Around 1700 the Asante kingdom united the inland Akan states under Osei Tutu, and tradition holds that his priest Okomfo Anokye called the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, down from the sky to rest on the knees of the new king: not a throne to be sat upon but the vessel of the soul of the whole Asante nation. Ivor Wilks' history of nineteenth century Asante shows a sophisticated state ruling from Kumasi through roads, tribute and diplomacy, its power felt from the savanna to the coast. Ancestral stools, blackened and fed at the Akwasidae festivals, made the same theology of seat and soul work at every level of society.
The British fought Asante through the nineteenth century and exiled its king in 1896; when the governor demanded to sit on the Golden Stool in 1900, the queen mother of Ejisu, Yaa Asantewaa, led the war that followed. The stool itself was never surrendered, and the Asante monarchy, restored in 1935, continues today within the Republic of Ghana.
Adinkra symbols are the Akan's most traveled inheritance. Stamped in black on funeral cloth, each condenses a proverb: Gye Nyame, the supremacy of God; Sankofa, the bird reaching back for what was left behind, teaching that it is no shame to return and fetch it; Adinkrahene, the concentric chief of symbols. W. Bruce Willis' dictionary catalogues scores of them, and they now mark buildings, books and bodies across Ghana and the diaspora, a visual language of Akan thought.