Looted artefacts from Asante Kingdom now worth £2B – Prof. McCaskie

The Head of the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham University, Prof. Tom McCaskie, has said that the looted artefacts from the Asante Kingdom during the Sagrenti War of 1874, had some gold dusts which in today’s value would be worth £2 billion.

According to him, this is a part of the Asante history that has been ignored, but deserves attention.

Prof. Tom McCaskie, in a citinewsroom.com report, stated that a lot of wealth collected by Asantehene Kofi Karikari’s predecessor, Nana Kwaku Dua I, was looted and the whole city of Kumasi was set on fire.

“The amount of gold contained in Adakakese alone at Kwaku Dua’s death was in excess of 400,000 ounces. This in 1867 was worth 1.2 million pounds sterling. The current value of the Adakakase is somewhere over 2 billion pounds,” he stated.

He explained that the lot of the gold dust was stored in three places, Kumasi, Aburaso and Breman, and was inherited by Kofi Karikari when Nana Dua died in 1867.

He also said that no history of the war mentions the money.

“The attempt to get back the treasures looted from Kumasi by Garnet Wolseley in 1874, takes no account - because it cannot - of the gold or gold dust that the British must have carried away with them. We don’t know about this because it was loot, a private loot and so it is separate from the cultural artefacts that Otumfuo is trying to retrieve for Asanteman,” he stated.

NW/ ADG