The Anglo-Ashanti Wars and the Anglo-Zulu War: The History of the British Empire’s Costliest Campaigns against Indigenous Africans

By the mid-19th century, other European powers became interested not only in the exploration of Africa but the exploitation of it, especially once the German Empire unified after the Franco-Prussian War. This began a rush, spearheaded mainly by European commercial interests in the form of chartered companies, to penetrate the African interior and woo its leadership with guns, trinkets and alcohol, and having thus obtained their marks or seals upon spurious treaties, begin establishing boundaries of future European colonies. The ease with which this was achieved was due to the fact that, at that point, traditional African leadership was disunited, and the people had just staggered back from centuries of concussion inflicted by the slave trade. Thus, to usurp authority, to intimidate an already broken society, and to play one leader against the other was a diplomatic task so simple, much of Africa would come under European influence in a short time.

For almost a century, the British in West Africa were faced with a powerful and stubborn African opponent: the Ashanti Empire. The Ashanti were formed by alliance and the conquest of the Akan people in the rainforest zone between the West African coast and the Sahel country to the north. The Ashanti fought the British in five wars over the nineteenth century, and they were the only West African people inflicting more than one defeat on the British. War in tropical West Africa was different from most of the rest of the world. The prevalence of endemic diseases like malaria typically killed half of the Europeans posted there per year; it was called “The White Man’s Grave” for a reason. A second factor was the presence of the tsetse fly that carried a disease able to kill horses quickly. Military expeditions were left to move entirely on foot, carrying whatever drafted or hired laborers could carry. There were no carts, no wagons, no pack animals, and no cavalry.

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