Kumasi

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On the closing Sunday of a forty-two-day month, the forecourt at Manhyia fills before the heat does. State umbrellas turn slowly above the chiefs, each canopy a different color, each spinning to a private rhythm. The great fontomfrom drums answer the smaller talking drums, and the drummers are not keeping time but speaking — reciting, in the tonal grammar of Twi, the praise-names and the roll of the dead kings. The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, comes out under the largest umbrella, his arms and neck heavy with cast and beaten gold, and takes his seat. Chiefs file past in order of precedence to greet him; ordinary subjects are allowed, at this one rite, to come near and shake his hand. Somewhere in the palace, never carried into the crowd on an ordinary Adae, rests the object all of this is arranged around. This is Akwasidae, and it recurs eight or nine times a year, and it is the reason Kumasi is not merely the second city of Ghana but a sacred one.

Under the kum tree

The name is a compression. In Twi it is Kumase — kum, the kum tree, plus ase, “under” — the place under the kum. The tree in question was one that the priest and councillor Okomfo Anokye is said to have planted in the founding generation of the Asante union, and the planting is remembered as a wager. In the oral tradition kept at Kumasi, Anokye set kum seeds at rival sites and let the trees decide the capital: at Kwaman the seedling took and flourished, and there the metropolis rose as Kumase, “under the kum”; at Kumawu the tree withered, and the name is read back as kum-wu, “the kum died.” Whether the etymology is history or a story told to fit the outcome, it is the kind of charter a place tells about itself, and it is worth marking as tradition rather than dated fact — the Akan kept no alphabetic record before the coast, and the founding reaches the page through oral memory and, later, through the notebooks of European visitors.

The founder in that tradition is Osei Kofi Tutu I, first Asantehene, who around the 1680s made the Oyoko settlement on the Kwaman plateau his capital and, with Anokye, welded the surrounding Twi-speaking towns into a single nation. He must be held apart from the monarch of the same stool-name who reigns today: the living Asantehene enstooled in 1999 is Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, born Nana Barima Kwaku Duah, the sixteenth occupant of the Golden Stool — a different man across three centuries, sharing a throne-name and nothing of the seventeenth-century biography. The rise of the state that Kumasi capitals belongs to the Asante empire; what concerns the city is the town that grew up as its seat.

Kumasi sits in the moist semi-deciduous forest belt of southern-central Ghana, at roughly 250 to 300 meters above sea level, about 200 kilometers northwest of Accra, and it is the capital of the Ashanti Region and the seat, still, of the Asantehene. It did not sprawl into being; it was laid out. The English envoy Thomas Edward Bowdich, who reached the city with a Cape Coast mission in 1817 and published his account two years later, described a planned royal town of broad, named streets — four principal avenues about half a mile long and up to a hundred yards wide, some twenty-seven streets in his day, each under a “superior captain” answerable for it. The town was organized into wards, by tradition seventy-seven of them, and the wards were occupational: goldsmiths in one, umbrella-makers in another, and so through the crafts and offices that a court requires. The palace quarter held the eastern side behind its wall; to the northwest lay Bantama, the mausoleum suburb where the remains of dead Asantehenes were kept; and a ring of subordinate towns fed the capital. Around this order today lives a metropolis: the 2021 census returned 443,981 people in the city proper and about 3.49 million in the wider Kumasi built-up area, making it the largest urban center in Ghana after the capital.

What the city keeps

A sacred city is defined by what it holds and what it stages, and Kumasi holds a great deal in a small compass. Its living center is Manhyia, the palace that is both the seat of office and the residence of the Asantehene. Within the Asantehene’s custody at Manhyia rests the Sika Dwa Kofi — the Golden Stool “born on a Friday,” named for the day of the week on which the Akan reckon it came. It is not a throne to be sat upon; it is understood as the sunsum, the soul, of the Asante nation, a person rather than a possession. No one sits on it, not even the king, who has his own black stool; it is never allowed to touch the bare ground; it is brought into public view only at the very greatest occasions and not at an ordinary Adae; and the place where it rests is restricted, known to few. What the stool means — how an object can carry the collective soul of a people, and why a demand to sit on it could bring on a war — belongs to the account of the Asante empire and of Akan religion. What belongs to the city is the plain fact of custody: that this is where it lives, guarded, and this is where, on the rare day, it is shown.

The Manhyia Palace at Kumasi, seat and residence of the Asantehene and, since 1995, a museum of the Asante monarchy. Dan Sloan, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The city’s ritual pulse is the Adae cycle, and to understand it one has to reckon by the Akan calendar rather than the Gregorian. The Akan year is divided into nine periods, each running roughly forty to forty-two days; within every one of those periods fall two Adae observances — Awukudae on a Wednesday and, closing the period, the great public Akwasidae on the final Sunday. The arithmetic yields Akwasidae eight or nine times a year, and the last of the year, Adae Kese, is the largest of all. At Akwasidae the Asantehene holds durbar in the Manhyia forecourt, seated in gold amid the umbrellas and the drums, receiving his chiefs and his people; the blackened ancestral stools of the dead kings are ritually fed; and the day binds together the living, the nsamanfo — the ancestors — and the abosom, the deities, in a single recurring act. The cosmology behind that feeding, the reason the ancestral dead are present and hungry rather than departed, is the province of Akan religion; the point for the city is that this act happens here, on this ground, on a schedule that has not lapsed, and that it is what converts a royal town into a sacred one. The rite is described here at the distance of the public record and the festival crowd; it is not a manual.

If Akwasidae is the city’s sacred calendar made visible, the Okomfo Anokye sword is its founding legend made touchable. On ground that now belongs to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, in the Bantama quarter, a sword stands driven into the earth. Tradition dates its planting to about 1695 and assigns it to Anokye himself, who is said to have fixed it there to seal the union of the Akan towns and pronounced it immovable; the story holds that the Asante nation endures only so long as the sword stays in the ground, and that no one — the attempts are enumerated in the telling — has ever drawn it out. The Ghana Tourism Authority’s own description of the Komfo Anokye Sword Site treats it exactly as the tradition does, as a landmark whose meaning is the survival of the nation. It is a rare thing: a charter-object of a founding myth that a visitor can walk up to on a working hospital campus.

The enclosure over the Okomfo Anokye sword, driven into the ground by tradition around 1695 and held to be immovable, on the grounds of the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi. Sucram Yef, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Bantama itself is the third of the city’s sacred nodes. It was the royal mausoleum quarter, the place where the physical remains of deceased Asantehenes were kept and tended and where the greatest of the ancestral rites were performed — the counterpart, in the geography of the dead, to Manhyia in the geography of the living. And then there is the everyday counterpoint that keeps Kumasi from being only a ceremonial stage: Kejetia, the Kumasi Central Market, one of the largest markets in West Africa, with well over eight thousand stalls and tens of thousands of traders and buyers moving through it on an ordinary day. The market draws sellers from across Ghana and from Togo and Benin beyond it; the same city that guards the soul of the nation is also the commercial engine of the forest zone, and the two functions have never been separable. Kumasi grew rich astride the gold and kola roads that ran north toward the Sahel and the world of the Mali empire and south to the coast, and the market is the living remainder of that position.

That southward road is also the harder half of the city’s history to hold. The routes that carried Kumasi’s gold and kola to the European forts carried captives as well, and in the Atlantic centuries the Asante state was at once a target of the trade and, in its own political economy, a supplier and middleman feeding the coastal markets of the Fante and the castles at Elmina and Cape Coast. The last stages of that road are memorialized now at Assin Manso, the river where the enslaved took a final bath before the coast; a full account belongs there and to the history of the Ashanti state, but the forest capital sat at the inland head of the same system, and its wealth cannot be read apart from it. The reckoning is neither to sensationalize the trade nor to explain it away, but to keep both facts of the city in view at once — the sacred metropolis and the node in an economy of human beings.

The scars and the homecoming

The built fabric of Kumasi carries the marks of conquest, and they have to be read soberly, as things done to a city rather than as a campaign to be re-fought. The high point of the old royal architecture was the Aban — the stone “castle,” sometimes called the Palace of Culture — completed in 1822 under Asantehene Osei Bonsu, with stone and labor supplied through the Dutch establishment at Elmina. It was a showpiece and a treasury: European visitors from Bowdich onward, and later Thomas Birch Freeman in 1841 and the journalist Winwood Reade in 1874, cataloged its rooms of gold-handled swords, plate, glassware, clocks, and books in several languages. In the Third Anglo-Asante War, a British expedition under Sir Garnet Wolseley entered Kumasi in 1874, burned much of the town, and destroyed the Aban with explosives; its dressed stone was later carried off, and in 1896 reused to raise a British fort on the site — the same fort that would soon become the pivot of the city’s next crisis.

That crisis came in 1900. The colonial governor Frederick Hodgson arrived in Kumasi that March and, in a speech that has never been forgotten, demanded the Golden Stool for himself to sit upon — mistaking a nation’s soul for a chief’s furniture. The rising that answered him, led in the tradition by the queen mother Yaa Asantewaa, besieged the British and their garrison in the fort built from the Aban’s stones. The siege belongs to the military history of the Asante empire; what it left on the city was the memory of the fort under blockade and of Hodgson’s escape from it, breaking out of Kumasi on 23 June 1900 as supplies failed. The stool itself was never handed over and never found; it had been hidden, and it remains in Asante keeping.

By then the reigning Asantehene was already gone. Agyeman Prempeh I had been deposed and deported in January 1896, taken first toward the coast and then into a long exile — to Sierra Leone and afterward to the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, where he remained for twenty-eight years. His return to Kumasi in 1924 is one of the emotional centers of the city’s modern memory; the British would restore him only as Kumasihene, withholding the higher title of Asantehene, but the homecoming after nearly three decades was a restoration in the deeper sense, and its 2024 centenary drew heads of state to the city. It was for the returned Prempeh I that the British built, in 1925, the palace now called the old Manhyia — a modest two-story house compared to the vanished Aban, put up on ground the deported king had to pay for before he would occupy it. That 1925 building served two Asantehenes and then, on 12 August 1995, opened as the Manhyia Palace Museum, its rooms holding the regalia, the portraits, and the wax effigies of the kings; the reigning Asantehene lives in a newer palace nearby. The details of the museum’s founding are set out on the palace’s own record and in the standard reference account of Manhyia Palace.

The heritage that colonial violence tried to break is now a live civic asset, and the tension in that fact is part of the city’s present. Kumasi markets its gold-working, its kente and adinkra, and the silhouette of the stool itself to a tourism and a global fashion trade that rarely pause over what the stool is; the imagery travels the world stripped of the custody and the restriction that give it meaning at home, and the city both benefits from that circulation and is flattened by it. The market that anchors the old economy has itself been remade in this register: the first phase of the Kejetia redevelopment, a project of some 259 million US dollars, ran from 2015 to 2018 and replaced the sprawl with a built complex of thousands of stores, and it was to the new market that the Prince of Wales was taken on a state visit on 6 November 2018; a second phase began on 2 May 2019. The redevelopment reordered the physical market without displacing its function, which is the pattern of the whole city — the fabric changes, the office endures.

For the deepest continuity is not in any building. Manhyia has been rebuilt; the Aban is a memory in reused stone; the fort is a museum; the market is a new complex. What has not lapsed is the calendar. The Asantehene is a living monarch, not a curatorial figure; the Golden Stool is in keeping, not on display; and on the closing Sunday of the next forty-two-day month the umbrellas will turn again over the Manhyia forecourt, the fontomfrom will speak the names of the dead, and the ancestral stools will be fed. A city is called sacred for many reasons; Kumasi earns the word by keeping an appointment it has kept for three hundred years.

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