The Fall of the Asante Empire (12 page)

The hero loves a fight, The hero loves a, fight, You love a good fight, a good fight, Fighting is good, yes … Fighting is good, yes …
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In addition to these martial airs, there was good-natured bantering among the men, but discipline was ordinarily nearly as strict as it was in the tightly controlled British army.
The army usually marched slowly with many halts.
Some halts were made as a show of force in a tributary state, some because the rains were too heavy, and many because the day was not thought to be propitious for travel.
When a large river had to be crossed, and there were many, canoes had to be found or bridges constructed by pounding four large forked tree trunks into the stream bed, placing beams along these forked pillars, then positioning cross-beams that were finally covered with four to six inches of dirt.
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Although the army seldom chose to move rapidly, it could move at great speed when called on to do so.
European prisoners who marched with an Asante army unit in 1873 wrote that they were “able to march day after day at a quick, steady pace, with short intervals of rest, and a modicum of food.
They lie down to sound sleep at night, after a light supper of
corn, waking refreshed and strengthened to resume their way at sunrise.”
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Highway police maintained order along the line of march, cooking fires were prohibited when the enemy was nearby, and officers’ orders were obeyed at all times, even in the heat of battle.
For example, during a battle in 1824, a British officer was wounded and lost consciousness.
He suddenly regained consciousness when an Asante soldier began to cut his head off.
Too weak to resist, he expected to die and was amazed when an Asante officer, whom he recognized as a man he had once done a small kindness while the man was on a trading mission to the coast, ordered the soldier to stop.
Despite the heat of the moment, the man immediately obeyed the order.
This was only one example of Asante discipline.
In battle after battle, Asante troops marched in perfect order, their guns carried at exactly the same angle, before they turned toward the enemy and fired volleys on command, the only African army that was known to do so.
A European army could hardly have been better drilled, as several British officers who saw them in action observed.

Sometimes weeks at a time were spent in huge encampments where the men slept on latticelike beds with backrests and carried out camp duties such as preparing food and maintaining their weapons with great care.
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One notable and puzzling failing was the lack of sanitation.
The Asante were meticulous about disposing of human waste in their towns and villages, but the army on campaign did not dig latrines, and when it was camped in one area for any length of time, diseases such as dysentery and smallpox regularly took a huge toll of lives.
Another problem was sexuality.
The army might remain in a camp for weeks and even months at a time.
Many officers and other men of high social rank had their wives with them, as did some of lesser rank, and they did not abstain from sexual relations at night, but most men had no women of their own, and most women in neighboring villages had either fled or were carefully guarded.
Any female captives belonged to the king, who would later give them to deserving commanders, and ordinary soldiers were kept away from them on pain of death.
As campaigns dragged on, tensions grew.
The sounds of officers having sexual relations in their huts were not music to the ears of their sexually deprived soldiers.

As an Asante army neared its enemy, omens became especially important.
If necessary, the Asante would spend days hidden in forest camps while they awaited more information, avoided “evil” days, or heeded the omens sent by dreams, flights of birds or beetles, and the advice offered by the Muslim and Asante diviners and prophets who always accompanied the army on campaign.
Long before an Asante army neared its enemy, spies had usually provided its commanders with precise information about everything of military importance.
These spies were sometimes in place so long that it was said that the Asante “cooked their wars” for years before they attacked the enemy.
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For example, well in advance of a planned campaign, some Asante traders who visited a potentially hostile kingdom would publicly criticize their king and complain about Asante life to the enemy, hoping to be seen as disaffected malcontents.
To reinforce their charade, some married local women and settled down to farm.
When they had learned all they could about the local terrain, its defenses, and the enemy’s army, they returned home to serve as guides for the Asante army.
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On his way to Kumase in 1816, Dutch envoy Huydecoper spent several days living in an Asante military camp.
He said it was so large that a man could not walk all the way through it in a single day.
While this immense army waited for orders from Kumase, the soldiers spent their time foraging for food, something they did so thoroughly that the surrounding area was soon plunged into famine.
The officers had a well-developed interest in alcohol, especially the gin that Huydecoper carried with him in large quantities.
A similar fondness for alcohol was shared by the dignitaries in Kumase.
A large portion of the palace was used to store bottles of wine, and British visitors were served gin and brandy in such huge tumblers that they could do no more than sip while observing the Asante down theirs with no difficulty.
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It was with difficulty that Huydecoper was able to save any of his supply of gin to present to the king—or for himself as “solace” on the journey, as he put it.
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The camp was not disorderly, thanks partly to the use of elephanthide whips by the officers, but the soldiers sang a great deal and became boisterous at times.
Even the otherwise austere officers allowed themselves some pleasure on propitious days.
Huydecoper witnessed what he referred to as “general jollification” on a “good
Sunday” (an
Adae
ceremony) when the officers danced to the music of drums, flutes, and horns all night and into the following midday.
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In battle the Asante were so brave that they were universally feared by other West African states and well respected by the British.
They could also be brutal.
They often killed women and children, and enemy chiefs were sometimes tortured to death, their bodies dismembered before being apportioned, much as an animal killed by a hunter would be.
As evidence of Asante victory, the jaws of the slain enemies were taken back to Kumase where they were displayed in the palace.
But sometimes they treated prisoners with kindness, as some British captives were to learn.
They were also greatly concerned about their own dead and wounded.
When possible, for example, they smoked the bodies of their own slain commanders over a slow fire to preserve them until they could be returned to their families for burial.
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Even when Asante military campaigns were successful, as most of them were, the army often suffered great losses from disease or starvation after the food resources of the conquered area had been exhausted.
Nevertheless, the army’s return march to Kumase was typically conducted with great discipline.
A starving army can easily become mutinous, particularly when so many of the soldiers were slaves taken from other ethnic groups, but the Asante commanders were able to maintain control.
Even when a campaign had not been successful, it concluded with a rousing ceremony at the royal palace.
The army camped outside Kumase until the time was propitious for it to receive the acclaim of the many thousands who gathered to honor it.
When the soldiers marched into the city, they were preceded by their senior officers, who carried hundreds of jaws taken from their high-ranking enemies.
On one occasion when the army returned with too few jaws to properly proclaim victory, jaws taken in earlier campaigns were smuggled to them from Kumase so that their entry would appear to be sufficiently triumphant.

When the troops entered the city, they marched through the marketplace, which was filled with not only many thousands of people but every important person in the court, including the king.
The soldiers were dirty and disheveled, their hair tied up in long spikes and coils, their beards unkempt—even the officers were
much the worse for wear—but they were received with great applause.
They fired their muskets in salute to the king, then circled around and repeated the salute.
A day of mourning followed, complete with fasting, while the inhabitants of Kumase painted their faces and upper bodies red to symbolize the blood that had been spilled.
The following day, rum was available everywhere, as it was during the yam festival, and many people became quite drunk but not too inebriated to be enthralled by the human sacrifices that then took place to expiate the deaths of the great men who had died in battle.
Many slaves were required to die for each of the fallen senior commanders.
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A kernel of corn representing every soldier who died was dropped into a large urn by each senior commander while the king looked on sadly, sometimes feeling a personal loss because among the dead were usually members of the aristocracy or even the royal family.
He did not grieve for dead slaves, but he worried nonetheless because slave soldiers would have to be replaced, and heavy losses would invariably strengthen the power of those members of the inner council who regularly opposed the use of force as an instrument of state policy.

As the Asante and the British marched toward battle, the Asante had a great advantage in numbers.
The British were sometimes able to recruit African allies from coastal peoples, but these soldiers, however numerous, were rarely a match for the Asante in bravery or discipline.
The Asante also had an advantage in jungle fighting where it was difficult for the British forces to see their enemy, much less use their usual infantry tactics, such as their famous square formation, or deploy their artillery effectively.
Also, the Asante were relatively immune to the malaria that so quickly struck down all but a few Europeans.

British forces were reasonably secure in their stone forts, although not completely so as we have seen, and they were at a distinct advantage when combat took place in open country where they could deliver well-aimed musket fire at far longer range than the Asante could and were able to bring their cannon and rockets to bear long before the short-ranged Asante muskets could take a toll.
These weapons would make the difference in a large battle in open terrain in 1826.
As time passed, the British advantage in weapons became even more decisive.
By 1853 the Enfield rifle, accurate up to eight hundred yards, was available to British troops, and in 1866 the .577-caliber Snider rifle (that strangely enough had been invented by a New York wine merchant) was adopted.
It was this weapon, along with artillery, that gave them success in the great battles of 1874.
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When the final round of fighting took place in 1900, British forces had still more accurate and longer-ranged rifles, along with Maxim machine guns (like their precursors, the Gatling and Hotchkiss guns, also invented by Americans) and modern 75-mm artillery—weapons that with little modification were used throughout World War I to deadly effect.
Most of the Asante were still armed with muzzle-loading, smooth-bore flintlock muskets.

But early in the nineteenth century when the Asante and British first clashed, their arms were relatively similar.
Muskets were abundant, at least along the West African coast.
The British sold guns along the coast as early as 1646, and in 1829 alone, British traders in West Africa sold 52,540 muskets and pistols and nearly two million pounds of gunpowder.
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The Dutch sold nearly as many guns and perhaps even more powder.
In 1833 alone, the Asante placed an order for ten thousand guns with the Dutch.
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From 1870 to 1872, as the Asante prepared for impending war with the British, they purchased over eighteen thousand muskets and twenty-nine thousand kegs of gunpowder.
The Asante problem was not the availability of guns and gunpowder but their poor quality.

Typically, the muskets sold to the Asante and other West Africans were shoddily made.
Their stocks split easily, and their barrels were likely to burst, leading to the development of gun-repair shops operated by Asante blacksmiths to repair them.
Most of the gunpowder was low in saltpeter, partly because it had been adulterated by European traders and partly because the Asante preferred weaker powder that was less likely to make the poorly made barrels of their guns explode.
However, the low saltpeter content often reduced the explosive power of the powder so much that the Asante had to increase the amount they used in order to give their guns a range of even as much as forty or fifty yards.
What is more, they had few bullets, relying instead on the much cheaper slugs of
lead, pewter, or iron, but these had such limited penetrating power that they were only lethal at very close range.