The Battle of Nsamankow: How the Asante Killed a British Governor

At the Battle of Nsamankow, fought on Jan. 21, 1824, an Asante army wiped out a British column and killed the governor of Britain’s West African settlements, a blow to imperial prestige that shaped British strategy on the Gold Coast for decades afterward.

The war grew out of a territorial dispute between the Asante kingdom and the Fante, a coastal people allied with Britain. When Sir Charles MacCarthy, the governor, rejected Asante claims in the disputed region, war followed. MacCarthy divided his forces into several columns meant to converge on the Asante army, but coordination between them broke down almost immediately. His own column, a few hundred regulars of the Royal African Colonial Corps and Cape Coast militia with irregular allies, pushed ahead alone through days of heavy rain and camped near a tributary of the Pra River. Carl Reindorf, the Gold Coast historian, put those irregulars at about 3,000.

Warned that a large Asante force was near, MacCarthy dismissed the danger. His brigade-major, Major Ricketts, recorded him saying the night before the battle that he “was determined to see how the Ashantees liked our balls.” At about 2 p.m. the next day an Asante army appeared that Ricketts was told numbered “considerably more than ten thousand men”; Reindorf later put it at nearly 20,000. In an odd overture, MacCarthy ordered his band to strike up “God Save the King,” and the Asante played back. The exchange settled nothing, and fighting broke out as Asante forces worked to cross the river.

The battle turned on a supply failure. Each man had 20 rounds, and by about 4 p.m. they were spent. The reserve ammunition never reached the line: its carriers refused to go on and most ran away, Ricketts wrote. With his allies fleeing and his men unable to return fire, MacCarthy was shot in the arm and then the chest, and was laid under a tree. Ensign Wetherell died beside him. MacCarthy’s secretary, J.T. Williams, was taken prisoner and, by his own account, was later locked up at night in a room with the preserved heads of MacCarthy, Wetherell and the engineer Buckle, kept by the Asante as trophies. Ricketts listed nine officers and officials killed and counted about 177 men killed, taken prisoner or lost in the woods.

Nsamankow did not end the war. Britain and Asante fought again several times over the next 76 years, until Asante was annexed in 1901. The kingdom’s full history is on our Asante page.