Asante Empire

A West African state founded on a stool that fell from the sky, which was a constitutional idea rather than a story about furniture. Osei Tutu unified the Akan chiefdoms around 1701, and the priest Okomfo Anokye is said to have called down a golden stool containing the soul of the nation - an object that made the union permanent rather than personal, since loyalty was to the stool rather than to any king. The empire grew rich on gold from its own soil and on selling war captives into the Atlantic trade, and built a capital at Kumasi with paved streets and a bureaucracy that European visitors described with surprise. It maintained a road network, a postal system of runners, and an army that could field tens of thousands. Five wars with Britain ran across the nineteenth century; in 1824 Asante forces destroyed a British column and killed the governor. Britain sacked Kumasi in 1874 and exiled the Asantehene in 1896. The War of the Golden Stool in 1900 began when a governor demanded to sit on it - nobody ever had. Yaa Asantewaa led that rising. The stool has never been captured. Kumasi remains the Asante capital and the second city of Ghana. The empire was founded around 1701 and annexed in 1902. Kente cloth patterns were originally reserved for royalty. The Asantehene remains a recognised traditional authority under the Ghanaian constitution. Adinkra symbols encode proverbs and are still used in design across Ghana and beyond, printed with carved calabash stamps.

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