Yaa Asantewaa

Yaa Asantewaa was born in the village of Boankra, in the Asante Empire, around 1840. She was Queen Mother — Ohemaa — of Ejisu, holder of one of the oldest and most respected stools in the Asante federation. The position in Akan political tradition combined ceremonial dignity with substantive authority over the affairs of women, the selection of chiefs, and the moral conduct of the state.

In March 1900, the British colonial governor of the Gold Coast, Frederick Hodgson, arrived at the royal court in Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool — the *Sika Dwa Kofi* — which, in Asante belief, contained the spirit of the nation itself. No human being could be allowed to sit upon it. To surrender the Stool was to surrender the soul of the people. Several chiefs were prepared to make peace. Yaa Asantewaa rose at the council and delivered words that have entered every Ghanaian schoolchild's memory: "If you, the men of Asante, 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 in the battlefields."

She raised an army of five thousand and laid siege to the British garrison at Kumasi Fort. The war lasted from March to September 1900 — the last war of African resistance against British colonial conquest in the region. The British eventually broke the siege with reinforcements drawn from across the empire, captured Yaa Asantewaa, and exiled her to the Seychelles. She died there on the seventeenth of October 1921, age approximately eighty-one. The British colonial state never possessed the Golden Stool. The Asante nation, sustained through colonial decades by the meaning her resistance gave it, was restored to full autonomy on the eve of Ghanaian independence in 1957.

She is honored here as the Queen Mother who, when men of state hesitated, took up the sword herself.