Prempeh I ascended to the Golden Stool in 1888, at around seventeen years old. He worked to restore Ashanti independence and refused to sign treaties that would reduce the Ashanti Kingdom to a British protectorate. In 1896, the British launched a military expedition to Kumasi under the pretext of quelling unrest. Prempeh surrendered peacefully to spare his people bloodshed, but the gesture earned him no mercy. He and key members of his court were seized and exiled to the Seychelles, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean more than 7,000 kilometers from home. He would not return for twenty-eight years. When he finally did, in 1924, his old palace no longer existed. The British had destroyed it during the War of the Golden Stool in 1900, the uprising led by Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa after the British governor demanded the Ashanti surrender their most sacred object.

The museum's mission is stated plainly: to commemorate the Ashanti people's kings, queens, and leaders, and to communicate the riches of their history and culture to future generations. Inside, visitors find video presentations alongside tangible artifacts of Ashanti royalty. Life-sized wax effigies of former kings and queens stand in the rooms where two Asantehenes actually lived: Prempeh I, the 13th king, and Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, the 14th. The Asanteman's first television set is here too, a small artifact that anchors a large story about a kingdom navigating modernity. The museum was rehabilitated and reopened to the public on August 12, 1995, by Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, the 15th king, as part of his Silver Jubilee celebrations.

In May 2024, the museum reopened after months of closure with an exhibition that carried particular weight. Thirty-two Asante artifacts, held for decades in British collections, were loaned back to Manhyia by the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The occasion marked the Silver Jubilee of Otumfuo Osei Tutu II's ascension to the stool. For visitors, seeing these objects in their original context rather than behind glass in London offered something no exhibit label could provide: a sense of homecoming. The loan arrangement underscored both how far conversations about cultural repatriation have come and how far they still have to go. The objects were on loan, not returned. But for a time, they were home.

The Golden Stool threads through every story in this museum. Believed to have been conjured from the sky by the priest Okomfo Anokye, it is not a throne to be sat upon but the spiritual embodiment of the Ashanti nation's soul. The British never understood this. In 1900, when Governor Frederick Hodgson demanded to sit on it, he ignited the war that bears its name. The Ashanti lost the military conflict, and their leaders were exiled alongside Prempeh I. But the Golden Stool was never captured, never surrendered, never sat upon by a foreign power. It remains with the Ashanti to this day. Standing in the palace where Prempeh I finally came home, surrounded by the memory of what his people endured and what they refused to give up, the museum makes that persistence tangible.