NewsTaken in 1874, back in Kumasi on loan: the story of the Asante gold
British troops packed the Asante king's gold the night they entered Kumasi in 1874. In 2024, 32 pieces returned to the city, but only on a three-year loan.
On the evening of 4 February 1874, British forces under Sir Garnet Wolseley entered Kumasi after a march from the coast. Asantehene Kofi Karikari had already left the city. That night, according to two eyewitnesses, Henry Morton Stanley and Frederick Boyle, prize agents went into the royal palace and packed its most portable valuables. On 6 February engineers set the town alight, and the king's stone palace was blown up with 125 kegs of gunpowder.
The conflict, which followed the Dutch handover of Elmina to Britain in 1872 and an Asante advance to the coast in 1873, is remembered in Ghana as the Sagrenti War, a rendering of "Sir Garnet".
The treaty and the sale
A treaty drawn up at Fomena in February 1874 demanded 50,000 ounces of gold. The king sent a first payment of about 1,000 ounces of his personal ornaments; only a small part of the rest was ever paid. The loot was sold at a prize auction at Cape Coast Castle, and the finest gold went to London, where, according to V&A records, the Crown Jewellers Garrard & Co. paid £11,000 for hundreds of items in April 1874. The South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, bought 13 pieces as examples of goldsmithing for British artists and designers. The Golden Stool was never taken.
Why it came back on loan
In January 2024 the V&A and the British Museum agreed to lend 32 objects, 17 and 15 respectively, to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi for three years, with the option of three more. The deal was negotiated over about nine months by the Asantehene's advisers after his May 2023 visit to London, and was made with the Asantehene rather than Ghana's government.
Both museums are bound by laws, the British Museum Act 1963 and the National Heritage Act 1983, that allow objects to be removed only in narrow cases such as duplicates or damaged items. A 2022 law allowing returns on moral grounds excludes them.
The objects arrived in April 2024. Opening the exhibition on 1 May, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said that though not all had been returned, "what we have here still embodies the soul of the Asantes." Critics asked why Ghana should borrow objects that were taken from it. The first loan term runs to around 2027.
The loan is not nothing: a child in Kumasi can finally stand in front of that gold. But a loan has an owner. In 1874 nobody asked permission to take it; in 2027 we might have to ask permission to keep it.
- Henry M. Stanley, Coomassie and Magdala (1874), eyewitness account and treaty text
- Frederick Boyle, Through Fanteeland to Coomassie (1874), eyewitness account
- British Museum and V&A joint press release (25 Jan 2024)
- V&A: A history of Asante gold at the V&A
- The Art Newspaper: British Museum and V&A loans to Ghana (25 Jan 2024)
- Graphic Online: UK loans back Ghana's looted royal artefacts
- British Museum Act 1963, section 5
- National Heritage Act 1983, section 6
- Museums Association: national museums excluded from law enabling restitution on moral grounds
Every factual line in this story is checked against at least two independent sources, unless the text says it comes from one report.