Okomfo Anokye

Okomfo Anokye was the priest who is said to have called down the Golden Stool from the sky and so created the Asante nation, and he is known almost entirely through oral tradition rather than through documents. The tradition holds that he was born at Awukugua in Akuapem, trained as a priest, and became the counsellor of Osei Tutu, the ruler of the small state of Kumasi in the late seventeenth century. The Akan peoples of the forest were then divided among states paying tribute to Denkyira, and Osei Tutu's achievement was to unite them; Anokye's role was to give that union a sacred object and a constitution. At a gathering of the chiefs he is said to have brought a stool of gold out of the sky onto Osei Tutu's knees, and to have declared that it held the soul of the Asante people, so that the nation would live as long as the stool was safe. The chiefs each surrendered their own regalia to be buried, which is the political point of the story: they gave up the separate legitimacy of their states. He is also credited with the seventy-seven laws, the ordering of the Asante confederacy and the oath that binds the chiefs to Kumasi. The stool has never been sat on, and the war of 1900 began when the British governor Frederick Hodgson demanded to sit on it, which the Asante understood as a demand to extinguish the nation. Yaa Asantewaa led the rising that followed. The stool was hidden and rediscovered in 1920, and remains in Kumasi. Anokye is said to have gone in search of the secret of immortality and never returned, and his sword is still planted in the ground at Kumasi.

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