Prempeh I

Otumfuo Kwaku Dua III Asamu — regnal name Asantehene Prempeh I — was born in Kumasi on the eighteenth of December 1870, the son of Yaa Akyaa, the Queen Mother of the Asante. He was elected to the Golden Stool in March 1888 at the age of seventeen, after the inconclusive Asante civil war over succession that had followed Asantehene Mensa Bonsu's deposition.

He attempted across the following eight years to maintain Asante sovereignty against the steady tightening of British colonial pressure across the Gold Coast. The British colonial governor demanded a formal Asante protectorate in 1891. Prempeh declined. The 1893 Asante embassy to London — Prempeh dispatched four senior chiefs including Albert Owusu Ansah, son of the former Asantehene Kwaku Dua I — attempted to negotiate directly with the British government over the head of the Gold Coast administration. The Colonial Office refused to receive them.

The Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War followed in late 1895. The British colonial expedition under Sir Francis Scott marched on Kumasi in January 1896 without significant resistance — Prempeh had decided, on the experience of the previous Anglo-Ashanti wars, to spare the city. Prempeh formally surrendered on the twentieth of January 1896. He was deported with the Queen Mother Yaa Akyaa, the principal chiefs of Kumasi, and approximately fifty members of the royal family to Elmina Castle, then to Sierra Leone, and finally to the Seychelles, where they were held for twenty-eight years.

The British colonial annexation of the rest of Asante followed the 1900-01 Yaa Asantewaa War (under the Queen Mother of Ejisu, also placed in this archive). Prempeh was permitted to return to Kumasi in November 1924 — twenty-eight years after his deportation — as a private citizen. He was restored to the Asante throne in 1926 in substantially constrained constitutional form.

He died in Kumasi on the twelfth of May 1931, age sixty.

He is honored here as the Asantehene who held the throne through twenty-eight years of exile and returned.