Why the Netherlands Sent an Embassy Inland
European powers on the Gold Coast rarely travelled to Kumasi. The journey inland was long, the forest road was controlled by Asante, and a mission could be detained indefinitely if it gave offence. That the Dutch government sent a senior officer to the Asante capital in the 1830s is itself a measure of how badly it wanted something.
What it wanted was soldiers. The colonial army in the East Indies had been drained by the Java War of 1825–1830, European recruits died of fever faster than they could be replaced, and The Hague was unwilling to rely too heavily on Javanese troops. An experimental shipment of West African men from Elmina in 1831 had gone well enough to justify putting the practice on a permanent footing — which meant reaching agreement with the power that controlled the interior.
Verveer's Mission
Major-General Jan Verveer was appointed to lead the embassy and travelled to Kumasi, where he was received by Asantehene Kwaku Dua I, who had come to the Golden Stool in 1834. Negotiations concluded with a treaty in 1837.
Verveer's account of Kumasi is one of the more substantial European descriptions of the Asante capital in this period — a large, orderly city with wide streets and an elaborate court, quite unlike the picture of West Africa that circulated in Europe. The reception he was given was itself part of the negotiation: Asante diplomacy used ceremony deliberately, to establish the standing of the parties before terms were discussed.
What Was Agreed
The core of the treaty was a supply arrangement. Asante would provide men for Dutch service; the Netherlands would pay for them and would maintain a recruiting depot at Elmina from which they would be shipped. Around this ran the usual framework of a nineteenth-century treaty of friendship and commerce: peaceful relations, protection of trade along the road from Kumasi to the coast, and the continuation of the existing understanding regarding Elmina.
Two young men of the Asante royal house travelled to the Netherlands in connection with the agreement, to be educated there. Their position was ambiguous — part guarantee of good faith, part a genuine offer of European schooling of the kind that Asante rulers periodically sought. Their later lives diverged sharply: one built a professional career in Dutch service and spent much of his life in the East Indies, while the other returned to the coast and died there, never having been restored to a position at home. Their story is among the most poignant in the whole Dutch-Asante record, and it is treated separately elsewhere on this site.
How Each Side Read the Bargain
For the Netherlands the treaty solved a manpower problem cheaply and gave a commercial justification for keeping the Gold Coast establishment after abolition had removed the old one.
For Kumasi the calculation was political. Asante's persistent strategic aim was secure access to the coast and to European goods, above all firearms, without submitting to British authority. A treaty relationship with a European power that held Elmina, wanted something Asante could supply and was manifestly weaker than Britain was worth having. The men themselves — mostly captives and unfree persons, the standard currency of such transactions in the region — cost the Asante state little.
The Difficult Question
Whether the treaty amounted to a slave-trading agreement in disguise has been argued over ever since. The Dutch had prohibited the slave trade in 1814; the recruits were legally free men enlisting for pay. Yet money changed hands for their delivery, and many had no realistic capacity to refuse. Historians have not reached consensus, and the honest position is that the arrangement sat deliberately in the gap between the letter of Dutch law and the reality of how men were obtained on the Gold Coast.
Legacy
The 1837 treaty governed Dutch–Asante relations for the rest of the Dutch presence. It sustained the recruitment that produced the Belanda Hitam and their descendants in Java and in Elmina; it kept a Dutch resident interest in Kumasi's goodwill; and it gave Asante a European counterweight on the coast that lasted until the transfer of Elmina to Britain in 1872 removed it — with consequences that followed almost immediately.
