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MISSIONARY LIFE IF ASHANTEE. 
They all agreed that under such circumstances no king- 
dom could stand, such an insult could only be avenged by 
war. Whatever the secret wish of the king might then 
have been, he had at that time no war material, so they 
were forced to wait. Owusu Kokoo, the second man in 
the kingdom (Ansa's brother, and Kwakoo Dooah's uncle), 
swore the king's oath that he would restore the honour of 
the kingdom, and that if the people of the Coast were like 
deeply-rooted palms, he would uproot them, and bring as 
many prisoners as would avenge the insult. Having 
thus sworn he set out, and in the summer of 1863 crossed 
the Prah, without however effecting much. 
When he had escaped a trap set for him by the Fan- 
tees, he re-crossed the river with forty prisoners, was 
stationed there for some months, but was finally recalled 
by the peaceful king. Whilst preparing for a second 
attempt he met his death (in April 1867). The nobles 
said he had died of grief because he was unavenged, and 
when assembled round the corpse, declared he should not 
be buried until Gjanin's insult was avenged, and the 
head of the Denkjera prince, Kwakju, brought to his 
burial. The young king Kofi would not consent to this. 
It seemed to him a disgrace to leave the dead unburied, 
but he wished to honour him with elaborate death cere- 
monies. Gjanin's matter was not to be forgotten how- 
ever, notwithstanding all mutual assurances, but the 
right time must be watched for, and when the highest 
nobility placed Kofi on the throne, he swore " my business 
shall be war." 
An eventful result was that in 1868, when Akra 
was transferred from the Dutch to the English, the 
latter made over their territory west of Elmina to the 
Dutch. This caused great rejoicing in Coomassie, be- 
cause the people of Denkjera, their slaves, who had 
escaped to the Coast fourteen years before, had thus gone 
