War of the Golden Stool
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| War of the Golden Stool | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Combatants | |||||||
 Great Britain |
 Ashanti Kingdom |
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| Commanders | |||||||
| Frederick Mitchell Hodgson Major James Willcocks |
Yaa Asantewaa | ||||||
| Casualties | |||||||
| 1,007 casualties | Unknown, several thousands | ||||||
The War of the Golden Stool, also known as the Third Ashanti Expedition, the Ashanti Uprising or variations thereof, was the final war in a series of conflicts between the British Imperial government of the Gold Coast (later Ghana) and the Ashanti Kingdom, a powerful semi-autonomous African state which fractiously co-existed with the British and their vassal coastal tribes. The war began in 1900 due to a poorly-advised attempt by the then governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson to assert his authority over the Ashanti, whose capital Kumasi had been annexed by the British in 1895, and subsequently grew to become a significant West African colonial conflict which saw the Ashanti powerbase destroyed and several thousand soldiers on both sides killed.
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[edit] Pre-war situation
Relations between British colonial authorities and the Ashanti had been steadily deteriorating since the demise of the slave trade over a hundred years before. Both the Ashanti and the British had profited from it and its loss provoked resentment amongst both sides when eventually culminated in skirmishes in 1814 and the first war in 1824, when an outnumbered British force was led into the forests and wiped out. During the next 75 years, relations continually deteriorated, culminating in a full-scale war in 1874 in which Kumasi was burnt to the ground and the Ashanti defeated in the field. In 1895, following raids by Ashanti slavers and cattle thieves on groups under British protection coupled with nearby French and German colonial expansion into West Africa, an expedition advanced on Kumasi and arrested the Ashanti king, Prempeh I and thirty senior advisors who were exiled to the Seychelles. Following this Kumasi was added to the British territory of the Gold Coast and a British administration office set up in the city.
Five years later, very little had actually changed in Kumasi, the Ashanti still ruling themselves with little reference to their supposed overlords. Much like the thrones of European monarchs, Ashanti rulers were venerated by the wooden stools on which they sat when they heard plaintiffs and at the heart of the entire Ashanti religious and feudal power structure was the Golden Stool, a gold-plated stool of the Ashanti gods, which was according to legend given to the first Ashanti king three hundred years before. This stool was not just a symbol of the power of the person who possessed it, it was the direct embodiment of the Ashanti gods and sacred ancestors, and as such had never been sat upon. The British authorities in Accra knew well how powerful possession of the stool might be in the control of the Ashanti and Sir Frederick Hodgson decided to take it for himself in the name of Queen Victoria in order to demonstrate his strength and ability to other West African nations who might oppose him.
[edit] The "Golden Stool" speech
Thus Hodgson advanced towards Kumasi with a small force of British soldiers and local levies, arriving on the 25 March 1900. Hodgson, as representative of a powerful nation himself, was accorded traditional honours upon entering the city and after ascending a platform, he made a speech to the assembled Ashanti leaders. The speech, or the closest surviving account which comes through an African translator, reportedly read:
Your King Prempeh I is in exile and will not return to Ashanti. His power and authority will be taken over by the Representative of the Queen of Britain. The terms of the 1874 Peace Treaty of Formena which required you to pay the costs of the 1874 war have not been forgotten. You have to pay with interest the sum of £160,000 a year. Then there is the matter of the Golden Stool of Ashanti. The Queen is entitled to the stool; she must receive it.
Where is the Golden Stool? I am the representative of the Paramount Power. Why have you relegated me to this ordinary chair? Why did you not take to opportunity of my coming to Kumasi to bring the Golden Stool for me to sit upon? However you may be quite sure that though the Government has not received the Golden Stool at his hands it will rule over you with the same impartiality and fairness as if you had produced it.
Not knowing the reverence felt for the stool, Hodgson clearly had no inkling of the storm his words would produce: The suggestion that he should seat himself upon their sacred stool was far too much for the listening crowd and as other Ashanti rulers read from prepared speeches, the queen mother of the Ejisu dominion within the Ashanti kingdom, Yaa Asantewaa, was collecting men to form a force with which to attack the British and retrieve their exiled king. The enraged populace produced a large number of volunteers and as Hodgson's deputy Captain Cecil Armitage searched for the stool in nearby brush his force was surrounded and ambushed, only a sudden rainstorm allowing the survivors to retreat to the British offices in Kumasi. The offices were then fortified into a small stockade which housed 18 Europeans, dozens of mixed race colonial administrators and 500 Nigerian Hausas who possessed six small field guns and four Maxim Guns. The Ashanti, aware that they were unprepared for a storm of the fort settled into a long siege, only making one assault on the position on the 29 April which was a bloody failure. The remaining time they sniped at the defenders, cut the telegraph wire, blockaded food supplies and attacked relief columns, one arriving in May which turned out to consist of 250 sick men and no extra food.
As supplies ran low and disease took its toll on the defenders, another rescue party of 700 arrived in June. Recognising that it was necessary to escape from the trap and to preserve the remaining food for the wounded and sick, some of the more healthy men were evacuated along with Hodgson, his wife and over a hundred of the Hausas. 15,000 Ashanti warriors were summoned to attack the escapees, who gained a lead on the long road back to the Crown Colony and avoided the main body of the enemy. Days later the survivors, having lost at least 40 of their number on the road arrived in the colony proper and took ship for Accra, receiving all available medical attention.
[edit] The rescue column
As Hodgson arrived at the coast, a rescue force of 1,000 men corralled from British units and police forces stationed across West Africa under the veteran Major James Willcocks had set out from Accra. On the march Willcocks' men had been repulsed from several well-defended forts belonging to groups allied with the Ashanti, most notably the stockade at Kokofu where he had suffered heavy casualties. During the march he was faced with constant trials of skirmishing with an enemy in his own element and maintaining his supply route in the face of effective guerilla opposition. In early July, his force arrived at Beckwai and prepared for the final assault on Kumasi, which began on the morning of the 14 July 1900. Using a force lead by Yoroba warriors from Nigeria serving in the Frontier Force, Willcocks drove in four heavily guarded stockades, finally relieving the fort on the evening of the fifteenth, when the inhabitants were just two days from surrender.
In September, after spending the summer recuperating and tending to the sick and wounded in captured Kumasi, Willcocks sent out flying columns to the neighbouring regions which had supported the uprising. His troops defeated an Ashanti force in a skirmish at Obassa on the 30 September and also succeeded in destroying the fort and town at Kokofu where he had been defeated before, using Nigerian levies to hunt Ashanti fugitives into the forests once the defenders fled after a stiff engagement. Following the storm of the town, Captain Charles John Melliss was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in the attack, the only such award of the campaign although a number of other officers received the Distinguished Service Order.
[edit] Aftermath
Following this mopping up campaign, the Ashanti were defeated and the war over. The following year thirty tribal chieftains including the Ashanti leader Yaa Asantewaa were arrested and deported to the Seychelles, not being allowed to return for twenty five years by which time many, including Asantewaa, had died. The Ashanti Kingdom was subsumed into the colony of the Gold Coast and given a British administration and a garrison of British levies in Kumasi, who demonstrated their colonial rule by ceremonially firing a cannon once a day until 1935. The fort remains as the city's military museum and contains many relics of the Anglo-Ashanti Wars. The city also retains a war memorial and several large colonial residences although it, with the rest of the Gold Coast, became part of Ghana in 1957.
The British never did find the Golden Stool; it was hidden deep in the forests for the duration of the war although efforts made to recover it lasted until 1920, when the colonial authorities were persuaded to give up the search. Unfortunately, shortly after this it was accidentally uncovered by some African labourers who stole the golden ornaments which adorned the stool, rendering it powerless in the eyes of the Ashanti people. The labourers were sentenced to death by an Ashanti court, but were eventually exiled by a British one instead. The war cost the British and their allies 1,007 fatal casualties, most from malaria and other tropical diseases rather than the result of battle. Ashanti casualties have never been calculated but must have been in the several thousands.
[edit] Bibliography
- Hernon, Ian Britain's Forgotten Wars (ISBN 0-7509-3162-0, 2002)
