A loan deal for the Asante treasures offers a golden opportunity for cultural exchange, argues the museum’s director
At 10.30am on Monday 23 February 1874, the prize objects taken by British troops from the royal palace in Kumasi were put up for auction in the palaver hall of Cape Castle, on the Gold Coast. “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold,” reported the Daily Telegraph. “On a side table stood the king’s plate. Against a broad screen hung swords and cartouche belts of leopard skin, and canes of huge silver heads, and calabashes bound in gold and silver, and embossed brass pans.”
Alongside the burning of the old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 and the Battle of Maqdala in Ethiopia in 1868, the sacking of Kumasi, during the third Anglo-Asante war, stands as one of the most infamous episodes in the history of British colonial plunder.