Ever since the founding of the Akan state of Asante at the end of the seventeenth century, the Golden Stool had fulfilled a crucial role in national life. Akan chiefs had hitherto acted as the guardians of ceremonial wooden stools which were used as a symbol of their authority and the well-being of their peoples. The stools were said to contain the spirit or soul – the sunsum – of Akan communities. But when contemplating how to bind together Akan chiefdoms into the Asante kingdom in the 1690s, Osei Tutu introduced a Golden Stool – the Sika Dwa – to represent the spiritual unity of the Akan people and to signify their sovereignty. ‘This is the sunsum of a new Asante nation,’ the king’s high priest declared. ‘If it is ever captured or destroyed, then just as a man sickens and dies without his soul, so will the Asante lose their power and disintegrate into chaos.’ The Golden Stool – a curved wooden seat encased in gold and hung with bells – was accorded its own Chair of State, shaded by its own palanquin and attended by its own acolytes.
A succession of thirteen kings – Asantehene – were enstooled at elaborate ceremonies in the capital, Kumasi, at which the Golden Stool featured as the embodiment of the nation. But then, in one of those incidents that peppered Europe’s occupation of Africa, a British official demanded that the Golden Stool be surrendered to the British. What followed was known as the War of the Golden Stool. For the British, it was just another tiresome conflict. For the Asante, it was the final struggle to retain their independence.
At the height of its power in the early nineteenth century, the Asante empire encompassed an inner core of six metropolitan chiefdoms centred on Kumasi and an outer circle of other Akan-speaking provinces and tributary states that stretched from the savanna regions of the north to coastal ports in the south. A system of ‘great roads’ kept Kumasi linked to all corners of the empire.
Asante was essentially a military society with a military ethos, able to put into the field up to 80,000 men. It owed allegiance to the Asantehene, but the power of the king was not absolute. As well as an inner council of advisers, both the Asantehene and the chiefs or lesser kings participated in a national assembly. There was no single royal family. The asantehene was chosen from a group of eligible matrilineal candidates by the Queen Mother and prominent chiefs, a system that limited the dangers of succession disputes. Prominent features of Asante rule included frequent executions and rituals of human sacrifice.
The empire was served by an effective bureaucracy that used the skills of literate Muslims from the north. Officials were often appointed by merit rather than by birth. The wealth that underpinned the empire came from both agriculture and gold-mining. Most gold was produced by slave labour. Some gold mines were owned directly by the asantehene and operated by his agents. Others were owned by Akan chiefs who paid taxes to the state. Akan peasants also washed alluvial gold from rivers. Gold dust was used as a medium of exchange. Every man of substance carried scales and gold weights. Even bananas were priced in gold dust.
The opulence of the Asante dazzled European visitors. In 1817, Thomas Bowdich, an official of the African Company of Merchants, set out from Cape Coast Castle on a mission to make contact with Osei Bonsu. After crossing the coastal plain of Fante, he entered the dense gloom of the tropical rainforest and three weeks later arrived at Kumasi, 140 miles to the north. Some 30,000 people gathered to witness his entry and to watch an exuberant welcome of martial music, gunfire and dancing.
Bowdich described Kumasi as a well-planned city with wide, named streets, carefully planted banyan trees and a distinctive style of architecture. Houses were built with high-pitched thatched roofs, projecting eaves, complicated plaster fretwork and ornaments of animals and birds; many were furnished with lavatories that were flushed with boiling water. Streets were swept every day and kept clean. The palace complex in the centre of the city covered five acres and consisted of a maze of interconnected courtyards and passages. It housed a number of administrative departments such as the treasury and the asantehene’s personal rooms and harem.
Taken to an audience with the king, Bowdich passed through a vast throng of courtiers and officials standing beneath huge umbrellas, dressed in fine kente cloth and silks and wearing an array of golden ornaments.
An area of nearly a mile in circumference was crowded with magnificence and novelty. The king, his tributaries, and captains, were resplendent in the distance, surrounded by attendants of every description . . . The sun was reflected . . . from the massive gold ornaments which glistened in every direction . . .
Introduced to Osei Bonsu, Bowdich found him an impressive figure. ‘His manners were majestic, yet courteous.’ After several months of negotiations and debate, Osei Bonsu signed a treaty agreeing to promote trade with the British at Cape Coast Castle.
Life in Kumasi became increasingly urbane. Foreign visitors brought the asantehene many gifts: plumed hats, gilt mirrors, four-poster beds, flags, magic lanterns, clocks. In 1841, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, Thomas Freeman, came with a European carriage drawn by human labour. Freeman was invited to a sumptuous dinner at the palace at which the asantehene, Kwaku Dua, wore an elegant brown velvet suit with silver lace, a white linen shirt, white satin trousers and a silk sash around his waist. Dinner was accompanied by a band of musicians, trained by the Dutch at Elmina, wearing blue dress uniforms trimmed with red, and equipped with flutes, clarinets, French horns and drums. During his visit, Freeman went to visit the asantehene’s stone-built Palace of Culture to view his collection of arts and crafts. ‘We entered a court yard, ascended a flight of stone steps, and passed through an ante-room into a small hall, in which were tastefully arranged on tables thirty-one gold-handled swords.’
For much of the nineteenth century, the British in their trading forts on the coast remained on amicable terms with the Asante empire. There were numerous disputes and several bouts of warfare, but also prolonged periods of peaceful trade. In 1843, the British government took steps to take over from a Committee of Merchants direct responsibility for the administration of the settlements on the Gold Coast, asking each settlement to sign a ‘bond’ authorising a British governor to act for it in certain judicial matters. The area under Crown Rule became known as the British Protected Territory. But the ‘bonds’ left unresolved the issue of sovereignty over what had previously been acknowledged as the southern provinces of the Asante empire. The British came to regard Asante as an expansionist power, seeking to extend its control over the Fante population and coastal trade. The Asante, for their part, were determined to preserve the integrity of the empire and ensure access to coastal ports.
The issue of sovereignty erupted in 1872 when the Dutch negotiated to sell their fort at Elmina to the British in defiance of the claims of the Asante. The Dutch had paid rent to the Asante every year since 1702. Moreover, the treaty signed by Bowdich and the Asante in 1817 had recognised Asante overlordship of the settlement there. ‘The fort of that place have from time immemorial paid annual tribute to my ancestors to the present time by right of arms,’ declared the asantehene, Kofi Kakari. ‘It is mine by right.’ Nevertheless, the sale went through.
At a meeting of the national assembly, the Asantemanhyiamu voted to go to war. In January 1873, an Asante army crossed the Pra River which marked the southern boundary of metropolitan Asante and established a forward base only five miles from the British headquarters at Cape Coast Castle; two other armies were sent to the south. By October 1873, however, a peace party at Kumasi had gained a majority in the Asantemanhyiamu and the invasion force was ordered to withdraw back across the Pra River.
The British response to the invasion was to assemble an expeditionary force of 4,500 men under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley. Although the Asante armies had withdrawn by the time it arrived in Cape Coast, Wolseley was determined to show what British military might could achieve. ‘King Coffee is too rich a neighbour to be left alone with his riches,’ observed the journalist Henry Stanley, who accompanied the expedition. The first columns left Cape Coast in December 1873 and reached the Pra River in January 1874. After attempts at a negotiated settlement failed, British forces advanced towards Kumasi. South of the capital, they encountered fierce resistance. When they finally entered Kumasi, the city was largely deserted. The asantehene and the bulk of his army had retreated, taking with them the Golden Stool, but leaving behind a palace still filled with a huge amount of treasure. The palace was plundered, then blown up; the stone-built Palace of Culture was also destroyed; royal tombs were desecrated; and the rest of the city was set ablaze. Leaving Kumasi an inferno, Wolseley led his force back to the coast.
Apart from demanding an indemnity of 50,000 ounces of gold, the British then left the Asante government largely to its own devices. Its military power had been broken. It descended into a period of internal turmoil, plagued by dissension and years of civil war. Its former coastal provinces were incorporated by the British into the Gold Coast Colony, administered from headquarters at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, which the British had purchased from the departing Danes in 1851.
But then another threat to Asante’s independence emerged during Europe’s scramble for Africa. Worried about French activities on Asante’s western borders and German activities to the east, the British in 1890 tried to persuade Asantehene Agyeman Prempe to accept British protection. Prempe, however, declined the offer:
The suggestion that Ashanti in its present state should come and enjoy the protection of Her Majesty the Queen and Empress of India I may say this is a matter of very serious consideration, and which I am happy to say that we have arrived at this conclusion, that my kingdom of Ashanti will never commit itself to such a policy; Ashanti must remain independent as of old, at the same time to remain friendly with all white men.
The British government countered in 1894 with a proposal that Prempe should receive a British Resident at Kumasi in return for stipends for himself and his leading chiefs. But Prempe and the Asantemanhyiamu rejected the idea. In 1895, when reports reached London that Prempe was trying to forge an alliance with Samori in neighbouring Bonduku, the British government took a more aggressive approach and sent an ultimatum to Prempe to accept a British Resident and demanded payment in full of the war indemnity of 1874. In December, a British expeditionary force landed at the Cape Coast. When news reached Kumasi, the Golden Stool and other valuables were taken away and hidden. Rather than fight another war, Prempe made no attempt to oppose the invading army. He was duly taken prisoner and sent into exile.
The British built a fort at Kumasi and posted a British Resident there, but they had no real claim to authority over metropolitan Asante. Resentment over British occupation and the forced exile of the asantehene continued to fester. In an attempt to bolster their legitimacy as rulers, the British began to search for the Golden Stool, believing that by capturing it, they would enhance their claim of sovereignty. As Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain subsequently explained to parliament in London: ‘In the opinion of the tribe, and according to the custom of the tribe, the possession of the Stool gives supremacy . . . Therefore it was of the greatest importance to get hold of this symbol of sovereignty, if we could possibly do it.’
Determined to break Asante resistance once and for all, the governor of the Gold Coast Colony, Sir Frederick Hodgson, travelled to Kumasi in March 1900 to tell a gathering of chiefs and nobles that Agyeman Prempe would never be allowed to return to Asante. In a show of discourtesy, he remained seated on a chair, telling them: ‘The paramount authority of Ashanti is now the great Queen of England.’ He also insisted that war reparations would have to be paid. And then he demanded that the Golden Stool be surrendered to the British authorities. ‘The Queen is entitled to the Stool; she must receive it,’ he said. According to African translators, he went on: ‘Where is the Golden Stool? I am the representative of the Paramount Power. Why have you relegated me to this ordinary chair? Why did you not take the opportunity of my coming to Kumasi to bring the Golden Stool for me to sit down?’
Despite the insults, the Asante chiefs remained composed, listening in silence. But within hours they met in secret to decide on war. Three days after Hodgson’s piece of provocation, he found himself under siege in Kumasi, along with an assortment of British troops, African auxiliaries, missionaries and their wives. It took eight months for British forces to fully subdue the Asante uprising. Asante was then annexed ‘by right of conquest’ and ruled by governors from the Gold Coast Colony. An Order in Council on 26 September 1901 stated: ‘The territories in West Africa . . . heretofore known as Ashanti have been conquered by His Majesty’s forces, and it has seemed expedient to His Majesty that the said territories should be annexed to and should henceforth form part of His Majesty’s dominions.’ A cannon was fired in Kumasi at noon every day to remind its residents of Britain’s occupation. The Golden Stool remained hidden.