Prempeh, the exiled Asante king, comes home to Kumasi after 28 years

Prempeh, the exiled king of the Asante, came ashore at Takoradi, on the coast of the Gold Coast, at about five in the afternoon on 11 November 1924. He had last seen his country as a prisoner in 1896, and the British had kept him away from it for 28 years.

He did not rest at the coast. According to the Ghanaian writer Kofi Ellison, he went straight on by a special overnight train towards Kumasi, the Asante capital. The train stopped at Sekondi so that thousands of people, among them chiefs and members of several political organisations, could welcome him. In Ellison’s words, they saw him as a great African political leader who had survived exile and come back with his head held high.

The man who returned was not the young king who had been taken away. He was now elderly, and he arrived in Kumasi wearing a European suit and hat. About 50 Asante companions came with him, most of them born in the Seychelles, the islands in the Indian Ocean where he had spent most of his exile. All of them had Christian names, because they had been baptised into the Anglican Church while they were away. Prempeh himself had been baptised, together with his mother, in 1904.

Born in 1870, Prempeh came to the throne in 1888. He was the Asantehene, the Asante king, at a time when Britain wanted to bring his territory into its growing Gold Coast protectorate, and he resisted. He refused every British offer to take the Asante under their protection. Officially, the expedition that followed was launched because he had failed to pay a sum the British demanded and because of human sacrifice in his kingdom.

A British army marched about 200 kilometres from the coast and reached Kumasi in January 1896. Prempeh told his people not to resist, and not a shot was fired. He could not or would not pay the 50,000 ounces of gold demanded of him, so he was arrested, removed from the throne and forced to sign a treaty of protection. The legal historian Michael Lobban points out that the king was no rebel, had not gone to war and had broken no treaty. In his view, the arrest and exile were pure imperial aggression, with no regard for the rule of law.

Prempeh was taken from Kumasi on 20 January 1896. About 50 relatives, chiefs and servants went with him as prisoners, and the British looted his palace. The prisoners were held first at Elmina, a fort on the coast, then shipped to Sierra Leone, and in 1900 sent on to the Seychelles. According to the BBC, the British finally gave in only in 1924, perhaps aware that his death in exile could cause political problems in Asante.

Even on the last night of the journey, the colonial authorities were nervous. Ellison writes that, fearing a riot, they did not let the king be taken into Kumasi station. The train stopped instead at Kaase, near the city, and there Prempeh stepped down onto Asante soil. He was driven by car to a new palace, where he stayed for a time. The thousands waiting in Kumasi were disappointed, but happy that their king had come home safely.

He did not get back everything he had lost. The British allowed him only the title Kumasehene, chief of Kumasi, rather than king of all the Asante. They built him a palace to replace the one that had been destroyed, but he moved in only after the Asante kingdom had paid for it in full. During his reign, in the 1920s, the request for the return of the Asante royal treasures, known as regalia, began. Prempeh died on 12 May 1931.

A century after his homecoming, an excited crowd filled the field outside the royal palace in Kumasi. The current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, was carried through it on his palanquin, heavy with gold jewellery, among musket shots, drums and horns made from elephant tusks. “The British did all they could but they couldn’t break the spirit of Asante,” the master of ceremonies shouted. Osei Tutu II thanked the Seychelles on behalf of the Asante people, and Ghana’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, called Prempeh one of the most inspiring figures in Ghanaian history.

The house Prempeh paid for still stands. Today it is the Manhyia Palace Museum, and on 1 May 2024 it opened an exhibition of Asante objects returned from the British Museum and other Western institutions, partly to mark 100 years since his return. The British Museum lent 15 objects and the Victoria and Albert Museum 17, all for three years. Among them were a gold peace pipe, a small gold eagle and a gold ring. Standing in the rooms where the exiled king had once lived, Osei Tutu II called the regalia “the soul of the people of Asante”.