The Fall of the Asante Empire (28 page)

A few important changes were made, among them a change in the law making homicide the only crime punishable by death, but Mensa Bonsu was never able to overcome the opposition of the senior members of the military oligarchy that had put him in power and that, he well understood, could depose him just as easily.
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Instead of presiding over a reformed government, as he and Prince Ansa had hoped, Mensa Bonsu found himself largely ignored by his inner council.
The great men of the kingdom still had power, including private armies as large as two thousand five hundred men.
Like the king’s own army of six hundred men, some of them were armed with Sniders.
These powerful men, many of whom were members of the royal family eager for more power, continually vied with each other for control of the king and the government.

In 1879 a conservative religious cult dedicated to the restoration of the power and glory of the Asante past tried to influence the ever-buffeted king to become even more traditional.
When Mensa Bonsu showed too little interest in their demands, a large group of the cult’s followers broke into the royal palace, destroying property and violating some of the king’s wives.
One man even shot at Mensa Bonsu, who barely escaped, thanks to the intervention of his royal guards, whose Sniders killed many of the extremists.
As a result of this attack and other palace coup attempts, the embattled king began to use his guards to purge his enemies, and he did so with a terrible vengeance.
Now more a warlord than a constitutional monarch, he used his palace guards as he wished, to flout custom, law, and decency.
Not only did he have his real or imagined enemies killed, he took pleasure in raping their wives.
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Like his predecessor, King Kakari, he also indulged in an orgy of debauchery.
When drunk, as he often was at this time, he ordered his guards to bring him any beautiful woman who caught his fancy.
If her husband complained, the man was killed.
In 1882 he began to eye the wives of some of the most powerful men in the kingdom.
Ignoring judicial process, he ordered his guards to beat or even kill
any who objected, and unless their private armies were stronger than his, he did so with impunity.
A British visitor to Kumase in 1882 reported that the situation had become so serious that no one could be certain that “he may not be summoned to appear before the King at any moment, fined for some imaginary offense, a sum he cannot pay, and in the end lose his head.”
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Later in the year his reign of terror even extended to his closest councillors, some of whom he had executed.
So many people in Kumase fled that the city was almost empty.
Many left metropolitan Asante for the coast where Snider-wielding palace guards could not reach them.
By early March 1883 Mensa Bonsu had alienated every segment of Asante society.
The opposition to the king, led by disgruntled young men of good families who saw no future for themselves, was joined by senior councillors who demanded that the king cease his tyranny, especially his rapacious abuse of the husbands and relatives of the women on whom he chose to impose his sexual desires.
They also insisted that he no longer order executions without the consent of his chiefs and senior councillors and that he consult them before imposing immense fines on his subjects, as he had been doing.
These were reasonable, constitutional demands, but the young men who led the opposition were so angry that some feared they would seize and flog the king.
There was every reason to believe that these alienated young men would destroy the monarchy.
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Only the king’s guards prevented his destoolment, and even they finally failed to intercede when coup leaders, led by his brother, General Owusu Koko, seized the king and sent him into exile, where he lived under guard in a small village in miserable poverty.

Though former King Kakari had stayed apart from the political turmoil that had splintered the Asante state for seven long and tumultuous years, he still had powerful friends, and as time passed, many Asante came to remember him fondly for his genial and courteous manner.
His adherents began to argue that his years of exile had given him the wisdom he lacked before, and they convinced him to seek the stool.
With armed support he mounted a serious challenge to his contender, Kwaku Dua, who eventually invited him and his army to a peace conference in Kumase to discuss the troubled succession.
It was a classic trap.
When Kakari’s six thousand supporters entered the wretched city, Snider fire
erupted from all sides.
At least two thousand were killed, but Kakari somehow escaped.
After wandering alone for two weeks, he was captured and returned to Kumase where, hungry and exhausted, he was imprisoned under heavy guard while Kwaku Dua II was enstooled.
A few days after Kwaku Dua’s accession to the throne, he ruthlessly but prudently ordered the execution of some three hundred of Kakari’s closest relatives, including women and children.
Small children were killed by men who held their legs and smashed their skulls against tree trunks.
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But only forty-four days into his reign, Kwaku Dua II died, apparently poisoned by the general who put him in power.
Soon after, former King Kakari was executed.
After being strangled with a leather thong, his neck was broken with an elephant’s tusk, a traditional way of executing someone of royal birth whose blood could not legally be spilled.
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The Asante political arena had never been a place for the faint of heart, but it had never been more dangerous than it was now.

The entire kingdom became engulfed in the most horrible civil war the Asante had ever known.
States fought states, private armies fought private armies, and what used to be the Asante union burned.
There were no safe havens.
No large towns survived, and even most small villages were destroyed.
Probably half the population fled or was killed.
When the fighting finally ended in 1885, after two full years of war, all the formerly tributary states were independent.
All that remained of the kingdom was a small area around Kumase, and the city itself was largely abandoned.
Elephant grass grew over fifteen feet high in its once immaculate streets, and the palace, rebuilt with bamboo and grass thatch, was a mockery of its former grandeur.

In 1888 a royal faction led by Yaa Akyaa succeeded in putting her son, a fifteen-year-old boy named Agyemon Prempe, on the stool.
The challenge before him could hardly have been greater: to reconstruct a kingdom splintered in all directions, most of whose people were either dead or refugees and whose resources had virtually ceased to exist.
The national treasury was so depleted that the royal family was reduced to asking the British governor at Cape Castle for a loan of £320 to pay for the enstoolment ceremony.
The Colonial Office decided it would be a good investment to lend the money to the “impecunious monarch.”
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However, the British
attached so many conditions to the loan that if Prempe had accepted it, he would have yielded his sovereignty to the British crown.
Prempe and his advisers refused to sell the kingdom for £320, but they could not restore the dominance of the government in Kumase.
In return for their support of the new king, the district chiefs and kings reclaimed much of their lost power.
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Partly as a result of the issue of the loan, Prempe’s formal enstoolment did not take place until June 1894.
But more significant was the matter of whom the new King would rule.
If he had been enstooled in 1888, he would have been no more than the king of Kumase district and a very impoverished district at that.
Yet thanks to remarkably skillful diplomacy, Prempe’s mother and councillors were able to reconcile many of the rebellious states.
In fact, conciliatory promises from the new king-in-waiting were so successful in reestablishing the loyalty of the dissident chiefs and kings that by 1893 the Asante kingdom was very largely reunited.
Prempe’s own qualities had much to do with the successful reunification.
Although he was plump and appeared effeminate, he was modest, respectful of his elders, and brave when in danger.
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He also truly believed in Asante unity, had no personal ambition, never went back on a promise, and possessed what the Asante referred to as “the sweet tongue”—an ability to win people over with his words.
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Now that the rule of law had been reestablished, peaceful trade once again began to flourish.
This new trade did not concentrate on guns and gunpowder, which were blocked by the British.
In 1890 the nearly forty thousand Asante traders who traveled to the coast purchased only 1,312 guns and 2,091 kegs of gunpowder.
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Asante still controlled major sources of gold, and new trade in cocoa and rubber was flourishing.
In 1893 three thousand two hundred pounds of rubber were carried to Cape Coast each day.
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In 1895 alone, over four million pounds of rubber were exported from the Gold Coast, two thirds of it from Asante.

British “forward policy,” as it was known, continued to call for the destruction of the Asante state as an economic power in order to place the increasingly lucrative Gold Coast trade under British control.
In support of the goal British administrators at Cape Coast rarely missed an opportunity to characterize the Asante government and its people as unworthy possessors of their empire.
In
1892 Governor Griffith wrote of the Asante that “their proper characteristics are deceit, falsehood, treachery.
In fact there is hardly a bad quality that they have not got.”
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His successor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, was convinced that the Asante social and political system was nothing but a “blood-thirsty despotism” that must be destroyed at any price.
The various missionaries in the Gold Coast agreed, and so did Joseph Chamberlain, new secretary of state for the colonies, who was an outspoken advocate of the use of imperial power in West Africa.

In the past, British foreign policy had given France more or less a free hand in West Africa, concentrating instead on the strategic Nile Valley Chamberlain, however, was willing to risk war with the French to secure the Gold Coast and the territories to its north.
On June 28, 1895, he declared that Asante independence was “an intolerable nuisance.” To add to Chamberlain’s annoyance, reports began to accumulate that the French, increasingly active in the Ivory Coast just to the west of the Asante, were attempting to establish an alliance with the Asante and that King Prempe was actively negotiating with them.
In fact, although he had some preliminary contact with representatives of Almani Samori, the brilliant African rebel against French rule, Prempe was not interested in an alliance with the French.
What he wanted was British help in bringing peace and prosperity to his war-weary people.
His pleas were communicated to Chamberlain, who dismissed them.
The Asante were a “nuisance,” and on November 21, 1895, Chamberlain cabled Governor Maxwell that military force would be used to subdue the Asante and bring about their submission to British rule.
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This decision to use force was made after Chamberlain’s rejection of an extraordinary entreaty for peace from a six-man Asante delegation to the Court of St.
James, a delegation led by Prince John Owusu Ansa and including his British-educated brother Albert.
The delegation offered the British a large business concession and submission to the British crown.
British authorities at Cape Coast, convinced that Ansa posed a danger to their interests, did everything they could to discredit him, even trying to deny him the right to travel to Britain.
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Chamberlain at first refused to hear from the Ansa delegation on the grounds that the ambassadors were not authorized by Prempe and therefore lacked legal standing.
But Prince Ansa hired a British barrister, who informed Chamberlain that the Asante ambassadors’ credentials were authentic and presented their submission that, in addition to offering a huge business concession, King Prempe would accept a British resident in Kumase and faithfully conform to the dictates of the queen or her representatives.
They promised that the practice of human sacrifice had been abandoned, as in fact it had been under King Prempe, and asked only for peace and trade.

Chamberlain agreed to consider the matter if the delegation returned at once to Cape Coast; he then traveled to Kumase with British representatives to reach an accord.
The Asante sailed back to the Gold Coast, convinced that they had averted war and established a business connection that would benefit both the British and the Asante.
But Chamberlain could not overcome his fears that the French were somehow conspiring to control the Asante and through them the Gold Coast.
While the Asante envoys were still at sea, he told Governor Maxwell that the planned military expedition to Kumase would go forward.
Ironically, Prince Ansa actually arrived at Cape Coast on a ship that was loaded with military supplies for the invasion of Kumase.
Maxwell received the Asante diplomats coldly, telling them that a military force would proceed to Kumase but holding out hope of peace.
The disillusioned Asante returned to Kumase, where they discovered that their countrymen were well aware of the impending British invasion.