Taking the Stool After a Catastrophe
Mensa Bonsu became Asantehene in 1874, in the worst circumstances any nineteenth-century ruler of Asante inherited. British forces under Garnet Wolseley had entered Kumasi in February of that year, burned the palace and much of the capital, and withdrawn. The Treaty of Fomena that followed imposed a large indemnity in gold, required Asante to renounce claims over southern states, and left the kingdom's prestige in ruins. His predecessor Kofi Karikari was destooled in the aftermath, accused among other things of removing gold from the royal mausoleum.
What Mensa Bonsu received, then, was a treasury emptied by war and indemnity, provinces testing whether they still had to obey Kumasi, and a court divided over whether the disaster had been caused by too much war or too little.
An Attempt at Reconstruction
His response was to try to rebuild the state's capacity, and to do so partly along European lines. Three strands are visible in the record.
Revenue
Rebuilding required money that tribute alone no longer supplied, and Mensa Bonsu extended taxation and levies, including on trade. Fiscal innovation is difficult in any polity; in one that had just been humiliated and where provincial loyalty was uncertain, new exactions were read as evidence that Kumasi was taking from those it had failed to protect.
A standing force
The traditional Asante army was raised from the constituent states when needed, which meant it depended on the willingness of chiefs to send men. Mensa Bonsu sought a permanent force answerable directly to him, recruited and paid rather than levied, and including men from outside Asante. A ruler with his own soldiers is less dependent on his chiefs, and the chiefs understood that as clearly as he did.
European advisers
He also employed Europeans and coastal Africans in advisory and technical roles. This was in keeping with a wider nineteenth-century pattern of African states hiring foreign expertise, but at Kumasi it was contentious, and the individuals concerned had mixed motives and mixed reputations.
Why It Failed
The programme ran against the constitution of the kingdom. Asante had never been an autocracy: the Asantehene ruled with and through a council of officeholders whose stools were their own, and who could and did remove a ruler who lost their confidence. Every element of Mensa Bonsu's reconstruction — taxes not previously levied, soldiers loyal to him personally, foreigners with access to the court — reduced the standing of exactly the men whose support he needed.
The provinces were meanwhile going their own way. Gyaaman, Adansi and above all the Brong and northern territories tested the limits of Kumasi's reach; Dwaben had already been in open conflict with Kumasi in the years after 1874. Every failure to enforce authority made the next refusal easier.
Contemporary accounts also charge Mensa Bonsu with personal misconduct and extortion. These reports come substantially from British sources and from Asante opponents who had reason to justify what followed, and they should be treated with some caution. The structural explanation for his fall does not require them.
Deposition and Aftermath
In 1883 Mensa Bonsu was destooled. What followed was worse than what he had presided over: a disputed succession, several years of civil war between rival candidates and their supporting factions, and a further weakening of central authority. Only in 1888 was Agyeman Prempeh I enstooled, and he inherited a kingdom whose capacity to resist external pressure had been badly reduced. Within a decade the British had exiled him to the Seychelles, and in 1901 Asante was formally annexed.
Judging Him
Mensa Bonsu's reputation has been unkind, and much of the unkindness comes from sources with an interest in it. A fairer assessment is that he correctly identified the problem — that the Asante state as constituted could not raise money or troops reliably enough to face a modern imperial power — and pursued a solution that the same constitution would not permit. The reforms that might have strengthened Asante were precisely the reforms that cost him the stool. It is a difficulty that other African states faced in the same decades, and few of them solved it either.
