King Prempeh I comes home to Kumasi after 28 years in exile

At around five o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, 11 November 1924, Prempeh landed at Takoradi, on the coast of the Gold Coast. He was the king of the Asante, and he had been living in exile. The last time he had seen his country was in 1896, when he left it as a prisoner, and the British had kept him away for 28 years.

He did not stop to rest on the coast. The Ghanaian writer Kofi Ellison says that the king travelled on immediately, taking a special train through the night towards Kumasi, the Asante capital. On the way, the train stopped at Sekondi, where thousands of people had come together to welcome him. Among them were representatives of the Asante Kotoko Society, the Aborigines Rights Protection Society and the Congress of British West Africa, as well as chiefs from the Western Province. As Ellison puts it, these people regarded him as a great African political leader, a man who had lived through 28 years of exile and returned with his pride intact.

The king who came off the ship was no longer the young man the British had taken away. By 1924 he was old, and when he reached Kumasi he was dressed in a European suit and hat. About 50 Asante companions travelled with him. Most of them had been born in the Seychelles, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean where he had spent the greater part of his exile. The Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation keeps a list of the people who returned, and it records each of them by name. They include Lucy, Ernest, Robert, Alice and Victoria Prempeh, along with families named Boaten, Baidoo, Appia and Asibe, and several others. Every one of them had a Christian name, because they had been baptised into the Anglican Church during the years abroad. Prempeh and his mother had been baptised together on 29 May 1904.

Prempeh was born in 1870 and became king in 1888. His mother, Yaa Akyaa, held the position of Queen Mother of the Asante from 1880 until 1917. As Asantehene, which is the title of the Asante king, he ruled at a time when Britain was enlarging its Gold Coast protectorate and wanted his lands to become part of it. He opposed this. Each time the British proposed to take the Asante under their protection, he said no. When the British then sent a military expedition, the official reasons they gave were that he had not paid a sum of money owed as compensation, known as an indemnity, and that human sacrifice took place in his kingdom.

A British army marched roughly 200 kilometres inland from the coast and reached Kumasi in January 1896. The Asantehene ordered his people not to fight back. Nobody fired a single shot, although 18 Europeans died of disease during the campaign. The British demanded 50,000 ounces of gold from Prempeh. He either could not or would not pay it, and so he was arrested, removed from the throne and made to sign a treaty placing his kingdom under British protection. Michael Lobban, a historian of law, is severe in his judgement of the arrest. He writes that the governor, William Maxwell, chose to hold Prempeh even though the king was not a rebel, had not started a war and had not broken any treaty. In Lobban’s view, the king was detained and exiled simply because of imperial aggression, and no notion of the rule of law limited what the British did.

Prempeh was removed from Kumasi on 20 January 1896. Around 50 of his relatives, chiefs and servants were taken with him as prisoners, and the British plundered his palace. The British Museum’s own records show that one of the objects taken was a bracelet made of glass beads and gold ornaments. It may have been made for a child, and the Gold Coast government gave it to the museum in the same year. The prisoners were first kept at Elmina, a fort on the coast. They were then sent by ship to Sierra Leone, and in 1900 they were moved again, this time to the Seychelles.

The king remained there for many years. The BBC reports that the British at last gave way in 1924. They may have realised that Prempeh’s death in exile could lead to political trouble in Asante.

The colonial authorities were still anxious on the final night of the journey. According to Ellison, they were afraid of a riot, so they would not let the king be brought into the railway station in Kumasi. Instead, the train halted at Kaase, close to the city, and it was there that Prempeh first set foot on Asante soil again. A car took him to the new palace of the Asafohene, where he stayed for the time being. Ellison writes that the thousands of people waiting in Kumasi to see him were disappointed, but glad that their king had returned home safely.

Not everything he had lost was given back to him. The British limited his title, so after his return he was Kumasehene, the chief of Kumasi, and not Asantehene, the king of all the Asante. The British built a new palace for him in place of the one that had been destroyed. However, the king only moved into it once the Asante kingdom had paid the whole cost. Robert Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scouts, had been one of the officers on the 1896 expedition, where he commanded a force of local soldiers. Once he was home again, Prempeh became Chief Scout of Ashanti.

He also started to ask for the things that had been taken to be returned. The campaign to get back the Asante regalia, the royal objects and symbols of the kingdom, began in the 1920s, while he was in power. Prempeh died on 12 May 1931.

One hundred years after he came home, a joyful crowd filled the open ground in front of the royal palace in Kumasi. The present Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, wearing a great deal of gold jewellery, was carried through the crowd on a covered chair called a palanquin, while muskets were fired, drums were played and horns made from elephant tusks were blown. The master of ceremonies shouted: “The British did all they could but they couldn’t break the spirit of Asante.” The celebration lasted three days. In his first speech, Osei Tutu II, who is the 16th king to sit on the Golden Stool, the throne of the Asante, thanked the Seychelles in the name of the Asante people. He said that the day Prempeh at last reached home, greeted by a delighted and loyal people, had confirmed once again the “undying” spirit of the Asante. Ghana’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, described Prempeh as one of the most inspiring people in the history of Ghana, saying: “his life tells us they didn’t lie down meekly to be trampled upon.”

The palace that Prempeh paid for is still standing. Today it is the Manhyia Palace Museum. On 1 May 2024 the museum opened an exhibition of Asante objects that had been returned by the British Museum and other Western institutions. The exhibition was timed to mark several anniversaries, one of them being the 100 years since his return. Most of the gold had been taken from Kumasi in 1874, before Prempeh became king. The British Museum lent 15 objects and the Victoria and Albert Museum lent 17, all of them for a period of three years. They included a gold peace pipe, a small gold eagle, a gold ring and four badges of cast gold, which were once worn by the officials whose task was to purify the king’s soul. Standing in the rooms where the exiled king had once lived, Osei Tutu II described the regalia as “the soul of the people of Asante”.