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Kumasi
Kumasi
Base Stats
Type Cultural
Suzerain Bonus
Your Icon stats land trade Trade Routes to any City-State provide +2 Icon Culture Culture and +1 Icon main gold Gold for every specialty district in the origin city.

Kumasi is one of the City-States in Civilization VI. It is sometimes also called Oseikrom, meaning "Osei Tutu's town". It is the capital of the Ashanti region of central Ghana, and the country's largest city. Built on an ancient meteor impact crater known as Lake Bosomtwe, there is evidence to suggest that Kumasi has continuously hosted human settlements since the Neolithic Era, over 6000 years ago.

Kumasi rose to prominence as the capital of the Ashanti Empire, known as the Asanteman, which dominated much of the area comprising modern Ghana beginning with the expeditions of Osei Tutu in the late 1600s up until the Asanteman's absorption into the modern state of Ghana in 1957. The ruler of the Ashanti, known as the Asantehene, has traditionally resided in Kumasi where he rules as both the Kumasihene (mayor) and as ruler of the Asanteman at large.

The role of the Asantehene was established and legitimated by the Golden Stool of the Ashanti, which is said to have been summoned from the sky by a priest named Okomfo Anokye. The Golden Stool landed in the lap of Osei Tutu, who thus became the first Asantehene and received the symbolic legitimacy necessary to build the Asenteman. Through a combination of conquest, diplomacy, strategic alliances, and his sacred ordainment, Osei Tutu spent the next several decades uniting various Akan clans and city-states against the unpopular Denkyira rulers, who had conquered the densely-populated region for control of its valuable gold trade routes. Tutu and Anokye subsequently authored a constitution that solidified the power of the Asantehene and the Golden Stool. Several wars were fought for possession of the Golden Stool in the centuries after Tutu's death at the hands of an Akyem sniper.

The War of the Golden Stool in 1900 eventually brought about the end of Kumasi's central role in regional politics. The war was launched by the Asanteman when a British colonial administrator known as Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson, after having robbed the Asantehene of all his valuables, demanded that the people of Kumasi bring him the Golden Stool and allow him to sit on it - an act which even the Asantehene himself could not do. The Ashanti subsequently fought a yearlong war against the British which resulted in their defeat and annexation into the British Empire, although they managed to secure the sanctity of the Golden Stool. The British extended legal protection to the Golden Stool and exiled those who violated Ashanti law by desecrating it.

On March 6, 1957, the Asanteman officially became part of Ghana when Kwame Nkrumah declared Ghana's independence from Great Britain. The Asantehene continues to exist in a symbolic role in Kumasi, where he has no official power but holds a great deal of influence over popular opinion in Ghana.

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