Kingdoms, Rulers & ResistanceAsanteFantedocumented history
The Hundred Years of the Anglo-Asante Wars
Between roughly 1806 and 1900 the Asante and the British fought a series of wars, and the middle of the nineteenth century in this part of West Africa cannot be understood without them.
Fort Kumasi (Kumasi Fort and Military Museum); the coastal forts at Cape Coast, Elmina and Anomabo.
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The Hundred Years of the Anglo-Asante Wars
Between roughly 1806 and 1900 the Asante and the British fought a series of wars, and the middle of the nineteenth century in this part of West Africa cannot be understood without them.
The set pieces Ghanaians remember: Sir Charles MacCarthy's column destroyed at Nsamankow in 1824, and the governor's death — his skull, the tradition holds, kept afterwards as a war trophy at Kumasi. The reversal at Katamanso in 1826, where a British-led allied force broke the Asante with rocket artillery they had not faced before. Sir Garnet Wolseley's expedition of 1873–74, which reached Kumasi, took what it wanted from the palace and burned the city. The 1896 expedition that took Prempeh I without a battle at all. And then 1900.
That struggle did not end with one battle. It shaped the roads, alliances and memories of the country that later became Ghana.
If you visit Ghana. Fort Kumasi (Kumasi Fort and Military Museum); the coastal forts at Cape Coast, Elmina and Anomabo.
Between roughly 1806 and 1900 the Asante and the British fought a series of wars, and the middle of the nineteenth century in this part of West Africa cannot be understood without them.
The set pieces Ghanaians remember: Sir Charles MacCarthy's column destroyed at Nsamankow in 1824, and the governor's death — his skull, the tradition holds, kept afterwards as a war trophy at Kumasi. The reversal at Katamanso in 1826, where a British-led allied force broke the Asante with rocket artillery they had not faced before. Sir Garnet Wolseley's expedition of 1873–74, which reached Kumasi, took what it wanted from the palace and burned the city. The 1896 expedition that took Prempeh I without a battle at all. And then 1900.
That struggle did not end with one battle. It shaped the roads, alliances and memories of the country that later became Ghana.