Diaspora EDU Spotlight, Vol. 1, No. 1
In 1900, a British governor stood in Kumasi and asked for a seat he had no right to. The person who answered him was a queen mother of sixty or more.
Her name was Yaa Asantewaa. She was the queen mother of Edweso, also written Ejisu, a state within the Asante kingdom in what is now Ghana. Historians place her birth somewhere between the 1830s and 1840, near Edweso. Her brother ruled Edweso, and when he died, her grandson took the stool.
In Asante society, the queen mother was not a ceremonial title. She advised the ruler and had a voice in who would rule next. Yaa Asantewaa would end up doing far more than advise.
The demand
The Golden Stool was the symbol of Asante unity, said to have descended from the sky, and every chief owed it allegiance. It was not furniture. It is believed to house the spirit of the Asante nation, living, dead and yet to be born. Even at his installation, a new king is lowered over the stool without touching it.
In 1896, the British exiled the Asante king, Prempeh I. Members of the ruling class went with him, including Yaa Asantewaa's grandson. With her grandson gone, she governed Edweso in his place.
Then, in 1900, the British governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, came to Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool. He is recorded as saying: "Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment?" To the Asante, it was not a request for an object. It was a demand for their surrender.
The war
The Asante leaders met in secret to decide how to respond. According to the accounts that have come down to us, it was Yaa Asantewaa who refused to back down:
"How can a proud and brave people like the Ashanti sit back and look while white men take away their king and Chiefs, and humiliate them with demand for the Golden Stool?"
She was named leader of the resistance. Asante forces besieged the British in their fort at Kumasi for roughly four months, until British reinforcements arrived. The British declared victory in July 1900, and the fighting that followed is still remembered as the Yaa Asantewaa War.
Exile, and the stool they never got
Yaa Asantewaa was captured, along with about fifteen of her advisers, and exiled to the Seychelles, an island chain in the Indian Ocean. She died there in October 1921, never having come home. Her remains were later returned, and she was given a royal burial. On January 1, 1902, Asante was formally made part of the British Gold Coast colony.
The British never got the Golden Stool. It stayed hidden. Hodgson had asked to sit on it, and no British official ever did.
Today, Ghana remembers her as a national heroine. The centenary of the war in 2000 was marked with celebrations across Asante, and there is a museum in her name in Ejisu.
Legend and record
Some of what is told about Yaa Asantewaa comes from tradition rather than written records. Even her birth year is uncertain. In the abstract of his article in the journal Africa, the historian T. C. McCaskie describes her as "locally famous in tradition" for her leadership in the war, and traces how her story has been retold and reworked over the past century, by Ghanaian nationalists, by politicians during the 2000 centenary, and by African Americans looking for heroes of their own.
Much of the written record of the war comes from the British, the side she fought. What survived of her own side was carried in memory, speech and ceremony. Her story reached us because her people decided it was worth keeping.
The lesson for us
Hodgson thought he was asking for a chair. Yaa Asantewaa understood he was asking for everything the chair stood for: who they were, who came before them, and who would come after.
What is our Golden Stool? What do we carry that is worth more than its material value: a name, a family story, a culture, a sense of who we are? And when someone asks us to hand it over, quietly or loudly, who decides to stand up?
She was not the king. She was not young. By the standards of the day, she was not the obvious choice to lead a war. She led anyway, because what was at stake was bigger than her position.
Legacy is not only what we build. It is also what we refuse to give away.
From many roots. One bloom.
Sources
- T. C. McCaskie, "The Life and Afterlife of Yaa Asantewaa," Africa 77, no. 2 (2007): 151–179, Cambridge University Press (abstract)
- Chantal Korsah, "Yaa Asantewaa," Dangerous Women Project, 2016
- "July 17, 1900: Kumasi surrenders to British forces under Sir Frederick Hodgson," Edward A. Ulzen Memorial Foundation
- "Nana Yaa Asantewaa and the War of the Golden Stool," Africa Defense Forum, 2022
Further reading: A. Adu Boahen, Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante-British War of 1900–1 (James Currey, 2003).
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