Baden-Powell of Mafeking by J.S. Fletcher

Amongst the vast collection of relics, trophies, and curiosities which Baden-Powell has housed at his mother's residence in London there is one object at sight of which those who know its history may be forgiven for feeling some slight qualms. It is a large brass basin, about five feet in diameter, ornamented with four lions and with a number of round knobs all round its rim. If the spirits of blood-lust, of unholiness, and cruelty abide anywhere on earth, they ought to be found in this bowl, which Baden-Powell found at Bantama when he went out with the Ashanti Expedition of 1895-6, and which in its time had received the blood of countless victims to the inordinate love of human sacrifice which has distinguished the kings of the Ashanti empire for centuries. It looks, that bowl, as innocent as an ordinary kitchen utensil as it hangs in its place on the wall, surrounded by trophies of a more fearsome nature, but not even the guillotine of the Reign of Terror had seen and smelt more blood than had run over its rim to putrefy in its depths and to be eventually turned, mixed with certain herbs, into fetish medicines. To Baden-Powell, whenever he sees it -- he has had small chance of seeing it since he brought it back to England, though! -- it must needs recall many things in connection with that foul corner of the earth into which he journeyed some five years ago in order to assist in bringing a reign of bloodshed and violence to an end.

We are often told that we, as a nation, are much too ready to interfere with the affairs of other folk, and there are candid people amongst us who are not afraid of hinting that our interference is usually with nations not quite so big and powerful as ourselves -- that we are, in short, something like the schoolboy bully who wants to fight, but only with a boy several sizes smaller than himself. There were whisperings and hintings of this sort when we sent out our Ashanti Expedition of 1895-6 -- but no nation, surely, ever had better reasons for undertaking such an expedition. There were more reasons than one why it should be undertaken, and every reason was a most potent one, but one towered above all in its strength and urgency. Human life was being sacrificed in Ashanti to an extent which civilized folk can scarcely comprehend. The following extract from Baden-Powell's work on the Ashanti Expedition of 1895-6 gives one some notion of what was going on in and around Kumassi before the British Government stepped in: --