Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

This is the fifth floor.

The fifth floor, you knowsson.

This is the fifth floor at Farnak Amidi Sobath. This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all

around the world. I'm your host, Faranak Amidi.

I guess it's not every day that you end up offending a king, but let's say you did.

Would you know how to apologize to him?

Recently in Ghana, a journalist made some comments on television about the king of the Asante tribe,

and soon she found herself at his palace apologizing.

But the whole thing didn't go down very well.

Daniel Dadzea, BBC Africa is from Ghana, and I spoke to him to find out about the protocols

and what went wrong with the apology.

So the Asante tribe or the Ashanti tribe, it's one of the largest tribes in Ghana, has a very rich history, one of the most respected tribes in the country.

So there's an interesting fact about the Ashanti's.

The symbol of the Ashanti kingdom is the stool that the king sits on and it's made of gold.

So it's called the golden stool.

There's a bit of law that it actually came from heaven.

And it's settled on the knees of the first chief of the Ashanti tribe.

It was said that whoever has the golden stool is actually the overlord of the Ashanti's.

So when they finally, after a series of wars, lost against the British, the British demanded

the golden stool, but they gave them a fake.

So as a result, the Ashantis believed they were actually never colonized.

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