The Fall of the Asante Empire (10 page)

What Captain Yeo and others saw so clearly, the merchants of the African Company were now reluctantly forced to acknowledge as well.
They knew that the Asante were preparing another invasion of the coast to devastate the Fante yet again, and perpetual war was decidedly bad for business.
Ten years earlier, King Osei Bonsu had suggested to the merchants that they send one of their officers to the Asante capital as their resident representative.
Not until ten years had passed and the British fear of a Dutch trade monopoly with the Asante had grown did the Bowdich mission to Kumase in 1817 set forth.

The Asante army that devastated the Fante and could have taken the British fort at Cape Coast was large by any standard and was far larger than any of its West African opponents.
Bowdich estimated its strength in full mobilization at 200,000, and this may not have been an overestimate.
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But even if its actual size were only half this, it was still larger than that of its most formidable foe, the kingdom of Dahomey to the east, whose women warriors—the so-called Amazons—would later so capture the fancy of European visitors, including Sir Richard Burton.
The large size of the Asante army was only one reason for its military prowess, however, and not the most important one.
Its great successes against other African armies came in part from its advantage in firearms, but more important was its remarkable organization and the exceptional discipline and bravery of its officers and men.

Because the availability of Asante gold enabled them to acquire large numbers of muskets before their northern neighbors could (they were farther from the coastal trading routes), the Asante were able to defeat them and make them tributary states.
Part of this tribute would be paid in able-bodied male slaves to serve in the Asante army, helping to increase its size even further.
In fact, although all officers in the army were metropolitan Asantes and the high-ranking commanders were usually aristocrats, the great majority of the common soldiers were slaves.
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Slaves not needed for the army or the Asante economy were traded to the coast for more muskets and gunpowder.
Success in batde also heightened Asante esprit and confirmed the belief that bravery would bring victories, not to mention the spoils of war.
Success bred arrogance, an attitude the Asante were well known for.

Much like the president of the United States, the Asante king was the commander in chief of the army, and it was for him to appoint its field commanders.
But the decision to go to war lay with the inner council and the national assembly, much as it does with the U.S.
Congress.
The field commander and all of his high-ranking officers were much like feudatory lords in Europe.
Most were aristocrats or royal leaders of large districts during peacetime but took prescribed roles in the national army in times of war.
Though these leaders were referred to as chiefs by the British, the title understates their role and power.
They were, more accurately, “priest-chiefs” (
Obene Okomofo
), whose stool gave them powers that were established equally by Asante law and religion.
In many respects they closely resembled the lord lieutenants of an English county in their ability to retain the loyalty of men in their district, as well as the legal right to call them to war when needed.
Unlike many African armies, the Asante did not call up men in regiments based on age or the date on which they were circumcised.
In fact, the Asante did not practice circumcision at all, believing that the body should be kept intact, a belief that put them very much at odds with their Islamicized northern neighbors, many of whom would fight against them later in the century.
The foundation of the Asante army was territorial: men from the same district owed allegiance to their leader.

Beginning early in the nineteenth century, the king maintained a
small force of several hundred regular soldiers to serve as a kind of royal guards unit.
Later in the century, other full-time guards units were established, and there was also a full-time medical corps, a drum company, and about one thousand regular war messengers, or couriers, whose ability rapidly to communicate information over a considerable distance in battle was vital.
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Like British bugle calls, Asante “talking drums” could convey certain kinds of standardized information over considerable distances.
So too could traditional melodies played on elephant-tusk horns, but for complicated messages to be conveyed in the noise and confusion of battle, messengers were vital.
The remainder of the army, and by far its largest part, consisted of slaves, retainers, or freemen owing obedience to their chief or district king, who had the right to summon them to war.
These chiefs were given quotas to fill depending on the extent of the mobilization and the seasonal needs for agricultural labor or other activities.
The largest of these quotas were given to the kings of Dwaben or Bekwai, either of which could easily mobilize over ten thousand men.
These part-time soldiers were expected to own their own muskets and other weapons; the king was required to provide them with gunpowder and shot.
Sometimes these locally raised armies marched directly to battle after assembling in their own districts and being joined by senior Asante commanders, but on those occasions when a major campaign had been ordered, they marched to Kumase where the entire army came together to prepare for war.

Chiefs or district kings who failed to respond to the Asante king’s request for soldiers risked royal displeasure that could easily take the extreme form of a punitive expedition against them.
But it was not only fear that led to cooperation.
A successful campaign could lead to great amounts of booty in the form of gold, guns, gunpowder, captives, and land.
In principle all war booty belonged to the king, but he usually returned at least two thirds of it to his commanders, who in turn shared it with those loyal to them.
For many powerful men war was the royal road to glory and riches.
The victorious General Amankwatia III, for example, who had triumphed in 1803, was given the town of Sreso, seven miles from Kumase, with nearly all of its eight thousand inhabitants as his personal soldiers, slaves, or retainers.
When he visited the court in Kumase,
the flourish his horn players loudly trumpeted meant “no one dares trouble me.”
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Other generals had equally boastful airs.
These men might fall out of favor and lose their wealth or be killed in batde, but there were always others eager to lead an army to glory and riches.

The organization and tactics of the Asante army on the march were highly standardized.
Originally modeled after ants, who march in several columns before joining at the crucial moment, the army in a traditional fully-mobilized campaign was led by two or three thousand scouts (
akwansrafo
) who marched well in advance of the regular troops, often at night to avoid detection.
Most of these scouts were professional hunters who, when detected, used their skill as marksmen to snipe at their enemy’s advanced forces, often from a perch high in a tree.
To draw the enemy’s fire and force them to reveal their positions in the jungle foliage, they carried long wooden sticks with hooks on the end to shake trees as if someone were in them.
Because it was considered unlucky for a scout to be killed, these men were not expected to become involved in any prolonged fighting.
After exchanging a few shots with the enemy, the scouts typically withdrew through the next wave of troops, the advance guard (
twafo
).

When the forest was open enough to permit maneuvers, a condition common in the north of Kumase but rare in the south, this guard advanced in two or three long lines.
After the men in the first line fired their muskets, the next line advanced through them while they reloaded.
Then the rear line advanced, and the entire process was repeated or the advance was halted.
No one was permitted to retreat.
To assure that no one did, the advance guard was backed up by a line of trusted metropolitan Asante freemen known as sword bearers (
afonasoato
).
Armed with hippopotamus-hide whips and heavy swords, these men flogged or slashed anyone who attempted to flee.
The same practice, though not often publicized, was common in European armies during the nineteenth century and on both sides during the American Civil War.
Behind the brave Confederate soldiers who charged to their deaths at Gettysburg were others with bayonets (they were called “file closers”) to make certain they did not change their minds.
All of these armies understood the importance of making it as dangerous for its troops to retreat
as it was for them to advance.
Asante soldiers were taught to repeat this saying: “If I go forward, I die; if I flee, I die; better to go forward and die in the mouth of battle.”
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Behind these sword bearers would come the main body (
adonten
), which could consist of twenty thousand men or more.
An equally large force marched on each flank with orders to surround the enemy.
The commander of the army followed the main body, surrounded by his retainers and bodyguard.
In each of these large forces, there were hundreds of men who were armed only with knives to dispatch the enemy’s wounded.
Behind the main body marched many thousands of slaves who carried supplies on their heads and all manner of camp followers, including many women.
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Finally, there was a smaller rear guard (
kyidom
) that always faced the rear during an engagement in case the enemy attempted to encircle the army.
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Each of the flank units as well as the rear guard had its own senior commanders in addition to many lower-ranking officers.
Men from the various Asante districts had traditional places in the flank units, the rear guard, or the main body that marched forward in every campaign.
They understood the tactics necessary for them to succeed in battle.
Of course, some battles did not develop as planned, and these formations became jumbled together.

Before marching toward battle, the fully mobilized army assembled in Kumase, where gunpowder and shot from the king’s apparently huge armory (no European is known actually to have seen it), located three miles outside of the city, were distributed to the men.
Much of the gunpowder was of inferior quality, having been adulterated by European traders or damaged in transit, and their ammunition was inferior, too.
Unlike contemporaneous European armies, whose men usually fired lead bullets that more or less fitted the bore of their muskets, the Asante typically fired an assortment of nails or slugs cut from the lead or iron bars that European traders sold to them.
Their guns were six-foot-long muskets known as “Long Danes,” after the Danish traders who introduced them to the region.
These heavy, flintlock weapons were often shoddily manufactured (many of them in Birmingham, England), but they could be deadly at short range.
Difficult and time-consuming to reload (it took seven distinct movements and up to a minute to do so), rifles as long and heavy (nearly twenty pounds)
as these were hardly ideal for jungle warfare.
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Yet they were the only firearms then available on the Gold Coast, and they were well cared for and lavishly decorated, often with patterns of red shells attached to the stocks.
Very early in the nineteenth century some soldiers carried poisoned arrows and javelins, while officers and sword bearers carried heavy swords, but after 1807 these weapons were not used against the British.
Horses were known to have survived in Kumase, but because they could not survive in the tsetse fly-infested forest zone to the south, there was no cavalry.
Although high-ranking officers sometimes rode horses in Kumase with all the hauteur of a European guards officer, they did not ride to battle.
Instead, they were carried in ornate hammocks.

On ceremonial occasions both officers and common soldiers were elaborately uniformed.
In addition to the officers described by Bowdich (see chapter 1), these same British visitors to Kumase came upon hundreds of what appeared to be junior officers wearing leopard-skin tunics covered with cockleshells.
Several small blue-handled knives in silver and gold sheaths were fastened to the front of their tunics, and similarly ornamented elephant-hide cartridge belts were worn around their waists.
Each man carried a gold-handled sword in a scabbard behind his left shoulder, and half a dozen brighdy colored silk scarves and white horse’s tails streamed from their arms, which cradled their long Danish muskets, richly ornamented with gold and red shells.
When Bowdich and his companions passed by these men, they then came upon thousands of soldiers who sat so closely together that the British visitors could not pass through them without stepping on their feet, “to which they were perfectly indifferent,” Bowdich wrote.
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Each man wore a cap made of anteater and leopard skin, carried a cluster of small knives on his shoulders and hips, and wore cartridge pouches embossed with red shells and brass bells.
The stocks of their muskets were covered with leopard skin.
Their faces and arms were painted with long white stripes.
A few wore iron chain collars that signified their exceptional bravery in past batdes.
Bowdich wrote that they were prouder of these collars “than of gold.”
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