27 - The Kings Resist

Summary

PEOPLES IN CONTACT WITH EUROPEANS DURING THE NINETEENTH century were aware of their danger. If nothing else, the history of the firearms trade had taught it to them. ‘He who makes the powder’, observed a king of Dahomey, warning his commercial officers to be patient with testy European visitors, ‘wins the war.’ The general approach of most of these kingdoms was to show enough strength to contain European ambitions within what were regarded as reasonable or inevitable limits, and then to make treaties of trade and friendship which, it was hoped, the Europeans would keep. Useful variations on this policy were found in playing off one set of Europeans against another. The kings fought only when all else failed.

Asante policy under Osei Bonsu (reg. 1801-24) displays primary resistance in many of its facets, both backward-glancing and forwardlooking. The first British governor of the Gold Coast trading castles along the Asante coastline, Sir Charles Macarthy, thought Osei Bonsu a barbarian, and had little opportunity to learn better, for he lost his head in a disastrous battle with the Asante army in 1824. In monarchal terms, as it happened, Osei Bonsu was an unusually progressive ruler. He took over an empire, somewhat larger than modern Ghana, that was already beginning to outgrow its means of exercising central authority; and he tried to solve this problem by administrative reforms. In this he followed a notable predecessor, Osei Kwadwo (reg. 1764-? 77), who had reinforced the central power by appointment of 'king's men’ over against office-holders promoted by right of birth.

Osei Bonsu again strengthened royal control by creating three new stools of the Ankobia Stool, or, translating, three new departments of the imperial Ministry of Home Affairs. He improved the functioning of the Gyaasewa Stool, or Ministry of Economic Affairs, by extending its activities and introducing the use of written records by Muslim clerks imported from the north. He professionalised the diplomatic service by making it fully appointive, and ‘completed the conversion of the Cabinet or Privy Council from a fixed body of hereditary members to an ad hoc Council to which members were invited according to the nature of the business to be transacted’.