Asante Empire

Osei Tutu welded a cluster of rival Akan states into a single empire around 1701, sealing the union with the Golden Stool that his priest Okomfo Anokye is said to have called down from the sky as the soul of the Asante nation. The defeat of the overlord state Denkyira at Feyiase that same year opened the way south toward the coast, the gold, and the Atlantic trade. Asante sat on some of the richest goldfields in West Africa — plentiful enough that Europeans named the shoreline the Gold Coast — and its smiths cast crowns, badges, and regalia by the lost-wax method from the capital at Kumasi. Disciplined armies pushed the empire’s reach across the forest interior, and through the nineteenth century Asante fought Britain in a long run of wars. In the third of them, in 1874, General Garnet Wolseley’s column reached Kumasi, looted the royal treasury, and burned the palace, yet the empire was not finished.

The end came over the Golden Stool itself. In 1896 the British deposed and exiled the Asantehene Prempeh I; in 1900 Governor Frederick Hodgson stood at Kumasi and demanded to sit on the stool. Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, led the last rising, the War of the Golden Stool, with a force of about 5,000; the siege of the British fort failed, she was captured in 1901 and exiled to the Seychelles, and Britain formally annexed Asante on 26 September 1901, folding it into the Gold Coast colony on 1 January 1902. The sovereign empire ended there. The Asante people did not, and neither did the throne: Ghana, independent in 1957, still recognises an Asantehene who reigns from Manhyia Palace in Kumasi over a traditional kingdom — a ceremonial and cultural office, not a state. The Golden Stool survives, never taken. As with the Hawaiian and Zulu kingdoms in this museum, the crown that endures is tradition; the power that ruled is gone.