The Priest Who Brought Down the Stool

Asante oral tradition places Okomfo Anokye beside Osei Tutu at the founding of the Asante union, in the years around 1697 to 1701 when the constituent Akan chiefdoms of the region around Kumasi were drawn together under a single rule strong enough to face the Denkyira state that had previously dominated them. The tradition holds that Anokye, acting as priest and oracle, caused the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, to descend from the sky in a black cloud amid thunder and settle onto the knees of Osei Tutu before the assembled chiefs, and that he declared the stool to hold the sunsum, the soul, of the whole Asante people rather than of any one ruler or lineage. Where each chiefdom had previously held its own stool as the seat of its own ancestors and authority, the Golden Stool was presented as belonging to no single office holder, not even the Asantehene, who does not sit on it; it is displayed only on its own side chair on the greatest state occasions.

The historian Ivor Wilks, working from both oral testimony and the documentary record that begins to thicken in the eighteenth century, treats the stool's creation less as a single dramatic event to be verified than as the origin charter the Asante union told about itself, an account that did the real work of persuading previously independent chiefdoms to accept a shared symbol of unity under Osei Tutu's rule.