Osei Tutu I

Osei Kofi Tutu I was born in Kokofu, in the Akan forest of what is now Ghana, around 1660, the nephew of the chief of Kumasi. He spent his early years at the court of the Denkyira state — the dominant Akan power of the late seventeenth century — to which his Kwaman clan paid tribute.

He returned to Kumasi around 1680 and inherited the chiefdom shortly thereafter. With the priest Okomfo Anokye he conducted the political and religious work that unified the surrounding Akan chiefdoms of Mampong, Nsuta, Bekwai, Kokofu, Juaben, and Kumawu into the Asante Confederacy. The unification ceremony at Kumasi around 1701 produced the Sika Dwa Kofi — the Golden Stool — which Okomfo Anokye is said by Asante oral tradition to have called down from the sky. The Stool became and remains the spiritual seat of Asante nationhood: it contains, in Asante religious understanding, the soul of the Asante people; no human being may sit upon it.

In 1701 the new Asante Confederacy defeated Denkyira at the Battle of Feyiase, ending the Denkyira hegemony over the central Akan forest. The defeat established Asante as the dominant power of the region and opened the trans-Atlantic gold and slave trade to direct Asante negotiation with European powers at the coast.

He died in 1717 in a battle against the Akyem state at the Pra River. The Asante Empire he founded would expand across the next two centuries to encompass most of modern Ghana and substantial parts of Côte d'Ivoire and Togo, and would resist British colonial conquest more successfully than any other West African polity.

He is honored here as the founder of the Asante Empire and the convener of the Golden Stool.