The Fall of the Asante Empire (21 page)

Despite nearly three quarters of a century of experience on the Gold Coast, the British had somehow not yet understood that carrying heavy loads was not men’s work there, it was women’s.
When they finally began to recruit women, they found that Fante women were not only willing but capable carriers.
It soon became commonplace to see long lines of Fante women cheerfully chatting as they walked along, each with a sixty-six-pound box of Australian beef on her head and most with a baby on their back.
For carrying this load over one hundred miles to the base camp at Prahsu, a woman would earn a maximum of ten shillings, the price of half a dozen chickens.
A special correspondent to the
Daily Telegraph
was touched when one of the slave women carrying his goods recognized her mother among another company of carriers and rushed over to embrace her.
As mother and daughter embraced, they sobbed and laughed with such joy that all the other women stopped to watch.
The two women had been enslaved by the Asante seven years earlier and had not seen each other since.

The British had reservations about relying on women as carriers.
For one thing, they were reluctant to put women in the line of fire, and too many women in camp at night could lead to disruptive temptations, not only for African men, but for British soldiers, sailors, and marines who had been away from women for a dangerously long time.
So British officers continued to search without success for more men to carry the masses of supplies that were piling up at Cape Coast.
Desperate, Wolseley turned to a special-service officer, Colonel George Pomeroy Colley, perhaps the most brilliant staff officer then serving in the British army.
Superbly organized and tireless, Colley saved the day.

When Colley took over, he found himself in command of 201 African carriers and 583 deserters, hardly a happy circumstance.
There were several reasons for these mass desertions.
Some British officers and African overseers were not disinclined to kick, beat, and even flog carriers.
Moreover, relatively little food was available to carriers, and that was largely rice, a foreign food these men thoroughly disliked.
Not least, their pay was late in coming.
When a few men walked away in disgust, mass desertions followed.
Colley first tried to use soldiers of the 2nd West India Regiment as carriers, but they were unable to carry the loads that Fante women could, and when one soldier actually collapsed under his load and died, Colley resorted to kidnapping.
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Colonel Colley asked Wolseley’s permission to hunt down the deserters and to capture new carriers by force.
Wolseley quickly agreed, and British officers, including several from the fleet offshore, led dozens of expeditions that burned villages where deserters lived and carried off nearly the entire adult populations of others, leaving only grandmothers behind to care for the small children.
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Colley soon put these thousands of men, women, and children (who carried smaller loads) to work under close guard.
Force was used when officers felt the need for it, but Colley favored persuasion and was wise enough to organize the carriers on a tribal basis, with each group having its own interpreter.
He also paid them reasonably well and allowed them a day off for every four worked.
Colley and his officers worked so hard that all came down with dysentery and malaria, but they soon had over two thousand carriers efficiently moving supplies up the road toward
Kumase.
By late December the number rose to six thousand, of whom one thousand six hundred were women.
To command this large number of men and women, Colley never had more than sixteen officers, all of whom were dreadfully ill much of the time.

On December 9 Wolseley was surprised by the arrival of a large British troopship that anchored off Cape Coast.
His telegram requesting British troops had reached London on the seventeenth of November, and later that same day the Cabinet approved his request.
With an unaccustomed sense of urgency, orders went out that night, and two full-strength battalions sailed on the nineteenth.
A third battalion that Wolseley had not asked for sailed a few days later.
Wolseley knew nothing about the dispatch of these troops until the first ship arrived, and although he was delighted to have them, he was far from being ready for them.
Fearful above all of needlessly exposing the men to disease, he sent the ship back to sea.
It held 30 officers and 652 noncommissioned officers and men of the Rifle Brigade, including Prince Arthur, son of the queen; 4 officers and 68 men of the Royal Engineer; and 70 or so other officers and men, most of whom were medical personnel.
There were two chaplains as well.

Three days later another ship arrived with the second battalion of the 23rd Regiment, the Royal Welch (then written “Welsh”) Fusiliers, half a battalion of Royal Artillery, and more medical officers and chaplains.
Five days later, to Wolseley’s great surprise, yet a third battalion arrived, the 42nd Highlanders (the famous Black Watch), accompanied by several senior staff officers, another forty medical personnel, and supplemented by a draft of 169 Scots from the 79th Highlanders.
Wolseley now had not two but three battalions of English troops, even if the Black Watch consisted of Scots, the Royal Welch were largely Welshmen, and the Rifle Brigade had many Irish.
The Cabinet’s rapid response to Wolseley’s telegram would prove embarrassing to the general.
Because there was nothing for the troops to do until the road had been completed, camps prepared, and supplies stockpiled, nearly two thousand men would cruise aimlessly in the sun until the end of December.
Christmas passed almost as unnoticed aboard the ships as it did on shore,
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and the news that Charteris had died aboard ship and that Neill’s shattered arm would require surgery in Britain did nothing to raise
the spirits of the men who were trying so hard to put a military campaign together.

By the time the British troops finally landed on New Year’s Day, Wolseley, despite his intense distaste for Africans, had assembled several large contingents of African soldiers.
Wolseley’s views were widely shared.
Captain Maurice, the same man who was horrified when a Hausa speared a helpless boy, wrote this comment about New Year’s Eve: “A nigger company, not requiring paint to make them look it, performed round a camp fire for our benefit, a small boy beating an old empty store box by way of castanet with wonderful skill.”
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It was a rare British officer who did not express racist views about Africans, yet a vital role in Wolseley’s campaign would be played by two large brigades of African militia that would be led by British officers.
Baker Russell of the 13th Hussars would command one brigade and Colonel Evelyn Wood, who earned a Victoria Cross for bravery in the Crimean War, would command the other.
In addition, Captain Glover had raised several thousand Africans to march on Kumase from the east, and Major W.
F.
Butler, one of Wolseley’s favorite officers, would attempt to raise an African army to drive toward Kumase from the southeast.
Finally, there was a small unit of scouts commanded by Lieutenant Lord Giffbrd, a lean, handsome, recklessly brave twenty-three-year-old, who would spend the campaign scouting far in advance of the troops.

In late December, wearing their drab gray uniforms instead of their traditional kilts and green or scarlet tunics, the British troops came ashore in small boats rowed by Africans.
The notoriously ill-tempered goat that served as the regimental mascot of the Royal Welch Fusiliers did not get very far.
No sooner had the battalion formed up and begun to march across the beach than he fell dead.
He was not a lovable mascot, but this was not a good omen.
As soon as the battalions were assembled, British troops began their march north toward their base camp at Prahsu, just south of the Pra River, which marked the southern boundary of metropolitan Asante.
The soldiers were joined by a naval brigade of 250 sailors and marines wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, who marched into Prahsu camp in perfect order, singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Newsman Henry Stanley, a veteran observer of
military campaigns including the American Civil War, was gready impressed by the robust health of these men, their high spirits, and the athletic way in which they marched.
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The 2nd West Indian Regiment came next, slouching in a leaden careless walk, according to Stanley.
Stanley did not realize that they were brave, disciplined soldiers who were devoted to their British colonel, a man appropriately named Bravo.
Each force was followed by hundreds of carriers, at least one for each soldier.

When the entire British force assembled at Prahsu in January, the camp held 3,520 combat troops, about 2,500 of them British, over three thousand carriers, and hundreds of tons of supplies.
Another five thousand carriers were at work bringing more supplies up from the coast.
As might be imagined, a military camp this size was a lively place.
Men of the Naval Brigade were inveterate pranksters, not only among themselves but with officers as well.
During one inspection tour by General Wolseley, they convinced a small African boy whom they had made their mascot to wear a full naval uniform with a wooden sword, step forward, salute, and introduce himself as “Mixed Pickles, Sir.” This was apparently such a screamer that even Wolseley, who was not known for his sense of humor, admitted he was amused.
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The Naval Brigade also had many pets, including a young chimpanzee and a small crocodile who lived in a canvas bathtub.

The troops especially enjoyed watching an elephant bathing in the Pra River, a novel sight because the recent retreat of the massive Asante army had left the forest almost empty of animals.
After dinner officers bathed in the river.
At night sentries fretted about the exotic night sounds, but the camp itself was a picture of peace-time soldiering.
Huge fires blazed everywhere, and the British units vied with one another in singing their favorite songs for Wolseley and his staff.
The Naval Brigade was said to sing best, but they refused to do so until they had their nighdy ration of rum.
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The British army men were not pleased that the sailors and marines had rum because unlike most campaigns, where they received a daily ration of liquor, Wolseley had ordered this one to be dry (except for officers, of course, who were not without requisite bottles of whiskey and champagne).
The African carriers gambled long after everyone else was asleep.
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Virtually all of the officers had already
suffered at least one attack of malaria, and now some of the newly arrived troops began to fall victim, even though officers handed out quinine every morning and the men obeyed orders to avoid chills at all costs and to wear a hat whenever they were in the sun.
Oddly, only one correspondent, who happened to sleep under a mosquito net, reported being troubled by mosquitos, and several newspapermen reported that they never saw a single one.
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Patrols that crossed the Pra reported no sign of Asante troops.
The southernmost portion of metropolitan Asante was deserted.
The events that took place in Kumase in 1873 and early 1874 have been chronicled by the missionaries Ramseyer and Kühne and the French businessman Bonnat.
Although they were often away from the court, living on plantations a few miles outside of the city, they were in continual touch with influential Asante and could share experiences with J.
S.
Watts, a part-African catechist of the Wesleyan church who was also being held in Kumase.
Besides, they were frequently in the company of the king, who needed their services as interpreters for the many notes that were delivered from concerned church groups and British authorities at Cape Coast.
The Ramseyers were particularly welcome because King Kofi Kakari had grown fond of their daughter, who would run to him and sit on his leg while he played with her.
He was also fascinated by Rose Ramseyer’s blond hair.

In July 1873, as General Amankwatia’s army was crossing the Pra on its march to the south, life in Kumase continued as before.
Despite the absence of as many as eighty thousand people—officers, soldiers, sutlers, carriers, wives, priests, and others—large festivals still took place.
In one the son of King Kwaku Dua I organized a festival to thank Kofi Kakari and others for their many gifts and human sacrifices given to celebrate the deaths of his mother and brother some years earlier.
A large party of his soldiers, painted red to symbolize the blood that had been shed, fired salutes to the king for at least fifteen minutes before more gifts were exchanged and several men were sacrificed.
One of these victims had managed to hide a knife on his person and made an attempt to fight back before he was disarmed and executed.
Ramseyer was appalled to see many Asante standing near the headless bodies “laughing and joking.”
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In September a far grander and more terrifying funeral took place to celebrate the death of a sixteen-year-old crown prince.
Executioners rushed through the city seizing slave victims for sacrifice, some 150 in all.
With their cheeks pierced and their arms bound behind their backs, they were taken away to await their turn to die.
The king sent word to the Europeans not to worry for their own safety, but he warned that the sacrifices would not be pleasant.
As various chiefs presented the king with gifts of silk cushions, clothing, gold ornaments, sheep, and slaves, the prince’s pages, who had attended the coffin, were beheaded as muskets fired to signal their doom.
They had known what their fate would be since the prince had died three days earlier.
The sacrifices continued for ten days, and several members of the royal clan were slain by the king himself.
Their bodies were left exposed to the royal vultures.