The Fall of the Asante Empire (8 page)

Asante religion was centered around the belief that every person had an immortal soul.
After death the soul became a spirit for a time, and if the person died prematurely or at the hands of another, that spirit could bring harm to the living.
Most ancestral spirits, however, went quietly to the underworld, where life was lived much as it had been on earth.
(This was one of the reasons why slaves were sacrificed to serve their masters and why a wife sometimes demanded to be sacrificed after her husband’s death.) These ancestors were thought to join with other supernatural forces to reward people who adhered to Asante values and laws and to punish offenders, keeping all on their best behavior.
Sometimes these spirits took corporeal form as, for example, a huge bird with great talons that would swoop down on offenders at night.
There were also red-haired albinos with flowing beards and very tall women with enormously pendulous breasts that could frighten wrongdoers to death.
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It was thought that eventually a person’s soul would be reborn through a woman of its own lineage.

One of Bowdich’s misconceptions that would be shared by almost all British political and military leaders who followed him to the Gold Coast was that the Asante “lived for war.” It is true that their army was a formidable instrument of power that must receive the credit for the success of the Asante expansion and nineteenth-century dominance over such a large area.
It is also true that many senior Asante military commanders were, like British army officers, men who longed for the military action that could bring them glory, wealth, and power.
Yet there had long been powerful proponents of peace in Asante who favored diplomacy and trade relationships over military conquest.
Indeed, the Asante invested an inordinate amount of money and energy in the development of diplomacy.
The government stressed the training of diplomats, who were instructed in the arts of negotiation and taught to respect the sanctity of treaties, a view that British officials often did not reciprocate in their treaty negotiations with the Asante.
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They
made regular use of envoys and diplomatic missions in the search for peace.
The highest-ranking diplomatic officers carried gold-hilted swords and a golden axe on their missions to symbolize their willingness to cut through any difficulty to achieve their purpose.
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The British misunderstanding of these symbols—that is, as threatening martial action—led them to dismiss several important Asante missions, and they would never understand the subtlety and allusiveness of the Asante negotiating style nor the fact that for many powerful Asante the greatest good was not war but peace, open roads, and trade.
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As a result, they consistently miscalculated Asante intentions—not surprising, given their contempt for Asante culture and their belief that the Asante sought only war.

War, indeed, had built the Asante Empire, but peace was necessary to maintain it because the Asante depended on tribute and trade.
Except for the six districts that made up metropolitan Asante, all of the conquered districts paid an annual tribute.
A relatively poor northern district that lacked gold might pay only five hundred slaves, two hundred cattle, four hundred sheep, and several hundred cotton and silk cloths to Kumase, but richer districts were assessed two thousand slaves as well as gold and other valuables.
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Tribute also included skilled labor such as doctors, potters, smiths, and leather workers and goods such as sandals, leather pouches, elephant tails, fly whisks, and musical instruments.
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Because the amount and kind of tribute a district could reasonably pay was subject to changing circumstances, a special court was established in Kumase to adjudicate such matters.
The need to pay annual tribute was softened somewhat for tributary chiefs because the Asante king usually returned a portion of it as gifts.

In addition to tribute the Asante relied on trade, sending gold, ivory, and slaves south to the coast for firearms, gunpowder, and other European goods.
To do so, they had to pass through the territory of sometimes hostile tributary people, such as the Fante, or use them as middlemen.
Without a modicum of peace, the Asante could not obtain the weapons and gunpowder needed to maintain their army and control their subject states.
They also required peace to continue their profitable trade to the north.
In return for sea salt obtained at the coast and kola nuts that helped to suppress thirst in these arid lands, the Asante received the slaves they needed
both to trade to the Europeans at the coast and to fuel their own economy.
Salt was so valuable that a handful of it would often bring as many as two slaves in return.
The trade in gold, ivory, and slaves was monopolized by the wealthy, but the commoners participated widely in the salt and kola nut exchange.
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Trade to the west and east was less important but it also took place.

To maintain these trade relationships, the Asante built and maintained a system of roads.
At least five roads led north toward their tributary states, and an equal number fanned out to the south.
Only two roads, both relatively unimportant, ran to the west or the east.
Even when located in the relatively more open territory of the north, these roads required enormous manpower to build and more to maintain.
Cutting roads through the dense tropical rain forest to the south required herculean efforts, as British military engineers discovered during their invasion of 1873/74.
And preventing millions of rapidly growing roots, vines, and creepers from growing back called for continuous labor by thousands of men and women, most of whom were slaves.
It also called for numerous detachments of highway police to assure the safe passage of goods up and down these roadways.
The Asante government took great care to maintain a network of police and military depots to assure that trade would proceed peaceably and that taxes and tribute would flow to Kumase.

The Asante possessed more gold and used more of it as ornaments and symbols of rank than any other West African people.
Much of the gold lay within metropolitan Asante, but many more rich deposits lay in districts that were tributary to them.
The Portuguese were so impressed by the quantity of gold the Asante brought to the coast that they named their principal trading fort Elmina—“the mine.” Some gold was obtained by panning in streams—work almost entirely done by women and children—but much of the region was dotted with small mine pits dug a few yards into the earth.
There were deep shafts as well, several dug one hundred feet deep before sending out tunnels several hundred feet in length.
One mine had a timber-shored tunnel three hundred yards long with numerous large galleries where the gold was worked.
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To reach a vein of gold, miners had to chop their way through hard rock such as feldspar or granite, work that could only
be done by men, and in some mines gunpowder was used to blast the rock away.
The diggers gave the chunks of ore to women who carried it to crushing areas where men put it on granite slabs and pounded it to bits with hammers before women milled it to powder and washed it to separate the gold.
The work was usually done by slaves supervised by the family they belonged to, but sometimes thousands of men, women, and children worked together to mine a rich reef of gold.
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In peak years as many as forty thousand mines were being worked.
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In law all gold belonged to the king, and some mines were directly managed by the treasury, but others were under local control.
When a nugget was found, it was supposed to be taken to the local chief, who sent it on to the king, who in return sent the chief some gold dust as his commission.
There were tight controls, and the chiefs’ spies were willing to report misconduct in anticipation of sharing a reward.
Still there
was
cheating, especially after the gold had been reduced to dust when it could be adulterated with silver, copper, or coral.
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Gold may originally have been mined by the Asante themselves, but at least by the seventeenth century, slave labor was used almost exclusively, perhaps because shafts collapsed by heavy rains and rising groundwater made mining such a dangerous activity.
Much gold was extracted by having a slave dig into the soil above a known reef, then handing the earth up for panning until he hit the water table.
Slaves slept and ate in these pits, being fed by the freemen who panned the gold on the surface.
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So great was the Asante demand for slaves in these times that the Portuguese actually imported slaves to the Asante from as far away as Angola!
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Well before Bowdich’s visit slaves were also essential for Asante food production.
Originally, Asante farmers practiced shifting cultivation to exploit the fertile but shallow, easily exhausted forest soil.
Fields were cleared by chopping and burning the undergrowth, leaving a layer of ash as fertilizer.
Yams and plantains were probably the main crop until the sixteenth century, when along with iron hoes many new crops were introduced by Europeans.
Cassava, peanuts, maize, oranges, avocados, tomatoes, and pineapples thrived, and productivity grew.
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As villages and towns multiplied, the need for more food led to the development of large plantations to supply the urban dwellers.
The labor needed to clear
the forest and cultivate the fields of these plantations was increasingly provided by slaves.

Confined to Kumase, the earlier European visitors were able to learn little about country life.
In addition to Kumase and Dwaben there were several towns of five thousand to seven thousand people.
Salaga, a market town to the north, was twice as large as Kumase, but the great majority of the people in metropolitan Asante lived in villages of a few hundred to a thousand people.
The key to Asante village life was the relationship between a mother and her children.
In addition to natural ties of affection, the role of the mother was central because the Asante reckoned both descent and inheritance through the female line.
A mother’s brother was the legal guardian of her children; her husband had few legal responsibilities for them, except the obligations to see that they were well cared for and well behaved and to find and pay for a suitable wife for his son.
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A husband had some legal rights over his wife, including the right to cut off her nose for adultery, her lips for betraying a secret, or her ears for listening to his private conversation.
Women mutilated in these ways were not an uncommon sight, especially in Kumase.
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However, women had relative equality with men in many ways, including the right to initiate divorce.
Every Asante belonged to a group of people related through women, and it was this group—the
ntoro
, or “lineage” in English—that gave them legitimacy in the world of living Asante and ties to their ancestors, to whom animal and human sacrifices had to be made on special occasions.
These various lineages belonged to one of eight clans, one of which was the royal Okoyo clan.
Lineage ties were so strong that wherever a man might live, the village where his lineage was centered was his home, and it was there that he would want to be buried to be close to his ancestors.
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Veneration of ancestors and respect for authority were combined in the office of chief.
Each lineage had its head, who occupied a stool and served as a councillor to the village chief.
Each village had a formally acknowledged leader, or chief, chosen by a council of elders representing the various lineages and clans in the village.
The chief had the power to resolve minor disputes and to collect taxes, but like the king he was bound by a sworn oath to consult the elders on all matters of importance and to follow their advice.
Although
the Asante system has been likened to English feudalism, the Asante chiefs ruled not because of a contractual relationship with their people, or vassals, but because various kin groups chose them to lead—elected them in fact—and because religious authority cemented their power.
Only the chief had the authority to serve as an intermediary between the people and the ancestors.
Each chief had a stool, as the king did, that represented the soul of his people while linking them to ancestors whose blessings on the living were essential to their well-being.
Approximately every three weeks the chief was responsible for directing a religious ceremony—the
Adae
—during which the ancestors were praised, their great deeds recounted, and their favors beseeched.
Assured that all was well with their world, everyone joined in drinking palm wine and joyously dancing to the rhythm of dozens of drums.
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Unlike the excitement and danger of life in Kumase, life in these rural villages was usually routine and tranquil.
There were some specialized village settlements of artisans, religious specialists, gold-smiths, and slaves, but most villages consisted of families, free and slave, that lived by cultivation.
A village usually had only one street, but like those in Kumase, it too was wide, often over fifty yards, and it was swept clean every day.
The rectangular houses with high-pitched thatched roofs were small and simple, as were their furnishings, but they were uniformly clean.
Because dirt, trash, and refuse were thought to be dangerous, women and children had the daily chore of gathering up all trash and depositing it in a midden outside the village.
Because menstruation was dangerous, too, women were secluded in huts during their menses, and a woman who touched her husband at this time could be killed.
Latrines were situated far away from the houses of the village, which were built on both sides of the single long wide road that also served as the village meeting place.
The village was surrounded by its fields and domestic animals—mostly chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, and dogs.
Shaded by huge trees, people promenaded along this street and sat in the shade, chatting or playing a complicated board game called
ware
that resembled pachisi.