The Stool

The Stool is a dual-timeline literary novel set in the Asante interior. It is the fourth and last of the four-territory sequence and the only one in which the disputed thing is not land.

In November of 1935, ten months after the restoration of the Asante Confederacy, a District Commissioner comes to a small town to record the customary law of succession to its stool. He does it for a good reason and he says so: a custom that lives only in the memory of the elders becomes, the moment there is a quarrel, a quarrel about memory, and a quarrel about memory cannot be settled.

The man who answers him is Kwabena Adarkwa, the ɔkyeame, whose office is exact speech and who has spent nineteen years deciding which words are for the room and which are for the town.
He gives an accurate account. He leaves out one thing, which is that the elders have always been free to decline a nomination and have done so three times in living memory, and he leaves it out because the man it concerns is sitting eleven feet away and because a thing that has been managed does not survive being written down.

The declaration is gazetted. It settles two harmless arguments in ten years. Then a nomination is refused, and a man walks into the palace with a newspaper he has kept folded in his cloth since 1936, and the only person alive who knows that the paragraph is incomplete is the man who made it incomplete, and he cannot say so without saying that he gave an incomplete account on oath.
In 2026 the stool has been empty for seven years. Two branches are before a judicial committee. The revenue is frozen, a road stops at a line, and Afua Boakye-Danquah, a professional genealogist, is engaged by the committee itself to prepare a family history without reference to either party's case.
She finds a branch that both sides have agreed is extinct, a biscuit tin in a schoolmaster's back room, and a queen mother who has been waiting since 1998 for somebody to bring her a piece of paper.