Yaa Asantewaa

In March 1900 the British governor of the Gold Coast addressed an assembly of Asante chiefs at Kumasi and asked why the Golden Stool had not been produced for him to sit upon. He appears to have taken the stool for a throne, the seat of a deposed king that a conquering power could now occupy. In Asante understanding it is nothing of the kind. The stool holds the sunsum of the nation and is sat upon by nobody, the Asantehene included, so the request was not a hard bargain or an insult to a defeated ruler but an act of sacrilege proposed in public. The chiefs left without answering.

Asante tradition holds that the council then hesitated, and that Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu, spoke to shame them into resistance and took charge of the rising herself. The fighting that followed besieged the British fort at Kumasi for months. It ended in defeat, and she was deported with other leaders to the Seychelles, where she died. The stool itself was never surrendered. It had been hidden, and when it was later found and stripped of gold by men who came upon it, those responsible were punished under Asante law. The episode is the clearest case in Asante history of a war whose cause was a religious object rather than territory or trade, and it is remembered in Ghana in those terms.

Yaa Asantewaa's authority came from an office, not from an emergency. In Akan states succession is matrilineal, and the ohemmaa, usually rendered queen mother, is the senior woman of the royal lineage. She is not the ruler's wife and often not his mother. Her functions are constitutional and ritual at once: she nominates candidates for the stool from her lineage, she may publicly rebuke the ruler in council, and she holds her own stool with its own attendants and its own obligations towards the ancestors. At the level of the whole union the equivalent office is the asantehemaa. Akan thought supplies the reason such an office exists.

Personhood in the Akan scheme, as Kwame Gyekye sets it out, is composed rather than simple, and lineage is transmitted through the mother, so the woman who heads the lineage holds the thread by which the ancestral dead are joined to the living. Ritual duty towards those dead is hers. When the Golden Stool was demanded, the person best placed to say what the demand meant was the officeholder responsible for the lineage's relations with its ancestors. Reading Yaa Asantewaa only as a wartime leader mislays that, and mislays the wider point, which is that Akan religion assigns senior women a standing office rather than treating them as an exception to a male one.