Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (50 page)

But to keep its momentum the Empire must grow. By now the British had almost filled the available empty spaces of the world. The half-hearted Empire of 1837 had doubled in population, and tripled in area. The empty wilderness of Canada had been tamed, the desolations of Australia had been explored, Burma, New Guinea, New Zealand, Natal, Hong Kong had all been acquired, since Victoria came to the throne. Flushed with the magnitude of their success, eager to find new outlets for their energy, apprehensive, if only subconsciously, about their future, during the last years of Victoria’s reign the British turned to the last unexploited continent. The first part of this book was dominated by India: the last will take us time and again to Africa, for it was there, in a new, headier and seamier series of adventures, that the idea of Empire would find its obsessive fulfilment.

I
N Africa stood Ashanti-land. There on a Friday near the beginning of the eighteenth century the sage Okomfu Anokye, fetish priest to Osei Tutu the Asantahene, had received from Heaven the Golden Stool: a mysterious gold-encrusted throne, hung as the centuries passed with talismanic emblems—golden handcuffs, human masks, bells, thongs, images—never to be used as a seat or even allowed to touch the ground, but to be cherished for ever as the dwelling-place of the
sunsum
or national spirit. So, according to legend, the Empire of the Ashanti was born, to become by the middle of the Victorian era one of the most remarkable of the myriad black Powers of Africa.

Until Osei Tutu’s time the Ashanti had been no more than a tribe. Their original home was the country around Lake Bosomtwe, a sinister tree-infested mere which intermittently belched gas and mud from its recesses, and was thought by some Africans to be the hole out of which the human race first crawled. It was in the seventeenth century that they first entered history. They then began to display a talent for organization, both civic and military, exceptional in West Africa. Gradually they imposed their suzerainty upon their neighbours until the hereditary Asantahene, the king of the Ashanti, became the most powerful indigenous ruler of the entire region, his writ running in one degree or another from the Black Volta to the sea.

The revelation of the Golden Stool had consolidated this power, providing a supernatural focus of loyalty. Where it really came from, nobody knows. It was a wooden tripod partly sheathed in gold, and according to legend it first appeared from the skies during an assembly of chiefs and people at Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, floating down from the sky in a cloud of dust, to the sound of
thunder and the flash of lightning. The Ashanti revered it as the embodiment of their nationhood. So long as it was safe, the kingdom would flourish in unity. The Stool took precedence over the Asantahene himself. It reclined upon its own Chair of State, shaded by its own palanquin and attended by its own acolytes. It provided a constant in the amoebic structure of the Ashanti State, and upon its mystique there rested the whole fabric of Ashanti custom. There can have been few other nations whose soul was embodied in a
thing
: but one might perhaps fancy a similar arcane identification among the jumbled urns and effigies, the hushed inscriptions and the allusive references of Westminster Abbey.

Not, however, the Victorian empire-builders, to whom such a suggestion would have seemed not merely ludicrous, but probably sacrilegious. Africa in mid-century appealed to their instinct more than their reason, and brought out the best and worst in them. The best was the long and passionate struggle against the slave trade, still an inspiration to idealism. ‘I go back to Africa,’ Livingstone told an audience of Cambridge undergraduates in 1857, ‘to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry out the work which I have begun!
I
leave
it
with
you
!’ The worst was a crude contempt which, in the last decades of Victoria’s rule, was progressively to taint the spirit of Empire.

In the common British view Africa possessed no worth-while values of its own. Its people, mostly pagan and almost all illiterate, seemed not far removed from beasts in the Darwinian scale. Its customs sounded childish, meaningless or repulsive. Its languages were so useless or obscure that until the end of the eighteenth century no European bothered to learn any of them. Its art, expressed in the ambiguities of Obo legend, or the stylized grotesqueries of Ife art, appeared downright debased. The imperialists were at once horrified and fascinated by the cruelty of Africa, the sensuality, the shamelessness. It was, they thought, a continent congenitally inferior, a slate upon which the Empire might scrawl what it pleased, compassionate text or raw obscenity.

In Africa white faced black, strangers to each other, and in the confrontation between these two elemental forces no conflict was more telling than that between the empires of Britain and Ashanti—a conflict of fits and starts, in which the white power pressed inexorably upon the frontiers of the black, sometimes by guile, sometimes by force, until in the end it burst into the heart of the black kingdom to violate the Golden Stool itself. This was, to both sides, a conflict of destinies. The Ashanti regarded it as divinely ordered, and so did the British: as Hope Grant wrote in 1874, as he prepared to invade the Ashanti homeland, ‘I cannot help thinking that it is willed by the all-powerful Ruler above that Africa shall be opened, and that these savage and inhuman tribes will be brought to reason, and their horrible iniquities put an end to. The poor wretched creatures at present know no better….’

By African standards the Ashanti civilization was urbane. Its polytheistic observances were intricate and devout. Its social forms were liberal. The Ashanti were excellent craftsmen in gold, silver and wood, and they had developed an architectural style all their own, with projecting eaves, high-pitched thatched roofs, complicated plaster fretwork and curious ornaments of animals and birds. Early British visitors to Kumasi, in the first years of the nineteenth century, found the capital unexpectedly impressive. In 1817 Edward Bowdich reported a reception by bands of flutes, horns and drums, and by vast companies of warriors, resplendently accoutred with horns, feathers, bells, shells and leopard tails. The city he found well-planned and scrupulously clean, with wide named streets and carefully planted trees. Each house had its lavatory, flushed with boiling water, and rubbish was burnt daily. The royal palace, in the centre of the capital, was a group of interconnecting courtyards covering some five acres, and when Sir William Winniett was entertained to dinner there in 1848 he was given roast sheep, turkey, plum pudding, nuts, ale and wine—‘really very nicely served up’.

But the root of Ashanti policy was a lust for power. ‘If power is for sale,’ ran an Ashanti proverb, ‘sell your mother to buy it—you
can always buy her back again.’ Ashanti nationalism was aggressive and self-confident, and the Ashanti national practice of human sacrifice was ruthless in its scope. When an Asantahene died, scores, sometimes hundreds of people were slaughtered to provide a ghostly retinue for the king. Most of the victims were criminals or war prisoners whose lives had been saved for the occasion, but others were senior officials or royal relatives who had sworn to die with their ruler. Every Ashanti generation knew this communal rededication by death, and at times of war or crisis there were often
ad
hoc
sacrifices too, of victims doomed on the spur of the moment. Like the Golden Stool, the practice gave cohesion to the nation, binding the past with the present, fate with free will, the decrees of gods with the destinies of humans.

All this the Ashanti veiled in a web of mysticism. They were people of secretive tastes, and their minds worked in elusive bounds and side-steps, very difficult for Europeans to grasp. Ashanti folktales, for example, were extraordinarily opaque. When the duiker told the man called Hate-to-be-Contradicted that his palm nuts were ripe, this is how Hate-to-be-Contradicted replied: ‘That is the nature of the palm nut. When they are ripe, three bunches ripen at once. When they are ripe, I cut them down, and when I boil them to extract the oil, they make three water-pots full of oil. Then I take the oil to Akase to buy an Akase old woman. The Akase old woman comes and gives birth to my grandmother who bears my mother, who, in turn, bears me. When Mother bears me, I am already standing there’.

This was unnatural stuff, to readers of Samuel Smiles or Marcus Aurelius. The British Empire had no taste for the avant garde. Glimpsed by the imperialists through the screen of their surrounding forests, the Ashanti seemed a disconcerting people; murderous, queer, alarming, with their fearful orgies of sacrifice, their weird fetish shrines among the trees, their dark sacred lake upon which no boat could sail, their central enigma of the Golden Stool, and this topsy-turvy manner of thought.

The British had been on the Gold Coast, the foreshore of Ashanti, for 250 years. Together with the traders of eight other European countries, they had built themselves fortresses on the coast to act first as slave stations, later as entrepôts of more general trade. At first they did not aspire to sovereignty, but when one by one the rival European Powers withdrew from the coast, so their own interest in the country became more political. They were no longer content to be respectful traders on a foreign shore, but wished to control the trade themselves. As the Victorian years passed their trading forts became imperial outposts, the coastal tribes became their wards, and their headquarters at Cape Coast Castle acquired a pro-consular air. It had been built by the Dutch and embellished by the Portuguese, but by the middle of the nineteenth century the British had made it all their own. Its sea-gate gave entrance to a parade ground within the walls; its double staircase led ceremonially to gubernatorial quarters above; bugles sounded from its ramparts; prisoners languished in its gaol. Around its walls an African vassal village had arisen, woodsmoke rising from its mud huts, dried fish stinking in its yards, and the castle stood there like a royal palace above the hovels, gleaming whitewashed in the sun, while the surf beat against its foundations, and the black fishermen paddled their canoes beneath its ramparts.
1

From this imposing base the British looked inland towards the mysterious recesses of Ashanti. Though they had no coastline of their own, the Ashanti exerted a compelling influence over the Fanti tribes along the shore, and their presence astride the trade routes from the interior powerfully affected prices and supplies. The British had opened relations with them in the 1820s, but never made friends with them. Both sides really wanted mastery of the coast, however
circumlocutory their diplomacy or nicely served up their plum puddings. There were constant misunderstandings, and intermittent skirmishes. At one time the Ashanti army threatened Cape Coast Castle itself, and in 1824 the British Governor, Sir Charles McCarthy suffered so ignominious a defeat that he killed himself: the Ashanti sent his skull triumphantly to Kumasi, where for years the Asantahene used it as a drinking cup, parading it before the people on ceremonial occasions, and sometimes swearing oaths upon it.

These were sparring contests. It was only in the 1870s, when the British Empire turned its attention to the future of Africa, that the Ashanti learnt the meaning of modern imperialism. In hindsight it appears an unequal conflict, between a European empire approaching the apogee of its power, and an unlettered kingdom of the bush. To the Ashanti at the time it did not seem so unbalanced. If the British were an imperial people, so were they. The Ashanti military record was as proud as the British. The British generals might have their Gatling guns and rocket batteries, but the King of Ashanti went into battle hung all over, head to foot, with infallible ju-jus, forming a kind of spiritual chain mail, and fastened so thickly to his person that his face scarcely showed through the magic tufts and fragments, and when he moved the whole silhouette of his presence menacingly rippled.

These were armies that clashed in ignorance, like Arnold’s armies of the night. Neither side remotely understood each other. The Ashanti pagan culture on the one hand, the European Christian civilization on the other, were both movements of immense aggressive assurance, armoured in faith. The Ashanti thought the British perfidious cowards, the British considered the Ashanti superstitious savages. The Ashanti, having little conception of the strength of the forces opposing them, still thought they might drive the white men into the sea. The British, impelled by interests mercantile, evangelical and plain expansionist, were reaching the conclusion that Ashanti must be shackled. The Europeans brooded and bided their time: the Ashantis brooded too, and marched here and there in inconclusive petty wars.

In 1872 the belligerent young Asantahene Kofi Karikari precipitated the issue. The Dutch then decided to withdraw from the
Gold Coast, and sold their fort at Elmina to the British. This the Ashanti resented, because they claimed to own the fort themselves, and they accordingly crossed the River Prah, the traditional frontier of Ashanti proper, to besiege both Elmina and Cape Coast Castle. They were driven off, taking with them European missionaries as hostages; and the British seized the pretext for a crash campaign to settle the fractious Ashanti once and for all, and achieve an imperial stability upon the Gold Coast.

Of all the colonial wars of the Victorian era, this was the most classically perfect, a metaphor of the genre. At its head was Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, KCMG, CB, now emerging as the very archetype of the imperial soldier—or as W. S. Gilbert had it, ‘the very model of a modern major-general’. He was invited to take complete civil and military charge of the operation, and ‘Heavens’, he later recalled, ‘with what internal joy I did so!’ At 40 he was the youngest general in the army, and he now gathered around him the ‘Wolseley Ring’, that coterie of clever, reformist and socially desirable officers which was to play so large a part in British military affairs for the rest of the century. ‘I felt’, he wrote, ‘that ordinary men could not be good enough for the war I had undertaken’, and among the young men who formed his staff were nine who would later become generals themselves, and one future Field-Marshal. Buller was there, from Red River, and William Butler, and a brilliant newcomer, Colonel George Colley, who had just written the article ‘Army’, sixty pages long, for the ninth edition of the
Encylopaedia
Britannica.
1
They sailed off to the Gold Coast in a spirit of elevated purpose, whiling away the voyage in a careful study of the geography and history of Ashanti. Wolseley himself thought of their mission as a crusade. He intended, he said, to inflict ‘such a heavy punishment upon King Koffee, to show him, his people, and all neighbouring nations that no extent of deadly forest could protect them from the British Army’. Right was on his side. To be British was enough. ‘Remember’, he told his soldiers, ‘that
the black men hold you in superstitious awe: be cool; fire low, fire slow and charge home.’