In 1900 a British governor demanded to sit on the most sacred object in Asante. The war that followed bears the name of Yaa Asantewaa, a queen mother from Ejisu.
On 28 March 1900 the British governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederic Hodgson, sat facing the chiefs of Asante at a meeting in Kumasi, the Asante capital in what is now central Ghana. His visit was about money and British control. A year later a British MP told the House of Commons what the governor had asked the chiefs that day: ‘Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on it at this moment?’
To the Asante, the Golden Stool held the soul of the nation. Not even the king sat on it. Within days of the governor’s demand, the country was at war. That war is remembered by the name of Yaa Asantewaa, the queen mother of Ejisu, a town near Kumasi.
Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu
Yaa Asantewaa was born at Besease, near Ejisu, into the Asona clan. Nobody wrote down the date. The historian T.C. McCaskie places her birth in about the 1830s, and other writers suggest the 1840s. In 1887 her brother, Nana Kwesi Afrane Okpese, the chief of Ejisu, made her queen mother, known in the Twi language as ohemmaa.
An Asante queen mother had real power. She advised the chief and held her own court, and when a chief died she had a say in choosing the next one. When her brother died, she is said to have helped her grandson become chief of Ejisu. In 1896 the British arrested that grandson, along with the Asantehene (the king of Asante), Prempeh I, and other leaders, and sent them into exile. By 1900 Britain controlled Ejisu and the rest of Asante, and the Asante king was still in exile.
Key facts
- Yaa Asantewaa was queen mother of Ejisu, a state of the Asante confederacy, from 1887.
- Her birth date is unknown. McCaskie dates her life from about the 1830s to 1921.
- Governor Hodgson made his demand about the Golden Stool in Kumasi on 28 March 1900.
- The war of 1900 is widely known in Ghana as the Yaa Asantewaa War.
- She was captured in March 1901 and exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in October 1921.
- The British never took the Golden Stool.
The demand for the Golden Stool
Asante tradition says that around 1700, when the kingdom was founded, the priest Okomfo Anokye called the Golden Stool down from the sky, and that it holds the sunsum, or spirit, of the Asante people. This account belongs to Asante tradition and faith, and it is not found in written records of the time. It helps explain why the governor’s words caused such anger.
The British government later said it had never told the governor to take the stool. In the House of Commons on 12 March 1901, the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, said that ‘no instructions were given to Sir F. Hodgson as to the Golden Stool’. Asked what the stool was worth, he said it had a ‘moral and intellectual value’. When another MP, C.P. Scott, asked whether it was regarded as ‘the symbol of possession’, Chamberlain answered, ‘Precisely.’
The governor’s visit was also about money. Chamberlain told the House that Hodgson had been allowed to raise £12,000 a year from Asante, presented as interest on war costs that Britain said the Asante still owed. Hodgson had crossed the Pra river into Asante on 22 March with an escort of only thirty Hausa soldiers, men of a people from what is now northern Nigeria and Niger. By then the Asante king, Prempeh I, had been in exile for four years.
Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on it at this moment? I am the representative of the paramount Power; why have you relegated me to this chair?
Words attributed to Governor Sir Frederic Hodgson, Kumasi, 1900, as quoted by David Lloyd George in the House of Commons, 19 March 1901 (Hansard)
The MP who told this story was David Lloyd George, a fierce critic of the government, speaking on 19 March 1901. He said the chair the governor had complained about was a biscuit box. He also compared the search for the Golden Stool to an old European legend about knights searching for a sacred cup, calling it ‘something like the quest of the Holy Grail’.
Yaa Asantewaa and the war of 1900
What was said when the Asante leaders met after the governor’s speech is known mostly from oral tradition, the history passed on by word of mouth. In the best-known story, Yaa Asantewaa scolded the men for holding back and said that if they would not fight, the women would. Ghanaian schoolchildren learn versions of her speech, and it is often quoted in print. Nobody wrote it down at the time, and the wording changes from one telling to the next.
The written record is clearer about what happened next. Asante fighters surrounded the British fort at Kumasi and kept the governor and his party trapped inside for weeks. His wife, Mary Alice Hodgson, was with him. In 1901 she published her own account, The Siege of Kumassi, which describes those weeks from the British side. The governor fought his way out in June. A relief force under Colonel James Willcocks reached Kumasi in July, and fighting in the forest went on for months.
Historians disagree about how far Yaa Asantewaa led the fighting herself. The Ghanaian historian A. Adu Boahen, in his 2003 book Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante-British War of 1900–1, described her as the leader of the war. McCaskie, writing in the journal Africa in 2007, looked at how her part was recorded at the time and remembered later. He argued that her real life and her ‘afterlife’ as a national symbol should be studied separately. Both agree that the British saw her as one of their main enemies.
Capture, exile and the stool that was never found
Yaa Asantewaa was captured in early March 1901. Some accounts say she was betrayed, and others that she gave herself up. Historians still disagree on that point. The British sent her and other Asante leaders into exile in the Seychelles, islands in the Indian Ocean, where Prempeh I was already being held. In 1901 Britain formally annexed Asante, making it part of its empire.
She never returned to Ejisu in her lifetime. She died in the Seychelles on 17 October 1921, and her remains were brought home to Asante in 1924, the year Prempeh I was allowed to return.
The British never found the Golden Stool. Its keepers hid it, and it stayed hidden for twenty years. In 1920 men building a road came close to the hiding place. Some of the people guarding the stool then dug it up and took gold ornaments from it.
When this came out in 1921, it caused outrage across Asante. The British arrested the men accused, and Asante chiefs in Kumasi tried them under customary law, the traditional law of the Asante, and sentenced some of them to death. The colonial government changed the sentences to banishment, which meant being sent away from Asante, and promised not to interfere with the stool. It was later restored, and it was photographed in 1935, the year the Asante Confederacy was revived.
How Ghana remembers Yaa Asantewaa
In Ghana today her name is easy to find. A girls’ secondary school in Kumasi, founded in 1960, is named after her. A museum in her honour opened near Ejisu. On 23 July 2004 a fire destroyed much of the building, along with belongings linked to her, including sandals and a batakari, a kind of smock.
She is also remembered outside Ghana, including among people of African descent in Britain and the United States. A well-known photograph is often said to show her, but no one has confirmed who is in it, so we have not used it. The image at the top of this page is a sculpture at the museum in Ejisu. It is an artist’s interpretation, not a portrait from life.
Written records, oral tradition, and the Golden Stool today
Her story comes to us from two kinds of evidence. Hansard, the official record of debates in the British parliament, keeps the governor’s words and the minister’s denials. Oral tradition keeps the speech that Ghanaian children learn at school. Historians such as Adu Boahen and McCaskie have worked out where the two agree and where they differ.
Asante lost the war of 1900, and Britain ruled the country for more than fifty years afterwards. The Golden Stool was never handed over. It is still at the centre of Asante life and is brought out on important state occasions. No one sits on it. For more lives like hers, see our People section, and for the wider story of the Gold Coast, our History pages.
Sources and further reading
- Ashanti Expenditure: The Golden Stool, House of Commons debate, 12 March 1901, Hansard.
- The Ashanti Expedition, House of Commons debate, 19 March 1901, Hansard.
- T.C. McCaskie, ‘The Life and Afterlife of Yaa Asantewaa’, Africa 77:2 (2007).
- A. Adu Boahen, Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante-British War of 1900–1 (Sub-Saharan Publishers, Accra, and James Currey, Oxford, 2003).
- October 17, 1921: Yaa Asantewaa, Queenmother of Ejisu, dies in the Seychelles, EAUMF.
- Fire guts Yaa Asantewaa Museum, GhanaWeb (July 2004).
Image credits: Featured image: sculpture at the Yaa Asantewaa Museum, Ejisu, Noahalorwu, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (an artistic interpretation, not a portrait from life). ‘Typical fight in the forest’, unknown artist, Battles of the Nineteenth Century (1901), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The Golden Stool, 1935, UK Government via The National Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
