Festival · Kumasi, Ghana · every sixth Sunday
Akwasidae and the Golden Stool
Every sixth Sunday the Asante kingdom of Ghana gathers at the Manhyia Palace in Kumasi to honour its ancestors and its king. The gold on display at Akwasidae is remarkable, but at the centre of the ceremony is an object of gold that no one is permitted to sit upon, in a region whose gold once gave an entire coastline its name.
A calendar of forty-two days
The Akan peoples of Ghana traditionally reckoned time in cycles of forty-two days, and at the turn of each cycle comes Adae, a day on which the spirits of past rulers are honoured. When it falls on a Sunday it is Akwasidae, the most important of these occasions in Kumasi. The Asantehene, the king of the Asante, sits in state in the palace courtyard, receiving chiefs and elders to the sound of talking drums and horns, while praise-singers recite the lineage of the royal house. Rites are performed privately in the stool house, where the blackened stools of past kings are kept, with offerings of food and drink to the ancestors. Once a year, usually between July and October, the cycle reaches its fullest expression in Adae Kese, a larger celebration associated with renewal and the year’s turning.
The Golden Stool
The Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, is the most sacred object of the Asante. According to tradition, around the end of the seventeenth century the priest Okomfo Anokye called it down from the sky, and it descended onto the lap of Osei Tutu, founder of the Asante kingdom, as a sign that he had been chosen by the ancestors. It is held to contain the soul of the Asante nation. It is not a throne: no one, the king included, sits upon it. On great occasions it rests on its own chair beside him, and it is never allowed to touch the ground.
Its significance was tested in 1900. Sir Frederic Hodgson, the British governor of the Gold Coast, demanded that the stool be brought to him so that he might sit on it as the representative of the Crown. The demand provoked the War of the Golden Stool, led by Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu. The Asante were defeated and their leaders exiled, but the stool was hidden and never surrendered, and the British did not repeat the demand. It remains the clearest example on this calendar of gold whose value has nothing to do with its weight.
Gold dust and brass weights
The Asante were also a kingdom built on gold in the commercial sense. For centuries gold from the forests of present-day Ghana travelled north across the Sahara and later south to European ships, and the coast became known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. Within the kingdom, gold dust served as everyday currency. It was weighed on small scales against brass weights known as abrammuo, cast by the lost-wax method in a striking range of forms, from geometric designs to animals, people and scenes from proverbs. Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, Akan smiths are estimated to have cast some three million of them, and they are now held in museums around the world as some of the most inventive small sculpture ever produced in the service of trade.
Ghana remains one of the world’s major gold producers today, from large industrial mines to small-scale workings whose expansion has brought serious environmental problems to rivers and farmland. At Akwasidae the older relationship with the metal is still visible: gold worn by chiefs and court officials as regalia, in rings, bracelets, headbands and the gold-hilted ceremonial swords known as afena, each piece belonging to an office rather than to the person who wears it. It is gold as inheritance and authority, held in trust by one generation for the next.
A note on dates. Akwasidae recurs every forty-two days. The remaining 2026 dates published for Manhyia Palace are 11 October and 22 November; Adae Kese is held once a year at a date set by the palace. Palace calendars can change, so dates are best confirmed close to the day.
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Akwasidae falls every sixth Sunday; the next are 11 October and 22 November 2026. Find it on the Gold for All Seasons calendar.