The continent of Africa has had many great kingdoms rise and fall, almost none of which get covered in your standard histories. Egypt is the big exception, and even they are usually a brief unit on our way to important stuff, like Greece.

When Europeans began their slow and steady path toward world domination, Africa was mostly an obstacle to get around on the way to richer harvests on the other side, like China and the spice islands.

But, of course, that was going to change. Africa didn’t have much in the way of spices, but it had plenty of other resources and many of them were for sale. Sale, not conquest, because Europeans who went far into the interior of Africa tended to die of tropical diseases. So for many long centuries, the Europeans contented themselves with forts along the coast.

Meanwhile the African kingdoms went about their business and were more than happy to trade for European goods they didn’t produce themselves. One item they offered in return was slaves, but also ivory and gold.

It was not until the 19ᵗʰ century that Europeans fully grasped what the Quechua people of Peru had long known: quinine is a miracle drug. It worked so well against malaria that Europeans could now turn their beady eyes on the great interior of what they called the Dark Continent for more than one reason.

The British had long held forts on the coast of what we now call Ghana, but they called it the Gold Coast because that is the resource it was most known for. The forts had once been the clearing houses for slaves who were about to bid their continent and probably their lives goodbye. But by this point, the Brits had discovered that slavery is immoral. (What a concept!) I can’t say there were no slave ships coming and going. But there were no legal slave ships going out. That’s legal under British law. Slavery was alive and well in the interior.

The Asante Empire

One of the many trading partners the British dealt with were the Asante (also called the Ashanti). They were an empire based in the city of Kumasi. (This a city I have actually visited, only now I need to go back because I knew pretty much none of this episode’s material at the time. I am tempted to tell you that college trips are wasted on the college-aged. Only it was an awesome trip. Not a waste, even if I was powerful ignorant at the time.)

Anyway, the Asante, like any self-respecting empire, spent a couple hundred years assimilating their neighbors and that went pretty well for them. (Less so for their neighbors.) And the British were okay with that. The Asante made a buffer state against other powers, and they kept the gold flowing. But by the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century, the British were not so sure about this situation. The Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Germans all had their eyes on Africa, and it seemed to the British that Asante independence was no longer tenable. They were going to belong to one European power or another, and the British naturally had strong opinions about which European power ought to win that fight (Buah, 85; Ward, 301). The Asante disagreed about the whole premise.

War broke out and in 1874, there was a fragile peace called the Treaty of Fomena. The treaty said the Asante would pay 50,000 oz of gold in installments as a war indemnity. They would also renounce their claims over a lot of the tribes they had conquered. They would withdraw troops from the west, allow traders freedom of movement, keep the roads in good repair, and end human sacrifice (Buah, 86).

In return the British promised to… well, actually I’m not aware of anything the British promised to do. It was basically the beginning of the end of the Asante as an empire, but it was not the final death throe. They still had a king and a core group of subordinate states.

Yaa Asantewaa

One of those subordinate states was Edweso, just barely 12 miles from the capital Kumasi (McCaskie, 151). In Edweso was a woman, who was eventually known as Yaa Asantewaa. She was born in the 1830s, when the British were only just beginning to think about maybe moving inland. So the major power troubling her people for much of her life wasn’t the British. No, it was the Asantehene himself, the king in Kumasi. Throughout the 19ᵗʰ century, the Asantehene and his office-holders in Kumasi enriched themselves at Edweso expense (McCaskie, 152).

Meanwhile, Yaa Asantewaa lived a normal life. She married, and she had a daughter (McCaskie, 150). Her husband had at least three wives at the time, but that was nothing. Legally, the Asantehene was supposed to have 3,333 wives (Parker, 24). It is hard to imagine any man really living up to that responsibility.

We have no details about Yaa Asantewaa’s life during any of this. She certainly ate yams, the traditional food crop in her area. She probably also ate cassava and maize, which the Europeans had brought from the Americas (Parker, 230). She probably wore the colorful Kente cloth for which the Asante are still known today. She may have held her own private property in her own name. The Asante are matrilineal, which means that women did not rule (that would be matriarchal), but they did trace descent through the female line.

The Queen Mother was the highest-ranking female role, and she was not the king’s wife. She was usually his mother, or possibly a sister. She could rule alone if there were no male heir. She had official duties: she advised (and even rebuked) the king in public. She ran her own judicial system for any cases involving women or the royal family. Her presence was required for major decisions of state, and she could be removed from office if she neglected her duties (Aidoo, 2).

Yaa Asantewaa was not the Queen Mother of the Asante. She wasn’t from Kumasi. But by the 1890s, she was the Queen Mother of the client state of Edweso. She was actually the grandmother of the Edwesohene, or king of Edweso, who answered to the Asantehene in Kumasi.

The Asantehene, Prempeh I, was in trouble. He had come to power after a long and bloody succession dispute. In fact, Edweso, which had long suffered under Kumasi rule, had regained a lot of status in exchange for supporting Prempeh’s bid for power (McCaskie, 155).

Once Prempeh got all that sorted out, the British came calling. They offered to take the Asante under their protection. You, me, and Prempeh all know what that meant, so he said no. At which point, the British said okay, what about that 50,000 oz of gold you promised us 20 years ago? You never paid up, and it is now officially past due.

A nervous Prempeh offered them a substantial installment, but it wasn’t enough, and the British were in no mood for loan forgiveness. The debt issue was a pretext, obviously. They knew full well that Prempeh couldn’t pay it. If he could have, he surely would have after what happened next. You see, the British said they needed security on the amount they were still waiting for. The security they took was not goods or property, it was people. Specifically, the king, Prempeh. Also his Queen Mother, a powerful woman in her own right who maybe deserves her own episode someday.

Also 55 (yes, 55) other important rulers, members of the elite (Buah, 96). All these people the British rounded up and shipped off to exile in the Seychelles, islands in the Indian Ocean. In one fell swoop they had decapitated the Asanti government.

One of the 55 was Yaa Asantewaa’s grandson, the king of Edweso. Yaa Asantewaa was not deported. As Queen Mother of a subordinate state, the British apparently did not consider her important enough to eliminate. Some of them would live to regret that mistake.

Queen Mother of Edweso

With her grandson gone, Yaa Asantewaa was the sole ruler of Edweso. She theoretically answered to the Asantehene in Kumasi, but there was no Asantehene in Kumasi.

Among her many resources was a gold mine. Her grandson had rented it to a neighboring king, and Yaa Asantewaa was now collecting the regular rent payments. Well, the British didn’t like that either. They declared the rental agreement null and void and allowed British speculators to collect the cash instead (McCaskie, 157).

And if that wasn’t enough, there was still one more crowning offense. The British had assumed that removing the leaders would be enough to crush the Asante. But symbols also matter, and the Asante still had a symbol. European monarchs had thrones and scepters. The Asantehene had a stool, the kind you sit on, with a seat that curved upwards on the sides. Only nobody sat on it, not even the king. It was too sacred for that. There were many stools, representing many people of power, but the one for the Asantehene was covered in gold. The Asantehene was said to “take the stool” when he began his rule. The Golden Stool was said to contain the soul of the Asante people (Ward, 308).

What’s great about using a Golden Stool, rather than big honkin’ throne in a palace is that a stool is movable. When the British came for Prempeh, the Asante simply hid the stool. Their souls were not for sale.

Such was the situation for a few years. But in December 1899, an Asante boy toId the new British Governor Frederic Hodgson that he knew where the stool was and could lead him to it. Nothing came of the tip, but by March, Governor Hodgson was in Kumasi making one last British pitch. He informed the gathered crowd that Prempeh would never come back, that the indemnity was still not paid, and that he, Governor Hodgson, was the person in charge. He wrapped up with a demand that displayed a breathtaking level ignorance about his audience. He said:

“Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on the Golden Stool at this moment? I am the representative of the paramount power; why have you relegated me to this chair? Why did you not take the opportunity of my coming to Kumasi to bring the Golden Stool and give it to me to sit upon? However you may be quite sure that although the Government has not yet received the golden stool at your hands, it will rule over you with the same impartiality and with the same firmness as if you had produced it.”

(Ward, 308)

Remember, nobody sat on the stool. And certainly not an enemy. In the words of one author, this was the equivalent of a medieval Viking invader demanding that a Christian bishop let him feast on the communion bread which was the literal body of Christ (Ward, 308). The Asante were outraged.

According to a later British account, Yaa Asantewaa listened to Governor Hodgson and said “Good. He is calling the Asante to arms for me! He could not do it better than he has done it in demanding the Golden Stool!” (Kimble, 321).

In a subsequent meeting without Hodgson, Yaa Asantewaa made a speech of her own. She said to the assembled Asante:

How can a proud and brave people like the Asante sit back and look while white men took away their king and chiefs and humiliated them with a demand for the Golden Stool. The Golden Stool only means money to the white men; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall not pay one [pound] 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.

(Aidoo, 12)

The meeting broke up. Three days later the Asante were ready for war. Yaa Asantewaa herself donned the traditional battle dress called a batakari kese. It was made of many pouches of different materials, like leather, cloth, silver, and gold. Inside the pouches were sacred substances and possibly even scriptures from the Koran. (No, the Asante were not Muslim, but Muslims had been in the area. The Asante had picked up a few things.) The battle dress was a talisman meant to make the wearer invulnerable (Parker, 61).

From this point on the details are murkier than I would like. The accounts vary, depending on whether you are a writer who wants to play up the role of women or the type who wants to play it down. You’re probably not surprised that I’m the type who would like to play it up, but I also the type that likes intellectual honesty, and in all honesty, I don’t know whether Yaa Asantewaa personally took to the field and led the troops to war. Maybe she merely rallied them for a male general to lead. Maybe she was leading the charge.

If she did fight, then she was helped by a singular fact that I would not have considered. One researcher who has looked into the roles of women of this period commented that Asante women held a stronger position than their European counterparts, given the matrilineal society. However, women were still held back because of strict taboos and uncleanness surrounding menstruation. Yaa Asantewaa is just one of several warrior queens in the history of the area, but all of those warrior queens have one factor in common: they were all post-menopausal (Aidoo, 5). Yaa Asantewaa was pushing 70 before she made her big splash. Imagine your grandmother donning a battle dress and rallying the troops. I’m not advocating insurrection here, but since I live in a world where older women are sometimes invisible, I’m sort of happy that Yaa Asantewaa wasn’t young and gorgeous when she made her move, whether she personally commanded the army or not.

The Asante army rose up and blocked all roads to Kumasi. By the end of April 1900, all Europeans in the area had fled to Kumasi fort (Ward, 309). That includes Hodgson, who was probably regretting that he hadn’t read the briefing materials on the Asante back when he had a chance. The Europeans remained trapped with their dwindling food resources for seven months (Parker, 61).

Eventually, the siege was broken by outside reinforcements, The Asante were defeated and Yaa Asantewaa was deported to the Seychelles. She never came home. After 21 years of exile, she died at age 90 (McCaskie, 159).

The Asante Without an Empire

By then the Asante had long since been formally annexed to the British empire, which happened in 1901. (Kimble, 328).

There was one tiny of sliver of victory for the Asante, however. They still had the Golden Stool. No one gave it up.

It did not resurface until the Asante had spent 20 years being British. In 1920 the stool was found, and it was desecrated. The gold had been stripped. The offenders were caught and tried before the Asante council. Since this was sacrilege, it was much worse than murder, and the council sentenced them to death. But the British thought it was only stealing, so the punishment was their favorite one: deportation for life. The fact that the British overruled the Asante council on a matter of such importance was just one more item in a list of affronts (Kimble, 483)

Even so, the times were actually changing. The Asante were permitted to keep the stool, as long as it was in the open, and no one was plotting insurrection (Ward, 484). Prempeh was allowed to come home in 1924, after 28 years of exile. He was even allowed to claim the title of king of Kumasi, though not king of the Asante, which was a much larger entity (Kimble, 485).

In 1957 the country of Ghana became the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence back from the Europeans. Ghana’s borders encompass more than the old Asante empire, but the Asante people and culture are still a major part of Ghana, and they still have ceremonial stools.

One last note: Much later, the city of Kumasi built a museum to Yaa Asantewaa. It displayed, among other things, her batakari kese. Sadly it was destroyed by a fire, and the battle dress is no more.

Selected Sources

Aidoo, Agnes Akosua. “Asante Queen Mothers in Government and Politics in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 9, no. 1 (1977): 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41857049.

Buah, Francis Kwamina. A History of Ghana. London, Macmillan, 1998.

Fuller, Harcourt. “Commemorating an African Queen: Ghanaian Nationalism, the African Diaspora, and the Public Memory of Nana Yaa Asantewaa, 1952-2009.” African Arts 47, no. 4 (2014): 58–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43306258.

Kimble, David. A Political History of Ghana. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1963.

McCaskie, T. C. “The Life and Afterlife of Yaa Asantewaa.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 77, no. 2 (2007): 151–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026704.

Parker, John. Great Kingdoms of Africa. Univ of California Press, 21 Mar. 2023.

Ward, WEF. A History of Ghana. New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1958.