The Fall of the Asante Empire (32 page)

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.

A
S THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGAN, THE ASANTE PREPARED FOR
war—or rebellion as the British always called it.
They were surprisingly well organized, considering how unexpectedly the conflict had come.
Guided by Opoku Mensa, their political leader, and Kofi Kofia, a vigorous young general, newly mobilized soldiers rapidly assembled outside Kumase where the first battles would have to be fought.
Some few of the Asante troops had breech-loading rifles, for the most part older models such as Sniders, but almost all their men were still armed with antiquated flinlock muskets, and they were chronically short of shot and powder.
Asante generals were fully aware that the British troops they had chosen to face would not only all be armed with the most modern rifles but also have machine guns, powerful, rapid-firing 75-mm cannon, and seemingly limitless supplies of ammunition.

In searching for a way to neutralize British firepower, Asante military leaders seized on the idea of the stockade, which had apparendy been explained to them by Mende travelers who knew of the use of stockades against the British in Sierra Leone in 1898.
Despite inexperience with this kind of defensive structure, the Asante accomplished an astonishing engineering feat.
There were
only a dozen roads or paths that led out of Kumase through the dense jungle barrier that surrounded the city.
If these paths were blocked, British reinforcements could not reach Kumase to relieve the British fort, nor could the forces in it hope to escape.
In the space of only three weeks, the Asante managed to block all these roads with twenty-one massive log barricades.
Using slave labor driven on by armed troops, the Asante cut thousands of huge logs and dragged them into place.
Two six-foot-high walls of logs, lashed together with telegraph wire torn down from its route from Kumase to the coast, were filled in with five to six feet of densely packed dirt, stones, and smaller logs.
Loopholes were cut to allow firing.
Many of these stockades were built in zigzag patterns to allow cross-firing if the British troops were able to press their attacks close to these formidable barriers.
These stockades were so monumental that they were impervious to the heaviest artillery fire the British guns could manage.
What is more remarkable, these were not narrow structures that merely blocked a path, like the fallen trees that had been used to impede Wolseley’s advance.
Several stockades were over four hundred yards long, and many others were nearly that extensive.
The flanks of these stockades were also fortified and entrenched, so that even if British troops succeeded in cutting their way through the jungle to outflank the stockade, they would still encounter heavy fire from well-protected defenders.

Behind each stockade the Asante leaders built extensive war camps capable of housing many thousands of troops.
These camps consisted of a thousand or more well-made huts equipped with bamboo beds, outside sitting areas, and some large structures with reinforced log roofs capable of withstanding anything but a direct hit from a 75-mm shell.
The camps included large markets and supply areas well-provided with food and gin, the staple beverage of Asante campaigns.
Most of the occupants of the camps were armed men, but there were some women and children, too, and traders came and went with supplies.
As was the case in earlier Asante wars, sanitation was poor, but the comforts that these camps provided so amazed British officers when they later examined them that the Europeans wondered aloud why
they
were living in far less comfort.

In addition to the well-built Basel mission station that was now established in Kumase, the British had constructed a prison, a hospital,
and large barracks for troops, but the key to their power in the city was the gleaming white fort that commanded the area.
Its twelve-foot-high, loopholed stone walls enclosed a fifty-square-yard area that included various multistoried living quarters for residents, large storage rooms, a small hospital, sundry offices, a kitchen, and a well.
Large, well-protected circular firing turrets for machine guns and cannon rose above the walls at each of the fort’s four corners.
The turrets and the living quarters had roofs of red corrugated iron.
The only entrance to the fort was a massive iron gate.
The fort mounted four cannon and five machine guns that commanded the city, a nearby vegetable garden, and numerous sheds and houses.

While the Asante forces were building their stockades and war camps, Governor Hodgson was frantically telegraphing for reinforcements.
The British government was sympathetic to his plight, but the British army was stretched to its limits by the expanding war against the Boers in South Africa and, most recently, by the need to send an expeditionary force to China to help quell the Boxer Rebellion.
Even if the War Office had troops to spare, it was not comfortable about asking white soldiers to campaign during the rainy season in the Gold Coast.
London had not forgotten that only sixty-eight of the four hundred men of the Royal West Yorkshire Regiment were fit for duty after Scott’s force returned to the coast five years earlier.
However, British public opinion, which was already ill-tempered after the many reverses suffered in South Africa, would not tolerate a defeat in the Gold Coast.
A victory was badly needed, and African troops led by British officers and noncommissioned officers would have to do the job.
As orders came over the telegraph lines, troops began to muster in Accra to march north to Kumase, while others in the Northern Territories made ready to march south.
Other troops from Sierra Leone to the west and Nigeria to the east began their march to the coast where ships were waiting to carry them to the Gold Coast.

For the Nigerian troops led by Captain Harold Biss and Captain Charles Melliss (soon to become a major and a recklessly courageous leader), the march included their first, and wildly exciting, ride in a railroad train.
These men, who had never before even seen a train, next had their first sight of the sea as they were ferried aboard a modern steamship on their hurried way to Cape Coast.
One of them saw an ice cube for the first time in his life.
Fascinated by this strange object, he carefully wrapped it in a cloth and put it in his pack.
When he returned with a friend to show off the mysterious object, he found that it had disappeared, and he was convinced that it had been stolen.
It took a British officer some time to explain to him what had happened.
¹
These African soldiers were not only naive about ice and various aspects of European technology, they were young and inexperienced in the ways of modern warfare.
They were so likely to fire wildly, wasting precious ammunition, that British officers chose not to issue them repeating magazine rifles, and many of their officers openly doubted that they would stand against the Asante.
²
2 Wolseley had used the same concerns to insist on being sent British troops.

The first troops to reach Kumase were 107 Hausas who had marched down from the north, led by an ill-fated captain named Middlemist.
Two other officers, named Marshall and Bishop, along with a doctor named Hay (who would prove to be exceptionally brave) accompanied them.
They arrived on April 18 without meeting any opposition.
The following day, on Hodgson’s orders, two columns of troops marched out of the fort to destroy abandoned war camps near Kumase without encountering any hostilities.
The Asante leaders were still trying to avoid war.
But five days later, when Hodgson repeated the order to punish the Asante, one hundred fifty men led by the recendy arrived Captain Marshall marched into a deadly ambush.
Four men were killed and fifty-eight wounded, including Marshall, Bishop, and Dr.
Hay.
The column withdrew to the fort in disorder.
All that night the Asante sang and drummed in celebration of their victory.
Sleep was impossible in the fort, and Governor Hodgson spent the night sending telegrams requesting more reinforcements.
They were the last telegrams to leave Kumase.
By morning the line was cut.
The construction of the stockades had been completed, and the Asante were ready for war.

The Asante did not intend to starve the British garrison out of the fort.
Even though the fort was impregnable to Asante weapons, at ten o’clock on the morning of the next day, the twenty-fifth, the Asante attacked.
Despite heavy fire from Hausas deployed outside the fort and from machine guns and artillery in the fort’s turrets, the Asante advanced steadily, taking the barracks and other European
buildings as well as the Basel mission where they were delighted to find hundreds of bottles of wine.
Thousands of African civilians fled toward the fort ahead of the Asante advance, and as some of the British troops withdrew into it, they made a panic-stricken charge to join them inside its walls.
Captain Middlemist was so badly crushed against the fort’s iron door that he was critically injured, and it was only with the utmost effort that he was pulled inside and the door locked shut.
The white missionaries, led by Friedrich Ramseyer and his wife, Rose, were admitted to the fort, but their African students and teachers were forced to remain outside where they huddled together, terrified and utterly disillusioned.
³
There was not enough room inside for all of them, but all the same, it was not an attractive advertisement for the advantages of converting to Christianity.
Machine guns and cannon from the fort stopped the Asante long enough to allow a cordon of Hausas to dig trenches and set up a perimeter defense around the refugees, who were now huddled under the protection of the fort’s guns.
Among these forlorn people were several wives of one of the detained Asante kings.
They lived in a green canvas tent and were visited only by their sovereign.

The light from the burning city, the wailing of terrified women and their children, and the triumphant shouts of the Asante troops made the night one that the besieged people in the fort would never forget.
⁴
4 This night, as on most that would follow, the forts’ occupants were kept awake by the seemingly incessant drumming and shouting coming from the Asante war camps behind their stockades.
Well fueled by gin, men in the various camps would shout challenges like these back and forth:

C
AMP
A [
to Camp B
] : “We are like the mighty bull that prowls about the forest; what are you?”

C
AMP
B [
to Camp A
]: “We also are as strong as that great bull.”

C
AMP
A: “Are you ready?”

C
AMP
B: “Yes, we are.”

C
AMP
A: “Then man your stockades.”
⁵

Sounds of cheering men rushing to their positions followed, as one camp after another manned its position.
At 5
A.M.
, when British buglers sounded reveille, the Asante still had enough energy to answer with loud soundings on their elephant-tusk horns.

ASANTE BATTLE ZONE in 1900

During the afternoon of April 29, the trapped occupants of the fort listened expectantly to the sound of heavy fighting just beyond Kumase.
As the light began to fail, they saw a column of troops straggle toward the fort.
Led by Captain J.
G.
O.
Aplin, 250 troops from Nigeria had arrived at Cape Coast on the nineteenth.
Accompanied by carriers, they immediately began to march north through heavy rain along the same primitive road that Wolseley and Scott had followed.
On the twenty-first they met Captain
Davidson-Houston, the British resident at Kumase, who was on his way to the coast to pursue what was referred to as urgent private business.
Davidson-Houston told Aplin that there was some unrest at Kumase but assured him that there was nothing to fear—a dubious assessment, considering that only a few months earlier Davidson-Houston had been so concerned about a possible uprising that he forced all the major chiefs to swear an oath of loyalty to the queen.
As Aplin continued his difficult trek north, he met nonAsante traders fleeing to the south.
These men told a different story.
They assured him that there was a great deal to fear—indeed, that there would be war.
Aplin’s first real evidence of Asante hostility came when his men encountered an injured British employee of the telegraph department who had been waylaid by the Asante.
They had used pieces of telegraph wire to beat the soles of his feet bloody before leaving him.
Davidson-Houston had assured this man, too, that there was nothing to fear.