The Stool, the Festivals, and a Living Faith

Akan religion remains woven into the public and civic life of Akan communities today, even as most Akan people are also Christian or Muslim. The stool is its central sacred object of chieftaincy: a chief's blackened ancestral stool is the seat of the ancestors and of the community's soul, and its rites bind the living ruler to the dead.

Great festivals mark the ritual year, the Akwasidae, celebrated in the Ashanti cycle of forty-two days when the chief honours the ancestors, and the annual Odwira, a festival of purification, first-fruits and the renewal of the community and its bonds with the ancestral dead. These observances continue under the Asante and other traditional authorities alongside the churches and the mosque, so that Akan tradition persists less as a separate congregation than as the ritual and moral framework of chieftaincy, family and festival. It is a present, practised tradition, and is described here as such.