The Ashanti Empire

Before 1700 the Akan states of the forest lived under the yoke of Denkyira. That ended when Osei Tutu of Kumasi, guided by the priest Okomfo Anokye, united them in a confederacy sealed by a sacred symbol: the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi), said to have descended from the sky in 1701. At the Battle of Feyiase that year, the new Asante union crushed Denkyira and an empire was born.

Built on gold, kola trade and military organisation, Kumasi became one of Africa’s great cities — its streets, visitors reported, were wider and cleaner than many in Europe. The empire’s power brought it into repeated collision with Britain: a century of Anglo-Ashanti wars culminating in the 1874 sack of Kumasi and the exile of Asantehene Prempeh I in 1896.

The final act was heroic defiance. In 1900, when Governor Hodgson demanded the Golden Stool itself, Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa of Ejisu led the War of the Golden Stool — the last great anti-colonial war in the region. Defeated and exiled, she became a legend; the Stool itself was never surrendered. Ashanti was formally annexed in 1902, but the kingdom’s institutions — restored under Prempeh II in 1935 — endure today under Otumfuo Osei Tutu II.