More than 120 years ago, the mighty Asante Kingdom, once the beating heart of West Africa’s gold-rich interior, faced the crushing weight of British colonial power.

In 1896, British forces finally stormed Kumasi, the cultural and spiritual capital of the Asante people, and arrested the 26-year-old Asantehene, Nana Agyemang Prempeh I, along with the Queen Mother, Nana Yaa Achiaa, and more than 50 royal family members, chiefs, and attendants.

What began as a mission to negotiate the Asante’s place within the expanding British Gold Coast protectorate ended in betrayal.

While an Asante delegation argued its case in London, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, authorised the military invasion to break the Asante’s fierce independence once and for all.

The arrested royals were first held at the coastal fort at Elmina, a grim holding ground for prisoners and captives for centuries, before being shipped to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

From there, they were forced aboard the SS Darkwa for an even more distant fate: exile on the remote islands of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, what the British dubbed a “prison without bars.”

Prempeh’s exile was meant to crush the spirit of Asante resistance. Instead, it fueled a final act of defiance.

In 1900, while Prempeh and his court languished thousands of miles from home, the legendary Queen Mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa, rose to lead the last great Asante uprising, the War of the Golden Stool, against British rule.

When that revolt too was suppressed, Yaa Asantewaa and about 20 more chiefs and warriors joined Prempeh in Seychelles.

For nearly three decades, Prempeh I, once a king crowned with gold, lived as a political prisoner in a villa on a former sugar plantation overlooking the Seychelles’ coconut groves and turquoise sea.

Some, like Yaa Asantewaa and Nana Yaa Achiaa, never saw their homeland again, dying in quiet dignity far from Kumasi’s sacred grounds.

Prempeh himself kept the flame of Asante identity alive in exile. He learnt to read and write, converted to Christianity, and insisted that Asante children born on the islands be taught the history, language, and customs of their people.

He organised festivals and retold ancestral stories under the swaying palms of Ashanti Town, the small enclave where the exiles built a fragile sense of home.

Yet the years in exile took a heavy toll. In a letter written in 1918 to King George V, Prempeh pleaded for mercy:

"Consider how wretched I am for I was being taken prisoner… for now 22 years, and now how miserable to see that father, mother, brother and nearly three quarters of the chiefs are dead. The remaining quarter, some are blind, some worn out with old age and the rest being attacked by diverse diseases."

In all, Prempeh spent 27 years in forced banishment, an ordeal often compared to Nelson Mandela’s long island imprisonment generations later.

When the British finally allowed him to return in 1924, Kumasi erupted with emotion. Crowds slept by the railway lines just to greet him, weeping with relief as the king stepped off the train, no longer in royal robes but in a European suit and hat, a living testament to endurance.

Though weakened by age and grief, Prempeh resumed his role as spiritual leader of the Asante.

He died just a decade after his return, but his exile remains one of the most poignant chapters in Ghana’s history.

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