From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The latest success for Ghana’s Manhyia Palace Museum – the return from South Africa of 28 pieces of gold regalia, including swords, necklaces and rings, believed to have been taken from the Asante kingdom in the 19th century – was celebrated by King Osei Tutu II in a ceremony broadcast live on TV, radio and social media. ‘We thank God they are all back home,’ intoned the MC, as the treasures were paraded before hundreds of chiefs and followers in Kumasi, the historic capital of the Asante kingdom. ‘It is a personal honour to bring these treasures to Kumasi where they were forged all those years ago,’ said Stewart Bailey of the mining company AngloGold Ashanti, which had purchased them from the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva in 2000.
The AngloGold returns in late November cap an extraordinary year for the Manhyia Palace Museum, which is owned by the king, who is also known as the Asantehene. In February, the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, returned seven pieces of Asante regalia, all believed to have been looted by British soldiers in 1874. In May, the British Museum and the V&A returned – albeit only on loan – 32 pieces of magnificent gold and silver regalia, almost all of which had also been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896. The latest returns, the museums said, cement its role ‘as a symbol of Africa’s growing influence in reclaiming its cultural heritage’.
That may be true, but the Manhyia Palace Museum is housed in a building which many British visitors will find carries an incongruous atmosphere of Home Counties suburbia. It was built by the British authorities in the 1920s as a home for Prempeh I, whose return from 28 years of exile in 1924 signalled a new chapter in Asante history after the wars of the 19th century, during which many of the treasures were plundered (Manhyia means ‘all people should come together’). A successor of Prempeh I moved to an adjacent and grander palace in the 1970s and the old building, surrounded by preening peacocks and handsome Indian rubber trees, became a museum in the 1990s. The downstairs rooms are still home to mid 20th-century European furniture, an antiquated fridge and television, and a book shelf containing biographies of George VI and Nikita Khrushchev and novels by Charles Dickens, while the returned treasures from the Fowler, British Museum and V&A are beautifully displayed upstairs in state of-the-art cabinets.
The Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, Ghana. Photo: Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images
The returns in May were perhaps the highlight of the Manhyia Palace Museum’s year, given the quality of the objects and the symbolism of them coming back from Britain. Osei Tutu II said: ‘These items that were stolen, looted […] not all of them have come back, but those we have here still embody the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent’. Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, who travelled to Kumasi for the ceremony, said: ‘We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.’ Those words might have been unimaginable from the director of a museum in Britain until recently, but the fact that the V&A and British Museum were only loaning back the objects, for an initial period of three years – both are restricted by legislation which makes it difficult to permanently deaccession items from their collections even if they wish to – also caused frustration in Kumasi.
I was at the ceremony in May, and travelled back in November to find out how the museum was faring six months later. Encouragingly, the number of visitors in 2024 has almost doubled from the previous year, to more than 87,000 by the end of October, despite the museum being closed in April for renovations. About one tenth of these are foreigners. Over the course of a few days I spoke to an extraordinary range of visitors from Salt Lake City, Seoul, Sydney and many places in between. Almost all visitors, Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian alike, expressed bewilderment that the British had only loaned back the items. ‘I’m offended,’ said one woman from Washington, D.C., while a tourist from Yorkshire who had come to Ghana after googling ‘safest country in Africa’ said he was ‘absolutely in favour of returns when objects are inappropriately taken’. Sammy Amoah, one of the museum’s guides, said that the overriding impression he had from local visitors was ‘joy; they see these items here and they understand what they’ve been taught in history books is true.’
Negotiating returns is one thing, but maintaining a popular and viable museum in the long term is quite another. Africa has all too many poorly funded and under-visited museums, typically built during the colonial period and apparently of little relevance to today’s youthful population. Manhyia Palace Museum is certainly not immune from these challenges (a significant proportion of its visitors are children who file through dutifully on school trips) but it has more autonomy and less bureaucracy than many state institutions, which are often hampered by underfunding and mismanagement. In contrast, Manhyia Palace Museum raises most of its own revenue and receives occasional grants directly from the palace, and its management reports only to a board of trustees. ‘We’ve received no funding from government for 30 years,’ says curator Justice Brobbey.
King Osei Tutu II leads a ceremony in Kumasi, Ghana, in May 2024, celebrating the return of gold regalia to the Asante kingdom. Photo: Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images
Success brings new challenges, however, and a greater level of scrutiny. Storage, accounting methods, the composition of the now ageing board – all need improving and revitalising as the Manhyia Palace Museum continues to grow. And growth is certainly the museum’s intention, as a large extension is due to open in early 2025. This will display the objects returned by AngloGold, as well as a series of temporary exhibitions celebrating the Asante way of life.
In the meantime, the museum’s director, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, already in discussion with the Wellcome Trust in Britain over further returns of looted artefacts, is riding the wave of the global restitution movement. ‘We want to get back as many objects as is humanely possible,’ he says. ‘We are very interested in co-operating with whoever wants to work with us, whether it’s loans or permanent returns. We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.’
A gunbearer’s cap at the Asante Royal Palace, on loan from the British Museum. Photo: Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images
Barnaby Phillips is the author of Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Oneworld).
From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.