King Prempeh comes home to Kumasi after 28 years away

Prempeh, the king of the Asante people, arrived by ship at Takoradi on the coast of the Gold Coast at about five in the afternoon on 11 November 1924. The British had taken him away as a prisoner in 1896, and for 28 years they did not let him come back to his country.

He did not rest at the coast. According to the Ghanaian writer Kofi Ellison, the king travelled on that night by a special train towards Kumasi, the Asante capital. On the way, the train stopped at Sekondi, where thousands of people were waiting to welcome him. For them, he was a great African leader who had come back with his head held high.

The king was not young any more. When he arrived in Kumasi, he was wearing a European suit and hat. About 50 Asante people came home with him. Most of them had been born in the Seychelles, the islands in the Indian Ocean where he had spent most of his years away.

Prempeh was born in 1870 and became king in 1888. At that time Britain wanted to add his land to its Gold Coast colony, but he did not accept this. The British asked many times to take the Asante under their protection, and each time he refused.

A British army then marched about 200 kilometres from the coast to Kumasi and arrived in January 1896. The king told his people not to fight, and not a shot was fired. The British asked for 50,000 ounces of gold. Prempeh did not pay it, so they arrested him and took away his power as king. The historian Michael Lobban writes that Prempeh had broken no agreement and had not gone to war. In his view, the arrest was pure aggression by the empire and had nothing to do with the law.

On 20 January 1896 Prempeh was taken from Kumasi. About 50 family members, chiefs and servants went with him as prisoners, and the British took many things from his palace. The prisoners were held first at Elmina, a fort on the coast. Then they were sent to Sierra Leone, and in 1900 to the Seychelles.

The years passed. According to the BBC, the British finally agreed to let him go home in 1924. Perhaps they understood that his death far from home could cause political problems in Asante.

Even on the last night, the British were nervous. Ellison writes that they were afraid of a riot, so the train did not go into Kumasi station. It stopped at Kaase, near the city, and there Prempeh stepped onto Asante land again. A car took him to a palace where he stayed for a while. The crowds in Kumasi were disappointed, but they were happy that their king was safely home.

Life was not the same as before. The British gave him a smaller title: he became chief of Kumasi, not king of all the Asante. They built him a new palace, but he moved in only after the Asante had paid for it in full. In the 1920s he began to ask for the return of the royal objects that had been taken. Prempeh died on 12 May 1931.

A hundred years after his return, a large and happy crowd filled the field outside the royal palace in Kumasi. People carried the present king, Osei Tutu II, through the crowd among drums and gun shots. “The British did all they could but they couldn’t break the spirit of Asante,” the man leading the event shouted. In his first speech, the king thanked the Seychelles for the Asante people.

The palace that Prempeh paid for still stands. Today it is the Manhyia Palace Museum. On 1 May 2024 it opened an exhibition of Asante objects returned from the British Museum and other Western museums, partly to mark 100 years since his return. The British Museum lent 15 objects and the Victoria and Albert Museum lent 17, all for three years. They included a gold peace pipe, a small gold eagle and a gold ring. In the rooms where Prempeh once lived, Osei Tutu II called these objects “the soul of the people of Asante”.