Asante

History and Political Structure

While their Akan ancestors were probably in the area of central and southern Ghana for several thousand years, the modern Asante are the descendants of the Asante empire, which was at its at peak during the 17th through the 19th centuries and was the largest and most powerful kingdom of the Guinea Coast, at one point controlling most of modern-day Ghana from the coast to Yendi, and including parts of what is now Côte d'Ivoire and Togo.

Although iron and agriculture were undoubtedly important factors in the development of civilizations in this region, iron probably becoming common by about 300 AD, it was surely the trade in gold to the Sudanic empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, beginning in the first millennium AD, which led to the eventual wealth and power of the Akan states. Asante gold was traded across the Sahara by these empires, along with kola nuts and ivory from the rain forest region.

Sometime during the 12th or 13th centuries, Akan-speaking people began to enter the region of modern Ghana. Some historians explain this as a migration from the disintegration of the Sudanic kingdoms to the north and from encroaching Islamic [Page 284]rule, though linguistics suggests a shared ancestry with other southern forest groups such as the Yoruba. In either case, independent villages, perhaps seeking control over the gold mining or the long distance trade (which came to include trade in slaves), began to combine into small states. By the 17th century, the Denkyera (or Denkyira) and Akwamu emerged as the most powerful of these, and after the wars of1650 to 1670, the Denkyera reigned supreme. Osei Tutu, a nephew of the chief of Kumasi, was sent to Denkyera as a hostage along with regular annual tributes of gold and slaves. Osei Tutu became a general in the Denkyera army, but eventually revolted and fled back to Kumasi, where he succeeded to the Kumasi stool upon the death of the chief, about 1697. Kumasi and other subject kingdoms were being exhausted by their annual payments to Denkyera, and Osei Tutu determined to put an end to this. Sending the Denkyera tax collectors home without their hands, a declaration of war, he defeated the Denkyera army, captured and beheaded their king, and, with the advice and wisdom of his chief counselor and friend, the priest Okomfo Anokye, put together a loose confederation of kingdoms.

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