Yaa Asantewaa

Yaa Asantewaa was born around 1840 in Besease and rose to become the Ohemaa — queen mother — of Ejisu (Edweso), one of the Asante (Ashanti) towns at the heart of a kingdom in what is today Ghana. In the Asante system the queen mother is no ornamental title: she nominates and counsels the king, and she is keeper of the lineage. By 1900 much of Asante's leadership had already been gutted by the British, who in 1896 had seized and exiled the Asantehene, King Prempeh I, to the distant Seychelles islands. With the king gone, Yaa Asantewaa held the regency of the Ejisu-Juaben district — and watched the empire's spine bend under colonial pressure.

The breaking point was sacred. The Golden Stool — Sika Dwa Kofi — is believed to house the very soul of the Asante nation, the living, the dead and the yet-to-be-born; it is so holy that not even the king himself sits on it, but is raised and lowered above it at his coronation. In March 1900, the British governor Sir Frederick Hodgson stood before the chiefs in the Kumasi fort and demanded to be allowed to sit upon the Golden Stool, ordering a search to find it. It was, to the Asante, an act of spiritual violation. When the assembled chiefs hesitated, Yaa Asantewaa rose and shamed them into action with words traditionally attributed to her — that if the men of Asante would not go forward, then the women would, and would fight the British until the last of them fell on the battlefield.

The rising that followed — the War of the Golden Stool, also called the Yaa Asantewaa War and the last of the Anglo-Asante wars — saw her direct a force that besieged the British inside the Kumasi fort. It was a brutal, six-month struggle. Britain poured in reinforcements, broke the siege, and by 1901 crushed the rebellion and formally annexed Asante into its Gold Coast colony. Yaa Asantewaa was captured and, like the king before her, exiled to the Seychelles, where she died on 17 October 1921, never seeing home again.

Yet the war she led was, in its deepest aim, not lost. The British never found the Golden Stool — the Asante hid it, and it was only stumbled upon years later by road workers who stripped some of its gold and were severely punished for the desecration. The empire's most sacred object was never sat upon by a colonial governor. In 1924 Prempeh I was finally allowed home, and the kingdom's soul-symbol endured. Today Yaa Asantewaa is honoured across Ghana — in festivals, in the Yaa Asantewaa Girls' Secondary School founded in Kumasi in 1960, and in the memory of a woman who refused the surrender her men were ready to make.