The Fall of the Asante Empire (16 page)

That move was taken in 1829—the same year that Sir Robert Peel introduced “bobbies” to cope with London’s crime—when the British government, frustrated by the futility of its efforts to rule the Gold Coast, gave the administration of the area back to the merchants.
The first president of the newly formed merchants’ council did nothing even to attempt a peace settlement and was asked to step down from his office.
Nothing further happened until February 1830, when Captain George Maclean of the Royal African Colonial Corps became the second president of the newly established merchant council in Cape Coast.
Unlike his predecessors, Governor Maclean immediately opened negotiations with Osei Yaw, while he used everything in his power—which at that time consisted more of the force of his personality than military assets—to intimidate the Fante.
While Charles Darwin sailed along the coast of South America in the
Beagle
, a treaty consisting of the same terms proposed two years earlier was signed in 1831.
Maclean would not change the world the way Darwin did, but he would change the Gold Coast, giving it sixteen years of welcome peace and free trade.

Maclean is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of British colonial relations in Africa.
He ruled at a time when the British government had almost no interest in the Gold Coast.
He possessed a pitifully small police force of one hundred twenty men to control all of the maritime people of the Gold Coast, and yet he managed to control them with what very soon amounted to absolute authority.
He was not only the ultimate policeman, but without any official judicial authority, he quickly became the judge
to whom everyone brought the most difficult cases.
Known for his scrupulous impartiality, his judgments were obeyed.
He was patient, courteous, and wise, the rare British official of that time who actually respected and liked Africans.
He was also utterly fearless, often facing down truculent opponents at great risk to his own life.
When one local chief defied him, Maclean led his one hundred twenty policemen on all-night marches to surround the offending village.
Just before dawn broke, the sleeping offenders were easily taken into custody.
Without legal authority over the peoples of the Gold Coast because no official protectorate had been declared by the British government, Maclean nevertheless established his authority over a large and populous area along the coast, and his positive influence was felt throughout the inland area controlled by the Asante and their tributary states.
So grateful were the Asante for Maclean’s ability to enforce peace that they gave him a nickname that meant “the white man in whose time all slept soundly.”
³¹
The king was so grateful to Maclean for protecting Asante trade interests that he regularly prayed and conducted sacrifices to assure his good health.
³²
His good health lasted until 1847 when he died of dysentery.

His remarkable successes on the Gold Coast notwithstanding, Maclean was vilified in some circles in England because his wife, a well-liked poet, died suddenly only a few months after joining him at Cape Coast castle.
It was rumored that she committed suicide due to his mistreatment of her or his philandering with African women.
A British merchant who was there when she died disputes this, insisting that she was perfectly happy the evening before she died and that she died of a congenital heart defect for which she was taking medication.
³³

Osei Yaw died in 1834 and was succeeded by his nephew, Kwaku Dua I.
As much as Maclean was respected in Kumase, he was not the only representative of a European power to receive a favorable hearing there.
The Dutch had always been sympathetic to Asante interests, and in 1836 they became so impressed by the success Britain had achieved in recruiting West Indians into their army that they decided to emulate them by recruiting Asante men into the Dutch Army to serve in Dutch colonial possessions in the East Indies.
³⁴
They asked King Kwaku Dua I to receive a high-ranking
emissary, Major General Jan Vermeer, who hoped to establish a permanent army recruiting station in Kumase.
In return General Vermeer would promise the delivery of firearms.
The request was accepted, and Vermeer arrived in Kumase in January 1837 with one thousand men and a military brass band.
He reported that he was greeted by a crowd of sixty-seven thousand people, a suspiciously precise number, but the crowd was clearly a large one.
Vermeer gave the Asante king two thousand guns in advance, and the king gave Vermeer two of his nephews to accompany him to Holland, apparently as collateral.
One of these boys had an unhappy life and committed suicide, but the other became a successful engineer and never returned to the Gold Coast.
³⁵

The king also sent a few recruits to Elmina who were described as good and strong men, but he asked the Dutch for more muskets and some cannon as well as all manner of presents, including fine silverwork.
General Vermeer, now back in Holland, had established as Dutch resident in Kumase the same W.
Huydecoper who had visited in 1816.
Huydecoper found himself sandwiched between the king, who demanded more and more from the Dutch while he produced fewer and fewer recruits, and Vermeer, who angrily demanded that matters be set straight.
Huydecoper was also horrified by the numbers of people who were beheaded, as well as some who were hanged and, Huydecoper wrote, partially eaten.
By the time the recruitment station was closed in 1842, largely due to British protests, just under two thousand Asante, almost all of whom were war prisoners, had been recruited and sent to the East Indies.
Many of these men later returned and settled around Elmina.
³⁶

Although there were many threats of war during the reign of Kwaku Dua I, he was devoted to peace and managed, although sometimes with difficulty, to avoid open warfare with the British despite their vacillating policies after the death of Maclean in 1847.
Although he did nothing to reduce the numbers of humans who were executed or sacrificed, Kwaku Dua was a wise and prudent king, who continued Osei Bonsu’s policy of trade and peace.
He even went so far as to consider allowing British missionaries to open a mission in Kumase.
In response the Reverend Thomas B.
Freeman was the first European missionary to visit the capital.
After a preliminary visit in 1839, when he preached the gospel despite
his sense of horror at the headless bodies he so often reported seeing in the dirt along the roads, he returned with a large entourage in 1841, bringing with him a carriage similar to the ones used by European aristocracy.
Even though the roads were remarkably well maintained, getting the carriage across the two hundred or so streams and rivers was no small achievement, and Freeman was delighted that King Kwaku Dua I was pleased by the gift.
So pleased, as it turned out, that he maintained the carriage in immaculate condition for at least five years, although in the absence of horses, it was pulled by men.

The carriage was only one example of a dramatic pattern of gift exchange between Europeans and the Asante kings.
Gift exchanges were not present in many parts of Africa, but for the Asante and their European suitors they were obligatory.
Early in the eighteenth century the Dutch and English were sending gifts as diverse as plumed hats, gilt mirrors, general’s truncheons, four-poster beds, flags, magic lanterns, clocks, silverware, silver-topped canes, all manner of garish uniforms, and, not least, a glass coffin.
Much of the material given to Asante kings was little better than junk and was of so little use to them that they stored hundreds of items away in the stone palace, a kind of museum for European exotica.
In return Asante kings often presented gifts of far greater value to the Europeans.
For example, former Royal Navy Commander Governor Sir William Winniett, who replaced Maclean in 1848, gave King Kwaka Dua I £300 worth of gifts in return for which the king sent 550 men to him bringing bullocks, sheep, pigs, fowls of various sorts, and all manner of food.
Winniett characterized the gifts as “magnificent.”
³⁷

Kwaku Dua invited the missionary Freeman to a sumptuous dinner, to which the king wore an elegant European brown velvet suit with silver lace, a white linen shirt, white satin trousers, and a silk sash around his waist.
Two golden knives were suspended from a chain around his neck, and another large gold chain coiled six to eight times around his neck before hanging down to his waist.
³⁸
A middle-sized man of about thirty-six who, unlike most wealthy Asante, neither smoke nor drank, the king was courteous to Freeman and was satisfied about the missionary’s good intentions.
Freeman returned to the coast convinced that a mission would be established,
but in his absence conservative Asante resistance to Christian influence grew, and it would be more than a half century before a Christian mission actually opened in Kumase.

During Governor Winniett’s visit to Kumase in 1848, King Kwaku Dua took him to task for British newspaper accounts that characterized the Asante as bloodthirsty savages addicted to human sacrifice.
Winniett was surprised that the King knew anything about the British press and was not able to appease Kwaku Dua.
³⁹
From this time on, relations grew more troubled, but no serious rift took place until 1862 when an elderly and wealthy Asante citizen was accused of hoarding gold nuggets rather than conveying them to the king, their rightful owner.
Rather than risk facing trial in Kumase, this man fled to the British protected territory along with many of his retainers.
King Kwaku Dua requested his extradition, as he had a treaty right to do, but Richard Pine, the new governor, was convinced of the man’s innocence.
A lawyer himself, Pine was torn between the treaty, which required extradition, and his conscience.
Pine refused extradition, and Asante pleas went unanswered.

That there had been no armed conflict between the Asante and the British since 1826 is truly extraordinary.
During this thirty-six year period the world was hardly a peaceful place.
America fought a war against Mexico and began its terrible civil war, much of West Africa was torn by tribal wars, and Britain fought colonial wars in Canada, Aden, Afghanistan, Lebanon, India, South Africa, Burma, Persia, China, New Zealand, Bhutan, and Ethiopia, as well as the horrible Crimean war against the Russians.
The Asante fought states to the north during this period, including a three-year war against the Gonja that was raging while Freeman and Winniett were in Kumase.
The Asante and the British were anything but unwilling to wage war, but until Pine’s fateful decision, they had lived in peace with one another for over three decades.

Reluctantly, King Kwaku Dua I, fundamentally a man of peace, felt obliged to assert his treaty rights.
Over the objection of his councillors, who recommended further negotiation, the king uncharacteristically called for mobilization, and the inner council finally agreed.
An army of as many as sixty thousand men commanded by Owusu Koko, the son of King Osei Bonsu, moved
south with little opposition.
After brushing aside some troops from a rival state, advance units of the Asante army came up against a native army bolstered by four hundred disciplined troops led by a British major named Cochrane.
Instead of facing the Asante as his men urged, Cochrane ordered a retreat, leaving behind a rear guard that was easily overrun.
This shameful performance left the Asante with a clear path to the coast.
But before launching a major invasion of the south, General Owusu Koko offered Governor Pine another choice—extradition of the wanted man or war.
Pine chose war, declaring that he would fight “until the Kingdom of Ashantee should be prostrated before the English Government.”
⁴⁰
For someone with very little military force, this was an incautious threat.
But before the Asante general could make up his mind to order an attack, the rains came, and he withdrew his army to Kumase.
The king was so angry that he ordered a court of inquiry into the conduct of Owusu Koko and his senior commanders, at least one of whom was executed for dereliction of duty.
⁴¹

Pine was aware that his luck could run out if he did not establish a strong military force.
The cost of maintaining a large native militia was beyond his means, and Britain rejected his appeal for two thousand regular white troops.
Still, Pine was determined to show the flag, and he eventually decided to march the troops he had—men from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th West India Regiments, six hundred in all—to the Pra River.
The troops marched during the dry season and built a fortified camp well supplied with arms, ammunition, and food; but even during the dry season neither the West Indian troops nor their white officers had great enthusiasm for their role.
A force of this size could not possibly cross the Pra to invade Asante territory, nor could it hope to stand very long against a determined Asante attack.
More likely, an Asante army would simply bypass their position and sweep on to the coast.
When the rains returned, the health of the men quickly deteriorated, and soon many were down with malaria and dysentery.
As soon as the rains abated enough to allow travel, the entire force straggled back to the coast, leaving behind their only partially destroyed supplies, cannon, and stores of ammunition.
Not a shot had been fired.
King Kwaku Dua was amused, remarking that “the white men bring cannon to the bush, but the bush is stronger than the cannon.”
⁴²
Pine’s failed
gamble left British prestige at a new low.
A noted Gold Coast historian wrote, “Never did any enterprise end in such utter failure.”
⁴³