The Fall of the Asante Empire (7 page)

Nothing impressed European visitors more than public executions.
Huydecoper was made aware of many executions during his stay.
He wrote that he had “certain knowledge” of the deaths of eighty Fante.
He also reported that a rebellious chief was tortured for some time before he was put to death.
After pepper had been rubbed into innumerable cuts on his body, the man’s ears, nose, and arms were cut off before he was finally decapitated.
Huydecoper wrote that when he witnessed the execution of a young man in the company of Osei Bonsu, “The King asked me if I was not afraid.
I said I was not, but that the sight distressed me.
‘Oh,’ said the King, This is nothing.
It happens here quite frequently.’|”
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European visitors, especially missionaries, tended to exaggerate the frequency of human executions, but there can be little doubt that the king spoke the truth.
Two decades later, one of many executioners in Kumase, a young man who appeared to be not yet eighteen, told a European visitor that he had personally executed eighty people.
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Like Huydecoper and other Europeans who would visit Kumase in the ensuing years, Bowdich was appalled by the human executions.
They were impossible to ignore.
On various occasions when large crowds were assembled in Kumase and could be suitably impressed, criminals were executed.
After being convicted by a court, these men (like the man Bowdich saw when he first arrived in Kumase) were usually marched to their execution with large knives driven through their cheeks so that they could not utter magically dangerous curses against their accusers or the king.
Bowdich was surprised that their expressions were so apathetic.
On one occasion Bowdich saw thirteen victims surrounded by their executioners, who were dressed in shaggy black vests and hats that made them resemble bears.
Men and women, chanting in a dirgelike fashion, encircled the condemned.
Rum and palm wine was poured copiously while horns played and muskets were fired into the air.
Finally, an executioner cut off a condemned man’s hand with his sword, then threw the man on the ground before he patiently hacked his head off in a sawing motion with a small knife that was intentionally not very sharp.

Bowdich and the other Britons could not bear to witness any more executions, but they were told that all thirteen men died in a similar way and that numerous people, including women, had later been sacrificed for religious reasons.
Hutchinson wrote that he had once come upon the headless bodies of two women lying in the market as vultures pecked at them.
Vultures were sacred birds that could not be killed, and a woman who accidentally caught one in her basket was executed.
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Hutchinson also wrote about another execution scene that the king personally witnessed.
Osei Bonsu sat drinking palm wine from a silver goblet while the executions proceeded.
As each head was severed, the king, still seated, imitated a dancing motion, which apparently signified his pleasure.
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The Asante practice of execution, whether of criminals or for religious purposes, would plague the British conscience for the remainder of the century.

Bowdich was a gifted and reliable observer, but there was much about Asante culture that he could neither see nor readily comprehend.
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For one thing, he thought that King Osei Bonsu was an autocrat, a natural conclusion for someone who only saw the king
on public occasions, when his role as absolute monarch was acted out to the fullest.
It was true that many lesser officeholders displeased the king at their peril.
One provincial administrator, who lived in Kumase in great luxury, traveled in such pomp that whenever he went anywhere, even a short distance, he insisted on being carried in his taffeta hammock, protected by a huge silk umbrella and accompanied by a troop of sycophants who constantly praised him.
Some actually swept the ground he would walk on before he stepped out of his hammock.
Yet when he overstepped his orders in trying to settle a provincial dispute, the king stripped him of all his property, leaving him a beggar.
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The king was the government’s chief executive, the commander in chief of its army, and the judge of its highest court.
According to the Asante constitution, only he could order executions.
In actuality, however, the king’s powers were greatly circumscribed, as some European visitors understood as early as 1819.
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Osei Bonsu was at pains to act as if his whim were law when in public, but where matters of significant import for the Asante state were at issue, he shared power with a national assembly of some two hundred men, representing all regions of the empire, that regularly managed the affairs of government and decided all disputes as a supreme tribunal.
Its members were the senior chiefs of the traditional districts of the state.
In addition, the king was advised—and sometimes dominated—by an inner council of eighteen nobles: powerful military commanders, some princes, major government officials such as the treasurer, some ceremonial officers, two of the king’s chamberlains, the head physician, a senior priest, and often most influential of all, the queen mother.
The council—known as the
Asante Kotoko
, meaning the Asante porcupine (“no one dares touch them”)—ordinarily met every day with considerable pomp, attended by servants, court criers, soldiers, and the seemingly ever-present executioners.
Frequently their deliberations continued under torchlight until late at night.
Like the British privy council, the inner council was both a court of law and a legislature.
In addition to the public deliberations of this body, these and other powerful people often had access to the king’s ear, and no prudent king would wisely offend the wealthiest and most powerful people in his realm.
For example, the king once apologized to Joseph
Dupuis, who visited Kumase in 1820, for a decision he had made, saying, “Don’t be angry … I must do what the old men say; I cantricts help it.”
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In every sense the king served at the pleasure of his most influential subjects and could be removed for misconduct, as would happen later in the century.

An Asante king owed his throne—his stool—to the political faction that put him in power.
He had to retain their favor to survive, while doing as little as possible not to offend other powerful factions, some of which were led by aristocrats and members of the royal family.
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Four noble families wielded great power.
Until recently they had not been subject to capital punishment, and one of these men ruled over the government when the king was out of Kumase.
A wise king would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid offending these nobles.
For example, when one of Osei Bonsu’s wives was accused of having sexual relations with another man, the king ordered her executed as Asante law permitted him to do.
However, when he was informed that this particular wife was the daughter of a powerful noble and military commander, he quickly spared her and even offered her a gift of gold if she were to remarry.
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Despite these limitations on their power, Asante kings lived majestically.
The palace staff was elaborate, and it did much to create an aura of majesty.
Among the more than a score of separate departments established to serve the king were spokesmen, stool carriers, drummers, umbrella carriers, bathroom attendants, elephant-tail switchers, fan bearers, cooks, heralds, sword bearers, gun bearers, ministers, eunuchs, and the ubiquitous executioners.
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At several points around the city, particularly the great market, there were six-to eight-foot-high circular platforms of polished clay painted red, where the king sat under his great umbrella, greeting his subjects and sipping palm wine, which he ceremoniously allowed to drip through his beard to the ground.
Palm wine was to be quaffed in a single gulp, and etiquette called for much of it to run down through a man’s beard.

Some fifty to one hundred of his attendants sat below him on steps cut into the platform.
The chief of each district also occupied a stool and was supported by a similarly large and diverse staff of officials and retainers.
This panoply of power served the king and his loyal chiefs well, but the actual governance of the nation was
carried out by hundreds of bureaucrats concerned with such essentials as diplomacy, trade, and taxation.
For example, because a central concern of the government was the prevention of the emergence of a powerful merchant class that might challenge royal power, laws were established restricting the accumulation of gold and slaves, the principal forms of wealth.
Hundreds of government tax collectors belonging to the treasury department enforced a harsh estate tax by quickly descending on the house of anyone of substance who died.
A very small percentage of his wealth was awarded to his heir, but the greater portion was confiscated and became the property of the king.
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Even though these taxes prevented the inheritance of wealth, nothing was more important to most Asante than its accumulation during their lifetime.
A famous Asante proverb said that “one becomes famous not by being noble born but by being wealthy.”
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Another said, “If power is for sale, sell your mother to obtain it.
Once you have the power there are several ways of getting her back.” For a people who so revered their parents, this was the ultimate sacrifice.
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Wealth was not only its own reward, it brought great social prestige and formal honors.

Some men, and a few women as well, became sufficiently wealthy through entrepreneurial activities that they were honored by the king as belonging to a kind of nobility, which was symbolized by the right to be preceded in public by troops of well-born boys, known as
asikofo
, who carried elephants’ tails.
Such honor was done to such a distinguished person (the king, after all, would inherit his wealth) that the king would delegate some of his own sons to serve him and to carry the elephants’ tails.
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This honor was so coveted that at least one man was tempted to claim it fraudulently.
During the reign of Osei Yaw (1824-1833), this man claimed to possess a great fortune that he willed to the King.
Duly honored as a result, the man enjoyed the benefits of nobility, but when his large pots of gold were opened after his funeral, they were found to contain worthless brass filings.
His disinterred corpse was tried, found guilty, and beheaded, depriving his soul of everlasting life.
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Given this national fascination with wealth, it is not surprising that there was a government department of the treasury that was
greatly concerned with maintaining accurate weights and measures for gold and for assessing its purity.
Assuring the safety and purity of the state’s gold called for many locked chests and gimlet-eyed guardians, and locks and keys were both necessary and a mark of personal prestige.
There was also a need for careful accountants who were, needless to say, closely watched.
Although some literate persons were recruited to Kumase to enhance Asante diplomatic relations and some written records were kept, Asante was essentially a preliterate state.
As a consequence, the Asante treasury featured overlapping responsibilities and many cross-checks against dishonesty.
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In 1819, desiring even tighter control over the treasury, Osei Bonsu eagerly sought to have his children receive a British education.
British Resident Hutchinson was happy to oblige, and arrangements were well under way for some of his sons to go to Cape Coast and, perhaps, later to England.
However, the “Aristocracy and Great Chiefs” opposed this innovation, and the king was forced to abandon the idea.
The head of the exchequer, Opoku Frere, the second most powerful man in Asante, later confided to Hutchinson that the opposition arose because he and other wealthy men were accustomed to cheating the king “a little,” and they feared that they would be unable to continue this practice if the king’s relatives acquired a European education.
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Another source of power in the state was religion.
The British referred to all Asante religious objects and activities as “fetish,” borrowing a Portuguese term that was used disparagingly to reduce them to a superstitious idolatry or a magical dread of certain objects.
In reality the Asante had a complicated religion that recognized a supreme creator as well as numerous lesser gods, who took a more active interest in human affairs.
The most powerful of these was the river god, Tano.
Most houses contained a shrine to a particular god, who was propitiated in various ways.
There were many religious ceremonies, too, along with beliefs in divination, evil spirits, magic, and witchcraft.
It is not altogether clear how much power Asante priests (many of whom were women) had, but they did play a vital role in helping people deal with misfortune, sickness, and death.
It is clear though that at times they opposed the king on certain issues and that there was an inherent tension beness, the priests and the monarch.
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Priests derived much of their
power from the supernatural assistance of
mmoatia
, forest dwarfs who resembled small human beings except that they communicated only by whistling and their feet pointed backwards.
Human sacrifice and small objects thought to have supernatural power were a part of Asante religious life, but they were hardly the totality of it.