UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, August 16. 1995
19A
Royal ceremony brings thousands to Ghana
The Associated Press
KUMASI, Ghana — First came the pounding of leopard-skin drums to signal their arrival. Then the ruby-red velvet parasols, fringed in gold, flapping up and down like elephant ears above their royal charges.
They slowly streamed in by the thousands, hour after hour, the kings and queens of Africa, the chiefs and deputy chiefs of Ghana, with their entourages bearing gifts of golden swords and ebony stools.
to the Ashanti king, His Majesty Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, one of the continent's most powerful and revered royals, who was celebrating 25 years on his golden throne.
They came to this West African country on Sunday to pay homage
Putting aside the heartbreak and conflict in many of their nations, the all-day procession, known as the Grand Durbar, was a brilliant spectacle of Africa in all its rich and proud glory.
The Ashanti belong to the Akan ethnic group that comprises about 40 percent of Ghana's 15 million people. Their heartland of Kumasi, 160 miles north of the capital
Accra, is full of gold and timber that for 300 years has made them among the wealthiest and most powerful African ethnic groups.
About 75,000 people came from around the world for a rare glimpse of the Golden Stool, which is brought out of the king's palace only once every five years. This year the day was Sunday.
The small, solid-gold antique — which never is sat upon, even by the king — is said to have been sent to Earth as a message from heaven to form the clan.
"It's much more than a symbol."
said Enid Schildkrout, curator of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "It's a symbol of a throne, it's an office, it's a title, and it has a relationship to the ancestors."
Before the king arrived at the Kumasi Sports Stadium, typically two hours late and only after Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings appeared, he was preceded by priests and poets, toothless grannies sprinkling holy water before him, young men balancing herbs on their heads to rid the stadium of any lurking doom, Queen Victoria Opuku Ware and the Queen Mother Afua Serwaa Kobi Ampem.
The king himself, 15th in a line of direct descendants to the throne, was dressed in a traditional toga draped over his left shoulder made of kente, a heavy cloth woven from bright rectangular strips that many consider the most symbolic of African pride.
Carried on the shoulders of shirt-
less bearers, following hunters bellowing through rhino horns, the 75-year-old king and English-trained
attorney lifted his arms dripping with strings of gold and slowly waved to the crowd.
He was carried past a stand of other kings and their queens, such as the Emir of Kano and the Oni of Ife, both of Nigeria, King Zwalithini of South Africa and the Moro Naba of the Mossis of Burkina Faso.
"It's just incredible, such a momentous event," said actor Danny Glover, one of the many African Americans who traveled to Ghana for the event. "The ritual, the regality of it all, it's just mind-boggling."
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