Museum Elmina

At the recent MuseumsLab session in Rotterdam organised by Museum Rotterdam, our founder Michael Kunke shared how Museum Elmina uses visuals to tell difficult histories, sensitively and powerfully, drawing on his experience as a tour guide and cultural heritage documentary maker.

He spoke about our ongoing digital heritage project and how we’re bringing new technologies, from AI-generated visuals to 360° virtual tours, into the museum space to reach a new generation the Gen Z’s who are tech-inclined and drawn to fast-paced, engaging visuals, and that’s exactly where we’re meeting them: building genuine interest in museums and in preserving our culture and heritage.

This weekend, our digital heritage team spent time at the Dutch Cemetery in Elmina, using the Insta360 X5 to capture imagery for the Museum Elmina virtual tour.

The cemetery was built in 1806 on the order of Johannes Petrus Hoogenboom, then Governor of the Dutch Gold Coast who, in an ironic turn, became one of the first people buried there himself after he was killed in Elmina two years later.

Two centuries of weather have left many of the marble tombstones difficult to read. One belongs to Carel Hendrik Bartels (1792–1850), a judge and merchant at Elmina and a son of one of the coast's prominent Euro-African families.

Another marks Adriaan Isaac Runckel, born in Hoogezand in the Netherlands in 1817, who served as an Assistant in the Dutch Establishments on the Coast of Guinea and died here at Elmina in 1851, aged just 34.

Where the inscriptions had nearly faded into the stone, we used AI to enhance the images and recover the text names, dates, and titles brought back into legibility.

Side by side, these two stones tell a fuller story than either does alone: one a locally rooted Euro-African family of the coast, the other a young official who travelled from a small Dutch town to die far from home. Both are part of Elmina's layered past.

This is part of our ongoing work to document the history of Elmina and bring it to a wider audience. It's a reminder of what's possible when AI works as an assistant to the historian rather than a replacement: helping us read the past more clearly and carry these stories into the present.

By June 1873, Nana Kobina Gyan I, was already in Sierra Leone, far from Elmina, with no way of knowing what was about to happen to the city he had refused to betray. For centuries the Asante had viewed Elmina not only as allies but as blood relations, and any attempt to bring that city under British control would be resisted. And in the hills around that same city, the Asante garrison was already close enough to hear the tensions from the town.

The Asante had never accepted that Elmina could simply be handed from one European power to another like a parcel. For generations, Elmina had been their gateway to the sea the route through which their goods, their gold and their trade reached the wider world. When the Dutch signed Elmina away to the British without so much as a conversation, the Asante saw it for what it was, an attempt to cut them off from the coast entirely, by people who had never been asked whether they had the right to do so. So they marched, and by now their camp was close enough that the smoke from the town was visible from where they stood.

News travels even when armies are watching each other across hills and forests. A spy in Cape Coast had confirmed it, the king had been moved, Cape Coast to Sierra Leone. Kobina Gyan was gone, and Elmina was now without the one man who had stood in that castle and refused to bend. For the Asante commanders, this changed everything about how fast they needed to move.
Inside the command tent of Bantamahene General Amankwatia, the mood was tense. The British had declared martial law in Elmina, their window to act was closing fast. One of the generals, looking over the map spread before them, said what everyone in that tent already knew. The British could not be trusted. They moved like a net closing in, not like a spear thrown in a single direction. Whatever the Asante intended to do, they needed to be smarter than that net, and they needed to do it soon.

Next: the net closes, and Elmina pays the price.

Dawn came over Elmina on 13 March 1873 with the HMS Seagull already waiting in the bay.

Word had spread through the night the way word always spreads in a city that small, house to house, street to street, until by the time the soldiers brought Nana Kobina Gyan I out, the waterfront was already full. Men, women, children, elders, the people of Elmina pressed forward against a wall of British rifles they had no way through. Release our king!!! They have no right. We want our king back!!!. The soldiers did not move and the ship did not wait, and there was nothing anyone on that shore could do about any of it.

But before they took him to the water, Harley gave him one thing, a moment to speak to his people. And standing there on those steps, surrounded by soldiers, about to be shipped off to a prison in Cape Coast and then exile in Sierra Leone, Nana Kobina Gyan I did not use that moment to ask for sympathy. He used it to explain himself. The governor had offered him a large sum of money, he told them, to let the transfer go on smoothly and peaceably. He had refused. And the reason he refused, in his own words, still on record today was that had he taken it, the chiefs would have turned round on him afterwards and said he sold the country for money. He had understood exactly what accepting that bribe would mean for how his people would remember him. He chose exile over that.

Then they took him to the water.

By custom, a king of the Edina people does not cry in public. It is one of the things that marks him as king. That particular weight carried alone, behind the face the world sees. But standing there on that waterfront, looking out at the faces of his people with the soldiers at his back and the Seagull waiting behind him, something gave way. A single tear ran down his face. His people saw it and never forgot it. The Edina people swore the Third Ntam, the Third Great Oath in his memory. Nana Kobina Gyan Ne Nyinsuwa. The Tears of Nana Kobina Gyan I. That oath is still kept in Elmina to this day.

Next: three months later, the British came back. This time with cannons.

There is a moment in that room when everything changes.
The document has been on that table long enough. Kobina Gyan looks at it, then at Harley, then out of those tall windows at the town below, his town, his people going about their morning completely unaware of what is happening in this room above them. He gets up from that chair, and his fist comes down on the table hard enough that the oil lamp shakes and the papers scatter. And when he speaks, his voice does not waver once.
I am not afraid of your power. You may hang me if you like. I will not sign any paper.

These are his exact words. Recorded that same morning by Hendrik Vroom, the young British customs official who was in that room taking the minutes. Written down because even the British understood that what they were witnessing was something they needed to document. A king, in the castle his people had lived beside for over 300 years, looking the most powerful empire on earth in the face and telling them they could hang him if they wanted. He was not going to sign.

And then he said something else. Something that told Harley exactly how long this resistance had been building and how deep it ran. We have taken oath to oppose the English coming to Elmina, he said. That oath is not broken.

Harley had heard enough. The finger came up. Seize him!!!
Kobina Gyan did not run. He did not beg. He stood exactly where he was and let them come, because a man who has already decided he would rather hang than sign has nothing left to fear from anyone in that room.

Next — they put him on a ship