Asante

Asante religion places a remote creator, Nyame, above a body of lesser deities, the abosom, who are approached through priests and understood to derive their power from him. Kwame Gyekye's account of Akan thought sets out the anthropology that accompanies this. A person is composed of okra, the soul given by Nyame and returning to him, sunsum, the personality or spirit, and mogya, the blood inherited through the mother, which makes the matrilineal clan a religious fact and not only a social one.

The ancestors, the nsamanfo, are the nearest of the powers and the most constantly addressed. Libation opens any serious gathering, and the blackened ancestral stools kept in the stool house are the seat of a lineage's continuity rather than furniture. The Adae ceremonies, falling on a cycle set by the forty two day adaduanan calendar, are the occasions on which those stools are attended.

Above all of them stands the Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, which Asante tradition holds was brought down from the sky by the priest Okomfo Anokye for the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu, and which contains the soul of the nation. It is not a throne and is never sat upon. The British demand in 1900 that a colonial governor be permitted to sit on it produced a war, which is the plainest evidence available of what the object is understood to be.

The Asante union was formed at the end of the seventeenth century when Osei Tutu brought a group of Akan states together against Denkyira. Ivor Wilks's study of the nineteenth century state describes what followed as a genuine administrative structure rather than a loose confederacy: a capital at Kumasi, appointed officials, a road system measured in days of travel, and a bureaucracy keeping accounts in gold dust.

Religion and government were not separable within it. The Asantehene is the occupant of the Golden Stool, the Adae and the annual Odwira festival were state occasions as much as religious ones, and the removal of a chief who failed in his duties was a procedure the system provided for rather than a rupture of it.

Four wars with Britain across the nineteenth century ended in the annexation of the territory in 1902 and the exile of Asantehene Prempeh I, first to Sierra Leone and then to the Seychelles. He was returned in 1924, and the Asante Confederacy was formally restored in 1935. The office continues today within the Republic of Ghana, holding no sovereign power but real authority in land, chieftaincy disputes and custom, and the funeral of an Asantehene remains one of the largest religious gatherings in West Africa. Christianity and Islam are now widely held alongside the older observances rather than in place of them.