Osei Tutu: the hostage who came back

Osei Tutu: the hostage who came back

Before the Stool came down, there was a young man in the wrong court.

Osei Tutu was of the Oyoko royal line of Kwaman, and he was sent — as was normal, and as was humiliating — to serve at the court of Denkyira, the power the Akan forest states paid tribute to. He learned that court from the inside: how it worked, how it fought, what it feared. Then, the tradition holds, he had an affair with a sister of the Denkyirahene and had to leave in a hurry.

He went to Akwamu, and that turned out to matter more than anything. Akwamu had firearms and Akwamu had a way of organising an army by wings — a centre, a left, a right, an advance guard, a rear — that could move a large force without it becoming a mob. Osei Tutu learned it there.

And in Akwamu, or on the road, he met Okomfo Anokye.

When he came home to be enstooled at Kwaman, he brought back three things: knowledge of his enemy, a modern army, and a priest. The Stool came down at Kwaman before the assembled chiefs, and the Akan states that had each been too small to resist Denkyira became one thing with one soul and one oath. Osei Tutu was Asantehene. The name of the place became Kumasi.

At Feyiase in 1701 the Asante broke Denkyira and killed its king, Ntim Gyakari — caught, the tradition says with relish, playing oware with a favourite wife while the battle turned. The tribute ended. The Asante took Denkyira's rights on the coast, and with them the trade, and inside fifty years they were the dominant power in the forest.

Osei Tutu died around 1717, ambushed at a river crossing on campaign against the Akyem. The Asante kept it quiet for a long time, because the news itself was dangerous.

If you visit Ghana. Manhyia Palace Museum, Kumasi; Feyiase, south of Kumasi.