Yaa Asantewaa

“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!”

 

Yaa Asantewaa (17 October 1840 – 17 October 1921) was the queen mother of Ejisu in the Ashanti Empire – now part of modern-day Ghana. In 1900 she led the Ashanti war known as the War of the Golden Stool, also known as the Yaa Asantewaa War, against British colonialism. She died in 1921. She was a successful farmer, an intellectual, a politician, human right activist, queen, mother and a military leader. Quite an impressive CV.

Ashanti is a southern region of modern Ghana, named after the clans of Ashanti people who hard formed their own kingdom in 1670. The region had grown rich and powerful, trading gold and slaves with the British, Dutch and Danes. When Yaa Asantewaa was born in 1840, the British had assumed control of the other European’s Gold Coast forts. By 1870, they had ransacked the Ashanti capital, building their own palace to rival the king’s and demanding huge taxes of the Ashanti people.

Yaa Asantewaa was born into a royal family. Her brother, Afrane Panin, became the chief of Edweso, a nearby community from 1880-1994. After an uneventful childhood, Yaa Asantewaa cultivated crops on the land around Boankra. She entered a polygamous marriage with a man from Kumasi, with whom she had a daughter. Following her brother’s death, Yaa Asantewaa’s grandson, Kofi Tene, inherited the throne.

During her brother's reign, Yaa Asantewaa saw the Ashanti Confederacy went through a series of events that threatened its future, including civil war from 1883 to 1888. In 1896, Kofi was exiled by the British and sent to the Seychelles  alongside the King of Asante Prempeh I and other members of the Asante government. They demanded that the Ashanti give up their land and become a part of the British Empire.  After the deportation of Prempeh I, the British governor-general of the Gold Coast demanded the Golden Stool, the symbol of the Asante nation and their most prized possession. This request led to a secret meeting of the remaining members of the Asante government to discuss how to secure the return of their king and avoid surrendering the stool and with it their independence . There was a disagreement among those present on how to go about this. Yaa Asantewaa was the Guardian of the Golden Stool at this time and she addressed the meeting with her now famous speech:

“How can a proud and brave people like the Asante sit back and look while whitemen took away their king and chiefs, and humiliated them with a demand for the Golden Stool. The Golden Stool only means money to the whitemen; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall not pay one predwan to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments.”

For added emphasis, she seized a gun and shot it in front of the men.  

The men were suitably roused and Yaa Asantewaa was chosen by a number of regional Asante kings to be the war-leader of the Asante fighting force. This is the first and only example for a woman to be given that role in Asante history. The Ashanti-British War of the Golden Stool – also known as the "Yaa Asantewaa War"– was led by Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewaa with an army of 5,000.

She proved an effective leader, ordering each village to build a defensive stockade and winning back the capital by siege – preventing British troops receiving their supplies. Beginning in March 1900, the rebellion laid siege to the fort at Kumasi where the British had sought refuge. The fort still stands today as the Kumasi Fort and Military Museum. After several months, the Gold Coast governor eventually sent a force of 1,400 to quell the rebellion. Thus, her success was at an end. In 1901, the British overwhelmed the 5000 Ashanti troops and won the War of the Golden Stoool.

During the fighting, Queen Yaa Asantewaa and fifteen of her closest advisers were captured, and they, too, were sent into exile to the Seychelles. The rebellion represented the final war in the Anglo-Asante series of wars that lasted throughout the 19th century. On  January 1, 1902 the British fully seized the land that the Asante army had been defending from them for almost a century, and the Asante empire was made a protectorate of the British crown.

Yaa Asantewaa died in exile in the Seychelles on  17 October 1921. Three years after her death, on  17 December 1924, Prempeh I and the other remaining members of the exiled Asante court were allowed to return to Asante. Prempeh I made sure that the remains of Yaa Asantewaa and the other exiled Asantes were returned for a proper royal burial. Yaa Asantewaa's dream for an Asante free of British rule was realized on  6 March 1957, when the Asante protectorate gained independence as part of Ghana. Ghana was the first African nation in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this feat.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Asantewaa understood the ramifications of British occupation. She is seen by Ghanaians today as a queen mother who exercised her political and social clout to help defend her kingdom. The role she played in influencing the Ashanti men to battle the British continues to be significant in cultural history.

Yaa Asantewaa's call upon the women of the Asante Empire is based on the political obligations of Akan women and their respective roles in legislative and judicial processes. The hierarchy of male stools among the Akan people was complemented by female counterparts. Within the village, elders who were heads of the matrilineages (mpanyimfo), constituted the village council known as the ôdekuro. The women, known as the mpanyinfo, and referred to as aberewa or ôbaa panyin, were responsible for looking after women's affairs. For every ôdekuro, an ôbaa panyin acted as the responsible party for the affairs of the women of the village and served as a member of the village council. The head of a division, the ôhene, and the head of the autonomous political community, the Amanhene, had their female counterparts known as the ôhemaa: a female ruler who sat on their councils. The ôhemaa and ôhene were all of the same mogya, blood or localized matrilineage. The occupant of the female stool in Kumasi state, the Asantehemaa, the united Asante, since her male counterpart was ex-officio of the Asanthene, was a member of the Kôtôkô Council, the Executive Committee or Cabinet of the Asanteman Nhyiamu, General Assembly of Asante rulers. Female stool occupants participated not only in the judicial and legislative processes, but also in the making and unmaking of war, and the distribution of land.

The experience of seeing a woman serving as political and military head of an empire was foreign to British colonial troops in 19th-century Africa, showing how the supposedly “savage” Africans were actually ahead of British “civilization” in many ways.

“The woman who fights before cannons/You have accomplished great things/You have done well.”

Yaa Asantewaa remains a much-loved figure in Asante history and the history of Ghana as a whole for her role in confronting the colonialism of the British. She is immortalized in songs such as that above.

To highlight the importance of encouraging more female leaders in Ghanaian society, the Yaa Asantewaa Girls' Secondary School was established at Kumasi in 1960 with funds from the Ghana Education Trust.

In the year 2000, a week-long centenary celebration was held in Ghana to acknowledge Yaa Asantewaa's accomplishments. As part of these celebrations, a museum was dedicated to her at Kwaso in the Ejisu–Juaben District on 3 August 2000.

We always stan an empowered black queen who not only roused the fighting courage of her men but also kicked a lot of British arse while she was at it. Yaa Asantewaa is a great example of why the stereotype of both women and of colonized nations as weak people who will simply role over to more “dominant” forces. Not only did she and her women show more bravery and effectiveness than her male warriors in preparing to fight the battle, she also shows how passionately Africans resisted British imperialism and how both colonisation and de-colonialization are gradual processes with pressure on both sides. All hail Yaa Asantewaa. A true hero imo.