The siege of Kumasi—The Governor in 1900—The rebellion—The friendlies under the walls of the fort—The Ashanti warrior of ten years ago and the trader of to-day—The chances of the people in the fort—The retreat—The gallant men who conducted it—The men who were left behind—The rescue—Kumasi of to-day—The trade that comes to Kumasi as the trade of Britain came to London in the days of Augustus—The Chief Commissioner—The men needed to rule West Africa.
And when I had been to Obuasi nothing remained but to go up the line and see Kumasi and go as far beyond as the time at my disposal would allow.
I wonder if English-speaking people have forgotten yet the siege of Kumasi. For me, I shall never forget, and it stands out specially in my mind because I know some of the actors, and now I have seen the fort where the little tragedy took place; for, put it what way you will, it was a tragedy, for though the principals escaped, some with well-merited honour, the minor actors died, died like flies, and no man knoweth even their names.
It was dark when I reached Kumasi and got out on to the platform and was met by the kind cantonment magistrate, put into a hammock, and carried up to the fort, and was there received by the Chief Commissioner and his pretty bride, one of the two white women who make Kumasi their home, I had seen many forts, old forts along the Coast, but this fort was put up in 1896, and in 1900 its inmates were fighting for their lives. In it were shut up the Governor, his wife, two or three unfortunate Basel missionary women, a handful of troops, and all the other white people in the place. Standing on the verandah overlooking the town to-day, with a piano playing soft music and a dining-table within reach set out with damask and cut-glass and flowers and silver, it is hard to believe that those times are only ten years back. I have heard men talk of those days, and they are reticent; there are always things it seems they think they had better not tell, and I gather that the then Governor was not very much beloved, and that no one put much faith in him. The rebellion started somewhere to the north, and by the time it reached Kumasi it was too late to fly, for it was a good eight days' hard march to the Coast through dense forest. The nearest possible safety outside that fort lay beyond the River Prah, at least three or four days' march away. Every white man and many of the black who were not Ashantis had taken refuge in the fort, which was crowded to suffocation, and outside, in front of the fort, camped the friendlies, safe to a certain extent under the white man's guns, but dying slowly because the white man could not give what he had not got himself—food; and here they died, died of disease and hunger and wounds, and the reek of their dying poisoned the air so that the white man, starving behind his high walls of cement, was like to have his end accelerated by those who stood by him.
And out beyond, where the English town now stands, with broad streets planted with palms and mangoes and ficus, were the encampments of fierce Ashanti warriors, their cloths wound round their middles, their hair brushed fiercely back from their foreheads, their powder-flasks and bullet-bags slung across their shoulders, and their long Danes in their hands, the locks carefully covered with a shield of pigskin. The same man, very often the very same individual, walks about the streets of Kumasi to-day, and if he wears a tourist cap and a shirt, torn, ragged, and dirty, he is at least a peaceful citizen, and ten years hence he will probably, like the Creoles in Sierra Leone, be talking of “going home.” But it was ghastly in the fort then. It was small and it was crowded to suffocation. The nearest help was at Cape Coast, nigh on 200 miles away, and between lay the dense forest that no man lightly dared. The Ashanti too was the warrior of the Coast, and the difficulty was even to get carriers who would help to move a force against him. Shut up in the fort there they looked out and waited for help and waited for death that ever seemed coming closer and closer.
Kumasi is set in a hollow, and round it, pressing in on every side, was the great forest. Away to the south went the road to Cape Coast, but it was but a track kept open with the greatest difficulty, and hidden in the depths of the forest on either hand were these same warriors. Truly the chances of the people in the fort seemed small, small indeed. And day after day passed and there was no sign of help. Provisions were getting low, ammunition was running short, and from the Ashanti no mercy could be expected. It was war to the death. Any man or woman who fell into their hands could expect nothing but torture. I gather that his advisers would have had the Governor start for the Coast at once on the outbreak of hostilities, but he could not make up his mind, and lingered and lingered, hoping for the help that did not, that could not come. No one has ever had a word of praise for that Governor, though very gallantly the men under him came out of it. Starvation and death stared them all in the face; the gallant little garrison, heavily handicapped as it was, could certainly hold out but little longer, and the penalty of conquest was death—death, ghastly and horrible.
At last the Governor gave in and they started, a forlorn little company, for the River Prah, which had generally set a bound to Ashanti raids. The Governor's wife was carried in a hammock, but the Basel missionary women, who had escaped with only the clothes they stood up in, walked, for the hammock-boys were too weak to carry them, and they had to tramp through mud and swamp. The soldiers did their best to protect the forlorn company, the friendlies crowded after, a tumultuous, disorderly crew fleeing before their enemies, and those same enemies hung on their flanks, scrambled through the forest, ruthlessly cut off any stragglers, and poured volleys from their long Danes into the retreating company. Knowing the forest, I wonder that one man ever escaped alive to tell the tale; that the principal actors did, only shows that the Ashanti was not the practised warrior the Coast had always counted him. Had those Ashantis been the lean Pathan from the hills of northern India, not a solitary man would have lived to tell the tale, and the retreat from Kumasi would have taken its place with some of those pitiful stories of the Afghan Border. But one thing the Ashanti is not, he is not a good marksman. He blazes away with his long Dane, content to make a terrific row without making quite sure that every bullet has reached its billet. And so, thanks to the bad marksmanship of the Ashantis, that little company got through.
But let no man think I am in any way disparaging the men who fought here, who by their gallantry brought the Governor and his wife through. Major Armitage and his comrades were brave men of whom England may well be proud, men worthy to take their places beside Blake and Hawkins and all the gallant Britons whose names are inscribed on the roll of fame; they fought against desperate odds, they were cruelly hampered by the helpless people under their care, and they stuck beside them, though by so doing they risked not only death, but death by ghastly torture. Some of them died, some of them got through—they are with us still, young men, men in the prime of life—and when we tell our children tales of the way England won her colonies, we may well tell how that little company left the fort of Kumasi, every man who was wise with cyanide of potassium in his pocket, and fought his way down to the Prah.
But even though they went south they were not going to abandon Kumasi, which had been won at the cost of so much blood, and in that fort were left behind three white men and a company of native soldiers. All in good time the relief must come, and till then they must hold it.
A verandah hangs round the fort nowadays that the piping times of peace have come, but still upstairs in the rooms above are the platforms for the gun-carriages, and I climbed up on them and walked along the verandahs and wondered how those men must have felt who had looked out from the self-same place ten years ago. If no help came, if waiting were unduly prolonged, they would die, die like rats in a hole, and the men in their companies were dying daily. They were faithful, those dark soldiers of the Empire, but they were dying, dying of disease and hunger, and their officers could not help them, for were they not slowly dying themselves? Rumours there were of the relief force, but they were only rumours, and the spectres of disease and starvation grew daily. Could they hold out? Could they hold out? The tale has been told again and again, and will probably be told yet again in English story, and at last when they had well-nigh given up to despair they heard the sound of English guns, so different from the explosions of the long Danes, and presently there was the call of the bugles, and out into the open trotted a little fox terrier, the advance guard of the men who had come to save Kumasi.
And now the change. Kumasi has a train from the coast port of Sekondi every day, it has a population that exceeds that of the capital of the Gold Coast itself, every day the forest is receding and in the streets are growing up great buildings that mark only the beginning of a trade that is already making the wise wonder how it was when wealth lay on the ground for the picking up, England, who had it all within her grasp, was amiable enough to allow the greater portion of this wonderful land to fall to the lot of the French and Germans.
The forest used to close Kumasi in on every side. It is set in a hollow, and the tall trees and luxuriant green in the days that I have just spoken of threatened to overwhelm it. Now that sensation has passed away. Whatever Kumasi may be in the future, to-day it is a busy centre of life and trade. Where the fetish tree stood, the ground beneath its branches soaked with human blood and strewn with human bones, is now the centre of the town where the great buildings of the merchant princes of West Africa are rising. They are fine, but they are a blot on the landscape for all that. The nation that prides itself on being the colonising nation of the earth never makes any preparation for the expansion of its territory or the growth of its trade, so here in this conquered country, bought at the cost of so much sweat and blood, the authorities are allowing to go up, in the very heart of the town buildings, very handsome buildings without doubt, so close together that in a tropical land where fresh air is life itself they are preparing to take toll of the health of the unfortunates who will have to dwell and work there. But beyond that one grave mistake Kumasi promises to be a very pretty place as well as a very important one. Its wide, red roads, smooth and well-kept, are planted with trees, mangoes and palms; its bungalows are set well apart, surrounded by trees and shrubs and lawns, their red-brown roofs and verandahs toning picturesquely with the prevailing green.
0507
Curious it is when one thinks of its history to see the white painted sign-posts on which are recorded the names of the streets. There is “Kingsway” for one, and “Stewart-avenue,” after the man who deeply loved the country, for another, and there are at least two great roads that lead away to the fruitful country in the north, roads that push their way through the dense forest and must even compel the admiration of our friends the Germans, those champion road-makers. And down those roads comes all the wonderful trade of Kumasi, not as the trade of London, of course, but as the trade of London was, perhaps, when Augustus ruled at Rome. The trade of the world comes to London nowadays, the trade of the back-country came to London then, and so does the trade of all the country round come to the Ashanti capital. Its streets are thronged with all manner of peoples, dark, of course, for the ruling whites are but an inconsiderable handful, and only the Chief Commissioner and one missionary have been daring enough to bring their wives.
Ashanti is a conquered country, and it seems to me it has got just the right sort of Government, a Government most exactly suited to the requirements of the negro in his present state of advancement. What a negro community requires is a benevolent despotism, but as a rule the British Government, with its feeling for the rights of the individual, does not see its way to give it such a Government. But Ashanti was conquered at great cost, wherefore as yet England has still to think of the rights of the white men who dwell there as against the rights of the black man, and the result to me, an onlooker, appears to be most satisfactory for both white and black. Of course, such a Government requires to administrate not only excellent men, not only honest and trustworthy men, but men who have the interests of the country at heart, and who devote themselves to it, and such men she has got in the Chief Commissioner, Mr Fuller, and the subordinates chosen by him. Only an onlooker am I, a woman, a passer-by, but as a passer-by I could not but be struck by the difference between the feeling in the Gold Coast Colony and the feeling in Ashanti. The whole tone of thought was different. Everywhere on the Gold Coast men met me with the question, “What did I think of this poisonous country? Wasn't it a rotten place?” and they seemed bitterly disappointed if I did not confirm their worst blame.
0511
But in Ashanti it was different. The very clerks in the mercantile houses had some good word to say for the country, and were anxious that I should appreciate it and speak well of it, and this I can but set down to the example and guidance of such men as the Chief Commissioner and the men he chooses to serve under him. Had the rest of West Africa always had such broad-minded, clever, interested men at the head of affairs, I think we should have heard a great deal less about its unhealthiness and a great deal more about the productiveness of the country. Since I have seen German methods I am more than thankful that I have been to Ashanti and learned that my own country is quite equal to doing as well, if not beating them at their own methods. The Ashanti himself, the truculent warrior of ten years ago, has under the paternal and sympathetic Government of this Chief Commissioner become a man of peace. If he has not beaten his long Dane gun into a ploughshare he has at least taken very kindly to trade and is pleased, nay eager that the white man should dwell in his country. He stalks about Kumasi in his brightly coloured, toga-like cloth still, very sure that he is a man of great importance among the tribes, and his chiefs march through the streets in chairs on men's heads, with tom-toms beating, immense gaily coloured umbrellas twirling, their silken' cloths a brilliant spot in the brilliant sunshine, their rich gold ornaments marking them off from the common herd, and all their people who are not Christian still give them unquestioned devotion. But Kumasi, as I said, is the centre of a great trade, and the native town, which is alongside but quite apart from the European town, is packed with shops, shops that are really very much in the nature of stalls, for there are no fronts to them, and the goods are exposed to the street, where all manner of things that are attractive to the native are set out.
And here one gathers what is attractive to the native. First and foremost, perhaps, are the necessities of life, the things that the white man has made absolute necessaries. First among them, I think, would be kerosene and bread, so everywhere, in market-place and shop, or even just outside a house, you may see ordinary wine and whisky bottles full of kerosene, and rows and rows of loaves of bread. Then there comes men's clothing—hideous shirts and uglier trousers, tourist caps that are the last cry in hooliganism, and boots, buttoned and shiny, that would make an angel weep. Alas! and alas! The Ashanti in his native state, very sure of himself, has a certain dignity about him even as must have had the old Roman. You might not have liked the old Roman, probably you would not unless he chose to make himself pleasant, but you could not but recognise the fact that he was no nonentity, and so it is with the Ashanti till he puts on European garments. Then how are the mighty fallen! for like all negroes, in the garb of civilisation, he is commonplace when he is not grotesque. What they are to wear I cannot say, but the better-class among them seem to realise this, for I have often heard it said, not only in Ashanti but in other parts of the Coast: “The Chief may not wear European clothes.”
0515
And beside clothes in the native shops are hurricane lanterns, ordinary cheap kerosene lamps, and sewing machines which the men work far more often then the women, accordions, mouth harmoniums, and cotton goods in the strange and weird patterns that Manchester thinks most likely to attract the native eye. I have seen brooms and brushes and dustpans printed in brilliant purple on a blue ground, and I have seen the outspread fingers of a great hand in scarlet on a black ground. But mostly there is nothing of very great interest in these shops, just European goods of the commonest, cheapest description supplied apparently with the view of educating the native eye in all that is ugliest and most reprehensible in civilisation.
There are horses in Kumasi, for the forest and undergrowth have been cleared away sufficiently to destroy the tsetse fly, and so most evenings, when the heat of the day has passed, the Chief Commissioner and his wife go for a ride, and on occasions many of the soldiermen play polo and hold race-meetings, but as yet there is no wheeled traffic in the streets. Most of the goods are carried on men's heads, and the roadways are crowded. There are women with loads on their heads and generally children on their backs, walking as if the world belonged to them, though in truth they are little better than their husbands' slaves. There are soldiers all in khaki, with little green caps like condensed fezes, lor the place is a great military camp and the black soldier swaggers through the street; there are policemen in blue uniforms with red fezes, their feet bare like those of the soldiers, and their legs bound in dark-blue putties; and there are black men from all corners of West Africa. There are the Kroo boys, those labourers of the Coast, with the dark-blue freedom mark tattooed on their foreheads, never carrying anything on their heads, but pushing and pulling heavily laden carts, in gangs that vary from four to a dozen, and their clothing is the cast-off clothing of the white man; there are Hausas and Wangaras, than whom no man can carry heavier loads, and they wear not a flowing cloth like the Ashanti, but a long, shirt-like garment not unlike the smock of the country labourer. It is narrower and longer, but is usually decorated with the same elaborate needlework about the neck and shoulders; if their legs are not bare they wear Arab trousers, full above and tight about their feet, and the flapping of their heelless slippers makes a clack-clack as they walk. There are Yorubas, dressed much the same, only with little caps like a child's Dutch bonnet, and there are even men from the far north, with blue turbans and the lower part of their faces veiled. Far beyond the dense forest lies their home, away possibly in French territory, but the trade is coming to this new city of the Batouri, and they wander down with the cattle or horses. For all the cattle and horses come down through the forest, driven hastily and fast because of the deadly tsetse, and many must perish by the way. A herd of the humped, long-horned cattle come wearily through the streets. Whatever they may have been once, there is no spirit left in them now, for they have come down that long road from the north; they have fed sparely by the way, and they are destined for the feeding of the population that are swarming into Kumasi to work the mines in the south.
0519
Three towns are here in Kumasi: the European quarter, the Ashanti town, and the Mohammedan town or zonga. Here all the carrying trade that is not done by Government is arranged for—by a woman. Here the houses are small and unattractive, nondescript native huts built by people who are only sojourners in the land, come but to make money, ready to return to their own land in the north the moment it is made. And they sit by the roadside with little things to sell. Food-stuffs often, balls of kenki white as snow, yams and cassada, which is the root of which we make tapioca, cobs of Indian corn, and, of course, stink-fish that comes all the way from the Coast and is highly prized as a food, and does not appear to induce ptomaine poisoning in African stomachs. Some of these dainties are set out on brass trays made in Birmingham; others on wooden platters and on plates delicately woven in various patterns of grass dyed in many colours. But most things they have they are ready to sell, for the negro has great trading instincts, and that trading instinct it is that has made him so easy to hold once he is conquered.
Kumasi is peaceful enough now, and the only reminder of the bad days of ten years back is the fort just above the native town, but it looks down now across a smooth green lawn, on which are some great, shady trees, where chiefs assembled whom I photographed. One was a great fetish chief with gold ornaments upon his head and upon his feet, and knowledge of enough magic, had this been the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth, to drive the white man and all his following back to the sea from whence he came; but it is the twentieth, and he is wise enough to know it, and he flings all the weight of his authority into the scales with the British raj. But at the gate of the fort still stands a guard of black soldiers in all the glory of scarlet and yellow which stands for gold, for the Chief Commissioner lives here, and in a land where a chief is of such importance it is necessary to keep up a certain amount of state, and the Chief Commissioner ruling over this country and receiving obeisance from the chiefs, clad in their gorgeous silken cloths, laden with golden jewellery, men looked up to by their followers as half-divine, must feel something like a Roman proconsul of old carrying the eagles into savage lands, and yet allowing those savages as far as possible to govern themselves by their own laws. Africa has always been the unknown land, but now at last the light is being let into dark places, the French have regenerated Dahomey, and the railway comes to Kumasi. I sat on that verandah and thought of the old days that were only ten years back, and learned much from the Commissioner, and I felt that civilisation was coming by leaps and bounds to Ashanti, and if it be true, as old tradition has it, that a house to be firmly built must have a living man beneath its foundation stone, then must the future of Kumasi be assured, for its foundations were well and truly laid in rivers of human blood.
