Nana Badu Bonsu II

One of Ahanta West's most enduring symbols of resistance, Nana Badu Bonsu II was the Omanhene (paramount chief) of Upper Dixcove who paid the ultimate price for refusing to surrender his people's sovereignty to a colonial power — and whose head spent 171 years in a Dutch laboratory before finally being brought home.

A chief of the Ahanta

In the 1830s, Ahanta — a small but politically powerful kingdom along Ghana's western coast — was a network of paramountcies whose people lived by fishing, farming, salt-making and the trade that flowed through the European forts dotted along the shore. Upper Dixcove, the seat of Nana Badu Bonsu II, was one of those paramountcies, sitting beside Fort Metal Cross which the Dutch had inherited from the British.

Contemporary records describe Badu Bonsu II as a proud, ambitious and unbending ruler who, like the Ahanta chiefs before him, treated the European garrisons as guests on his land — not as overlords. As Dutch ambitions on the Gold Coast hardened in the early 19th century, that posture put him on a collision course with the colonial administration in Elmina.

The Ahanta War, 1837–1838

Tensions came to a head in 1837 when a dispute over authority, tribute and trade rights erupted into open conflict between Badu Bonsu II and the Dutch governor of the Gold Coast. The chief refused to bow to Dutch demands and, according to oral and written sources, his warriors killed two Dutch emissaries — an act the colonial administration treated as outright war.

The Netherlands responded by despatching a punitive expedition: a force of European soldiers reinforced by African allies marched into the interior to crush Ahanta resistance. After months of bush fighting in difficult coastal forest, Badu Bonsu II was captured at his court in Bakanta in 1838 and summarily executed.

A head in a jar — 171 years away from home

In an act calculated to break the spirit of his people, Dutch officers decapitated the chief and shipped his head back to the Netherlands as a war trophy. It was placed in a jar of formaldehyde and added — alongside thousands of other "specimens" — to the anatomical collection of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), where it would sit on a shelf, largely forgotten, for the next 171 years.

In Ahanta, oral tradition kept the memory of the chief alive: stories were told from generation to generation of the king who had been taken and never returned, and his stool remained in mourning. But few in the wider world knew that the physical remains of Badu Bonsu II were sitting in a jar in a Dutch museum store-room.

Rediscovery and the long road home

The story re-surfaced in 2005, when the Dutch novelist Arthur Japin — while researching a book about a Ghanaian prince taken to the Netherlands in the 18th century — stumbled across an entry in the LUMC archives identifying one of the preserved heads as that of "Badu Bonsoe, king of Ahanta." Japin contacted the Ghanaian embassy in The Hague, and within months the news had reached the Ahanta paramount stool.

What followed was years of quiet diplomacy involving the Government of Ghana, Ahanta elders, the Dutch foreign ministry and LUMC. The Dutch authorities eventually agreed to formally return the chief's remains.

23 July 2009 — coming home

On 23 July 2009, in a solemn state ceremony at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, the head of Nana Badu Bonsu II was officially handed back to a delegation from Ghana that included his royal family, the Ahanta Traditional Council and government officials. Libation was poured, traditional rites were performed, and the chief began his final journey home.

Back in Ahanta, the remains were reunited with the body and given a paramount chief's burial with the full pageantry of stool, drums and warrior procession — 171 years after his death. For the people of Upper Dixcove, it was the closing of a wound that had never been allowed to heal.

Why his story still matters

Nana Badu Bonsu II's story is more than an episode of colonial violence. It is a story about a small African polity that refused to be erased; about the long memory of a community that never gave up on its king; and about what justice — partial, slow, but real — can look like even centuries later. It is also part of a wider, ongoing global conversation about the restitution of cultural and human remains held in European museums.

Today, his name is invoked at Ahanta festivals, taught in local schools, and remembered by visitors to Upper Dixcove and Fort Metal Cross. His story is — as the elders say — not just an Ahanta story, but a Ghanaian story of dignity, sacrifice and the long arc of remembrance.

"We did not forget him. We never forgot him." — Ahanta elder, on the return of Badu Bonsu II