Britain and Asante at War, 1824-1900

Ghana has always been an interesting name associated with West Africa. One of my earliest introductions to West African history always came with the caveat that there is an ancient “Ghana” empire and a modern-day Ghana, that had no nexus save for both being located in West Africa and the latter taking its name from the former when the area formerly known as the Gold Coast became independent from Great Britain.

However, a notable group of people in modern-day Ghana constituted what was known as the empire of the Asante, or better put, the Ashanti Empire. I have always been fascinated by how formidable and organised it was in precolonial times, how much territory it amassed and how it later stood up on multiple occasions to imperial Britain. Its kings and armies were a sight to behold. I have decided to look more closely into the Asante, and particularly the wars between her and the better-equipped British armies, in this article.

In March 1873, with his army inside the British protectorate on the Gold Coast, the Asantehene (King of the Asante) Kofi Kakari set out his terms in a letter to the British administrator. He wanted the Denkyira, Akyem and Assin restored to him as subjects, and the fort and people of Elmina returned as they had been. That, the letter said, “will be the only thing or way to appease him, for he has no quarrel with white men.”¹ Less than a year later British troops burned his capital.

The letter names what Britain and Asante fought over for most of the 19th century: the lands between the Pra River and the sea, and who held them. They went to war in 1824, again in 1863, and again in 1873. In 1896 a British force occupied Kumasi without a fight, and in 1900 part of Asante took up arms for the last time. Ivor Wilks, the historian of 19th-century Asante, objected to calling 1896 a war, since no one fought, and to calling 1900 an Anglo-Asante war, since most of Asante’s states stayed out of it.² Again, the kingdom’s longer history, from its founding around 1701, is on the Asante page.

Wilks also set out how Kumasi understood its claim to the south. In Asante thinking, he argued, sovereignty came from conquest, and it could be kept even when day-to-day authority passed to someone else. Asante land law had the same pattern: the land could belong to one person while the people living on it were placed under another. British officials read the same arrangements quite differently.³

Nsamankow and Katamanso, 1824-1831

By 1823 Britain and Asante had been at odds for six years over the coastal Fante and the provinces south of the Pra. The Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame, known to the British as Osei Bonsu, fell ill that year with a leg ulcer and a chest complaint and withdrew from government; reports of his death reached the coast early in November.⁴ The new British governor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, believed Kumasi could not mobilize in the middle of a succession, and in January 1824 he marched north into Wassa.⁵

His brigade-major, Major H. I. Ricketts, left the fullest account. The regulars and militia carried only 20 rounds each, with slugs and loose powder, much of it spoiled by rain.⁶ On Jan. 20, warned that the Asante were close, MacCarthy wrote that he did not believe it, and that he “was determined to see how the Ashantees liked our balls.”⁷ The next afternoon, about 2 o’clock, an army Ricketts was told numbered “considerably more than ten thousand men” came through the forest with horns blowing and drums beating. MacCarthy had the band play “God save the King.” The Asante played back, several times over, before the firing began across a river about 60 feet wide.⁸

The ammunition ran out. The reserve never came up: the man in charge of it had a barrel of powder and one of ball, and his 40 or so carriers ran when they saw the Wassa leaving the field.⁹ MacCarthy was hit in the arm and then in the chest and laid under a tree. The colonial secretary, J. T. Williams, was wounded beside him and woke to see the headless bodies of MacCarthy, the engineer Buckle and Ensign Wetherell. He spent about two months as a prisoner, locked up at night in a room with their heads.¹⁰ Of the 250 enrolled men in MacCarthy’s column, Wilks counts only about 70 who came back.¹¹

The British remembered Nsamankow as the battle in which the Asante killed a governor. The Asante resident commissioner at Elmina, Kwadwo Akyampon Bakki, gave Ricketts another version: the commanders had not known they were fighting a British-led force, and had no authority from Kumasi to do so.¹²

Sources disagree about what the new king intended. The British consul Joseph Dupuis heard that Osei Yaw Akoto opened his reign by vowing to water Osei Bonsu’s grave with the blood of white men. A tradition recorded by the Accra historian Carl Reindorf has the dying Osei Bonsu urging him never to fight the whites on the coast.¹³ Whatever was said, the army stayed south. On April 25, 1824, it drove the British out of Efutu, about eight miles from Cape Coast, and in June it fought outside the town. In August, with the rains on, smallpox in the camps and the queen mother in Kumasi worried that Gyaman and Akyem would attack the capital, Osei Yaw withdrew.¹⁴

He came back in 1826, after an envoy was murdered in Akyem, and swore to lead the army in person, against custom.¹⁵ On Aug. 7, 1826, at Katamanso on the plains northeast of Accra, his army met a British-led force under Lt. Col. Purdon and was badly beaten. No one agrees on the numbers. Reindorf and a later Gold Coast account by Djang put the Asante at 40,960, and Djang put the British side at 50,600. Purdon reported almost 12,000 men of his own and at least 25,000 Asante. Ricketts thought the Asante had about 10,000. Wilks suspects the largest figure counts carriers and camp followers.¹⁶ Many accounts credit the Congreve rocket, a weapon the Asante had not met before.¹⁷ Governor Neil Campbell, who saw the field afterward, wrote that the results “have been grossly exaggerated.”¹⁸

The defeat broke the war party in Kumasi rather than the army. Osei Yaw executed the counselor who had tried to have him removed, but he turned to peace.¹⁹ The talks took years. In 1828 he told two envoys from Cape Coast that a conqueror always asked a large sum and then reduced it once the defeated showed good faith, and that the British refusal to reduce theirs showed they still counted him an enemy. “Even if the amount was ten thousand ounces of gold bidden, and it reduced to eight thousand ounces, he would yield it,” one of them reported him saying. He would not fight the British again, he said, and if they attacked he would “rather blow up once.”²⁰

George Maclean, a captain of the Royal African Colonial Corps who became president of the merchants’ council at Cape Coast in 1830, closed the deal. Under the treaty signed at Cape Coast on April 27, 1831, the Asantehene deposited 600 ounces of gold with the British for six years and handed over two princes, Owusu Ansa and Owusu Nkwantabisa. He renounced tribute from Denkyira, Assin and the other former provinces, and the roads to the coast were to stay open to trade.²¹ By Wilks’s reading, Kumasi thought it had handed Britain the administration of the south, not the sovereignty, because the British had never conquered it.²²

Kwasi Gyani’s nuggets, 1863-1864

The peace held for about 30 years. It ended over a single man, Kwasi Gyani, a wealthy elderly Asante, who was accused of keeping rock gold for himself, against the law that all nuggets went to the royal mint in Kumasi. He fled south into the British Protected Territory with his followers, 80 of them by some accounts and 400 to 600 by others. In December 1862 officers from Kumasi asked for him back, and Governor Richard Pine refused.²³

The Asantehene Kwaku Dua replied on Feb. 9, 1863. He had once sent back about 70 runaway Wassa to the governor and paid four ounces eight ackies of gold dust to feed them on the road, he wrote. “But when you came, any of my slaves run to Cape Coast, you and your subjects take them … and now you are going to take Quashie Gainie also.”²⁴ Pine refused again and denied that any agreement on returning fugitives existed. With 50,000 local irregulars and 2,000 regulars, he told London, “I would undertake (driving the hordes of Ashantee before me) to march to Coomassie.”²⁵

The Asante invaded first. Owusu Koko, a son of Osei Bonsu, sent one division of 2,000 men southwest and another of 8,000 into Assin, and led the main force, reputedly 20,000 men, through the Akyem Kotoku towns, which it burned. By the middle of May 1863, the campaign was over.²⁶ Owusu Koko sent the governor two sticks, one short and one long. The short one meant giving up the runaways and ending the war, and the long one three more years of fighting. Pine, as the writer James Africanus Horton told it, chose the long one.²⁷ The council in Kumasi pulled the armies back before the rains anyway.²⁸

The British then built up a forward camp on the Pra, and sickness tore through it. In May 1864 London ordered it evacuated and all offensive operations stopped.²⁹ In the Commons a former war secretary compared the disaster to the Crimea, and the colonial secretary, Edward Cardwell, said British troops would not be sent to the Gold Coast again.³⁰ No peace followed. When an acting governor announced in January 1866 that the Asantehene had sued for peace, Kumasi was furious. “Even when a woman runs away because she has been ill-treated, she has to be returned,” Kwaku Dua said. “Kwasi Gyani has run away and he must be surrendered otherwise the road will remain closed.”³¹ The British deported Gyani to Sierra Leone instead, in July 1866, and by the end of that year, Wilks writes, the two were in a state of undeclared war.³²

Elmina, 1867-1873

In 1867 Britain and the Netherlands agreed to swap forts on the Gold Coast so that each held one stretch of shore; the exchange took effect on Jan. 1, 1868.³³ Elmina had a long connection with Kumasi, and the Dutch paid the Asantehene a yearly sum for it. To the Fante on the coast, a British official reported, this made the Dutch “feudatories to Ashantee.”³⁴ The Fante blockaded Elmina, and in 1871 a group of their chiefs proclaimed a Fante Confederation with its own constitution, which the British broke up by arresting its leaders that December.³⁵

When Kofi Kakari learned that the Dutch meant to cede Elmina itself to Britain, he protested by letter on Nov. 24, 1870. The fort had paid tribute to his ancestors since the conquest of Denkyira, he wrote, “for it is mine by right.”³⁶ London told the Dutch to get the claim renounced first. What came back was a document dated Aug. 19, 1871, carried from Kumasi by a Dutch agent, Henry Plange, which said the Asantehene received a salary from the Dutch, not a tribute. A British writer, Ellis, argued in 1893 that it was a forgery, and Wilks concluded that Dutch officers, Plange and at least one Asante official had colluded in it.³⁷ The transfer went ahead in April 1872. The Asante commissioner at Elmina, Akyampon Yaw, was seized three times, last by a British party that landed him at Cape Coast in October 1872, where his belongings were sold in the town.³⁸

At the national assembly in Kumasi in September 1872, almost every senior chief supported war.³⁹ In October, the missionaries Ramseyer and Kühne, then prisoners in Kumasi, heard that the chiefs had sworn at Bantama to march on the coast and that the king had answered, “If you go, I shall go with you.”⁴⁰ The aims, Wilks argues, were limited: Elmina and the coast west of it, and the return of the Akyem, Assin, Denkyira and Wassa.⁴¹

The Bantamahene Amankwatia led the main army out of Kumasi on Dec. 9, 1872, and crossed the Pra on Jan. 22, 1873.⁴² Ryan Patterson, in a recent military history, puts his army at 30,000 to 40,000 men; one estimate cited by Wilks puts all the forces in the field at about 80,000.⁴³ By April they held Dunkwa, about 16 miles north of Cape Coast. Two other armies moved into Akyem and Wassa.⁴⁴ In Cape Coast, on March 16, a mob seized four Asante servants of Prince Ansa, an Asante royal living in the town whom they suspected of supplying the invaders, and cut their heads off on the beach.⁴⁵ In June a British naval force landed at Elmina, bombarded the town and drove off an Asante attack.⁴⁶

By the autumn the war had turned in Kumasi. A peace party regained its majority at a council on Oct. 27, 1873.⁴⁷ Orders to withdraw reached Amankwatia’s camp on Nov. 6, while his men were attacking a British post at Abrakampa. The retreat that followed impressed Henry Brackenbury, one of Wolseley’s officers, who later wrote a narrative of the war from the official documents. “The army of a civilised nation need not have been ashamed of a retreat conducted with such skill and such success,” he wrote.⁴⁸ Back in Kumasi, soldiers coming home had their own view. “Even if the king send us forward again, we will not go unless he accompany; we are sick of it,” some said, as the missionaries recorded it. “The white men have guns which hit five Ashantees at once.”⁴⁹

Wolseley’s march, 1873-1874

By then the British had decided to invade. W. D. McIntyre, who worked through the ministers’ papers, found that the expedition was launched without consulting Parliament and that its form was settled without a Cabinet discussion. Cardwell, now at the War Office, asked Sir Garnet Wolseley for a plan on his own initiative; Parliament had been prorogued in August 1873 and the Cabinet was scattered. The march went ahead even though the Asante had left the protectorate before it began, and McIntyre concluded that Wolseley “decided to enter Kumasi with British troops and would not be deterred.”⁵⁰ The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, sent British battalions on one condition: Wolseley was not to keep them in the interior “a day longer than the paramount objects of your mission may require.”⁵¹

Parliament granted Wolseley £800,000. His force had about 2,500 British soldiers and sailors, from the Black Watch, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Rifle Brigade and a Naval Brigade. It also had about 2,000 men of the West India Regiments and the Sierra Leone and Nigeria forces, and several thousand auxiliaries from the protectorate.⁵² The whole transport system ran on human carriers. They were paid and fed, but many were coerced, and as the advance slowed some were simply rounded up.⁵³ The first columns left Cape Coast on Dec. 27, 1873.⁵⁴

Kofi Kakari tried to stop them without fighting. Early in December he gave Kumasi’s Muslims 10 peredwans of gold, about 22 ounces, “for using sorcery to hinder the white men from rising.”⁵⁵ On Jan. 9, 1874, he sent an envoy, Owusu Koko Kuma, to ask for a halt, and released the missionary Johannes Kühne as a sign of good faith. The envoy carried a Muslim charm that was supposed, with a shake of the hand, to make the governor go back. Wolseley would not meet him.⁵⁶ When British scouts reached the edge of Asante at Kwisa on Jan. 16, the Asante road patrol there told them it had no orders to fight. On the hill above, the British found a paper in Arabic. Translated by a Hausa soldier, it asked God that the white men “would fight among themselves, and return to their own country,” and declared, “Europeans never possessed any land in this country.”⁵⁷

North of Kwisa the Asante fought. Amankwatia waited outside the village of Amoafo with 15,000 to 20,000 men on a ridge above a ravine of bush and swamp. Wolseley advanced on Jan. 31 in a hollow square about 2,200 strong, which came apart in the undergrowth.⁵⁸ The 42nd Highlanders at the front lost “nearly every fourth man having been hit,” their brigadier, Sir Archibald Alison, reported.⁵⁹ Amankwatia was killed in the fighting.⁶⁰ On the British side four men died that day and 194 were hit. Patterson puts the low death toll down to the weak penetration of Asante slugs.⁶¹

The Asante losses are guesses. Alison thought they could not have been fewer than 2,000 to 3,000 killed and wounded. Wolseley wrote that his men buried 150 bodies beside the main road alone, and that the Asante took great risks to carry their dead away. Patterson gives 800 to 1,600 dead.⁶² Of the 1,550 European soldiers landed with the four British units, nearly 200 had already gone down with sickness before the battle.⁶³

After a last fight at Ordahsu, Alison’s column walked into Kumasi unopposed at about 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 4. The king and court had gone.⁶⁴ Wilks calls them the first foreign troops ever to enter the city.⁶⁵ Kofi Kakari did not come in to make peace, the rains were starting and fewer than 1,000 European soldiers were fit, so Wolseley decided to destroy the town and leave.⁶⁶ That night prize agents went through the palace by the light of two candles, with 30 carriers to take what they chose. Brackenbury, who went with them, listed gold masks, one of them a ram’s head of more than 41 ounces, necklaces and bracelets, bags of gold dust, silver plate, and the sword Queen Victoria had once sent the king.⁶⁷ On the morning of Feb. 6 engineers set the town on fire from north to south and mined the palace, the stone building completed in 1822 to hold the king’s collections.⁶⁸ Brackenbury watched the smoke rise and wrote that it showed the king and his people “that the white man never failed to keep his word.”⁶⁹

The treaty and the gold

Envoys caught up with Wolseley at Fomena on Feb. 13. They brought 1,000 ounces of gold, said the king had never been asked for such a sum, and pointed out that Maclean in 1831 had asked only 600 ounces as security. About 40 ounces more came out of the folds of their robes. Much of the payment was in worked gold: plaques, pieces of necklaces and bracelets, nuggets.⁷⁰

Wolseley handed them a draft, explained to them paragraph by paragraph and dated at Fomena that day. Asante was to pay 50,000 ounces of gold, renounce Denkyira, Assin, Akyem, Adanse and Elmina, withdraw from the western coast, keep the road to the Pra cleared to a width of 15 feet, and allow free trade. On human sacrifice, the king promised only to “use his best endeavours to check the practice.”⁷¹ The envoys objected to the size of the indemnity and to the loss of Adanse, whose ruler had asked to move his people south of the Pra under British protection.⁷²

The treaty was signed weeks later, at Cape Coast. On March 13 an embassy under the king’s son Kofi Nti arrived with the draft marked with two crosses for the king. They said he understood the indemnity to be 5,000 benders, or 10,000 ounces. Told it was 50,000, they withdrew to consult, and on the third day signed it, with representatives of the Asante states. Colonel Maxwell, left in charge on the coast, signed for the Queen.⁷³ Wolseley “did not contemplate that the remainder of this money would ever be obtained,” Brackenbury wrote, but the claim could be used as a lever later.⁷⁴ In 1896 another British governor, William Maxwell, demanded the arrears.

In Kumasi the defeat brought down the king. The councillors of Kumasi deposed Kofi Kakari in 1874, both for the way he had led the war and for taking gold from the royal mausoleum.⁷⁵ In London the campaign was counted a success. It cost £767,093. Disease killed 40 of the British contingent, and the Commons voted Wolseley £25,000.⁷⁶ An Order in Council of Aug. 6, 1874, made the coastal territories the Gold Coast Colony.⁷⁷

A kingdom that did not fight, 1874-1896

Twenty-two years later a British force marched into Kumasi again, and no one fired at it. Manuel J. Manu-Osafo, a historian at the University of Ghana, argues that the answer lies in what happened inside Asante after 1874. The state had no standing army. It raised armies through what he calls a social contract: subjects owed military service, and in return the state owed them protection and sound leadership, backed by oaths, rituals, sword-bearers who drove men forward, and road guards who stopped them escaping.⁷⁸ In October 1873, when the king heard that British troops had landed and were heading for Kumasi, guards were sent out to stop men fleeing and to press into service everyone who could carry a gun. Amankwatia, the missionaries wrote, “had thrown coals on an ant hill.”⁷⁹

After the defeat, Manu-Osafo writes, the state broke its side of the bargain. Kofi Kakari’s brother Mensa Bonsu ruled harshly and was overthrown by a commoner revolt in 1883. Civil war followed, until Agyeman Prempeh secured the Golden Stool in 1888, and by then the old means of compelling men to fight had worn away.⁸⁰ The army could still win smaller wars. When Nkoransa, a northern province, defied Prempeh in 1892, it drove the first Asante invasion back, but a second campaign in 1893 defeated it and took between 2,000 and 3,000 women and children captive, Kwabena Adu-Boahen writes.⁸¹

Britain, meanwhile, kept offering protection. In 1891 Governor Griffith sent an officer to Kumasi with the offer and £400 to spend on winning a yes.⁸² After long debate the kingdom answered that it “must remain independent as of old, at the same time to be friendly with all white men.”⁸³ In September 1895 the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, ordered an ultimatum demanding that the Asantehene accept a British Resident. It was delivered in Kumasi on Oct. 10, and an Asante embassy already in London accepted its terms in writing.⁸⁴

The expedition went anyway. A few miles south of Kumasi, two senior officials told Captain Donald Stewart that Asante would pay the indemnities and “come under the white men’s government,” and were told the king would not be deposed if he complied.⁸⁵ The British entered Kumasi on Jan. 17, 1896, to a state reception. At a public meeting on Jan. 20, Governor William Maxwell took the submission of Agyeman Prempeh and his mother, the Asantehemaa Yaa Kyaa, then demanded immediate payment of the indemnities. When that proved impossible, as Wilks writes he knew it would, Maxwell had them arrested from a list drawn up in advance, along with the ruler of Mampon, leading Kumasi councillors and the rulers of Edweso and Offinso.⁸⁶

“As soon as the King and the others were made prisoner,” Agyeman Prempeh later wrote, “orders were given to the soldiers to plunder and they plundered everywhere.”⁸⁷ The prisoners left Kumasi on Jan. 22 for Elmina, and later for Sierra Leone and the Seychelles.⁸⁸ Chamberlain cabled that “deportation or detention as political prisoners” had not been “contemplated by ultimatum,” but did not reverse it.⁸⁹ Maxwell said openly that his aim was “the destruction of the central power of Kumase.” Wilks, who worked the question through with his student Hamilton, calls it a coup d’état, and I think he is right.⁹⁰

The war of the Golden Stool, 1900-1901

For four years a British Resident governed in the Asantehene’s place, with powers of life and death that Maxwell had no authority to give him, as the colony’s attorney general discovered with alarm.⁹¹ On March 28, 1900, Governor Frederic Hodgson told the chiefs in Kumasi that the kingship was finished and that the Queen was now the paramount power. They would pay 2,000 peredwans a year, which he put at £16,000, as interest on the cost of the expeditions of 1873-74 and 1895-96. And he wanted the Golden Stool. “Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?” he asked. He ended by asking them to look on him “as your friend as well as your Governor.”⁹² In letters to Chamberlain over the next fortnight, Hodgson linked the claim to paramountcy to the gold-mining concessions being worked in Asante.⁹³ Accounts disagree on the size of the yearly levy; the Asante page sets out the figures.

On April 2 a party under Captain C. H. Armitage, sent to find the stool, was attacked.⁹⁴ By the end of April the British in Kumasi were under siege in the fort. Hodgson broke out on June 23, and a relief column under Colonel James Willcocks reached the town on July 15.⁹⁵ The British never got the stool. Its keepers had hidden it, and guarded it in the bush for years afterward.⁹⁶

Not all of Asante went to war. The Mamponhene, who traditionally held command of the national army, refused to lead it, and with the rulers of Dwaben, Kumawu and Nsuta tried to talk Kumasi out of fighting. Wilks argues that from that point the war was “an Anglo-Kumase and not an Anglo-Asante one.” The Kumasi forces were led by Kwabena Kyere, newly installed as Bantamahene to give them a commander by custom.⁹⁷ Not every Kumasi man followed him either. Kwabena Osei of Adiebeba, near Kumasi, later remembered that “no one listened except a few who went to Kumasi to fight the Chiefs’ war. I refused it. The Chiefs could do nothing. The days of their heedless power were over and done.”⁹⁸

Who led the war is still argued over. A British inquiry after the fighting said Yaa Asantewaa, the queen mother of Edweso, had been “elected to command Ashanti forces.”⁹⁹ Arhin Brempong concluded that the chiefs chose her as war leader, the first woman to hold that role. A. Adu Boahen called her the leader and commander-in-chief, though he notes that no British officer reported seeing her fire a gun.¹⁰⁰ T. C. McCaskie points out that the authorized history the Asante court compiled between 1937 and 1946 mentions her three times in passing and gives her no leadership role. Wilks describes the war as a countercoup “much inspired” by her and led by Kwabena Kyere.¹⁰¹ In 2017 Magdalene Mensah, at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, studied the oral account of Yaa Asantewaa recorded in her home village, alongside praise songs and clan appellations. She concluded, in French, that it has the marks of an epic and carries a patriotic and feminist message.¹⁰²

Kwabena Kyere was captured at Sunyani on Nov. 13, tried by a military commission for a massacre of some 80 rubber traders, and hanged in Kumasi on Nov. 25.¹⁰³ The fighting ended after Willcocks left Kumasi on Dec. 3, and the war formally ended when Yaa Asantewaa surrendered on March 3, 1901.¹⁰⁴ She was then sent to the Seychelles and died there in 1921.¹⁰⁵

“These people were called upon to suffer the consequences of defeat without having been defeated,” Chamberlain told the Commons on March 18, 1901.¹⁰⁶ The Ashanti Order in Council of Sept. 26, 1901, declared that the territories “heretofore known as Ashanti, have been conquered by His Majesty’s forces” and annexed them to the Crown. It was published in the Gold Coast Government Gazette on Jan. 1, 1902.¹⁰⁷

Whose account

Unfortunately, almost every number in these wars comes from British writers, mainly officers, war correspondents and governors writing to London. Wilks, writing of 1873, noted that most accounts were written from a British point of view and “lacked any clear appreciation of Asante strategy and tactics.”¹⁰⁸ The size of armies at Katamanso and the dead at Amoafo show how far those figures can drift.

The Asante side survives in letters the kings dictated to Cape Coast, in testimony like Akyampon Bakki’s and Kwabena Osei’s, and in traditions gathered in the 20th century. It survives too in the account Agyeman Prempeh wrote in exile in the Seychelles, The History of Ashanti Kings, edited and published by the British Academy in 2003.¹⁰⁹

Where the gold went

The gold weighed out at Fomena was later put on show in London. Brackenbury told his readers that many of them had probably seen it at Garrard’s in the Haymarket.¹¹⁰ Wolseley had wanted it thrown into the prize fund, but it was kept apart from the loot and shipped to Britain.¹¹¹ The loot itself, from the palace and from the souvenirs officers, men and carriers were made to give up, was sold in the palaver hall of Cape Coast Castle on the morning of Feb. 23, 1874, after the British battalions had sailed. The largest group of bidders were Fante and other Gold Coast men and women, who bought mostly cloth and aggrey beads, so much of it stayed in West Africa. The sale raised about £3,000, writes Patrick Watt of National Museums Scotland.¹¹² In April 1874 the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert, bought 13 pieces of royal regalia at an auction of the looted gold.¹¹³ In December 1876 the trustees of the Christy collection bought 89 gold pieces from the Crown Agents for the Colonies, recorded on their accession slips as “From Ashantee, part of the King’s Indemnity,” for £371 0s 4d. They are now in the British Museum.¹¹⁴

In January 2024 the V&A and the British Museum announced loans of 17 and 15 objects to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, for the Asantehene Osei Tutu II’s silver jubilee and the 150th anniversary of the war of 1873-74. The V&A’s loan includes all 13 pieces it bought in 1874. Both loans were agreed for three years.¹¹⁵

Notes

1. Kofi Kakari to Harley, March 20, 1873, Further Correspondence respecting the Ashantee Invasion, C. 819 (1873), quoted in Wilks 1975, p. 236. ↩

2. Wilks 2000, p. 13. ↩

3. Wilks 1975, pp. 191-192. ↩

4. Wilks 1975, p. 174. ↩

5. Wilks 1975, pp. 174-175. ↩

6. Ricketts 1831, p. 50. ↩

7. Ricketts 1831, p. 54. ↩

8. Ricketts 1831, pp. 55-56. ↩

9. Ricketts 1831, p. 57. ↩

10. Ricketts 1831, pp. 82-83, 85. ↩

11. Wilks 1975, p. 175. ↩

12. Wilks 1975, p. 175, citing the Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, Oct. 2, 1824, and Claridge 1915, vol. 1, pp. 364-365. ↩

13. Dupuis 1824, p. 215; Reindorf 1895, p. 200; Wilks 1975, pp. 179-180. ↩

14. Wilks 1975, p. 180. ↩

15. Wilks 1975, p. 182. ↩

16. Wilks 1975, p. 183. ↩

17. Wilks 1975, p. 183. ↩

18. Campbell to Bathurst, Nov. 12, 1826, quoted in Wilks 1975, pp. 184-185. ↩

19. Wilks 1975, p. 185. ↩

20. Buckman to Ricketts, July 12, 1828, in Ricketts 1831, pp. 165-167; Wilks 1975, p. 189. ↩

21. Wilks 1975, pp. 189-190. ↩

22. Wilks 1975, p. 192. ↩

23. Wilks 1975, pp. 219-220. ↩

24. Kwaku Dua to Pine, Feb. 9, 1863, in Despatches … explaining the cause of war, C. 385 (1864), pp. 6-7, quoted in Wilks 1975, p. 220. ↩

25. Wilks 1975, pp. 220-221. ↩

26. Wilks 1975, p. 221, from Horton 1870. ↩

27. Wilks 1975, p. 222, quoting Horton 1870, p. 65. ↩

28. Wilks 1975, p. 222. ↩

29. Wilks 1975, p. 223. ↩

30. Patterson 2021, p. 107. ↩

31. Wilks 1975, p. 223. ↩

32. Wilks 1975, pp. 223-224. ↩

33. Wilks 1975, p. 226. ↩

34. Ussher to Kennedy, April 6, 1868, quoted in Wilks 1975, p. 227. ↩

35. Wilks 1975, pp. 230, 235. ↩

36. Kofi Kakari and Owusu Ansa to Ussher, Nov. 24, 1870, quoted in Wilks 1975, pp. 231-232. ↩

37. Wilks 1975, pp. 233-234. ↩

38. Wilks 1975, pp. 232-233. ↩

39. Wilks 1975, p. 235. ↩

40. Ramseyer and Kühne 1875, p. 187; Wilks 1975, pp. 235-236. ↩

41. Wilks 1975, p. 236. ↩

42. Wilks 1975, p. 236. ↩

43. Patterson 2021, p. 110; Wilks 1975, p. 236. ↩

44. Wilks 1975, p. 236; Patterson 2021, p. 110. ↩

45. Claridge 1915, vol. 2, p. 21. ↩

46. Patterson 2021, p. 110. ↩

47. Wilks 1975, p. 237. ↩

48. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 1, p. 302; Wilks 1975, p. 238. ↩

49. Ramseyer and Kühne 1875, p. 252. ↩

50. McIntyre 1962, pp. 19, 44. ↩

51. Kimberley to Wolseley, Nov. 24, 1873, quoted in Patterson 2021, p. 115. ↩

52. Wilks 1975, p. 238. ↩

53. Patterson 2021, p. 114. ↩

54. Wilks 1975, p. 238. ↩

55. Ramseyer and Kühne 1875, p. 250; Wilks 1975, p. 239. ↩

56. Wilks 1975, p. 240; Ramseyer and Kühne 1875, p. 271. ↩

57. Wilks 1975, pp. 240-241, quoting Dooner 1874, p. 45. ↩

58. Patterson 2021, pp. 119-120. ↩

59. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 180. ↩

60. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 182. ↩

61. Patterson 2021, pp. 121-122; Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 183. ↩

62. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 180, 182; Patterson 2021, p. 121. ↩

63. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 184. ↩

64. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 223. ↩

65. Wilks 1975, p. 242. ↩

66. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 237-239. ↩

67. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 240-241. ↩

68. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 242-244; Wilks 1975, p. 178 n. 65. ↩

69. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 244. ↩

70. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 266-267. ↩

71. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 268-270. ↩

72. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 270-273. ↩

73. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, pp. 317-318. ↩

74. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 274. ↩

75. Manu-Osafo 2021, p. 268. ↩

76. Patterson 2021, p. 124. ↩

77. Wilks 1975, p. 242; McIntyre 1962, p. 43. Patterson 2021, p. 124, dates the proclamation of the colony to July 24, 1874. ↩

78. Manu-Osafo 2021, pp. 255, 267-268. ↩

79. Ramseyer and Kühne 1875, p. 241; Manu-Osafo 2021, pp. 267-268. ↩

80. Manu-Osafo 2021, pp. 268-269. ↩

81. Adu-Boahen 2006, pp. 68-69. ↩

82. Wilks 2000, p. 16. ↩

83. Wilks 2000, p. 18. ↩

84. Wilks 2000, pp. 37, 40-41. ↩

85. Wilks 2000, p. 43. ↩

86. Wilks 2000, p. 43. ↩

87. Agyeman Prempeh, “Reign of King Prempeh,” in Prempeh I 2003, p. 158; Wilks 2000, p. 44. ↩

88. Wilks 2000, p. 45. ↩

89. Chamberlain to Maxwell, draft cable, Jan. 22, 1896, quoted in Wilks 2000, p. 45. ↩

90. Wilks 2000, p. 45. ↩

91. Wilks 2000, pp. 52-53. ↩

92. Notes taken at a public palaver, March 28, 1900, Cd. 501, quoted in Wilks 2000, p. 54. ↩

93. Wilks 2000, pp. 54-55. ↩

94. Wilks 2000, p. 55. ↩

95. Boahen 2003, pp. 66, 88. ↩

96. McCaskie 2000, pp. 63-64. ↩

97. Wilks 2000, pp. 55, 57. ↩

98. Quoted in Manu-Osafo 2021, p. 269, from McCaskie, Asante Identities (2000), p. 78. ↩

99. Wilks 2000, p. 55, citing Cd. 933 (1902). ↩

100. Brempong 2000, p. 110; Boahen 2000, pp. 115-116, 125. ↩

101. McCaskie 2007, pp. 160-161; Wilks 2000, p. 58. ↩

102. Mensah 2017, pp. v-vi (résumé). ↩

103. Wilks 2000, p. 58. ↩

104. Boahen 2003, p. 28. ↩

105. McCaskie 2007, p. 159. ↩

106. House of Commons debate, March 18, 1901, Hansard, 4th ser., vol. 91, col. 357; Wilks 2000, p. 58. ↩

107. Wilks 2000, p. 59. ↩

108. Wilks 1975, p. 237. ↩

109. Prempeh I 2003. ↩

110. Brackenbury 1874, vol. 2, p. 266. ↩

111. Watt 2023, p. 32. ↩

112. Watt 2023, pp. 31, 33-34. ↩

113. Citi Newsroom 2024. ↩

114. British Museum, Af,Ash.51, acquisition notes. ↩

115. Citi Newsroom 2024. ↩

Ubani, P. (2026, October 18). Britain and Asante at War, 1824-1900. Provenance Africa. https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/anglo-asante-wars/

Ubani, Princewill. "Britain and Asante at War, 1824-1900." Provenance Africa, 18 Oct. 2026, https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/anglo-asante-wars/.

Ubani, Princewill. "Britain and Asante at War, 1824-1900." Provenance Africa. October 18, 2026. https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/anglo-asante-wars/.

Ubani, P. (2026) 'Britain and Asante at War, 1824-1900', Provenance Africa. Available at: https://provenanceafrica.com/history/articles/anglo-asante-wars/ (Accessed: 27 October 2026).

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