The Fall of the Asante Empire (23 page)

Dawson then demanded to know whether the Fante and other African prisoners were to be released, as Wolseley insisted, or only the Europeans.
“‘What’, the King angrily exclaimed, ‘Is it not enough if I send
you
, am I to give up the Fantees too?’” The queen mother also was excited, and the entire council rose in consternation, “swearing and shouting in the wildest confusion.”
⁶⁷
In a rage the king shouted that no one would be set free.
Terrified, the Europeans sat meekly, praying for deliverance.
To their great surprise it came.
After some time Kofi Kakari softened and said, “Oh, I have nothing against you….
Go speak a good word, I have now done what I can.
If the governor will not wait, I must leave the matter with God.”
⁶⁸

As the Europeans prepared to leave, they were surprised and pleased to receive valuable gifts from the king, including an Asante silk dress for Ramseyer’s wife.
After 9
P.M.
they were summoned to the palace, where they feared the worst but found a deeply depressed King Kofi Kakari, who appeared as if their liberation had cost him dearly.
He looked at Ramseyer’s wife and, addressing her by her Asante nickname, complimented her on her new silk dress: “Well, Susse, you know how to wear the national dress.”
⁶⁹
Reverend Ramseyer and the French merchant Bonnat both felt such sympathy for the king at this moment of parting that they again promised to do everything in their power to bring about peace.
“He smiled and dismissed us with the words, ‘Yes; it is alright, go, do as you say.’”
⁷⁰

The Ramseyers and Bonnat were escorted toward the British troops, now only a few miles away.
When they came to a town called Dompoase, only three miles from the British advance guard, they found it swarming with Asante soldiers under the command of a middle-level commander named Obeng—by coincidence the same man who had treated them so badly on the way to Kumase after their original capture that they had suffered gready and their
infant son had died.
Though they feared for the worst, they were pleasandy surprised at being greeted politely.
They assured Obeng that they would urge Wolseley to seek peace.
The Asante officer asked that a good word for his men be expressed as well, saying that he, like the king, had “no quarrel with white men,” adding that war was an altogether bad thing.
“Look at this village, it is quite deserted; does it not make one’s heart ache?”
⁷¹

A
S THE
E
UROPEAN CAPTIVES WERE BEING WARMLY WELCOMED BY
some of Wolseley’s junior officers, the king was desperately attempting to muster enough troops to confront the British force.
While urging his men to mobilize, he tried to buy time and perhaps to forestall an invasion altogether by sending Wolseley another appeal to halt and negotiate.
Wolseley had already planned to halt on January 24 for four days at a town named Fomena because he wanted to build up a ten-day supply of food and ammunition before attacking, but he deceitfully wrote to the king that he would agree to make a peace gesture by halting.
Thirty years later Wolseley confessed his lie, writing “may God forgive me that fib—the halts were absolutely necessary.”
¹
However, before he would agree to negotiate, he demanded that he be sent six of the highest-ranking men and women of the Asante royal family, including the queen mother, as hostages, be paid a huge down payment on the fifty thousand ounces of gold indemnity, and be promised safe passage to Kumase for his staff and five hundred troops, where he would sign a peace treaty.
Once again he declared that it was his intention to march to Kumase and it was for the king to decide whether he did so peacefully or not.
He also specified the routes
that he, Glover, and Butler would follow in their advance, hoping to force the Asante to divide their forces.
In reality, he had little confidence that either Glover or Butler would advance at all, as both forces were stalemated to the east and southeast of Kumase.

King Kofi Kakari and his councillors were appalled by Wolseley’s harsh conditions.
For one thing 50,000 ounces of gold was worth £1.5 million (or over $6 million), substantially more than the cost of the entire British military campaign and far more gold dust than could possibly be delivered on short notice.
Furthermore, such high-ranking members of the royal family could not possibly be surrendered.
To do so would mean handing over the core of the royal family to British custody, an unimaginable betrayal.
Without any reasonable hope of negotiating peace, the king ordered Asante commanders to redouble their efforts to block all the British routes of advance and be prepared to fight if the British attacked.
Nevertheless, he sent two more letters again asking Wolseley not to advance and to allow more time for negotiation.
He knew that the rains were due soon, and if he could delay until they began, he might be safe.
This time Joseph Dawson, who as usual did the translation, included a note of his own, acknowledging some money sent to him by General Wolseley.
The note concluded, “Please see 2d Corinthians, chap, ii, ver.II.” Grabbing a Bible from a nearby soldier, one of Wolseley’s staff officers deciphered Dawson’s warning: “Lest Satan should get advantage of us, for we are not ignorant of his devices.”
²
Wolseley’s reply was curt: “I halted four days at Fomena to please your Majesty.
I cannot halt again until you have complied with my terms.” Then, as if to test the king’s grasp on reality, he concluded, “I am, King, your true friend.”
³

Initially, the Asante military commanders had planned to set up a defensive position at the crest of the one thousand six hundred-foot Adansi Hills, forcing Wolseley to attack up the steep escarpment, something that would have been difficult, especially for the men who would have to haul his artillery.
This would have been a very strong position.
In fact, it was so formidable that the king’s advisers, including some of his Muslim councillors, feared that the British would find this defensive line so impregnable that they would retreat before the Asante could surround them and capture all their weapons and supplies, something that at least some Asante
leaders regarded as perfectly feasible.
Persuaded by this argument, the king, who planned to go to batde with his commanders, agreed to leave the Adansi Hills unguarded, surprising the British to such an extent that many officers took it as a sign that the Asante would not fight at all.
Henry Stanley agreed with them and cursed the Asante for their cowardice.
Wolseley’s intelligence officer, the indomitable Redvers Buller, who would become a great hero in the British war against the Zulus five years later, knew better.
His spies told him that the Asante army would fight at a place called Amoafo.
Wolseley was pleased by the intelligence and wrote in his memoirs that the Adansi Hills were “delightful.”
⁴

The Asante army was willing to fight, but there was great controversy about what strategy to follow.
In an attempt to vindicate himself, Amankwatia proposed that the entire Asante army mass near Amoafo and, instead of following their usual enveloping tactics, launch a surprise frontal attack against the British.
The powerful king of Dwabin with his army of ten thousand men agreed to this plan, but King Kakari insisted on the traditional battle plan proposed by the charismatic Asamoa Nkwanta, Asante’s greatest and highest-ranking general, and perhaps the only man who could inspire the troops to fight.
Neither the king nor the Asante troops had confidence in Amankwatia.
He was the son of a famous general and the darling of many of the older war hawks, but he had insisted on the invasion of the coast that had not only failed to reap dividends but cost him half his army and, what was worse, brought Wolseley’s army into the Asante kingdom on his heels.
Amankwatia also ordered the cosdy frontal attacks on Elmina and Abrakrampa, decisions Kofi Kakari insisted were against his orders.

The king of Dwaben was so enraged by this decision not to make a frontal attack that he held his men out of the battle.
(These men later served the Asante cause by holding back Captain Glover’s force advancing from the east, but their absence at Amoafo was crucial.) Another ten thousand disciplined troops attacking the thinly manned British front could have made a decisive difference.
⁵
Instead, their seventy-year-old, gray-haired, and long-bearded commander, General Nkwanta, chose to fight a defensive battle at a position just south of Amoafo.
To attack the Asante line, the British would have to advance through marshy land, drop
down into a ravine, and then climb a ridge.
The brush was so thick that the Asante troops would be nearly invisible to them.
The main Asante force would lie flat on a broad front across Wolseley’s line of march.
Two flanking armies would circle the British and attack their rear.
One of these would be commanded by Amankwatia.
At least ten thousand men assembled at Amoafo, and as the British would soon learn, their failure to fight in the Adansi Hills had nothing to do with cowardice.

Although their will to resist had miraculously been rekindled since their humiliating withdrawal from the British protectorate only a few weeks earlier, the Asante were so short of powder and shot that many men would have to load their Dane guns with pebbles or even snail shells.
⁶
A handful of Asante had modern breech-loading British Enfield rifles that fired deadly bullets, but the only other additions to the antiquated Asante weaponry were one thousand well-worn French smooth-bore muskets originally used in 1814 at Waterloo!
Ironically, the brunt of the Asante fire at Amoafo would be taken by the Black Watch, a regiment that had lost 330 men at Waterloo, perhaps to fire from the same muskets.
⁷

Hoping to surprise the British, the Asante assigned highway police to prevent anyone from approaching Amoafo by road, but a spy hired for £20 was able to slip through, and he reported to Wolseley exacdy how the Asante troops were deployed.
⁸
In an attempt to gain more information, Wolseley offered large rewards to anyone who could bring in an Asante prisoner, but there was little success, partly because the African advance troops of Wood’s and Russell’s brigades preferred killing Asante prisoners to handing them over for questioning.
⁹
For example, on one occasion Colonel Wood’s aide, Lieutenant Arthur Eyre, ran to the colonel, asking him to hurry along with his pistol so that he could shoot some of his Mende troops who were practicing their sword strokes by seeing if they could cut an Asante prisoner in half with a single blow.
When Wood arrived, he found that the man was dead but cut only three quarters of the way in half.
Wood could not find the culprits because the African sentry who witnessed the act said he could not tell one Mende from another.
¹⁰

Wolseley never failed to send African scouts under British officers in advance of his main body, and far in advance of these men
was Lord Gifford with forty picked men from various tribes, including some Mende.
They wore short pants, had no shirts, and were barefooted; but some sported monkey-skin or buffalo-horn caps, others had long feather headdresses that stood straight up, and others had their own hair braided into long spikes that stood out in all directions.
¹¹
Gifford and his men had survived many harrowing encounters with Asante scouts, including one particularly frustrating episode in which Gifford challenged an advance party of armed Asante to fight, only to be indignantly told that they could not because they had no orders to fight white men.
He did not realize that these men were highway police, not soldiers, and thus quite properly refused to fight without orders.
¹²

Early in the morning of January 30, Gifford cautiously led his men through the gloomy, shadowless forest so dark that a man could not read written orders, toward the small village of Egginassie, a mile south of Amoafo.
Throughout the advance Gifford’s men had come upon magical and religious paraphernalia intended to deflect the British from their purpose or send them away.
One was a long white thread, apparently mimicking the telegraph wire that was thought to be British magic.
Earlier that morning the scouts found an emasculated slave impaled on a bamboo stake.
Disgusted, but lacking any tools to dig a grave, Gifford threw the man’s body down a deep ravine.
As Gifford’s scouts moved closer to Egginassie, a sudden roar of Asante musketry dropped three of Gifford’s men; he quickly withdrew, sending word back to Wolseley that the enemy were in strength and had opened fire.
Later that day another British patrol stormed an Asante village, capturing fifty-three muskets, twelve kegs of powder, and the umbrella of Essaman Quantah, a venerable Asante general who had taught Amankwatia the art of war.
The old general barely escaped capture.
¹³
It was an impressive little victory but not without loss.
Captain Nicol, a brave officer whom Wolseley characterized as elderly, was shot dead as he led his men into the village.
Some of Wolseley’s young officers blamed Nicol’s death on the general’s order to his men not to fire first.
One went so far as to refer to it as murder.
¹⁴
Later that day General Wolseley ordered that a general advance against Amoafo would take place on the following morning, January 31.

WOLSELEY’S CAMPAIGN ROUTE of 1874

As far as the jungle would permit, a traditional British square would advance along a six hundred-yard-wide front.
Royal Engineers and African laborers would do their best to open up the brush enough for the men to move forward.
The 42nd Highlanders, bearded veteran troops led by clean-shaven officers who seemed to Henry Stanley to be mere boys, would be in front, closely followed by Rait’s Hausa artillerymen with their cannon and rockets.
The front line would be commanded by Brigadier General Sir Archibald Alison, a veteran who had lost an arm in the Crimean War twenty years earlier.
The left flank, which would extend very loosely for over two miles to the rear, would be manned by half of the Naval Brigade followed by Russell’s African troops.
The right flank, equally long and vulnerable, would be led by the other half of the Naval Brigade followed by Wood’s African brigade.
The Rifle Brigade would be the rear guard.
Wolseley and his staff would direct the battle from the middle of the square, which would also hold the supply carriers and the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers led by their aggressive colonel, the aptly named Honorable Savage Mostyn.
Because the serious thigh wound he had suffered years earlier in Burma had been causing him great pain, Wolseley had ridden all the way to the battleground in a rickety American-made buggy pulled by four Africans, but once the battle started, he would be on foot like the other officers.