Ghana-Net.com · Central Region · Mankessim
Twenty-four years after the Bond of 1844, the Fante states tried to take their country back without firing a shot at Britain. At Mankessim they wrote a constitution, raised an army, set up courts and planned roads and schools. The British governor called it a "dangerous conspiracy" and arrested its ministers. It is often described as the first written African constitution on the Gold Coast, and it failed. This is why it mattered anyway.
Since the Bond of 1844, the Fante states had lived under British "protection". The British held the courts; the Dutch still held forts scattered along the same coast, around Elmina. In 1867 the two European powers simply swapped forts to tidy up their borders. Britain took the Dutch posts east of Elmina, the Dutch took the British posts to the west, and Fante towns found themselves handed to the Dutch without anyone asking them.
The Dutch were Asante's old friends. Elmina had long been allied to Kumasi, and to the Fante a Dutch coast meant an Asante road to the sea. In January 1868 the kings and chiefs met at Mankessim, the ancient centre of the Fante, and agreed to stand together. The Confederacy was born out of fear, not theory.
The Confederacy's first act was military. In February 1868 it put some 15,000 men into the field to stop the Dutch taking over Komenda, and then laid siege to Elmina itself. The siege stalled. Elmina held, the army ran short of money and supplies, and the campaign dragged on without a victory.
The problem solved itself in a way the Fante had not planned. In 1872 the Netherlands sold all its remaining forts to Britain and left the Gold Coast for good. The threat that had created the Confederacy disappeared, and with it much of the reason for the kings to stay united.
A first working constitution was drafted in 1868. The version that made history was adopted at Mankessim in November 1871 and presented to the British on 24 November.
A King-President elected from among the kings; a ministry of Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and assistants, all to be educated men; an Executive Council; a Representative Assembly; and a National Assembly meeting every October.
Main roads to link the Fante states, schools for all children, industrial and agricultural development, and the working of the country's minerals. A capital town was to be chosen.
A court at Mankessim and provincial courts with assessors. Appeals could still go to British courts: the Confederacy did not reject Britain outright, it wanted to share the justice the Bond had handed away.
To pay for all of it, a poll tax across the member states. After the failed British poll tax of 1852, it was a bold promise, and money was the Confederacy's weakest point from start to finish.
Two kinds of leader met at Mankessim: the kings of the Fante states, and a new class of educated Fante merchants, clerks and lawyers from the coastal towns.
Ghartey IV of Winneba, a merchant as well as a king, named King-President and chief magistrate of the court at Mankessim in the Confederacy's early years.
The rulers of Mankessim and Abora, who led the Confederacy under the 1871 constitution. From July 1872 Kwesi Edu of Mankessim held the office alone.
A Sierra Leonean army surgeon trained in Edinburgh, whose writings of 1868 argued that the West African states could and should govern themselves. His ideas shaped the educated men of Mankessim.
A note on names. The sources do not agree on who held which office when. Some list Ghartey as the first King-President, others name Kwesi Edu, Amfo Otu and Otabil of Gomoa as joint leaders in 1868–69. The Confederacy's leadership changed several times in five years, and we give the names the sources share.
The British Administrator at Cape Coast, Charles Spencer Salmon, read the 1871 constitution as a challenge to British authority. He called it a "dangerous conspiracy" and had the members of the ministry arrested.
London did not back him. The Colonial Office ordered the prisoners released, and Salmon's handling of the affair was criticised. But the damage was done. The Dutch had gone, the kings had less reason to cooperate, the merchants lost confidence, and the Confederacy's treasury was empty. By 1873 it had faded away.
A year later the question was settled by force. The Asante invasion of 1873 led to the Sagrenti War, and in 1874 Britain declared the coastal states a Crown colony. The people who had tried to govern themselves at Mankessim were now colonial subjects.
An African government, with a written constitution, elected offices, courts, taxes and a development plan, designed on the Gold Coast by Africans, a lifetime before independence.
The educated coastal class that met at Mankessim did not disappear. In 1897 their successors in Cape Coast founded the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society to defend the land against the colonial government.
It also showed the weak points that would return: money, and the gap between traditional rulers and the educated elite. Both ran through Gold Coast politics all the way to the Big Six.
The Confederacy's promise of schools for all went unfulfilled. Education on the Gold Coast stayed largely in the hands of the missions, from the Basel and Bremen missionaries to the Methodists of Cape Coast.
The heirs of Mankessim: guardians of land, law and identity in the Gold Coast.
The Dutch stronghold the Confederacy besieged in 1868, and Dutch until 1872.
Mankessim lies a few kilometres inland in the Central Region, on the main Accra–Cape Coast road. The regional capital is Cape Coast.
The town is the traditional home of the Fante, with the famous Posuban shrine of the local Asafo company at its centre. There is no museum or memorial to the Confederacy that we know of.
Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu and its Castle Brew, and Elmina.
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The Fante Confederacy lasted five years and achieved almost none of what its constitution promised. It was underfunded, divided between kings and clerks, and crushed less by British force than by British indifference and its own empty treasury. But in 1871, at Mankessim, Africans wrote down how they wanted to be governed: with elected leaders, their own courts, roads and schools. It took eighty-six more years to get there.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The founding at Mankessim in January 1868, the Anglo-Dutch exchange of forts, the 1868 campaign against the Dutch, the November 1871 constitution and its provisions, the arrest of the ministry under Administrator Salmon and its release on London's orders, and the end of the Confederacy by 1873 follow published accounts, including the text of the constitution. Accounts of who held which office differ, and are noted as such. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.
