ABSTRACT
West Africa south of about 9 degrees N is covered with a thick tropical rainforest, broken only in the area of modern Benin by drier, more open country. This belt of vegetation completely rules out the employment of cavalry for both epidemiological and practical reasons. Only in the “Gap of Benin” (covered in the next chapter) where the savannah penetrates almost to the coast, do we find the complex co-existence of cavalry, marine and infantry forces dominating war. In the area to the west of the Gap, which Europeans called the Gold Coast during this period, infantry reigned supreme and the nature of the terrain played an important role in the way these forces were organized and fought. Only when the infantry armies broke out of the forest to the north, as the kingdom of Asante did in the early decades of the eighteenth century, did one find encounters between mixed armies.
