Kumasi

Kumasi was founded in the late seventeenth century by Osei Tutu, the first Asantehene, as the capital of the Asante union he built with the priest Okomfo Anokye from a group of Akan chiefdoms. Tradition holds that the Golden Stool, the soul of the nation, was called down from the sky here, and that the city took its name from the kum tree under which it was placed. Wealth from gold, kola and the sale of captives to the coast paid for a planned royal town of wide streets and courtyard houses, which nineteenth-century European visitors described with astonishment.

Rivalry with Britain over the coast brought a long series of wars. A British expedition entered Kumasi in 1874 and burned the palace and much of the city; in 1896 Prempeh I was deposed and sent into exile in the Seychelles; and in 1900 the governor's demand to sit on the Golden Stool provoked the rising led by Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu, which ended with the siege of the British fort. Asante was annexed in 1902 and joined to the Gold Coast colony.

Prempeh I returned from exile in the Seychelles in the 1920s, the Manhyia palace was built in 1925, and the full role of king was restored in 1935. Cocoa, gold and the railway from Sekondi turned the rebuilt city into the trading centre of the interior, and after independence it became Ghana's second city, with a technical university, a huge central market and the workshops of Suame. Otumfuo Osei Tutu II has reigned since 1999, and the palace remains a real political and social force.

Kumasi considers itself the capital of Akan culture, and Twi is its language. The Asantehene's court still functions, with linguists who speak for the king and carry gold-topped staffs, stool carriers, drummers and horn blowers, and chiefs who are enstooled rather than crowned. Every sixth Sunday the Akwasidae brings chiefs to Manhyia to greet the king under great umbrellas, with the gold regalia brought out and the talking drums recounting Asante history.

The crafts are village specialities that the city sells: kente strips woven at Bonwire, adinkra symbols stamped at Ntonso, stools and staffs carved at Ahwiaa, and brass and gold weights cast by the lost-wax method. Each adinkra symbol carries a proverb, and cloth is chosen for the occasion, particularly for funerals, which are the great social event of the region and fill the weekends with canopies, drumming and matching cloth.

Football is the other loyalty: Asante Kotoko, founded in the 1930s, is one of the two clubs that divide Ghanaian allegiance, and matches against Accra's Hearts of Oak stop the city. Christianity dominates, with large churches and all-night services, and there is a long-established Muslim community with mosques of its own, settled by traders from the north and the Sahel. Manners are formal: greetings first, seniority respected, and the left hand kept out of transactions.

The Kumasi Metropolitan district recorded 443,981 people at the 2021 census, and Kumasi is the second largest city in Ghana, though the built-up area has long since spilled beyond the district into its neighbours on every side. It is a city of trade rather than industry: Kejetia and the streets of Adum distribute goods across the middle of the country and into Burkina Faso and beyond, and the lorry parks are its real engine.

Suame Magazine, the sprawl of workshops north-west of the centre, is reckoned one of Africa's largest industrial zones, employing an estimated 200,000 mechanics, welders, machinists and apprentices who rebuild engines and fabricate parts that cannot be bought. Cocoa and timber from the surrounding forest, gold from the mines at Obuasi and further west, the university, the teaching hospital and government offices make up much of the rest, alongside an enormous informal economy of hawkers, tailors and mobile-money kiosks.

Days start early with church bells, sweeping and the first taxis; markets peak in the late morning; and evenings belong to khebab stands, drinking spots and television football. Traffic and the state of the roads, flooding in the rainy season, the price paid to cocoa farmers and the damage done by illegal gold mining to farmland and rivers are the standing subjects of argument.

Kumasi is fufu country, and its chop bars have a national reputation for it: cassava and plantain pounded together in a wooden mortar into a smooth, elastic ball, dropped into abenkwan, the palm-nut soup, nkatenkwan, the groundnut soup, or a peppery light soup with goat, chicken, snail, bushmeat or smoked fish. It is eaten with the right hand, swallowed rather than chewed, and usually at the middle of the day.

The forest gives the rest of the table its flavour. Nkontomire, the stew of cocoyam leaves with egusi seeds, smoked fish and palm oil, is spooned over ampesi, boiled yam, plantain or cocoyam. Kokonte, a brown dough of dried cassava flour, is the cheaper staple with groundnut soup, and eto, mashed yam or plantain with palm oil and eggs, is served at naming ceremonies and celebrations. Giant snails from the forest are a delicacy, grilled or in soup.

Street food runs from koko and koose in the morning through waakye, jollof and fried yam at midday to khebab skewers over charcoal at night. Palm wine is tapped from felled oil palms and akpeteshie, the strong spirit distilled from it, is poured for the ancestors and drunk at wakes. Sobolo, the hibiscus drink, and locally made chocolate from Ashanti cocoa round out what the region grows.