The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa's Gold Coast.

The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa's Gold Coast, by Robert B. Edgerton (Free Press, 293 pp., $23)

ASANTE, more usually Ashanti, is little more than a footnote in British imperial history, remembered by a few as the country where Sir Garnet Wolseley made his reputation, and as the name of a curious green candy once popular with Scottish children, the "Ashanti plum." Fewer still could identify it with modern Ghana.

It has been Asante's fate to be misunderstood, chiefly by the British who incorporated it in their Empire after a sporadic struggle which lasted for most of the nineteenth century. One cannot really blame their lack of comprehension: an African state that practices human sacrifice but has indoor toilets flushed with boiling water; that has a highly developed bureaucracy but punishes gossiping wives with mutilation; that can muster an army two hundred thousand strong, splendidly drilled beyond anything else in Africa but equipped with no proper close-combat weapons; that goes in for head-hunting and occasional cannibalism but whose nobility are so festooned with gold they have to be supported and whose king wears a European suit and knows what the English newspapers are saying about him -- such a country might well baffle politically correct modern liberals, let alone Victorian imperialists.

Faced with this huge, dangerous, and unpredictable black empire looming over their trading foothold on the West African coast, an un-Christian slave state which was "an intolerable nuisance" and might even come under the influence of the French, the British did the inevitable: they took Asante over. How they did it, against enormous odds, and how the Asante resisted with a courage that aroused the invaders' admiration, is the theme of Professor Edgerton's book. It is a gripping story, heroic and pathetic, tragedy shot through with occasional comedy, but above all a story of two peoples that consistently underestimated each other.

The Asante were themselves imperialists who had subdued their neighbors in a series of bloody campaigns until they ruled an area the size of Wyoming, containing three million people, many of whom they had enslaved. Slave-trading was well established in black Africa before the Europeans arrived, and the Asante were large- scale purveyors until Britain outlawed the trade early in the last century; they continued to exploit a large domestic slave population, most remarkably in their highly disciplined army.

What brought them into all-out war with Britain is a complex story. To simplify: at the end of the eighteenth century, mainly peaceful relations existed between the Asante inland empire and the European traders on the coast, among whom the British were dominant. Unfortunately, between Asante and the coast lived the Fante tribes, by all accounts an obnoxious people, who detested their Asante overlords, hampered their trade with the coast, and, being under British protection, were a constant source of friction. British - Asante clashes took place, in which the Africans more than held their own; in one of these the British governor literally lost his head, which the Asante carried off and used as a drinking cup, a compliment which the British failed to appreciate.

Thanks to the tact and intelligence of a later proconsul, George Maclean, who genuinely liked Africans, and to moderation on the Asante side, comparative tranquillity marked the middle years of the century, with only occasional hostilities. Then, in 1869, the Dutch followed the Danes in leaving the coast, and sold to Britain a city that the Asante claimed as their own. In 1872 an Asante army of eighty thousand marched south to enforce the claim; they were unsuccessful, but the British decided that the time had come to deal with the Asante in earnest, and Garnet Wolseley, the original of W. S. Gilbert's "model of a modern major-general," was given the job.

He set about it with characteristic energy, undeterred by the 150 miles of appalling jungle, hills, and fever-ridden swamp between the coast and Kumase, the Asante capital, or by his enemy's overwhelming numbers; he had only contempt for the African, as soldier or anything else. The Asante, for their part, thought little of the British or their superior weaponry; they believed that "the bush is stronger than the cannon." Both were wrong.

Wolseley's principal concern was disease, for which the "white man's grave" was notorious. He took elaborate precautions for the health and feeding of his troops, dosing them with quinine and laying down strict rules of hygiene; still, nearly three-quarters of his command suffered some debilitating illness, usually malaria, which was thought to be an airborne infection. Wisely he equipped his British regiments with drab homespun instead of their traditional red coats -- much to the disgust of the Black Watch, who had to leave their kilts (but not their pipers) behind.

All told, Wolseley had about 2,500 fighting troops, more than half British regulars, a hand-picked staff and commanders, rockets, seven-pounder guns, and a retinue of war correspondents, among them H. M. Stanley, already famous for finding Livingstone, and the novelist G. A. Henty. After weeks of jungle-bashing they met and routed a vastly superior Asante army. Wolseley's men advanced in the traditional British square against an enemy invisible in the surrounding jungle; the Asante fought with great bravery, but their ancient muskets were effective only at close range, their marksmanship was dreadful, and they finally broke before the bayonets of the Black Watch.

Wolseley strolled through the battle, smoking, and noting with approval the coolness and accuracy with which Stanley ("a thoroughly good man") picked off the enemy. The battle lasted 12 hours; about three thousand Asante were killed for a British loss of only four dead and two hundred wounded. Three days later, having fought through ambushes and roadblocks, the Black Watch entered Kumase, three hundred Highlanders surrounded by thousands of armed Asante troops who offered no resistance, and crowds of townspeople who greeted them with cries of "Thank you," the only English words they knew -- which, if it suggests a remarkable amiability on the part of the Asante, also speaks volumes for the civility of earlier British visitors. Next day the town was deserted; the Asante army had melted into the countryside.

That war ended with a treaty, a thumping fine (which was never paid), the blowing up of the king's stone palace, and the burning of Kumase town with its "place of vultures," where countless thousands of victims of ritual execution had been left to rot. It had indeed been, in Wolseley's words, a "most horrible war."

Twenty years later, after a period of civil strife and revolt within the Asante Empire, another British expedition reached Kumase, this time without fighting. The king was exiled, a British resident installed and protectorate established, and a strong fort built and garrisoned by Nigerian Hausas. But that was not the end of the Asante, who did not take kindly to British rule, and particularly to British attempts to find the Golden Stool, the symbol of Asante nationhood, which had been carefully hidden.

That search led to war, but not before one of those ludicrously British incidents reminiscent of a "Carry On" film. Two young British officers, searching for the stool, found themselves menaced by fifty armed Asante, and decided to show the stiff upper lip by having their servants give them afternoon tea on a portable table. The Asante watched spellbound as cups, saucers, milk, and a teapot were set out, and the officers calmly sat down on folding chairs. The Asante then opened fire, blowing the table and crockery to pieces; the Britons withdrew, slightly wounded.

There was nothing comic about the war that followed, with Kumase fort besieged; the garrison, reduced to eating rats and lizards, breaking out to safety but having to leave their wounded in the fort; and relief columns fighting their way in past jungle barricades which the Asante defended with fanatical courage. The revolt was put down and Asante was annexed to the British dominions; its conquering people had been conquered in turn, and neither victors nor vanquished could guess that within two generations of the Asante Empire's fall, the British Empire too would have passed into history.

Professor Edgerton tells his story clearly and fairly. He has none of the bias of those revisionists who view every white imperialist as a villain and every aborigine as a saint. As befits a distinguished anthropologist, he is a fine reporter on the social, political, and domestic customs of a remarkable people sophisticated beyond their place and time, and respected in British military memory with the Zulu and the Dervish. Stanley wrote that given two thousand Asante, Britain could have spread her power from the coast to Timbuktu; coming from him, there could be no higher compliment.