Yaa Asantewaa

Yaa Asantewaa led the last Asante war against the British in 1900, at about sixty years of age, after the men of the council hesitated. She was queen mother of Ejisu, a constitutional office in Asante with the right to nominate and to depose the chief, and she was acting as regent because her grandson had been deported. The British had exiled the Asantehene Prempeh I to the Seychelles in 1896 without a war, and in March 1900 the governor of the Gold Coast, Frederick Hodgson, came to Kumasi and demanded that the Golden Stool be produced for him to sit on. The stool holds the soul of the Asante nation and no one, including the Asantehene, sits on it; the demand was understood as a proposal to extinguish the nation, and it was probably made in ignorance rather than malice, which did not improve it. At the council that followed, according to the account preserved in Asante tradition, she told the chiefs that if they would not go forward then the women would, and she took the oath. The rising besieged the British fort at Kumasi for three months; the garrison and the governor escaped through the lines in June, and a relief column of some fourteen hundred men eventually broke the siege. Around two thousand Asante and about a thousand British and allied troops died. She was captured and deported to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921 without seeing Asante again; Prempeh returned in 1924 and had her remains sought without success. Asante was annexed as a colony in 1902. The Golden Stool was never surrendered - it was hidden, and was rediscovered only in 1920 by road builders. A girls' secondary school in Kumasi carries her name.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history