henry of Battenburg, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law, came ashore riding a donkey and carrying a small white umbrella as protection against the sun. He was eager to show his enthusiasm for the military actions of his adopted country. With him as an aide-decamp was His Highness Prince Victor of Schleswig-Holstein. Christmas dinner for the troops included fresh meat, plum pudding, and a bottle of beer. It was declared excellent.34
The road that Wolseley’s engineers had built two decades earlier was in total disrepair. In many places the troops had to advance in single file, climbing over fallen trees and cutting away vines and underbrush. When clearings were reached, the troops were trained in the tactics Scott thought would be necessary to fight against an unseen enemy in the dense brush. Scott disdained Wolseley’s lightweight gray uniforms. This was the last time that British troops wore scarlet tunics on active service, but by the end of the first day’s march, the woolen tunics were so soaked with sweat that they turned black and stayed that way throughout the campaign. Somehow Scott had not learned from Wolseley. Before the force entered metropolitan Asante, patrols searched for the Asante army, and spies were paid to provide information about their whereabouts and plans. Though there were several alarms that led the British to take up defensive positions, there was no sign of Asante troops. All the British found were small villages, the formerly prosperous but now ruined towns of Fomena and Amoafo, streams that the engineers had to bridge, and shrines—so-called fetish houses—which the troops destroyed “in a ruthless, unheeding way,” despite orders to leave them alone.35
As Scott’s column approached Kumase, a group of high-ranking Asante envoys, attempting to meet with the colonel to discuss peace, were beaten and robbed by the Hausa soldiers. Officers eventually restored order, returned the Asante envoys’ property, and flogged some of the thieves. A newspaper correspondent for the Daily Telegraph commented, consistent with the rabidly racist feelings of many Britons on this expedition, “Sambo does not bear flogging well, usually howling piteously.”36 Captain Donald Stewart, Scott’s so-called political officer, apologized to the envoys and asked them to assure the king that it was an accident. He also assured them that the British had no intention of deposing King Prempe if he accepted British protection, allowed a resident to be appointed, paid a war indemnity of an unspecified amount, and provided hostages to assure payment of the balance. The Asante were not pleased, but they dutifully returned to Kumase.
On the night of January 16, Scott’s army camped just outside Kumase. In a scene reminiscent of Wolseley’s expedition, a tremendous thunderstorm kept everyone awake all night. When word came the next morning that Scott’s scouts had entered Kumase without opposition, Scott called the correspondents together to hear this fatuous declaration: “I want you correspondents to make a note of it: That it has been entirely owing to the rapidity of my movements there has been no fighting. The celerity of my movements have [sic] completely paralyzed Prempe’s efforts. Besides, bear in mind, we have come up in far less time than Lord Wolseley took in the last war.”37 One correspondent felt compelled to observe that Wolseley had to fight his way to Kumase.
As a Hausa brass band incongruously played “Home Sweet Home,” the British troops marched smartly into the bedraggled city, watched by a small crowd of somber Asante. After posting sentries, Scott met with King Prempe at about 5P.M.. Prempe greeted him with a wildly discordant medley of drums, horns, and metallic clanging, complete with dancing executioners and dwarfs as well as endless shouted eulogies by pages to the greatness of the Asante monarch. Following an exchange of greetings, Scott told the king that he would meet with him again when Governor Maxwell arrived in a day or so. He also peremptorily told him not to make loud noise at night, to cut the long grass in the streets, and to clean up the “filthy” city. Prempe returned to his palace accompanied by the Ansa brothers, who despite their European clothing joined in some riotous dancing on the way. The British troops put up tents and “slept soundly under cover, convinced there would be no attempt on the part of the miserable natives to disturb their rest,” as one member of the expedition scornfully put it.38
The next day, as Colonel Scott waited for Governor Maxwell, he was informed that eight people held as captives by King Prempe were pleading to be rescued before they were executed. These people were relatives of King Akrampa, a rival claimant to the throne before Prempe had been enstooled. Most of his followers had already died or been executed, but these eight, including his sister, were still alive, and they begged for their lives. Sir Francis was unwilling to interfere in any way, saying that their rescue might annoy King Prempe, and besides, as a correspondent who was a witness reported, “He was sure the black people did not mind or care much about their fate.”39 Colonel F. J. Kempster of the West Yorkshire Regiment angrily objected, insisting that all human beings cared about their lives. After some vigorous discussion Scott reluctantly agreed to the rescue, and at ten that night British troops drove away the Asante guard and freed the prisoners. Scott would have been surprised by their reaction. “When at last they were made to understand they were set free, their joy and gratitude were unbounded, and they cried and blessed their deliverers again and again.”40
Two days later at 6 A.M., not an hour King Prempe would ordinarily have chosen to conduct state business, Captain Stewart and an escort of special-service troops waited impatiently for King Prempe. The king, as it turned out, was ready promptly at six, but some members of his large retinue were tardy. When Stewart was told that the king was not yet ready, he testily said that he would give Prempe five more minutes and if he were not ready by then, his troops would enter the palace by force and carry the king to the meeting place. Three minutes later, drums and horns sounded furiously, functionaries of all sorts dashed about, and King Prempe, his mother, and entourage appeared. He was carried in his hammock, where he sat propped up by silk cushions and shaded by a blue velvet umbrella. Led by a detachment of British troops, the Asante were ushered into a large square of more British troops, who were lined up two abreast. The soldiers, with white leather belts and shoulder straps contrasting with once red coats and with bayonets glistening in the sun, were a striking complement to the multicolored silk togas of the Asante court and the formal European clothing of the Ansa brothers. To add a note of even greater incongruity, three scarlet-clad hunchbacked dwarfs danced in front of the king.
Across the square from the umbrella-shaded royal party sat Governor Maxwell, flanked on one side by Colonel Scott and on the other by Colonel Kempster. They sat on folding camp chairs that were perched precariously on top of a dais made of large biscuit boxes. The arrangement was hardly majestic, but elevation over native peoples was always a vital prop of colonial rule, just as it often was with African kings. Wearing a white toga, the light-skinned, plump King Prempe, with what observers found to be intelligent eyes, sat silently holding a kola nut in his mouth. In Asante court tradition the nut symbolized the king’s inability to speak an untruth. Not surprisingly, the British found the practice absurd. Major Robert Baden-Powell—who would later found the Boy Scouts and use an Asante scouting sign as the model for the Boy Scout salute—was not impressed. He wrote that the king’s “flabby yellow face” glistened with oil and “his somewhat stupid expression [was] rendered more idiotic by his sucking a large nut like a fat cigar.”41 An aristocratic young officer agreed, describing the king as “an oily, well-fed looking brute.”42 Both agreed that he appeared agitated.
Without any diplomatic preamble Governor Maxwell began by accusing the Asante of not maintaining the road to Cape Coast and not abolishing human sacrifice. The first charge was true enough, but the British had not maintained the portion of the road that ran through their colony either, and the abolition of human sacrifice was an utterly bogus issue. It had never been a part of the treaty Wolseley signed at Fomena, it still survived quite openly within the British protectorate, and Prempe had in fact abolished it! What he still practiced was the execution of murderers, something the British preferred to think of as human sacrifice, a nice way to maintain their moral ascendancy Without any semblance of diplomatic courtesy, Governor Maxwell then told his interpreter to tell the king that he must submit to British rule and pay the remaining forty-eight thousand ounces of the now twenty-two-year-old indemnity of fifty thousand ounces of gold. As these dramatic events were unfolding, soldiers from the Old West Yorks were passing out in the heat, one after the other. In all, thirty-six of them collapsed, joined by one soldier from the special-service corps. They lay unceremoniously in the dust until the ceremony was over.43
For some time Prempe sat motionless, apparently struggling with his emotions. No Asante king had ever made a personal submission to another authority. Finally, Prince John Ansa whispered something in his ear, and King Prempe deliberately removed his golden sandals and a golden circlet from his head. Joined by the queen mother, Prempe walked slowly toward the biscuit box dais. Mother and son knelt awkwardly and put their arms around the leather boots of the governor and the two colonels. The Asante onlookers were utterly still as they watched this unprecedented humbling of their monarch. When Prempe regained his seat, he rose again and through John Ansa said, “I now claim the protection of the Queen of England.”44 He added that he had 680 ounces of gold that he was prepared to pay now and would pay the remainder in installments.
Maxwell dismissed the king’s offer as “child’s play,” adding that he could not believe that the king had so little gold. Prempe repeated his offer and Maxwell again demanded more, reminding him that since the treaty of twenty-two years earlier, only two thousand of the fifty thousand-ounce indemnity had been paid. Prempe responded that the Asante government had never been pressed for the money before and that he did not have it now. Maxwell was unyielding. He had already decided that, in order to prevent Prempe from negotiating with the French, he would have to be removed from his stool. Maxwell also believed the widespread rumors that King Prempe had his own fabulously rich gold mine. (In fact, there was such a mine, and when after much difficulty the British found it, southwest of Kumase, in 1900, they were surprised to discover that a rich reef had been dug out for a length of one hundred yards with large, well-timbered galleries built all along the tunnel. How much gold was available to King Prempe in 1895 is, however, not known.) Maxwell next announced that he would take the king, the queen mother, and others of high rank as hostages until the remainder of the indemnity was paid. Prempe again asked to pay in installments: “It is usual for a man, before he takes his meals, to take something to sharpen his appetite. Then, if the Governor takes an instalment, that will sharpen his; he will look the keener after the remainder.”45
Maxwell was not amused by Prempe’s wit. He read the names of the hostages he would take from a list he had drawn up before leaving the coast. He also announced that the two Ansa brothers were under arrest for forgery. The Ansas were immediately handcuffed, while the King was forced to remove all emblems of his sovereignty. The Asante onlookers were stunned and angry, but a large guard of troops with fixed bayonets surrounded the royal party. Led by Major Baden-Powell, as unsympathetic to Africans as anyone could be, two companies of West Yorks smashed the doors of the royal palace and seized more hostages. Once again, the palace was looted, but this time little of value, except to the Asante, was found. As vultures looked on from nearby cottonwood trees, the hostages set out for Cape Coast, carried in hammocks but under heavy guard.
While the despondent royal hostages were being carried away from Kumase, some of Scott’s men explored the once vibrant but now almost deserted city. Large parts of Kumase had never been rebuilt after Wolseley burned it, but the royal palace of stone that Wolseley destroyed had been replaced by several huge bamboo huts that to the British resembled barns. Most of Kumase’s dwellings and offices were in sad disrepair, but some of the beautifully ornamented, ocher-red-painted structures that impressed earlier visitors still stood. Some British officers actually believed that the ocherous red paint used on the polished clay friezes that decorated these houses was made from the blood of victims of human sacrifice, particularly virgin girls.46
Drawn inexorably to the execution area, the British invaders found that it had been in recent use. In addition to skulls and bones displayed on the buttresses of cottonwood trees, decaying bodies were strewn about in the long grass. The stench was as terrible as it had been in 1874, and the vultures as numerous and well fed.47 The British still did not understand that these victims were considered criminals, not innocent human sacrifices, and that their bodies were exposed in this manner instead of being buried in order further to deter crime.
Many British troops went beyond sightseeing; they ransacked the city, carrying away valuables and smashing and burning what they did not take a fancy to. A British surgeon condemned the burning of old and beautiful houses as sheer vandalism.48 The royal mausoleum at Bantama, which had escaped destruction by Wolseley, was not spared this time. Many of the valuables buried there had been removed before the British arrived, but the coffins still contained royal skeletons. By Governor Maxwell’s order the mausoleum was burned, its religious artifacts smashed, and the nearby sacred trees destroyed by ax, gunpowder, and fire. The blazes lasted all day, as religious shrines were added to the pyres.While Bantama was being desecrated, Fante carriers were busily removing the teeth from bodies in the exhumed grave. They wore them as necklaces.49
Scott’s expedition marched out of Kumase on January 22 to begin the long, fourteen-day trek back to Cape Coast. The Ansas, under criminal arrest, were made to march the entire distance handcuffed. The royal hostages were carried in hammocks and reasonably well treated, but the queen mother was not impressed. She spat at any white man who ventured close to her. As soon as the hostages reached the coast, small boats took them out to the HMS Raccoon, waiting offshore. It was the first time any of the royal family had seen the ocean, and it could not have been a happy day for them. They were imprisoned in the fortress at Elmina, whose people had long been loyal to the Asante kingdom and where European traders had paid rent to Asante kings for over two hundred years. After nearly a year they were taken to Sierra Leone, but so many Asante trekked all the way to Sierra Leone with gifts of gold dust and news of Asante politics that the British moved the royal hostages, their spouses, and children—fifty-six in all—to the totally inaccessible Seychelles Islands, off the coast of East Africa. Prempe would live in exile there until 1924.
The increasingly westernized Fante population at Cape Coast gave a formal dance in honor of Scott’s expeditionary force. One officer who attended wrote that he was “astonished” to find the African women dressed in “smart low-necked frocks” and the men “perfectly dressed in evening clothes” except for the fact that all wore red socks. Another officer decided that he would like to dance with one of the African ladies and asked her partner’s permission. The man surrendered her reluctantly saying quite sternly: “For dance, yes; for make love, no.”50
For his bloodless victory Sir Francis Scott was made an honorary major general, and the other officers were promoted at least one grade. No shots had been fired, but the campaign had not been without cost. Despite quinine, over 40 percent of the white officers and men fell ill, some seriously enough to be invalided home before they reached Kumase. Two officers, eight noncommissioned officers, and eight white soldiers died. One of those who died of malaria was Prince Henry of Battenburg; Prince Victor survived his bout with the disease. The African troops suffered almost as badly.51
The Ansa brothers were imprisoned without bail until February 12, 1896, when they were tried in the supreme court of the Gold Coast. In May they were acquitted of all charges of forgery. Furious, the government ordered a second trial, this time for embezzlement. It was obvious to everyone that the charges were trumped up to punish the educated Ansas for their many efforts to restore and reunify the Asante kingdom. An editorial in the Gold Coast Chronicle, hardly a newspaper sympathetic to the Asante, concluded that “the arraignment of persons before a British Court of Law for alleged offenses committed under circumstances and in a country where the court had no jurisdiction, is a monstrous piece of high-handed despotism for which there is no excuse.”52 Friends of the Ansas in London insisted that they had been maliciously prosecuted, and Chamberlain was forced to defend the role of the Colonial Office in action before Parliament.Neither the question of the Ansas’ prosecution nor the more embarrassing question of the legality of the British invasion and the imprisonment of the king was resolved. It was apparent to most that the royal hostages were taken, not as security against payment of the indemnity of fifty thousand ounces of gold, but to prevent the king or his legitimate successor from signing a treaty with the French or Germans.53 In these heady days of imperial expansion, the niceties of international law were so often waived that wags changed the lyrics of the popular patriotic song “Rule Britannia” from “Britannia rules the waves,” to “Britannia waives the rules.”
Even in this climate of colonial arrogance, it became increasingly awkward for the Colonial Office to justify the British government’s patently illegal takeover of the Asante government. Secretary Chamberlain himself initially had been shocked by Maxwell’s unauthorized arrest of King Prempe, but Maxwell was eventually able to bring him around to support the action.54 To put the best face on his actions, Maxwell asked three Asante to serve in what he called the Council of Administration, which would, as he conceived it, be a puppet government for the British resident. To lead the council he chose Opoku Mensa, the most senior leader left in Kumase and a man totally loyal to King Prempe. Together with the other two well-respected council members, Opoku Mensa was able to subvert many of the resident’s plans. The council soon gathered support from districts beyond Kumase, taxed traders for money to support the king at Elmina, and lobbied mightily for his release, even hiring lawyers to draw up petitions on his behalf. As time passed, Opoku Mensa became widely recognized as the representative of the king, ruling in absentia.55
It was clear that the Asante government could function quite well even without its king, as a British Colonial Office report sourly noted: “I am afraid the Chiefs are slowly returning to their old ways…. There is no doubt that much of their doings are unknown to the Resident.”56 Although his plans were often subverted, the British resident in Kumase was able to force the chiefs to provide men for road building, to build an imposing stone fort for the defense of the residency, and most detestable to the proud Asante, who had never served as carriers, to carry Europeans and their goods. Those who refused were beaten by Hausa soldiers, who often took the law into their own rough hands.
Soon after Prempe’s arrest, Maxwell returned to England to assure members of the chambers of commerce in London, Manchester, and Liverpool that “Ashanti is now open to British trade.” He urged British traders to become “pushfull” about exploiting economic opportunities in the Gold Coast, which he promised to turn into “one of the brightest jewels in the British Crown.” Businessmen were quick to take him up on his invitation. By the end of 1899, twenty-five licenses had been granted to mine gold, exploit timber, and export rubber, all from large parcels of land owned by wealthy Asante or the king. Asante miners had worked every gold-bearing deposit in the country long before European miners arrived, but there was still a great deal of gold to be had, and some of these gold-mining concessions allowed the government and private investors to profit immensely.57 For example, the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, Ltd., was given a ninety-nine-year lease not only for mineral rights but for timber and rubber as well. It made its first shipment of gold in 1898. By 1946 it had produced almost six million ounces of gold.58
Christian missionaries of the rival Wesleyan and Basel missions who operated nineteen mission schools in the region had done everything in their power to subvert Asante sovereignty for over fifteen years. In addition to spreading lurid tales about Asante despotism and cruelty, especially human sacrifice, they gave intelligence to the British about Asante actions and on several occasions supplied Christian converts to the British as carriers, interpreters, and even soldiers.When Scott invaded, the former captive Reverend Ramseyer supplied hundreds of men to him as carriers. In appreciation for his services, only five days after Prempe was taken into custody, Governor Maxwell invited Ramseyer to open a mission in Kumase. When the missionary arrived, he was exultant: “It is no longer a dream…. Kumase is now a Basel missionary station…. All Asante lies open before us.”59
As time passed and British demands for labor and taxes were exceeded only by the missionaries’ demands for children to convert to Christianity, Asante bitterness became obvious even to disinterested European visitors.60 Surreptitiously, the Asante made more and more efforts to acquire modern weapons and ammunition. People still had hope that King Prempe would be restored to his stool, but patience was wearing thin. The British were impatient, too. As Secretary of State Chamberlain later explained in Parliament, the Golden Stool alone gave legitimate supremacy to the ruler of Asante. “Therefore it was of the greatest importance to get hold of this symbol of sovereignty, if we could possibly do it.”61
The British resident at Kumase, Captain W. B. Davidson-Houston, had no comprehension of the importance of the Golden Stool for the Asante. He and other British government officials thought of it as nothing more than a potent symbol, like the crown or throne of a European king. That the stool embodied the soul and well-being of the Asante people and linked generations of their ancestors in spiritual common cause was simply not grasped. Davidson-Houston made several thinly disguised attempts to find the Golden Stool, but they were as unsuccessful as they were deeply offensive to the Asante. In December 1899, almost four years after Prempe’s arrest, a lame Asante boy named Kwame Tua appeared at Government House in Accra, now the seat of British power in the Gold Coast, where he offered to reveal the hiding place of the Golden Stool. Without bothering much about what the boy’s motives might be, the former lieutenant governor, now governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, immediately dispatched his private secretary, Captain C. H. Armitage, with some Hausa soldiers and carriers in search of the Golden Stool. After marching north for about one hundred miles, the boy slipped away from Armitage and unaccountably told a local chief that the expedition was searching for the Golden Stool. Armitage lamely tried to convince the alarmed chief that the boy was quite mad and quickly marched on, the boy still in tow. Some twenty-five miles north of Kumase, the boy panicked again, refusing to go any farther. Armitage tried both threats and bribery with no success. By now it was widely known that the British were searching for the Golden Stool, and the countryside was thoroughly up in arms. When the chiefs learned that Governor Hodgson would soon visit Kumase, they assumed that he too was in search of the stool. And they were right.
Despite their anger, the Asante people received the governor and his large party with the dignified protocol typical of the royal court. Rose Ramseyer, now ascendant in her new Basel mission station outside Kumase, presented Lady Mary Hodgson with a bouquet, and the children from her mission school sang “God Save the Queen.” Later that day bugles sounded to announce his excellency, an honor guard of Hausa soldiers presented arms, and in full-dress uniform, Sir Frederick strode vigorously out of the fort to address an assemblage of Asante chiefs and nobles. The slim, graceful Lady Hodgson sat proudly next to the stocky, bull-necked governor, who spoke while sitting down. After some reassuring words about his pleasure at being in Kumase and some soon-to-be self-evident nonsense about his good knowledge of the people and their customs, the crude, overbearing Hodgson delivered a series of hammerblows to the Asantes’ pride, religion, and treasury.
First, he declared, King Prempe would never return. Power would remain forever in the hands of the British. Second, not only would the fifty thousand-ounce war indemnity have to be paid, but interest was accruing. He read out the amounts of interest owed by the various district chiefs and kings. He then launched into this astonishing casus belli: “What must I do to the man, whoever he is, who has failed to give to the Queen, who is the paramount power in this country, the stool to which she is entitled? Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?” He carried on in this vein, making plain to all Asante that he was a barbarian determined to violate the sanctity of the Golden Stool on which an Asante monarch had only physically sat during the most sacred occasions.62 When Lady Hodgson wrote her memoirs, she loyally denied that Hodgson had ever mentioned sitting on the stool, but Hodgson’s signed transcript of his speech makes it clear that he did, and Asante who were present vividly remember his words.63 Hodgson’s confrontational approach was a calculated one. He firmly believed that only if the Asante knew their king would never return and the Queen of England possessed the Golden Stool would they submit to British rule. But because he had no understanding of the meaning of the Golden Stool for the Asante, his tough talk would start a war.
The Asante audience left without an open display of anger, but there was little hope of averting war now. The loss of land to British mining concessions had already driven many Asante to the point of insurrection. In addition to the loss of land, the Asante were outraged when the British resident ordered chiefs to produce carriers for the European miners. It was bad enough that families had to send their slaves to work for the hated miners, but free Asante were forced to carry supplies as well, something that the Asante found deeply humiliating. The British also forced free men to work as laborers on the roads, and if they refused, they were flogged or their chiefs were fined. The Hausa soldiers who enforced these demands were seen as tyrannical and rapacious agents of a foreign government. Moreover, British efforts to abolish the slave trade, which still flourished, infuriated many others.
Slavery was still vital to the Asante economy, especially to agriculture and the important kola nut trade to the north. These northern people had no other means of paying for kola nuts than slaves, and as several British observers pointed out, by now Asante slavery was such a benign institution that when the British actually freed slaves from their Asante masters, they refused to leave.64 The French did nothing to discourage slavery in their West African possessions, including the Ivory Coast, which adjoined the Gold Coast to the west, and the Germans encouraged it in Togo to the east; but the British frequently tried to hold to principle even if social and economic conditions might have called for a more cautious policy. Caution finally won the day. The Colonial Office chose to be pragmatic: “If we make it known that we have entered a crusade against slavery, we will not have any allies and they might all combine against us. So we should move very warily and carefully in this matter. To abolish domestic slavery would mean a social revolution of the greatest character. All in Ashanti who have anything to lose would gravely resist this act.”65
The Christian missionaries’ attack on Asante religion was another factor that led many Asante to consider war. The Asante religion was as meaningful to them as Christianity was to the missionaries, and they saw no reason to embrace alien ideas that would profoundly alter their way of life. The people of Asante had come very close to open rebellion several times during the past two years, and now Hodgson’s aggressive declaration that Prempe would “never again” rule in Asante and that he should possess and “sit on” the Golden Stool pushed most of them over the brink.
A few hours after Hodgson’s provocative speech, most of the great chiefs and nobles met in secret. After the men had begun to debate the issues, the sixty-year-old queen mother of the kingdom of Edweso stood up. Asante queen mothers were expected to lead in times of great national crisis, and this one, Yaa Asantewaa by name, was a forceful woman with a grievance and a vision. Her son, the king of Edweso, had been one of Prempe’s most devoted allies. It was for that reason that he had been arrested and sent into exile along with Prempe. Edweso was so loyal to the monarch that it was there that the Golden Stool was hidden from the British until it had to be moved in December 1899, when the British began to search that area.66 The queen mother was determined not only to restore her son to his place of authority but to reunite the Asante Empire under King Prempe. She began her impassioned speech by declaring that she would never pay one penny of her portion of the interest on the indemnity that Governor Hodgson had demanded. She then asked the men how they could sit idly while the British humiliated them time and again. “If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments.” She then grabbed a rifle from a startled chief and fired it into the ground. That night, it is said, all the chiefs swore an oath to fight a war of national liberation from the British.67
To give their rebellion legitimacy, the Asante ruling council offered the Golden Stool to the closest relative of King Prempe left in Asante, Asibe II, the chief of Kokofu. He humbly agreed to accept the stool and to lead the war effort, but before he could take any action, he was betrayed, and Governor Hodgson had him arrested and detained in the fort. He later—and gallandy—escaped but was again captured. Kept in irons, he was soon after deported. Well advised by British sympathizers, of whom there were many, Hodgson also managed to detain five or six major kings in the fort at Kumase, effectively neutralizing the participation of troops from their districts, but the remaining Asante leaders nevertheless mobilized their men for war.
The war began three days after Hodgson’s bellicose speech, when the same boy who led Captain Armitage on a wild-goose chase after the Golden Stool reappeared at the fort in Kumase with a new offer to lead the white men to its hiding place. Ever hopeful and ever naive, Hodgson again sent Captain Armitage, with another British officer, Captain Leggett, and fifty Hausa troops with their many African carriers, to follow the boy in search of the hidden treasure. As the column entered each of two small villages, they found the young men restless and excited, but they were allowed to search the villages without opposition. Leaving Captain Leggett and fifteen Hausas in a village named Bali, Armitage ordered his Hausas to bully and actually whip some of the children in search of information about the stool, but the only product of his brutality was even greater Asante outrage. Armitage then followed the boy through a dense, silent forest for more than three hours before coming to a clearing where they found three small huts. Here, the boy guide assured them, lay the Golden Stool. Picks and shovels dug deeply underneath the floor of each hut until the boy finally admitted that he had made a mistake.
Thoroughly disgusted, Armitage and his men trooped back to Bali, where they discovered Captain Leggett and his men faced off against forty or fifty armed Asante. As perhaps only British officers ofthat era could do, the youthful-appearing Armitage and the strikingly handsome Leggett calmly sat down to have tea prepared by their thoughtful orderly. The excited Asante looked on in amazement while a folding table (an essential piece of furniture that had been lugged along by sweating carriers) was set with two enameled cups and saucers, a butter tin, condensed milk, and a teapot. While the two sides stared at each other with their fingers on their triggers, the officers sat down on folding chairs. Without warning, the tin of condensed milk flew into the air, followed by the cup and everything else on the table, as Asante slugs flew everywhere, slightly wounding Armitage and Leggett as well as several of the Hausas. The British troops quickly took cover in nearby houses and returned fire. With nightfall such heavy rain fell that the Asante troops could not prime their flindocks, and the night thus passed quietly.
Early in the morning Armitage and Leggett tried to fight their way back to Kumase. The Asante followed them all day, firing from the thick brush. By late afternoon the column had so many wounded that it could go no farther. Armitage issued ten rounds to Leggett and each of the men still able to march and ordered them to break through to the fort. He divided the rest of his ammunition among the men who remained. It came to three rounds for each man able to fire.Completely out of food and water, the men licked the dew off leaves and waited. Providentially, the Asante did not attack, and Leggett ran into a patrol from the fort that escorted the entire force to safety. The exhausted, thirsty, and wounded men were tended to by the six surgeons in the fort, then fed, and allowed to rest. After having his minor wounds treated and eating breakfast, Armitage slept for days.
So began the ultimate Victorian melodrama: British troops and white women besieged in a fort by “cruel savages,” their food running out, hope almost gone, as British troops fought valiantly to reach them in time. It was a script that could have been done for Hollywood. The drama was real enough, but so was the terrible war that had just begun, a war that would see some of the fiercest battles ever fought in West Africa and that, despite conspicuous Asante courage, would result in the loss of Asante independence forever.