The Sika Dwa Kofi, the Golden Stool of the Asante people of present-day Ghana, is the sacred object that holds the soul of the nation. By Asante tradition the priest Okomfo Anokye called it down from the sky around 1700 to seal the union of the Asante confederacy under the first Asantehene, Osei Tutu. It is never sat upon and never allowed to touch the ground. Its honor triggered the War of the Golden Stool in 1900, after a British governor demanded to sit on it, and it was hidden rather than surrendered. It remains the central emblem of Asante identity today.
In 1900 the British governor of the Gold Coast sat down before the Asante chiefs and made a demand. He wanted the Golden Stool brought out so that he, as the representative of the Queen, could sit upon it. The room went silent. To the British it looked like a chair, a throne to be claimed like any other prize of conquest. To the Asante it was the living soul of their whole people, a thing no human being had ever sat on, not even their own king. The governor had not asked for a piece of furniture. He had asked to sit on a nation's spirit, and the war that followed was fought to keep that from ever happening.