A Union of States, and Its Chieftaincy Today

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.