Okomfo Anokye

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.

Beyond the stool itself, Asante tradition credits Okomfo Anokye with a wider program of statecraft carried out in ritual form. He is remembered as having planted several sacred trees at sites including Kumasi and Kumawu at the time of the union's founding, among them one that tradition says he declared would stand exactly as long as the Asante state itself endured, so that the health of the tree became a recognized omen for the health of the nation, checked and discussed across later generations. He is also credited with laying out the ceremonial and administrative structure of the new capital at Kumasi and with reorganizing Asante military and political institutions to knit the formerly separate chiefdoms into a working union capable of defeating Denkyira in 1701, achievements the oral tradition folds into his identity as priest rather than separating out as ordinary politics.

Because almost everything known about Anokye survives through oral historiography recorded generations after the events it describes, historians read his story carefully rather than literally; Ivor Wilks's study of nineteenth century Asante treats the Anokye tradition as a genuine and valuable historical source in its own right, evidence of how the Asante state legitimized its own authority, even where the supernatural specifics of any single episode cannot be independently confirmed. The Golden Stool itself, which the British demand to sit upon in 1900 helped provoke the war led by Yaa Asantewaa, remains in Asante custody today, still treated as living rather than as an historical relic, which is the clearest surviving proof of how completely Anokye's founding ritual took hold.