The Scottish soldier and Empire, 1854-1902 - Reenactor.ru

2
THE BLACK WATCH IN WEST AFRICA
1
In the late nineteenth century the Asante War (1873–4) provided
the first opportunity for a Scottish battalion, specifically the 42nd
Highlanders (later the 1st Battalion, the Black Watch), to engage in
front-line fighting in Africa. The Asante (pronounced Ashanti) had
invaded the Gold Coast in 1873, an area over which Britain had
exercised an informal protectorate since the 1830s. As two previous
British expeditions to the Gold Coast had suffered serious losses, the
Colonial Office resolved not to send another British expedition to a
region infamously known as ‘the white man’s grave’. Initially it had
hoped that a composite force of local troops, some Royal Marines
and the 2nd West India Regiment could control the invaders, but the
continuing reports from the panic-stricken authorities at Cape Coast
Castle prompted a reluctant change of policy. 1 On 13 August 1873
Sir Garnet Wolseley was appointed as Governor and Commander-in-
Chief of the Gold Coast and was dispatched to the protectorate with
twenty-seven special-service officers. He was instructed to raise a
force from the local Fante tribes to defeat the Asante and secure
apeace treaty with the Asantehene (King Kofi Karikari), and only as
a last resort to call for British regiments. On his arrival in October,
Wolseley found that the Asante army, already weakened by hunger,
dysentery and smallpox, was retiring to its own territory beyond the
River Pra. Convinced that the Asante had to be punished for their
aggression and British honour restored, Wolseley pressed the Fantes
unsuccessfully to join a punitive expedition ‘to march victorious on
the Ashantee [sic] capital’. Dubbing the Fantes as ‘less warlike and
more peaceful than formerly’, he promptly requested the dispatch
of British forces. Wolseley promised to use the two months that
would elapse before their arrival to build a road through the tropical
rainforest to the Pra, and to employ British forces thereafter for no
more than ‘about six weeks, or at the most two months’. 2 On 17
November 1873 Gladstone’s cabinet authorised the dispatch
of three battalions. These would include the 2nd Battalion, Rifle