Yaa Asantewaa and the War of the Golden Stool

Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Edweso (Ejisu) in the Asante kingdom, is remembered as the leader of the last of the Anglo-Ashanti wars, fought in 1900 over an object the British never managed to see, let alone seize.

She was born around 1830, by the historian A. Adu Boahen’s reckoning, and grew up at Besease. When she became queen mother is not known, but she held the office in the 1880s and 1890s, while her brother Afrane Panin ruled Edweso. In the Asante system a queen mother named the candidates when a stool fell vacant and kept a stool and court of her own.

In January 1896 the British arrested the Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh I, with his mother and leading chiefs. Among them was Yaa Asantewaa’s grandson Afrane Kumaa, the ruler of Edweso, and with him gone she held both offices there, Boahen writes. The prisoners were sent to Sierra Leone and in 1900 to the Seychelles.

On March 28, 1900, Governor Frederic Hodgson told the chiefs at Kumasi that the kingship was abolished, that they would pay a yearly sum toward the costs of the British expeditions, and that they should hand over the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi), which in Asante tradition holds the soul of the nation. Notes of the meeting record him asking why he was not sitting on the stool at that moment. His wife, Lady Hodgson, later denied that he had wanted to sit on it.

That night, at a meeting of the chiefs, Yaa Asantewaa refused to pay her share and argued for war, according to an Edweso man who was there and was interviewed in 1970. Boahen credits her speeches with shaming the men into fighting and calls her the war’s leader and commander-in-chief. Other historians call her a symbolic head, and an Asante-written history of the 1930s and 1940s gives her no role at all. Boahen himself notes that no British officer reported seeing her fire a gun.

The fighting began on April 2, when a party searching for the stool was attacked. Hodgson and his party were besieged in the Kumasi fort until he broke out on June 23, and a relief column reached Kumasi on July 15. The fighting ended in December, and Yaa Asantewaa surrendered on March 3, 1901. She was deported to the Seychelles with 14 other leaders that year and died there in October 1921; Boahen gave the date as Oct. 17 in 2000, citing a Seychelles government letter, and as Oct. 18 in his 2003 book.

The Golden Stool was hidden at Wawase throughout the war and never found by the British. In 1921 road workers dug it up by accident, and a group of men stripped its gold. A monument to her stands at a roundabout in Ejisu, and in 2000 a new queen mother of Edweso took the stool name Nana Yaa Asantewaa II.