Said to Have Descended From the Sky to Found a Nation

The Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, is held in Asante tradition to have descended from the sky and settled on the lap of Osei Tutu, the first Asantehene, in a founding act attributed to the priest and statesman Okomfo Anokye around the turn of the eighteenth century, an event Asante tradition treats not as a legend about a distant past but as the founding moment of the Asante union itself, the point at which previously separate Akan states became bound together as a single nation under a single stool.

Wilks' history of nineteenth century Asante political structure describes the stool as functioning, in Asante political theology, as the physical seat of the nation's soul, sunsum, rather than as a piece of royal furniture or a mere symbol of office in the way a crown might function elsewhere, which is why the object commands a form of reverence categorically different from the personal regalia of any individual Asantehene who has since reigned. Enstoolment ceremonies for a new Asantehene follow a fixed sequence in which the stool's presence, rather than any crown or written charter, is the act that confirms legitimate succession, making it functionally closer to a coronation object than a piece of court furniture.