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Anglo-Ashanti wars

• Message 1. 

  Posted by dunchi (U14824339) on Saturday, 26th March 2011

  Four different conflicts occurred between the Ashanti tribe and the British Empire during the 19th century, located in what is now Ghana. The skirmishes began in 1823, with the last one ending in 1901. Three minor misunderstandings took place a few decades before, but the scale of the subsequent conflicts caused them to be known as the Anglo-Ashanti wars.
  The first Anglo-Ashanti war from 1823 to 1831 was fought because of territory disputes, with the Ashanti desiring a rival tribe's strip of land up the coast. British forces advanced
  In 1821 the British Company of Merchants at Cape Coast handed its forts on the Gold Coast (Cape Coast, Anomabu, Accra, Beyin, Dixcove, Kommenda, Winneba, Sekondi, Prampram and Tantamkweri), like those in the Gambia, to the British Crown as represented by the Governor of Sierra Leone. The Governor there at this time was Sir Charles MacCarthy, who sailed to Cape Coast at once to survey his new responsibilities. MacCarthy's mandate was to impose peace and to end the slave trade. He concluded that British interests in the Gold Coast required the crushing of the powerful Ashanti (Asante) Empire.
  
  In 1824, after the Ashanti executed a Fante serving in a British garrison for insulting the asantehene (king of the Ashanti), the British responded with a military expedition into the Ashanti Empire. A 10,000 man Ashanti force massed near Bonsaso to face the British expeditionary force. At the battle of Nsamankow (January 22, 1824) the Ashanti not only outnumbered the British but also used superior tactics. MacCarthy was killed, and most of his force was wiped out.
  
  By a strange chance, that same day (January 21, 1824) the asantehene, Osei Bonsu, died in Kumasi, and was succeeded by Osei Yaw Akoto. The new king maintained Ashanti resistance to the British by demanding that the latter give up Kwadwo Otibu of Denkyera, their ally and an enemy of the Ashanti. At another battle at Efutu a joint Denkyera and British force was defeated. But the Ashanti had now reached the highest point of their success. When they tried to storm the strongly fortified British headquarters at Cape Coast, they failed.
  
  
  
  

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Sunday, 27th March 2011

  You'll probably get more feedback if you post this on the History Hub or War and Conflicts. There are a few on both boards who are knowledgeable on Africa.

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  Posted by Portly (U1381981) on Friday, 8th April 2011

  Around 1920 my grandfather and his family moved to the island of Mahé in the Seychelles. My father claimed that apart from some employees of a telegraph company, who kept themselves to themselves, they were the only white people on Mahé. My grandfather was an agent for Lever Brothers buying guano and copra.
  
  Notable residents of the island were King Prehpeh I of the Ashanti and his family and servants, who had been exiled to the Seychelles by the British following the Ashanti Wars. According to my father they always turned up to church on Sunday and occupied pews at the front.
  
  Looking the details up on Wikipedia, I see that after many years in exile, Prempeh I was permitted to return to the Gold Coast in 1924 and lived in Kumasi.
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 15th April 2011

  dunchi
  
  I agree with ID that this is a strange thing to place on the A&A Board..
  
  Are you familiar with earlier aspects of Ashanti History?.
  
  My African History started with the volume produced by Penguin as part of its Africa Series back in the Sixties- Oliver and Fage I think, and the version of history was still very Eurocentric assuming that during the "European period" Africans had no real history of their own, but were merely adjuncts and annexes of European History.
  
  What was apparent, however, was that the opening up of the Atlantic routes to West Africa changed the internal dynamics of sub-saharan powers, so long dominated by the control of access to the wider world across the Sahara that was exercised by for example ancient Mali and Ghana.
  
  The result of the Atlantic trade seems to have changed the position of the Ashanti who had traditionally acted as slave-providers for those Northern States as great warrior people able to exact slaves from the lands to the south either as direct tribute or as prisoners of war (much as the Aztecs and their allies had done in Central America)..
  
  With the breaking of the Saharan monopoly control of access to the wider world, the Ashanti were able to become more independent playing a more central role using their historical strength and the new openings to the South as well as the North. The Ashanti Empire became strong in the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
  
  But with the creation of the British Royal African Company with its monopoly rights to the trade agreements forged between the King of England and the rulers of the coastal States, the Ashanti hegemony could be challenged by States that now had direct access to European goods, many of them valuable trade goods that could be "peddled" along the tracks that snaked across the African interior. In this shift of power the coastal states could reject the levies, tributes and taxes traditionally imposed by the interior peoples like the Ashanti.
  
  In his 1998 History Atlas of Africa Samuel Kasule makes the point that in the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century the Muslim States of the Sub-Saharan West Africa launched several intafadas- Holy Wars- to reassert their supremacy over their southern neighbours.
  
  But the coastal rulers, with treaty ties to England, had every reason to refuse to supply those condemned to slavery by their courts to the age-old slave-trails north, and even more reason to change their position of military and political inferiority to tribes like the Ashanti. Now they too could set up in the slave trade on their own account.
  
  By the 1730's the British island of Jamaica had received enough Ashanti slaves for an Anglo-Ashanti War to take place on the island. The British were unable to defeat the Ashanti and return them to slavery, so they were allowed to live in the interior hills and became a very distinctive population the Maroons (?)
  
  This West African "liberation struggle" from perhaps thousands of years of slave trading northwards into the wealth of the Mediterranean world, was undermined by the British unilateral decision to stop the slave trade, not just for themselves but for everyone.
  
  The Anglo-Ashanti Wars that you describe seem to belong to the period when those ties that had brought a shift of power towards the actual coastal littoral had been cut, and British attitudes, encouraged by the hyperbole of William Wilberforce, who said that 'people said that' the Africans were lower than the apes and that even the Ouran-utang had passed them buy, were that Africa was really a savage and primitive place that would need decades of missionary work before it would be a place peopled by populations that we "could do business with".
  
  
  Thus West Africa was to some extent cut off once again from the developing global economy.
  
  Perhaps Colonel Ghadaffi is waiting for the Western friends of those who wish to throw off his yoke in a similar way.
  
  Cass
  
  
  

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