Asante nationhood and colonial administrators, 1896–1935

Abstract

This study has to do with Asante nationhood in the colonial period.¹ Asante was declared a British Crown Colony, by right of conquest, by an Order of the King in Council of 26 September 1901.² It was to be administered by a chief commissioner, responsible to the Crown through the governor of the Gold Coast Colony, but it was not to be annexed to that colony. From 1902 to 1957, when Britain’s Gold Coast became Nkrumah’s Ghana, thirteen men had served as ‘Chief Commissioners, Ashanti’ (henceforth CCAs), or, after redesignation in 1952, as ‘Chief Regional Officers’ (CROs). From time to time they carne into conflict, and sometimes acute conflict, with the governors. This was not only a matter of bailiwicks, of ill-defined jurisdictions. There was a moral dimension to it all, for the particular interests of Asante were frequently at issue. I shall argue here that CCAs played a quite critical role in fostering conditions — necessary if not sufficient — such that a sense of Asante nationality survived the traumatic loss of political independence in 1901. To explore this theme I draw on the careers of three CCAs, F. C. Fuller, C. H. Harper and H. S. Newlands, and take 1935, the year of what was known as the ‘Restoration of the Ashanti Confederacy’, as a somewhat arbitrary cut-off date. I must, however, make brief reference here to the last to hold the position, A. C. Russell, whose advocacy of Asante rights was a cause of his removal from office by Kwame Nkrumah in 1957. In conversations with him, and from his letters and reports, I have learned much about the landscape of colonial Asante, and my debt to him is great.³