Looking North
Accounts of Asante usually face the sea. The gold, the forts, the treaties and the wars with Britain all lie to the south, and the Atlantic frame is the one European sources supply. But Asante was a forest kingdom with two frontiers, and the northern one — towards the savanna, the Niger bend and ultimately the Sahara — was of comparable importance and considerably older as a commercial system.
The savanna states beyond the forest edge were long-established polities with their own dynasties, their own chronicles and, in many cases, a Muslim scholarly class. Gonja lay to the north-west across the Black Volta country, Dagomba to the north-east. Both stood on routes that had linked the forest to the Sahel for centuries before any European ship appeared on the coast.
Conquest and Tribute
Asante expansion into this region came in the reign of Opoku Ware, the successor of Osei Tutu, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Campaigns brought both Gonja and Dagomba into a tributary relationship with Kumasi.
What that relationship meant in practice was not colonial rule. Asante did not replace the local dynasties, install administrators or occupy the territory in strength. The northern states kept their own rulers, courts and internal government, and acknowledged Asante overlordship through the payment of tribute and the obligation to supply men in wartime. Tribute took several forms over time, including captives, livestock and cloth, and the terms were periodically renegotiated.
This arrangement was cheaper and more durable than direct administration would have been. It also created a permanent tension: tributary states have interests of their own, and the northern provinces were a recurring source of trouble whenever Asante's central power weakened.
Kola
The commercial core of the relationship was a nut. Kola grows in the forest zone and not in the savanna; it is a mild stimulant, it keeps well enough to travel, and in the Muslim societies of the Sahel — where alcohol is prohibited — it was in constant, high demand for consumption, hospitality and ceremony.
Asante controlled the region where the most valued variety grew. Kola moved north in bulk; in exchange the savanna sent south the goods the forest lacked:
- salt from the desert trade and from savanna sources;
- cattle, sheep and goats, which trypanosomiasis made almost impossible to keep in the forest;
- shea butter, hides and finished leatherwork;
- cotton cloth, notably from the great weaving centres of Hausaland;
- and captives, moving in the opposite direction to the kola.
The great northern market of the nineteenth century was Salaga in Gonja, where forest and savanna traders met and where Asante commercial interests were closely engaged. Caravans from Hausaland and beyond came to it, and through it Asante was connected — indirectly, through intermediaries — to a trading world running to Kano, Timbuktu, the Sahara and North Africa.
Muslim Traders and the Court
Commerce brought people as well as goods. Muslim merchants and scholars from the savanna, Hausa and Dyula among them, were long established along the northern routes, and a Muslim community was present at Kumasi itself, where its members were valued for literacy in Arabic, for correspondence, for record-keeping and for the amulets and services they provided. Their standing at court is a reminder that Asante's external relations were never only with Europe.
Two Frontiers, One Strategy
Seen together, the northern and southern frontiers make sense of each other. Asante sat between two great trading systems — the Atlantic and the trans-Saharan — and profited from being the point through which forest products passed in both directions. Gold and captives went south to the Europeans; kola went north to the Sahel; imports flowed in from both ends and were redistributed from Kumasi.
That is the position the Asante state was built to hold, and it explains a great deal about its behaviour: the insistence on secure access to the coast in dealings with the Dutch and British, the care taken over the great roads, and the determination to keep the northern provinces in tribute. When the British severed the southern connection in the 1870s, they cut only one half of a system — but it was the half that had been paying for the firearms.
