African Queens #2: Yaa Asantewaa
A portrait of Yaa Asantewaa, the Asante queen mother who in 1900 publicly called her people to armed resistance against British colonial demands—including the seizure of the sacred Golden Stool. Her defiant speech galvanized the Asante Kingdom into a rebellion that, though ultimately quelled by superior British force, preserved Asante sovereignty and cultural independence in ways that outlasted formal colonialism itself.
Yaa Asantewa is one of the most emblematic figures of the Asante people of Ghana. Born in 1840, she was appointed by her brother, to be the ruler of Ejisu, a small town which was part of the Ashanti/Asante Empire.
The Asante Empire had a very sophisticated political structure back then. It was a confederacy made up of small states under which were smaller districts and towns. Each of those states had a ruler whom all answered to the Asantehene (Ruler/King). You would have deduced by now that ‘Hene’ means king. Yaa’s brother was Edwesuhene and that was how he was able to appoint her Ejisuhene
Now, a series of political turmoil had fractured the Confederacy and it had seen 5 years of civil war from 1883 to 1888. When her brother, the Edwesuhene died in 1894, she used her powers as Queen Mother to appoint her grandson Ejisuhene. However, the British exiled her son alongside many others, including the King of the Asante people himself to Seychelles just two years later in 1896.
Then the British demanded the Golden Stool from the Asante people. Here is where the story gets interesting. But first, you have to know about the Golden Stool.
The Golden stool is both the royal and the divine throne of the Asante people. It is more than just the seat of power, it is believed to have descended directly from the sky and landed on the lap of the first King of the Asante people, Osei Tutu. It is believed to be the house of the spirit of the Asante people. It never touches the ground, as it is always placed on a blanket. During coronations, the new king is raised and lowered over it but does not sit on it.
It was this stool that the British, led by colonial Governor Sir Frederick Hodgson, demanded on March 25, 1900. No doubt made boisterous by the fact that they, the British, had succeeded to exile the Asante King and many members of his court two years prior, he came that fateful day to Kumasi and spoke to a crowd of Assante people who had gathered to ‘welcome’ him (even singing God Save The Queen) that he be given the Golden Stool. He said he was the representative of the Queen of England and he demanded to sit on the stool.
Just another case of the white man who came to Africa and didn’t quite understand the significance of certain things and had not made the time to. Because if he had, he would have kept quiet. To add insult to injury, he said the Ashanti had to pay 160,000 pounds every year as reparations for the 1874 war they had fought against the British.
Yaa Asantewaa who was in the crowd, and was as angry as everyone else, rose up and gave a fiery speech in Twi.
"Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it were in the brave days, the days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye, and Opoku Ware, chiefs would not sit down to see their king taken away without firing a shot. No white man could have dared to speak to a chief of the Ashanti in the way the Governor spoke to you chiefs this morning. Is it true that the bravery of the Ashanti is no more? I cannot believe it. It cannot be! I must say this, if you, the men of Ashanti, will not go forward, then we will. We, the women, will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls on the battlefields." She said fiercely
Later that day, as Governor Hodgson’s men made their way into the bush to search for the stool which had been hidden, they were ambushed and their casualty list was high. It was the sudden rain that fell that saved them all from the scourge of the enraged Asante people.
The governor and what remained of the party he came with, fled to the British offices in Kumasi. They stockade themselves there and with the help of machine guns and the 500 Nigerian Hausas stationed there were able to defend themselves. The Asante people had blocked the roads leading to the offices and had cut the telegraph lines so they could not call for help. Their intention was clearly to wear them out till they surrendered.
They were able to hold up their position for 3 months before the governor and his family along with a few others escaped and fled to the coast.
There, he was able to ask for help and an army of 1000 soldiers was summoned from Accra. This army was made up mostly of Yoruba soldiers. They were able to get into Kumasi and relieve the people barricaded in the British station just two days before they had agreed to give up. This happened on July 15, 1900. Four months after the governor had asked for the Golden Stool.
The British continued their onslaught and captured the town of Kumasi, capital of the Asante Empire in September 1900. The British annexed Kumasi but the proud Asante people denied this annexation. They paid little deference to the British and continued to live by their own laws. The British arrested many chiefs in 1901, including Yaa Asantewa and exiled them to Seychelles.
She died in exile in 1921.
When the exiled leaders of the Asante Kingdom were allowed to return in 1925, King Prempeh I made sure that the remains of Yaa Asantewaa were returned for a proper royal burial. Her dream for an Asante free of British rule was realized on 6 March 1957, when the Asante protectorate gained independence as part of Ghana, the first African nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this feat.
At the end of the day, the British never really ruled over the Asante Kingdom like they did the rest of Ghana.
As for the Golden Stool, the British never captured it. In the early 1920s, it was accidentally uncovered by a team of labourers in the bush, where it had been hidden. They took the golden ornaments that adorned the stool (making it powerless in the eyes of the Ashanti).
An Ashanti court sentenced the labourers to death for their desecration, but British officials intervened and arranged for their exile instead.
Long live the Yaa Asantewaas of Africa.
- Wandji Wilfred.
The piece traces the Asante political structure, the internal civil wars of the 1880s, and the moment of peak British assertion in 1900, when Governor Hodgson's demand for the Golden Stool and the recent exile of the Asante king created a crisis of dignity and sovereignty. Yaa Asantewaa's emergence as a voice of resistance speaks to a moment when colonial power was at its height yet still incomplete—and when African leadership, especially women's leadership, found ways to act.
The essay documents a rarely centered episode in African resistance to colonialism: not a figure of nationalist independence (which came later), but a woman whose moral clarity in a moment of humiliation sustained a people's refusal to be conquered. Her speech and the Asante rebellion it sparked set a precedent of cultural defiance that shaped the region for decades. The piece matters now as a corrective to narratives that treat colonialism as total or inevitable, and as a reminder that resistance often took forms—spiritual, political, everyday—that were not military victory but something deeper.