Prempeh I returns to Kumasi after 28 years in exile

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 Tuesday, 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, the king went straight on by a special overnight train towards Kumasi, the Asante capital. The train stopped at Sekondi so that he could receive the welcome of thousands of people who had gathered there, among them representatives of the Asante Kotoko Society, the Aborigines Rights Protection Society, the Congress of British West Africa and chiefs of the Western Province. In Ellison’s words, they saw him as a great African political leader who had survived 28 years of exile and come back with his head held high.

The man who stepped off the ship was not the young king who had been taken away. By 1924 he was elderly, and when he arrived in Kumasi he was wearing a European suit and hat. With him came some 50 Asante companions, most of whom had been born in the Seychelles, the islands in the Indian Ocean where he had spent most of his exile. A list of the returning party kept by the Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation names them one by one: Lucy, Ernest, Robert, Alice and Victoria Prempeh, families called Boaten, Baidoo, Appia and Asibe, and others. All of them carried Christian names, because they had been baptised into the Anglican Church while in exile. Prempeh himself had been baptised, together with his mother, on 29 May 1904.

Born in 1870, Prempeh came to the throne in 1888, and his mother, Yaa Akyaa, was Queen Mother of the Asante from 1880 to 1917. He was the Asantehene, the Asante king, at a time when Britain wanted his territory brought into its expanding Gold Coast protectorate, and he resisted. When the British offered to take the Asante under their protection, he refused each request. The expedition that followed was launched, officially, because he had failed to pay an indemnity and because of human sacrifice in his kingdom.

A British army marched about 200 kilometres from the coast to Kumasi, arriving in January 1896. The Asantehene told his people not to resist. Not a shot was fired, though 18 Europeans died of sickness during the campaign. Prempeh was unable or unwilling to pay the 50,000 ounces of gold demanded of him, so he was arrested and deposed, and forced to sign a treaty of protection. The legal historian Michael Lobban judges the arrest harshly. Governor William Maxwell, he writes, decided to detain Prempeh although the king was no rebel, had not gone to war and had broken no treaty; his detention and exile were the result of pure imperial aggression and were unconstrained by any idea of 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. Among the things carried off, according to the British Museum’s own records, was a bracelet of glass beads and gold ornaments, possibly made for a child, which the Gold Coast government donated to the museum that same year. The prisoners were held first at the coastal fort of Elmina, then shipped to Sierra Leone, and in 1900 sent on to the Seychelles.

There the years passed. According to the BBC, the British finally relented in 1924, perhaps aware that if Prempeh died in exile it 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 allow the king to be taken into Kumasi railway station. The train stopped instead at Kaase, near the city, and there Prempeh stepped down onto Asante soil. He was driven by car to the new palace of the Asafohene, where he took up temporary residence. The thousands who had gathered in Kumasi to see him were disappointed, Ellison writes, but happy that their king had come home safely.

He did not get back everything he had lost. The British restricted the title, so on his return he became Kumasehene, chief of Kumasi, rather than Asantehene, king of all the Asante. The British built him a palace to replace the one that had been destroyed, but the king moved in only after the Asante kingdom had paid for it in full. One of the officers on the 1896 expedition had been Robert Baden-Powell, who led a force of local troops and later founded the Boy Scouts. After his return, Prempeh became Chief Scout of Ashanti.

He also began asking for the return of what had been taken. The request for the return of the Asante regalia started in the 1920s, during his reign. Prempeh died on 12 May 1931.

A century after his homecoming, the field outside the royal palace in Kumasi filled with an exuberant crowd. 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. In his first address of the three-day celebration, Osei Tutu II, the 16th king to occupy the Golden Stool, thanked the Seychelles on behalf of the Asante people. He said that the day Prempeh finally arrived home to a jubilant and loyal people had reaffirmed the “undying” spirit of the Asante. Ghana’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, called Prempeh one of the most inspiring figures in Ghanaian history: “his life tells us they didn’t lie down meekly to be trampled upon.”

The house Prempeh paid for still stands. It is now 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, timed to mark, among other anniversaries, 100 years since his return. Most of the gold had been taken from Kumasi in 1874, before his reign. The British Museum lent 15 objects and the Victoria and Albert Museum 17, all for three years. Among them were a gold peace pipe, four cast gold badges once worn by the officials who purified the king’s soul, a small gold eagle and a gold ring. Standing in the rooms where the exiled king had lived, Osei Tutu II called the regalia “the soul of the people of Asante”.