When it appeared
Dates range across the last years of the 1600s and the first of the 1700s. The Stool is tied to the founding of the Asante union under Osei Tutu, shortly before the victory over Denkyira around 1701.
Ghana-Net.com · Asante · History & Culture
Nobody sits on it. It is never allowed to touch the ground. The King of Asante himself only lowers his arm over it. In 1900 a British governor stood up in Kumasi and demanded to sit on it — and started a war. This is the object that holds the Asante nation together, and the story of how close it came to being lost.
Across the Akan world, a stool is not furniture. It is the seat of authority, and after a chief's death his stool can be blackened and kept as a shrine to his spirit. To be "enstooled" is to become a chief; to be "destooled" is to be removed. The stool matters more than the man.
The Golden Stool — in Twi Sika Dwa Kofi, "the golden stool born on a Friday" — is the stool above all others. It is not the Asantehene's personal seat. It is believed to hold the sunsum, the soul, of the whole Asante nation: the living, the dead and those not yet born. If the Stool were lost or destroyed, the nation would lose its soul.
The easiest way to understand it: the Asantehene rules on behalf of the Golden Stool, not the other way round. Kings come and go. The Stool is the nation.
According to Asante tradition, the Stool was not made. It arrived.
At the end of the seventeenth century the Asante were a group of Akan states paying tribute to the powerful Denkyira. Their leader, Osei Tutu, and his priest and adviser Okomfo Anokye, set out to unite them into one nation.
Tradition says that at a great gathering in Kumasi, Okomfo Anokye called down from the sky a stool of gold, which descended in a dark cloud with thunder and came to rest on Osei Tutu's knees. He declared that it held the spirit of all Asante, and that the nation's strength and survival depended on it. The rulers of the member states buried their own old stools, and their loyalty passed to the one Golden Stool.
Soon after, around 1701, the united Asante defeated Denkyira at the battle of Feyiase. The Asante Kingdom became the dominant power of the forest region for the next two centuries.
Read it for what it is. The descent from the sky is the founding story of a nation, and it is told with that weight in Kumasi today. What it records as history is real: a deliberate act of state-building that turned rival chiefdoms into one kingdom with one symbol.
Many of these details are guarded and not all are publicly confirmed. This page gives what is widely reported, not what is secret — and will not publish speculation about where the Stool is kept.
No single sentence did more damage to British rule in Asante.
By 1896 the British had occupied Kumasi, arrested the Asantehene Prempeh I and sent him into exile. They had the king. They did not have the Stool — the Asante had hidden it.
On 28 March 1900 the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederic Hodgson, addressed the chiefs of Kumasi. As his words are usually recorded, he demanded to know where the Golden Stool was, and why he, as the representative of the Queen, was not sitting on it at that moment.
To the chiefs, it was not a political demand. It was a demand to put a foreign man on the soul of their nation. Within days Asante was at war. Nana Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, took the lead, and the British were besieged in Kumasi Fort. The War of the Golden Stool lasted into 1901. Britain won the war, annexed Asante — and never got the Stool.
The wider story of Britain and Asante, from 1824 to 1901: The Anglo-Asante Wars. The earlier war that burned Kumasi: The Sagrenti War, 1873–1874.
The greatest danger to the Golden Stool did not come from the British. It came from within.
In 1921, men working on a road came across the place where the Stool had been hidden. They stripped some of its gold ornaments. When the discovery became known, Asante was in uproar: to many, this was a greater crime than anything done by the colonial power.
The men were tried under Asante custom and sentenced to death. The British colonial government stepped in and changed the sentences to banishment. Just as important was what the British did not do: after 1900, they made clear they would not try to take the Stool again. The Golden Stool had outlasted the demand to sit on it.
Prempeh I was allowed back to Kumasi in 1924. In 1935 the British restored the Asante Confederacy, and his successor, Prempeh II, was enstooled as Asantehene over the Golden Stool. The line continues today with Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, enstooled in 1999.
The Stool appears in public only at the greatest occasions of the Asante state. Photographs from such events show it carried under its own umbrella, resting on its own seat beside the Asantehene — never beneath him.
Almost certainly not. It is not on display, and no museum holds it. Be wary of anyone who offers to show it to you.
Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi tells the story of the Asantehenes and the Stool, with replicas and royal objects.
Akwasidae, held every six weeks, is the best chance to see the Asantehene in state at Manhyia, with drums, umbrellas and chiefs in full regalia.
Ask before photographing chiefs, do not point with your left hand, and follow what your host or guide tells you. This is a living institution, not a show.
Base yourself in Kumasi. Combine with Kumasi Fort, the Asante traditional buildings and Lake Bosomtwe. Hotels on ghanahotels.biz.
Much written about the Golden Stool online mixes the two. Here they are kept apart.
Dates range across the last years of the 1600s and the first of the 1700s. The Stool is tied to the founding of the Asante union under Osei Tutu, shortly before the victory over Denkyira around 1701.
This is the Asante account and is presented as such. It is the nation's founding story, and it is respected — not a claim this page tests.
Hodgson's demand in March 1900, the war that followed, the 1921 stripping of ornaments and the commuted sentences, and the restoration of the Confederacy in 1935 are recorded in colonial and Asante sources.
Claims about where the Stool is kept circulate online. They are not verifiable, and this page will not repeat them.
Kumasi tours cover Manhyia Palace and the city's heritage. None can show you the Golden Stool — and any that claims to is not telling the truth.
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The priest who, by tradition, called the Stool down — and the author of the laws that bound the new nation.
She led Asante into the War of the Golden Stool when the men hesitated.
Where the British were besieged in 1900 — now a military museum.
The old palace of the Asantehenes, and the best place to understand the Stool's story.
More on Asante: The Asante Empire and Kingdom · Ghana's traditional kingdoms · Kente · Adinkra · 1,000 years of Ghanaian history · Names of Past and Present.
The Golden Stool is one of the few objects in the world that has beaten an empire without firing a shot of its own. Britain took Asante's king, its capital and its independence — and in the end had to accept that the one thing it could not take was the thing that mattered most. You will not see it. Understanding why is the point.
Verified: 26 September 2026. The origin under Osei Tutu and Okomfo Anokye is given as Asante tradition. Governor Hodgson's demand of 28 March 1900, the War of the Golden Stool, the stripping of ornaments in 1921 and the commuting of the death sentences, the return of Prempeh I in 1924 and the restoration of the Asante Confederacy in 1935 follow standard historical accounts. Hodgson's words are given as usually recorded, not as a verbatim transcript. Details of the Stool's keeping are deliberately not published. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.