Kumasi

Gold built the Ashanti Empire, but it was the Golden Stool that held it together—and Kumasi exists because an empire needed a capital worthy of its ambition. Founded in the 1680s by Osei Tutu I, Kumasi became the seat of the Asante Confederacy, a sophisticated state that controlled gold and kola nut trade across West Africa. The Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi) wasn't a throne but a symbol of collective identity: it supposedly descended from the sky and contained the soul of the Ashanti nation. The British fought four wars to capture it and never did.

The Ashanti institutional structure was remarkably modern. Provincial chiefs held power through a council system (the Asantehene's court) that balanced central authority with regional autonomy—closer to a federal system than an absolute monarchy. When the British finally annexed the territory in 1902, they preserved much of this structure through indirect rule, and the Asantehene still holds genuine authority in Kumasi today.

Cocoa replaced gold as the economic engine in the early 20th century. Ghana became the world's largest cocoa producer by the 1920s, with Kumasi as the collection and trading hub. Kejetia Market—among West Africa's largest open-air markets—evolved as the physical manifestation of this trading culture. The new Kejetia Market building, completed in 2018, can hold over 10,000 traders under one roof.

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), founded in 1952, anchors the city's education sector with over 60,000 students. Kumasi's informal economy—artisanal manufacturing, auto repair clusters in Suame Magazine (the largest informal industrial district in West Africa), and agricultural processing—employs far more people than any formal sector.

Kumasi grows at roughly 5% annually, testing whether Ashanti governance traditions can manage a modern megacity, or whether the informal economy that makes it resilient also prevents the infrastructure investment it needs.