Yaa Asantewaa

Yaa Asantewaa was queen mother of Ejisu, a community within the Asante Empire in what is now Ghana, and the leader of the last Asante war against British rule in 1900. Rallying the Asante chiefs when the British governor demanded their most sacred object, the Golden Stool, she gave her name to the conflict, often called the Yaa Asantewaa War, and died in exile in the Seychelles in 1921. She is one of Ghana's most celebrated national heroines.

She was born around 1840 at Besease, near Ejisu, the daughter of Kwaku Ampoma and Ata Po, and farmed land around Boankra. She married a man from Kumasi, the Asante capital, as one of several wives, and had a daughter. When her brother became chief of Ejisu, he named her queen mother. In the matrilineal Asante system this was a position of real power: the queen mother sat on the chief's council, advised him, and helped choose candidates for the stool. She lived through a period of upheaval that included an Asante civil war from 1883 to 1888.

After her brother's death in 1894 she exercised her prerogative as queen mother and put forward her grandson as chief of Ejisu. In 1896 British forces occupied Kumasi and deported the Asante king, Prempeh I, together with other leading chiefs, including her grandson, eventually to the Seychelles. Yaa Asantewaa became regent of Ejisu-Juaben. In March 1900 the governor of the Gold Coast, Frederick Hodgson, came to Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool, which the Asante regard as the embodiment of the nation's soul and which no one may sit upon.

At a secret meeting of the remaining Asante leaders in Kumasi, the chiefs were divided over how to respond. According to the account handed down, Yaa Asantewaa rose and shamed them, telling the chiefs that if they were too cowardly to fight they should trade their loincloths for her undergarments, and she fired a gun in front of them to show her resolve. Several regional rulers then chose her to lead the Asante forces, the only time a woman is known to have held that role in Asante history.

Fighting began in March 1900, when Asante warriors surrounded the British and their Hausa troops in the stone fort at Kumasi. Relief columns forced their way in, and in June Hodgson broke out with part of the garrison. A larger force under Major James Willcocks relieved the fort in July and spent the following months crushing resistance in the surrounding districts, a campaign that lasted until about September. Estimates of losses vary; one account gives around 1,000 dead on the British side and thousands among the Asante. Despite their defeat, the Asante never surrendered the real Golden Stool, which stayed hidden.

After the war the British captured Yaa Asantewaa and other chiefs and exiled them to the Seychelles, and on 1 January 1902 Asante was formally annexed to the British crown. She died there on 17 October 1921. When Prempeh I was allowed home in 1924, he arranged for her remains to be brought back for a royal burial. Asante became part of independent Ghana in 1957. In 1960 a girls' secondary school in Kumasi was named after her, and in 2000 the centenary of the war was marked with a festival and a museum at Kwaso in the Ejisu district, where several items, including her battle dress, were lost in a fire in 2004.

Our 1880 map shows the Asante kingdom before the British conquest, and the 1900 map shows the year of her war, after which the British Empire annexed it to the Gold Coast.