A Reign Defined by What Did Not Happen
Kwaku Dua I was enstooled as Asantehene in 1834 and ruled until his death in 1867. His reign of more than three decades is the longest of the nineteenth century, and it is remembered above all for an absence: for most of it, Asante did not go to war with the coast. In a century otherwise punctuated by invasions, defeats and punitive expeditions, that is a substantial achievement, and it was a deliberate policy rather than an accident.
He came to the stool with the recent past clearly in view. The war of the 1820s had produced a famous victory at Nsamankow in 1824 and a serious defeat at Katamanso in 1826, and had ended in the treaty of 1831, under which Asante gave up claims over southern states and left gold and royal hostages at Cape Coast. The lesson Kwaku Dua drew from that sequence was that the southern campaigns cost more than they returned.
Commerce Before Conquest
His alternative was trade. Asante sat between the northern savanna markets and the Atlantic coast, and its wealth depended on keeping the great roads open in both directions: kola and captives northwards, gold and later palm oil and rubber southwards, European goods inland. War closed roads. Peace, even a humiliating peace, kept them open.
Kwaku Dua accordingly conducted a foreign policy of caution. He avoided provoking the British establishments, referred disputes to negotiation where he could, and resisted pressure from the war party at court — which existed, and which regarded his restraint as weakness. Managing that internal pressure was as much a part of his statecraft as anything he did abroad.
The Dutch Embassy of 1837
The most consequential foreign business of the reign came early. In 1836–37 the Dutch major-general Jan Verveer travelled to Kumasi at the head of a formal mission, seeking Asante agreement to supply recruits for the Netherlands East Indies Army. Kwaku Dua received him, and an agreement was concluded in 1837.
For Kumasi the attractions were straightforward: a valued diplomatic relationship with a European power that was not Britain, payments and goods including firearms, and a secure outlet at Elmina. Two young royals, Kwasi Boakye and Kwame Poku, travelled to the Netherlands in connection with the mission, to be educated there — an arrangement that turned out very differently for each of them.
The agreement is also the most uncomfortable episode of the reign. The men who went to Elmina and then to Java were described in Dutch paperwork as recruits and volunteers, but many were unfree people supplied by the Asante state, formally manumitted at the point of enlistment in order to satisfy Dutch law after the abolition of the slave trade. Historians differ over how far to treat the arrangement as disguised slave trading; what is not in dispute is that the legal form and the human reality were not the same thing.
Peace Under Strain
The long peace was not unbroken. Border incidents recurred, and in 1863 a dispute over fugitives who had fled Asante jurisdiction into British-protected territory led to Asante forces crossing the Pra. The British response was ineffective and the campaign petered out without a settlement, leaving the underlying question — who had authority over people and territory between Kumasi and the coast — exactly where it had been.
The episode showed the limits of Kwaku Dua's approach. Caution preserved trade but did not resolve the sovereignty dispute, and the unsettled question passed intact to his successors.
Death and Aftermath
Kwaku Dua I died in 1867 and was succeeded by Kofi Karikari, under whom the policy changed sharply. Within five years the Dutch had transferred Elmina to Britain, the treaty relationship that Kwaku Dua had cultivated for thirty years was gone, and Asante was at war with Britain again. The sack of Kumasi in 1874 followed.
Seen from 1874, the long peace looks like a postponement. Seen from within it, it was the period in which Asante's commercial system worked at its fullest extent, and in which the kingdom conducted diplomacy with two European powers on something close to its own terms. Both judgements have been made, and the argument between them is really an argument about whether the collision with British power was avoidable at all.
