The Fall of the Asante Empire (4 page)

T
HE CAPITAL CITY OF
D
WABEN DISTRICT WAS BOTH LARGER AND
than Kumase, having perhaps forty thousand residents, but the Asante kingdom was centered in Kumase, a city built on the side of a rocky hill.
In the early nineteenth century it ordinarily held some twenty-five thousand people, but it was large enough to accommodate a hundred thousand on important ceremonial occasions.
In addition to the Kumase division or district, which contained several other sizable villages, the districts of Bekwai, Dwaben, Kokofu, Mampon, and Nsuta made up metropolitan Asante, where probably just under one million Akan-speaking people lived in the four thousand-square-mile core of the kingdom.
To put these populations in perspective, in 1801 Glasgow had only seventy-seven thousand inhabitants and Manchester ninety thousand, while New York and Philadelphia, America’s largest cities, each had fewer than forty-five thousand inhabitants.
¹

The Asante government in Kumase exacted tribute primarily in slaves and gold from the forty neighboring kingdoms that Asante armies had defeated in battle or intimidated into submission.
So dominant was the Asante state in the early nineteenth century that all the European powers maintaining forts along the coast paid rent to
the Asante king,
²
and whenever an Asante envoy visited the Dutch trading center at Elmina on the coast, he was honored by a sevengun salute—European traders were not usually given to such deferential behavior.
³
Much of the credit for the ascendancy of the Asante Empire must go to the wise and inspirational leadership of generations of kings, councillors, and priests, especially King Osei Tutu, who was instrumental in founding the Asante state.
But it is unlikely that even the wisest of leaders could have achieved such political dominance if they had not possessed the enormous wealth in gold that allowed them to acquire European firearms, that gave their large and highly organized army a decisive advantage over its neighbors.

As early as 800
A.D.
the ancient state of Ghana to the northwest was known to Arabs as “the land of gold,” even though its deposits were far less rich than those of the Asante.
⁴
In 1471, the Portuguese, newly arrived on the coast at Elmina, south of the Asante kingdom, were so impressed by the flecks of gold that sparkled in the streams as they emptied into the sea that they called the area the Gold Coast.
The name stuck.
⁵
The sixteenth-century West African gold production has been estimated at nine tons a year, and the total amount mined from early times to 1900 was at least seven thousand tons.
⁶
Many millions of dollars’ worth of gold dust were maintained in the Asante treasury in Kumase, but private individuals also held huge sums.
One government official who died in 1814 left an estimated $500,000 in gold dust, and another a few years later left over $300,000.
⁷
Gold dust had long been the official medium of exchange throughout the region, and the weighing and appraising (and adulterating) of gold was a major industry.
In Kumase alone, one hundred men worked as full-time specialists converting gold ingots into gold dust.
⁸

The European traders who sailed to West Africa from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Brandenburg (as Prussia was then known) in search of gold, ivory, and slaves built trade forts, or “castles,” along the coast, but they did not bring enough armed men to permit them to establish their power beyond the walls of their forts.
They were able to carry on trade on the coast of West Africa only because the Africans found them useful, not because they were feared or even terribly much respected.
One of these trading enterprises was known as the African
Company of Merchants; it had replaced the original British Royal African Company in 1750.
This trading company was chartered by Parliament, which paid it an annual allowance to maintain its principal fort at Cape Coast.
At the start of the nineteenth century, this British company shared the Gold Coast trade with a comparable Dutch company located farther west at Elmina and a Danish one to the east at Accra.

The existence of the Asante kingdom was apparently not known to Portuguese traders until 1698, when its war with the Denkyira began, but its prosperity and power became generally known to Europeans soon after.
Arab traders and dignitaries also knew of Asante by this time and some had almost certainly visited Kumase, but the first person to leave a written record of such a visit was the director-general of the Dutch trading company, J.
P.
T Huydecoper, in 1816.
Huydecoper, the son of a Dutch trader and an African mother, was able to speak Asante well enough to have intricate political conversations with the king, Osei Bonsu, and he wrote about these talks in some detail.
He did not, however, have an eye for Asante life and seldom recorded anything of interest about what he saw in the capital, despite spending an entire year there.
He was followed to Kumase the next year by four Britons, one of whom, a twenty-six-year-old named Thomas Edward Bowdich, wrote a fascinating and largely accurate account of his five-month residence in the Asante capital.
⁹

Bowdich traveled to Kumase because John Hope Smith, the new British governor of the African Company of Merchants at Cape Coast, decided to send a mission to the Asante to negotiate a treaty and to establish a resident merchant among them before Britain’s Dutch competitors could fully capitalize on Huydecoper’s visit.
Smith gave command of the mission to Frederick James, a veteran officer of the company, who would be accompanied by Bowdich (who happened to be Smith’s nephew) as its scientific observer, William Hutchinson, who would become the British resident in the Asante capital, and Henry Tedlie, a young physician.
¹⁰
In addition to three interpreters, Smith also sent an African carpenter, bricklayer, and cooper to build Hutchinson a house that would serve as the company’s embassy and over one hundred Africans to carry the mission’s supplies.
Governor Smith instructed his men to
learn everything possible about the Asante kingdom, its power, trade relationships, and anything else that might be useful to the British merchants.

The Bowdich expedition left Cape Coast in late April 1817 to begin the 140-mile journey to Kumase.
It was an unfortunate time for such a trip because the spring rains were due in May, and once they struck, the travelers would have hard going with slippery mud and flooded rivers.
The best route followed a war-ravaged path through the seemingly impenetrable jungle that lay between the pounding surf of the coast and the Asante capital.
White men, who were usually unable to walk any great distance in the West African heat and humidity, were typically transported in large, canopied, hammocklike contraptions carried by four Africans.
It would take the British caravan almost a month to reach Kumase, an average progression of only five miles per day.

Near the coast the going was relatively easy as the single-file column pressed its way along a pulverized quartz path; but soon the sea breezes of the coast were left behind, and the heavily laden carriers entered the tropical rain forest that would envelop them for the next month.
Although the forest’s lofty canopy of trees, some of which soared to over two hundred feet, created a relatively cool shade, the midday temperature still reached 90°F, and at night it did not drop below the mid-seventies.
Much of the way was through mangrove swamps, where putrefying vegetation and dark stagnant water gave off a suffocatingly vile odor.
There were few flowers to brighten the way at that time of year, but large butterflies and dainty hummingbirds darted around the men, and there were flocks of larger birds such as hornbills, crown birds, parrots, toucans, warblers, and cranes, not to mention numerous crows, hawks, and vultures.
At night leopards could be heard coughing, lions roaring, and beetles chirping loudly like crickets, but nothing made as much noise as the little rabbit-sized pothos, a kind of lemur that sometimes screeched so piercingly that sleep was impossible.
The tropical rain forest was inhabited by all manner of animals, including miniature zebra and full-sized elephants, with large numbers of civet cats, wild hogs, anteaters, antelope, sloths, monkeys, and even chimpanzees, but the dense unbroken underbrush of vines, ferns, and creepers usually kept man and animals apart
from one another.
Snakes—including a fourteen-foot-long python—and scorpions came into closer contact, as did voracious ants that would attack sleeping humans.
Mosquito bites also annoyed the men, although no one then realized that the result could be a deadly bout of malaria.
In 1817 and for the remainder of the century, it was believed that “fever,” as it was known, was caused by poisonous air, particularly the decaying and malodorous effluvia of swamps.
In fact, the word
malaria
was a contraction of the Italian words for bad air, “mal aria.”

At first the Europeans were impressed by the magnificence of the rain forest’s immense trees, but soon they felt depressed by the solid walls and ceiling of dark green, which seemed to entrap and suffocate them.
For most of the journey they could not see more than a few feet on either side of the path.
Increasingly claustrophobic, they longed for clearings or rises that would permit them to escape from the jungle even for a short while.
Eventually they came to a few open places where the land had once been cultivated, and there were occasional ridges, one of which rose to one thousand five hundred feet.
When it was possible for the Britons to look out over the forest beneath them, all agreed that the spectacle was truly magnificent.
After passing through a dark, trackless stretch of jungle near the border between the coastal Fante people, bitter enemies of their Asante overlords, and metropolitan Asante, they encountered abandoned villages where the ground was littered with human skulls, relics of an earlier Asante invasion of the south.
When the column soon after reached a small clearing, Bowdich, undaunted by the earlier grisly sight, wrote that

Nothing could be more beautiful than its scenery … light and shade were most happily blended … trees towering in the shrubbery, waved to the most gentle air a rich foliage of dark green … the tamarind and smaller mimosas heightening its effect by their livelier tint … the cotton trees overtopped the whole, enwreathed in convolvuli, and several elegant little trees, unknown to me, rose in the background, intermixed with palms, and made the
coup d’oeil
enchanting.
¹¹

As the British mission crossed the Pra Bdver and entered metropolitan Asante, it began to encounter inhabited villages.
Some of
them were small, with their thatched-roof mud houses somewhat the worse for wear, but even these places had one wide main street, and most villages struck the visitors as being surprisingly clean.
Coastal villages had never made this impression.
The members of the mission also commented favorably on the lush fields that lay outside the villages.
The Asante inhabitants of these towns, whom Bowdich described as clean and cheerful, were also friendly and respectful, a sharp contrast to the sullen Fante the column had previously endured.

On the nineteenth of May, the column came to a halt one mile south of Kumase.
Messengers were sent to announce the arrival to the Asante king, who sent word to the British mission to wait in a nearby village until he finished his bathing (high-ranking Asante bathed at least once a day, using imported Portuguese soap, and none among them was more fastidious than King Osei Bonsu).
At two o’clock the expedition was invited to enter Kumase.
The first thing the men saw was an offering of a dead sheep wrapped in red silk, suspended over their pathway by two tall poles.
Before they had time to speculate about the possible meaning of this sacrifice, they were greeted—or, more accurately, engulfed—by more than five thousand people, most of them warriors, firing their muskets in the air so often that it soon became difficult for the English visitors to see their welcomers through the smoke.
But they could not fail to hear the deafening cacophony of the drums, elephant-tusk horns, reed flutes, wooden rattles, and iron gongs played with what Bowdich called “a zeal bordering on phrensy.”
¹²
When the air cleared enough for the white men to see, Bowdich and his comrades found themselves encircled by warriors and their officers who bounded about passionately waving Danish, Dutch, and British flags, some of which had been set on fire by discharges from their muskets.

For half an hour the throng continued its welcoming dance, led by military officers whose dress excited the wonder of the white men.
Each officer wore an immense cap topped by three-foot-long plumes of eagle feathers, with gilded ram’s horns thrusting out to the front.
On their chests they wore red cloth vests covered with amulets of gold and silver, as well as various small brass bells, shells, and knives that jangled as they moved.
Three or four animals’ tails
hung down from each arm, and long leopards’ tails dangled down their backs, covering a small bow.
A quiver of poisoned arrows hung from their right wrists, and each man brandished a small spear covered with red cloth and silk tassels in his left hand.
They wore loose cotton trousers that were stuffed into soft, red leather boots reaching to mid-thigh, where they were attached by small chains to cartridge belts worn around the waist.
Finally, each man held between his teeth a two-foot-long iron chain that had a scrap of paper covered with Arabic writing attached to the end.
Although the British officers were dressed in imposing scarlet and white uniforms and carried swords, they must have felt underdressed.