Opoku Ware I

Opoku Ware I was born around 1700 and succeeded Osei Tutu I as the second Asantehene around 1720 — three years after Osei Tutu's death in battle in 1717. He reigned for approximately thirty years.

His reign was the period of greatest territorial expansion in Asante imperial history. He conducted successful military campaigns against the Akwamu state to the south (1731), the Akyem Kotoku to the east (1742), the Aowin to the southwest (1715, before his accession but on his behalf as field commander), and the Bono-Mansu to the northwest. By the end of his reign in 1750 the Asante Empire encompassed approximately one hundred and forty thousand square miles — substantially larger than the present-day Republic of Ghana — and included the principal gold-producing zones of the West African forest, the kola-nut producing regions, and the trans-Saharan trade nodes at Salaga and Wenchi.

He centralized Asante imperial administration along the lines Osei Tutu and Okomfo Anokye had begun. He instituted the Adamfo system — through which conquered provinces were placed under the formal sponsorship of a particular Kumasi chief who took responsibility for their tribute, military levy, and diplomatic relations. He systematized the death-tax (Awunnyade) and the tribute-tax (Apeato) that funded the imperial treasury. He commissioned the building of the Manhyia Palace at Kumasi.

He died around 1750 of natural causes — among the very few Asantehene to do so. His successor Kusi Obodom inherited an empire whose framework would survive, in successively contracted forms, until the British conquest of 1900 and into the post-colonial Republic of Ghana that retained the Asantehene throne as a traditional institution.

He is honored here as the second Asantehene, under whom the Asante Empire reached its greatest extent.