The Fall of the Asante Empire (41 page)

What may be most important of all is the role that women played in encouraging bravery.
Any able-bodied Asante, free or slave, who failed to answer his chief’s call to war was subjected to the most vicious verbal and physical assaults by the women of the village.
The life of such a man would scarcely be worth living, and if he had a wife or wives, these women would freely join in the public humiliation heaped upon him.
On the other hand, men who staunchly went off to war had their virtue extolled by their women, many of whom marched at least part of the way into battle with them, singing praise songs, carrying their gear, and cooking their food.
A common soldier might not gain by going to war, indeed he might be maimed or killed, but Asante women saw to it that he could not gain by avoiding his duty Why women took so active a role in promoting bravery in military service is not well documented, but far more so than in most African societies, women and men among the Asante had relative equality and a similar stake in all affairs of the state.
As a result of their adherence to a cultural system of reckoning both descent and inheritance through the female line, women played a central role in Asante affairs, including, through the office of the queen mother, the decision to go to war.
It is obvious that a woman could stand to gain if her husband, son, brother, or close kinsman achieved wealth, honor, or power, but well beyond this profit motive Asante women were taught to believe in the greatness in the Asante union and the need for war to maintain and enlarge it.
Doubtless, much suffering came to these women when their men died in battle or their homes and fields were destroyed by invading armies, but the willingness of Asante women to support warfare was as consistent over the century as it was essential to the success of Asante armies.

Defeated Asante armies, such as those at Dodowa in 1826 and Abrakrampa in 1873, were capable of conducting such skillful fighting retreats that they earned the admiration of British officers; yet Asante soldiers, particularly in 1900 and to a lesser extent in 1874, sometimes broke ranks and ran, although usually only after they were charged by sword-waving British officers leading soldiers with fixed bayonets.
It must be understood, however, that
few troops anywhere were known to stand resolutely against bayonets during the nineteenth century.
European armies often charged their enemies with bayonets, but with the major exception of the Russians and Japanese, who often fought to the death with bayonets in Manchuria during their 1904/05 war, it was uncommon indeed for these weapons actually to be used—the defenders usually fled long before the attackers’ bayonets could be brought into play.
In fact, a British surgeon who served in the Peninsular War between the British and the French, both great proponents of bayonet charges, concluded that no regiment on either side ever stood against bayonets in that long and bloody war.
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The Asante were in very good company when they fled from a long line of bayonet-wielding enemies.
It should also be recalled that sometimes they did stand and fight against bayonets even though their weapons put them at a deadly disadvantage.

It is also true that once Asante soldiers began to turn tail and run, they seldom re-formed to fight a rearguard action.
Precipitous retreat was known to all armies, although it was extremely rare for British troops, who usually fought from a square formation, to run.
But compared to the Zulus, for example, no doubt the most celebrated warriors in Africa, the Asante ran under some semblance of control.
When the Zulus ran away, there was no stopping them, as they freely and good-naturedly admitted.
Asante soldiers could be brought under control by their officers and turned about to fight again.
And sometimes, as we have seen, they fought hand to hand before they were willing to retreat.

In view of the Asante fear of bayonets, it is puzzling that they made no apparent attempts to provide themselves with weapons to defend against them.
As mentioned earlier, their Dane guns took so long to reload that unless the troops were lined up in at least three lines to fire in sequence, they were defenseless against bayonets.
And during the nineteenth century wars against the British, the only times they were thus deployed, the battles were fought in the jungle, and there was no bayonet charge.
Their six-foot-long muskets were too long and heavy to be used effectively as clubs; apparently, such a use was rarely even attempted, though the British sometimes used their lighter rifles and carbines in this way.
Nevertheless, the Asante did not attempt to make or purchase bayonets
of their own.
It would not have been difficult for Asante blacksmiths to manufacture bayonets, and a bayonet on the end of a six-foot-long Asante musket would have been more than a match for one on the end of a four-foot-long British rifle.
Perhaps the problem was that a bayonet would have to be permanently fixed to the barrel, making the musket more difficult to load and use in the thick brush.

Whatever the reason for their failure to use bayonets, it is also odd that the Asante did not use swords to defend against them.
An Asante sword was an inferior weapon against a bayonet—or a steel saber for that matter—but it was better than no weapon at all.
When in 1900, the Asante fought the British hand to hand, they used neither swords nor (except rarely) even the knives they carried to behead their victims.
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At the beginning of the century, the Asante threw spears with great accuracy, but they soon after abandoned them, leaving the musket as their only weapon.

Much was made by the British of Asante reluctance to fight at night.
It is true that many African armies would not fight at night because of fear of the evil spirits thought to attack men in the darkness; the Asante to some extent shared this dread.
Other armies, such as the Zulu, chose not to fight at night because military honors could only be won if a man’s heroism were witnessed by others; the Asante shared this view as well.
But the reality is that the Asante army did sometimes—though seldom—fight at night.
When the army approached Dodowa in 1826, its commander urged a night attack led by torch-carrying scouts.
King Osei Yaw chose, in general, to attack in daylight so that the pageantry and invincibility of his army could be seen by his enemies.
Earlier at Cape Coast, however, Osei Yaw had planned to attack the fort at night, shielded by the diversionary tactic of burning the houses of the surrounding town.
Asante troops fought several battles at night during civil wars that followed the Wolseley invasion, and after Captain Hall had been driven back from Kokofu to Esumeja in 1900, the Asante continued their futile but furious attack throughout the night.
Other night fighting was aborted because torrents of rain during these battles fell more heavily at night than during the day, making it impossible for the Asante to prime their flintlocks.

Night fighting has become an issue because the reluctance of the
Asante to attack at night deprived them of a possible tactical advantage.
The Asante often drummed and sang for much of the night, keeping the British awake; but if they had used the night to attack British camps—particularly when Wolseley was marching on Kumase—they could have slowed their advance significantly.
As it was, Wolseley only beat the rains by a day or two.
Without the threat of night attack, the British did nothing to fortify their camps and seldom took the precaution of posting sentries.
What is more, night attacks against the unprotected carriers could have created panic and conceivably disrupted Wolseley’s campaign altogether.

Another reason why Asante bravery and discipline did not produce more victories was the relative inflexibility of their tactics.
For at least one hundred years before the Asante army ever collided with the British, they had enjoyed success against their enemies by using their classic enveloping formation, which sent large numbers of men around each flank of the enemy to, if all went well, surround and destroy them.
Used against African opponents, most of whom conceded defeat if threatened by envelopment, their traditional tactics were usually successful.
When an African opponent’s flanks were threatened, they withdrew, and when their rear was attacked, they broke and scattered.
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The Asante themselves always marched into battle supported by a large rear guard that faced to the rear to beat off any attack that might come from that direction.
This tactic succeeded against MacCarthy but failed against Wolseley, who simply charged straight ahead in his large square formation, confident that his strong rear guard could hold off the expected Asante attack.

Had Asamoa Nkwanta, the Asante commander in 1874, agreed to mass his troops in front of the British, as had been proposed, instead of dispersing most of them around the flanks of Wolseley’s formation, he would have had a far better chance of stopping the British advance, which as it was, broke through only after hours of heavy fighting against a thin screen of Asante soldiers.
The British tactic of advancing despite threats to their flanks and rear surprised the Asante.
Asante tactics rarely surprised the British, but occasionally there were signs of innovation.
Osei Bonsu’s troops were preparing to blow up the fort at Cape Coast when a peace treaty was agreed upon, and later, scaling leaders were used in a failed attempt
to take the fort at Elmina.
The proposed night attack at the battle south of Dodowa would probably have succeeded had it been attempted, and some of the Asante ambush strategies were novel.

The most original innovation was the widespread use of stockades in 1900.
The idea of stockades was not original to the Asante, but their use of these defensive structures was an effective response to the British use of machine guns and powerful artillery.
In fact, the construction of so many large stockades surrounded by flanking fortifications and supported by well-built war camps was a considerable achievement for people who had to use rude axes to cut down huge trees before shaping them into logs.
Slaves were used for most of the heavy labor, but the design of the stockades, as well as the transport and supply system developed to support the troops sheltered behind them, was ingenious and quite effective until British flanking tactics and even heavier artillery eventually turned stockades into death traps.
In a final tactical innovation the Asante commander Kofi Kofia had his men fight on the defensive by lying down in the open in an inverted crescent to protect their flanks.
The Asante commanders were not as flexible as the British were in devising better ways to defeat their opponents, but they were far more creative about warfare than the Zulus, who in 1879 fought seven major battles against the British and used the same enveloping tactics in all seven.

A major tactical failure on the part of the Asante was their inability to disrupt British supply lines.
In all the British campaigns against the Asante, survival as a fighting force depended on the regular provision of supplies from the coast.
Thousands of men, women, and children carried food, ammunition, and medical supplies on their heads along narrow roads that were often little better than paths, and they were rarely guarded by more than a handful of armed men.
Small groups of Asante soldiers could easily have moved unseen through the dense forest to positions from which they could have fired devastating volleys at short range into these easy targets.
They did attack these supply columns on a few occasions and always with some success, but if they had done so more often and with greater force, carriers would have refused to work without large escorts of troops, and the British never had enough soldiers available to them to guard their long supply lines and still
conduct offensive operations.
Such a tactic could have slowed British operations to a standstill, and the need for larger numbers of troops to defend miles of jungle paths might have made operations against the Asante more costly than the British government would have thought tolerable.
The British were well aware that their campaigns were terribly vulnerable to disruption by such attacks, and they were as surprised as they were grateful that the Asante largely left their supply lines alone.
Guerrilla warfare also could have tipped the scales toward the Asante, but Asante armies had always fought in large formations and continued to do so throughout the century, despite the fact that their enemies had sometimes been quite effective in using guerrilla warfare tactics against them.
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That the British officers who led African troops against the Asante in 1900 showed considerable tactical initiative, just as Wolseley had done in 1874, should not be taken to mean that the British army always showed greater flexibility than the Asante did.
In South Africa in 1900, British battalions again and again marched shoulder to shoulder against Boer machine gun and artillery fire only to be slaughtered by an enemy they never even saw.
Almost one hundred years earlier, at the Battle of New Orleans, British battalions that marched slowly toward the American breastworks were shot down so easily and in such numbers that the American riflemen actually wept as they pulled their triggers.
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The appalling losses of World War I were due in no small measure to British tactical rigidity.