The Ashanti Empire

What it covers

1. Osei Tutu and the Golden Stool In the late 1600s the Akan state of Kwaman, under Osei Tutu, broke free of the overlordship of Denkyira. With his adviser, the priest Okomfo Anokye, he united the surrounding Akan states into a confederation. Tradition says Anokye commanded the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi) down from the sky to rest on Osei Tutu's knees: it embodies the soul of the nation and no one, not even the king, sits on it. The confederation defeated Denkyira at the battle of Feyiase around 1701, the usual date for the empire's founding.
2. How the empire was run The Asantehene ruled from Kumasi with a council of chiefs and a growing class of appointed officials, including treasury, trade and diplomatic posts, which made the state more bureaucratic than most of its neighbours. Conquered states kept their own chiefs but paid tribute and sent soldiers. A network of roads radiated from Kumasi, and the Asante used a sophisticated system of weights for gold dust as currency. Under Osei Kwadwo (ruled 1764 to 1777) promotion by merit, not only by birth, became the norm for many offices, a reform historians call the "Kwadwoan revolution".
3. Gold, kola and the trade routes Asante wealth came from gold mines, kola nuts sold north to the Sahel, and control of trade between the forest and the coast. Northward routes connected to trans-Saharan trade; southward routes ran to the European forts on the Gold Coast, where gold, ivory and, in the 1700s and early 1800s, enslaved people were exchanged for guns, cloth and metal. Control of these routes was the main reason for Asante expansion toward the coast and the main source of conflict with the Fante states and the British.
4. The Anglo-Asante wars Asante and Britain fought five wars between 1824 and 1900. In the first, Asante forces killed the British governor Sir Charles MacCarthy at Nsamankow (1824). In 1874 a British expedition under Garnet Wolseley burned Kumasi. In 1896 the Asantehene Prempeh I was deposed and exiled to the Seychelles without a fight. In 1900 the governor Frederick Hodgson demanded to sit on the Golden Stool; the queen mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa, led the war that followed, which ended with Asante annexed as a British colony in 1902.
5. Asante today The Asante Kingdom continues inside the Republic of Ghana as a traditional state. The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II since 1999, presides from the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi and is one of the most influential traditional rulers in Africa. Kente cloth, Adinkra symbols, the Akwasidae festival and the Golden Stool remain central to Asante identity, and Kumasi is Ghana's second largest city.