Ntim Gyakari
Ntim Gyakari was the king of Denkyira, the Akan state that ruled the forest north of the Gold Coast at the end of the seventeenth century, and the man whose defeat and death at Feyiase in 1701 made the Asante the power of the region for the next two hundred years. The Asante tradition remembers him as the tyrant whose demands provoked the war, and his golden ankle-ring, or the stool he sat on when he was killed, was among the regalia of Kumasi. Denkyira had risen in the 1660s by controlling the roads from the gold-bearing forest to the European forts at Elmina and Cape Coast, and the Asante clans around Kumasi were among its tributaries, sending gold, slaves and, the tradition says, the wives of their chiefs. Ntim Gyakari succeeded about 1694, young, and the tradition makes him arrogant: he is said to have demanded from the Asante chiefs a tribute of gold dust, their favourite wives and their heirs, and the priest Okomfo Anokye is said to have used the demand to bind the chiefs to Osei Tutu under the Golden Stool. What the European records show is a war that began in 1699, in which the Dutch at Elmina, who held Denkyira's trade, watched with alarm, and which ended in a battle at Feyiase, a few miles south of Kumasi, in 1701. The Denkyira army was drawn into the Asante country and destroyed. Ntim Gyakari, the story says, was playing a board game with a wife in his camp when the Asante reached him, and was beheaded. The Asante took the capital Abankeseso, the treasury, and the note, or the right, by which the Dutch had paid Denkyira rent for Elmina castle, which they then presented at the coast and were paid. Denkyira survived as a small state that would join every enemy of Asante for a century. The Asante kept the dead king's stool blackened in the mausoleum at Bantama, as they kept the trophies of every enemy they broke, and the day of Feyiase was the first the kingdom counted.
- Nationality: Akan
- Roles: king, monarch
