The revelationof the Golden Stool consolidated power by providing a supernatural focus of loyalty. Through its agency the Ashanti came nearer than almost all other African people to a concept of nationalism in the Western sense. Where the stool really came from is anyone’s guess. It was a wooden tripod, partly sheathed in gold, and according to legend, it appeared from the skies during an assembly of the chiefs and people of Kumasi. Summoned by the great seer Anokye, it floated down from heaven in a cloud of dust, to the sound of thunder and the flash of lightening. It alighted on the knees of the Asantahene, and Anokye reverentially smeared it with a paste made from nail clippings and hair cuttings of the assembled chiefs, announcing that henceforth the stool would be the embodiment of the Ashanti sunsum.
At the Yam Festival of the Ashanti in 1817. shown in an English engraving, vassal chiefs gathered under umbrellas to pay homage to their overlord, the king og the Ashanti, seated in the center under his stately umbrella. Among the guestes were British officers of the Royal African Company. Image:http://hiphopcheerleader.tumblr.com/post/23497729136/peaceshine3-ashanti-yam-festival-depiction-1817
From that moment on, the stool took precedence over the Asantahene himself. It reclined on its side, as if in repose, upon its own chair of state, shaded by its own palanquin and attended by its own alcolytes. It provided a constant factor in the continually shifting structure of the Ashanti state, and upon its mystique rests, even now, the fabric of Ashanti custom. It was an impressive society in many ways with a distinct architectural style, high craftsmanship in gold, silver, wood, and a sophisticated urban organization with most homes having bathrooms, and trash removal, wide streets and almost Western style dining.
—Asantehene and enthroned Golden Stool, Ashanti, Ghana, wood with gold applique—Read More:http://www.arthistory-archaeology.umd.edu/ARTHwebsitedecommissionedNov32008/webresources/courses/ARTH275/FA05/Class%20image%20pages/101305class.htm
But the root of Ashanti^policy was a passion for power. “If power is for sale,” ran an Ashanti proverb, “sell your mother to buy it, you can always get her back again.” Ashanti nationalism was aggressive and self-confident, and to the eyes of baffled Westerners, peering through the forests in the early days of the Victorian era, the Ashanti kingdom seemed a dangerous and barbaric force. In particualr, the Christian world shuddered at the Ashanti practice of human sacrifice. When an Asantahene died, scores, sometimes hundreds, of citizens were slaughtered to provide a ghostly retinue for the king. Most of the victims were criminals or prisoners of war whose lives had been saved for the occasion, but some were senior officials or royal relatives who had sworn to die with their ruler.
Read More:http://www.thewartourist.com/africa.html
Every Ashanti generation knew this great communal rededication by death, and at times of war or crisis there were often ad-hoc sacrifices of victims doomed on the spur of the moment. Like the Golden Stool, the practice gave cohesion to the nation, binding the past with the present, fate with free will, the decrees of the gods with the destinies of humans. In the developing world of Victorian enlightenment, though, no state bound by principles of such dread atavism could long hope to escape the tuition of those who, in their own groves and temples far away, had evolved very different versions of the only truth.
—An Ashantee horseman equipped for War, 1824. Artist: Unknown
An Ashantee horseman equipped for war, Ashanti, Af
, 1824. From “Journal of a Residence in Ashantee. Second edition. Edited, with notes and an introduction, by WEF Ward” by Joseph Dupuis. (London, 1966).—Read More:http://www.diomedia.fr/public/;jsessionid=00D25C42BC0F2B5A66E3D36CDEE51CAA.worker2en/3202727/imageDetails.html
ADDENDUM:
A DIARY OF LIFE WITH THE NATIVE LEVY IN ASHANTI 1895-96
By Major R. S. S. Baden-Powell
13th Hussars, Commanding The Native Levy.
(see link at end) …In England we scarcely realise the extent to which human sacrifice had been carried on in Ashanti previous to the late expedition, but evidences were not wanting to show it.
In the first place, the name Kumassi means “the Death-Place.”
The town possessed no less than three places of execution; one, for private executions, was at the palace; a second, for public decapitations, was on the parade-ground; a third, for fetish sacrifices, was in the sacred village of Bantama.
Close to the parade ground was the grove into which the remains of the victims were flung, and which very aptly was known as “Golgotha” to the members of the force. The ground here was found covered with skulls and bones of hundreds of victims. At Bantama was the celebrated execution bowl, which was fully described by, Bowdich in his account of Kumassi in 1817. It is a large brass basin some five feet in diameter. It is ornamented with four small lions, and a number of round knobs all round its rim, except at one part, where there is a space for the victim’s neck to rest on the edge. The blood of the victims was allowed to putrefy in the bowl, and leaves of certain herbs being added, it was considered a very valuable fetish medicine. The bowl has now been brought to England. Then in Kumassi are two blocks of houses occupied entirely by the executioners-one being assigned to the sacrificial, the other to the criminal executioners. Among the loot taken in the houses of Prempeh and of his chiefs were several “blood stools,” or stools which had been used as blocks for executions, and which bore very visible signs of having been so used. In these notes, be it remembered, we are only dealing with Kumassi, but every king—and there were some half a dozen of them in the Ashanti empire—had powers of life and death over his subjects, and carried out his human sacrifices on a minor scale in his own capital.
In fact, the ex-king of Bekwai was deposed on account of his over-indulgence in that form of amusement.
Any great public function was seized on as an excuse for human sacrifices. There was the annual “yam custom,” or harvest festival, at which large numbers of victims were often offered to the gods. Then the king went every quarter to pay his devotions to the shades of his ancestors at Bantama, and this demanded the deaths of twenty men over the great bowl on each occasion. On the death of any great personage, two of the household slaves were at once killed on the threshold of the door, in order to attend their master immediately in his new life, and his grave was afterwards lined with the bodies of more slaves who were to form his retinue in the spirit world. It was thought all the better if, during the burial, one of the attendant mourners could be stunned by a club, and dropped, still breathing, into the grave before it was filled in. In the case of a great lady dying, slave-girls were the victims. This custom of sacrifice at funerals was called “washing the grave.” On the death of a king the custom of washing the grave involved enormous sacrifices. Then sacrifices were also made to propitiate the gods when war was about to be entered upon, or other trouble was impending. Victims were also killed to deter an enemy from approaching the capital: sometimes they were impaled and set up on the path, with their hand pointing to the enemy and bidding him to retire. At other times the victim was beheaded and the head replaced looking in the wrong direction; or he was buried alive in the pathway, standing upright, with only his head above ground, to remain thus until starvation, or—what was infinitely worse—the ants made an end of him. Then there was a death penalty for the infraction of various laws. For instance, anybody who found a nugget of gold and who did not send it at once to the king was liable to decapitation; so also was anybody who picked up anything of value lying on the parade-ground, or who sat down in the shade of the fetish tree at Bantama. Indeed, if the king desired an execution at any time, he did not look far for an excuse. It is even said that on one occasion he preferred a richer colour in the red stucco on the walls of the palace, and that for this purpose the blood of four hundred virgins was used. I have purposely refrained elsewhere from giving numbers, because, although our informants supplied them, West African natives are notoriously inexact in this respect. The victims of sacrifices were almost always slaves or prisoners of war. Slaves were often sent in to the king in lieu of tribute from his kinglets and chiefs, or as a fine for minor delinquencies. Travelling traders of other tribes, too, were frequently called upon to pay customs dues with a slave or two, and sometimes their own lives were forfeited.
When once a man had been selected and seized for execution, there were only two ways by which he could evade it. One was to repeat the “king’s oath”—a certain formula of words—before they could gag him; the other was to break loose from his captors and run as far as the Bantama-Kumassi cross road; if he could reach this point before being overtaken, he was allowed to go free. In order to ensure against their prisoners getting off by either of these methods, the executioners used to spring on the intended victim from behind, and while one bound his hands behind his back, another drove a knife through both his cheeks, which effectually prevented him from opening his mouth to speak, and in this horrible condition he had to await his turn for execution….Read More:http://www.pinetreeweb.com/bp-prempeh-01.htm
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