The Stool That Made a Nation

Asante tradition places the founding of the union in a single ceremony. Osei Tutu had already drawn the small forest states around Kumasi into a military alliance when the priest Okomfo Anokye is said to have brought down a stool of gold from the sky, which settled on the ruler's knees. The object was named Sika Dwa Kofi, the Golden Stool born on a Friday, and it was declared to contain the sunsum of the Asante people, the spirit that makes them one nation rather than a set of allied towns.

Stools already carried this meaning in Akan practice at the level of the household and the town, where a blackened ancestral stool holds the presence of the lineage dead. What the founding ceremony did was raise that logic to the scale of a state. Because the stool is the vessel of a collective soul it is not furniture and not a throne.

No one sits on it, and the Asantehene at his installation is lowered towards it and raised again without touching it. It is kept apart, has its own regalia and its own attendants, and is brought out only on the greatest occasions. Osei Tutu's authority followed from being its custodian rather than from occupying a seat. The consequence for Asante political life was long-lasting: a war fought over the stool was a war fought over the nation's soul, which is how a single object came to matter far beyond the century that produced it.