“The seat of power”. “The sitting governor”. The Throne. The judges’ bench and the lowly Parliamentary backbenchers. The executive chair. Power is what you sit in, and this is no less the case in Ghana than in the West. The difference is that Ghanaians exalt what may be, to the Western mind, the lowliest form of sitting implement: the stool. Wobbly and backless, the province of barstool philosophers, the stool is what we carry up from the basement and dust off when we have more guests than we do seating capacity.
Not here. The stool is the essential symbol of the hereditary, divinely-willed chieftainship for many of Ghana’s peoples. The most famous of these is the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, upon which the Ashanti king, the Asantehene, sits. At the peak of Ashanti power in the nineteenth century, southern and central Ghana as well as a large swatch of Cote d’Ivoire was administered from that stool. When the British seized the Ashanti capital, Kumasi, at the turn of the last century and deposed King Prempreh I, they also sought to seize the Golden Stool. The elders had anticipated this demand, however, and had created a fake stool which they gave to the British, while hiding the real Golden Stool until the reign of Prempreh II started in the 1930’s.
The chieftainship here in town also revolves around a stool. As it so happens, a new chief was just enstooled a few weeks before I arrived. He stopped by the office the other day, dressed in traditional attire (a Ghanaian toga, essentially) and trailed by his council of elders. He made a much more majestic first impression than had the chief of Dol Dol, who I first encountered as he was wondering alone down a path through the bush, carrying an assault rifle and dressed in military fatigues. But then, this chieftainship is much more significant. Among the Maasai of Dol Dol, authority was always decentralized to peer age groups and family elders, with no strong tradition of chiefs. They were the creation of the British colonial government, and even today they are appointed by the federal government and serve at the pleasure of the District Commissioner. In much of West Africa, including most of Ghana, authority has for centuries been vested locally in village chiefs and regionally in paramount chiefs. Disputes and disagreements are still brought before the chief to be adjudicated. He is not entirely autocratic, however. He has a council of elders with whom he must consult, and though his term is theoretically a lifetime one, he is forced to abdicate if he violates traditional law or loses the support of the elders or population at large. Since colonial times, chiefs have also had competition from bureaucrats, judges and politicians who have taken over some of their functions, and there exists
From what I’ve been told, this most recent chiefly transition was not without controversy. The outgoing chief was abdicating the stool because he was living in the US and the townspeople were dissatisfied with his absentee rule (in fact, the story is that he formally abdicated to the council of elders during a ceremony which he conducted over speaker phone from Virginia). Traditionally, the chiefs inherit the stool and the finery that goes with it, and they’re obliged to add to that finery during their reign, so that each succession makes the stool more magnificent. The problem is that this particular chief had not added to the finery, and being in the US, was rather outside the reach of traditional social control which might compel him to do so. The elders had a trump card, however. The chieftainship here rotates among the four branches of a ruling clan, and the elders warned the chief that if he did not contribute to the improvement of the stool, his branch would be cut out of the rotation. The chief’s extended family here in Ghana- which had ambitions of their children getting a shot at the stool- raised hell with the chief, and miraculously the objects appeared shortly thereafter. The stool’s glory was enhanced, the ruling dynasty was maintained and authority passed from one set of cheeks to another.
