“Yaa Asantewaa
The woman who fights before cannons
You have accomplished great things
You have done well”
On 17 October 1921, Yaa Asantewaa died in the Seychelles, far from the Asante homeland she had fought to defend. After the war of 1900–1901, the British sent her into exile, seeking to remove a woman whose leadership had turned an insult to the Asante nation into sustained armed resistance. More than a century later, her name remains inseparable from that struggle: defending the Golden Stool and a people’s right to determine their own future.
As the Queen Mother of Ejisu, she was already an experienced political leader when she became the best-known figure in the war that bears her name. She farmed, raised a family, advised on her community’s affairs, and assumed responsibility for Ejisu after its ruler was removed. Her stand in 1900 grew from these obligations. At its heart was self-determination: the refusal to surrender the institutions, ancestral commitments and sacred relationships through which Asante people understood their nation.
A Farmer and Queen Mother
Yaa Asantewaa’s birth is commonly dated to around 1840, although accounts differ. She was born at Besease, near Ejisu, in what is now Ghana, and belonged to the Asona royal lineage. Before the events that brought her lasting recognition, she cultivated land around Boankra and established herself as a skilled farmer. She also married and had children. Surviving accounts offer fewer reliable details about these early years than about her later public life. Her brother, Nana Akwasi Afrane Okese, became the Ejisuhene, the ruler of Ejisu, and selected her as its Queen Mother, or ohemaa. Asante society traced royal descent through the maternal line, and queen mothers held responsibilities in succession, counsel, justice and the welfare of their communities. They participated in government alongside male stool occupants and could advise, challenge and rebuke them.
Therefore, Yaa Asantewaa occupied an established position within Asante government when she entered our istwa (history) after the men hesitated to fight. Her later military leadership was exceptional, but her participation in political decision-making was not an intrusion into a world from which women had always been absent. It grew from an existing tradition of women’s leadership.
During her brother’s lifetime, Asante experienced years of internal conflict, including a civil war from 1883 to 1888. These struggles tested relationships among its constituent states while British interference continued to threaten its independence. After her brother died in 1894, Yaa Asantewaa nominated her grandson to succeed him as Ejisuhene, exercising one of the central responsibilities of her office.
In 1896, British troops entered Kumasi and arrested Asantehene Prempeh I and other senior Asante leaders, including the Ejisuhene. Their removal left communities without their rulers and families without relatives. Yaa Asantewaa became regent of Ejisu and carried its affairs through the years that followed. The arrests and banishments were therefore both a national crisis and a personal rupture in her own household.
The Golden Stool
The Golden Stool, Sika Dwa Kofi, was central to the confrontation that followed. It was not an ordinary royal seat, nor was it simply a valuable gold object. It embodied the unity and spiritual life of the Asante nation: a sacred connection among the living, their ancestors and generations yet to come. Allegiance to it extended beyond allegiance to any individual Asantehene.
No person, including the Asantehene, was permitted to sit upon it. Its significance cannot therefore be understood through the European image of a monarch occupying a throne. The Stool represented something greater and more enduring than a ruler. Its protection was a collective obligation.
In March 1900, Sir Frederick Hodgson, the British governor of the Gold Coast, arrived in Kumasi and demanded that the Golden Stool be produced for him to sit upon. His demand followed the removal of Prempeh I and accompanied further British financial demands. To the Asante, this was not a harmless misunderstanding of ceremonial practice. It threatened the sacred foundation of their national life. The king’s absence had not dissolved the Asante nation. Hodgson’s demand made the Golden Stool itself the immediate focus of resistance.
“We the Women Will”
Asante leaders met to consider how to respond. There was no easy agreement. Previous encounters with British troops had shown the cost of war, and some favored appealing again for Prempeh I’s return rather than another armed confrontation. Yaa Asantewaa rejected a response that would leave the Golden Stool exposed and the king’s removal unanswered. Her intervention survives in several versions. The celebrated speech associated with her belongs to the war’s history and to the oral memory through which later generations have understood it. In the version widely associated with her stand, she invoked the founders and earlier leaders of Asante:
“Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to fight for our king. If it were in the brave days of, the days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye, and Opoku Ware, leaders would not sit down to see their king taken away without firing a shot.
No [European] man could have dared to speak to the ruler of the Ashanti in the way the Governor spoke to you leaders this morning. Is it true that the bravery of the Ashanti is no more? I cannot believe it. It cannot be! 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 the [European] men. We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”
The challenge placed responsibility squarely before the council. If male leaders would not defend the nation, women would act. The speech also called the assembly back to its obligations: to the absent king, to the ancestors whose names she invoked, and to the sacred Stool that bound Asante communities together.
Several Asante rulers selected Yaa Asantewaa to lead the resistance. Her appointment as war leader gave practical expression to her declaration. She would not merely urge others to face the consequences of resistance; she would share them.
The War That Bears Her Name
The conflict became known as the War of the Golden Stool, the Yaa Asantewaa War and the final war in the long series of Anglo-Asante confrontations. Yaa Asantewaa helped mobilize fighters and sustain a campaign aimed at preventing British seizure of the Stool. Her leadership brought together political resolve, military organization and the defense of a sacred national trust.
She is remembered wearing the batakari kese, a war smock associated with Asante military leadership. Its attached pouches held protective substances and amulets, including Qur’anic writings obtained through Muslim clerics and trading networks. The garment joined material preparation for battle with spiritual protection. Its later appearance in statues and other representations of Yaa Asantewaa would become one of the most recognizable features of her public image.
Asante fighters blocked routes into Kumasi and besieged the British fort, where Hodgson, soldiers and others had taken refuge. The blockade restricted movement and supplies, placing the garrison under severe pressure. Resistance depended not only on direct fighting but also on holding roads, interrupting communications, and preventing relief from reaching the fort.
British reinforcements were drawn from several West African territories. The campaign was therefore not a simple encounter between a wholly European army and an African one: Britain also deployed African soldiers against Asante. Greater access to reinforcements and weaponry eventually enabled the British to break the resistance. The British captured Yaa Asantewaa and members of her war council, imprisoned them, and sent them to the Seychelles.
The military defeat was devastating. It brought further losses, forced removals, and extended British rule over Asante. Yet the British did not obtain the Golden Stool. It remained beyond their grasp. This distinction became central to how the war was remembered: the fighters had been defeated, but they had not surrendered the sacred object they defended. That survival did not erase the war’s suffering or restore the independence that had been lost. However, it preserved a vital source of Asante continuity. The British could remove leaders from their homeland without securing the allegiance embodied in the Stool.
Exile and Death
Yaa Asantewaa spent the remainder of her life in the Seychelles, joining Prempeh I and other Asante exiles. They removed her to prevent her from organizing further resistance. It also separated her from the community whose affairs she had helped guide and from the land in which her responsibilities were rooted. She remained in exile for the final two decades of her life.
She died on 17 October 1921. In 1924, Prempeh I and the surviving members of the exiled court were allowed to return to Asante. Accounts of her commemoration record that her remains were subsequently brought home for royal burial. Her return in death restored a connection that banishment had sought to sever.
An Asante Heroine, a Ghanaian Legacy
After her death, Yaa Asantewaa’s story traveled beyond Ejisu and Asante. Ghanaian independence leaders recognized in her resistance an example of African determination to reject foreign oppression. Kwame Nkrumah praised her in speeches, and the institutions of independent Ghana helped establish her as a national heroine.
That wider recognition did not entirely resolve questions about whose history she represented. Some Asante leaders objected to efforts to make her a national symbol when those efforts seemed to diminish the specifically Asante commitments she fought for. Her defense of Ejisu, Prempeh I and the Golden Stool preceded the modern Ghanaian state. Honoring her within Ghana’s history need not obscure those origins.
Her name also became associated with girls’ education. In 1960, the Ghana Educational Trust financed the Yaa Asantewaa Girls’ Secondary School in Kumasi, and Nkrumah ensured it bore her name. The choice connected remembrance to possibility: girls could encounter her not only as a figure from the past but as an example of women’s capacity to lead.
Her likeness appeared on Ghanaian banknotes and postage stamps, while museums and monuments gave her story a visible place in public life. The war’s centenary commemorations brought renewed attention to her achievements. On 3 August 2000, a museum dedicated to her opened at Kwaso in the Ejisu-Juaben area. A 2004 fire destroyed important objects there, including items identified as her sandals and battle dress—a reminder that preserving historical memory also requires protecting its material traces.
Yet her remembrance has never depended on museums alone. It lives in names, performances, family histories and songs. The song that honors her preserves an image more immediate than a formal title: a woman standing before cannons.
Koo koo hin koo
Yaa Asantewaa ee!
Obaa basia
Ogyina apremo ano ee!
Waye be egyae
Na Wabo mmode
“Yaa Asantewaa
The woman who fights before cannons
You have accomplished great things
You have done well”
The tribute honors her warrior spirit. Though advanced in age, Yaa Asantewaa chose to fight when her people’s sacred inheritance was threatened. She endured military defeat and exile, but neither extinguished her legacy. Generations have sung her courage, carrying her name far beyond the homeland she defended. Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, accomplished great things.
Sources:
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.
Lartey, Solomon, “Exploring the Life and Legacy of Yaa Asantewaa in the Context of African Resistance Movements: Woes to the British Empire,” ResearchGate, September 2024, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383920429_Exploring_the_Life_and_Legacy_of_Yaa_Asantewaa_in_the_Context_of_African_Resistance_Movements_Woes_to_the_British_Empire.
https://gjss.org/sites/default/files/issues/chapters/papers/GJSS%20Vol%2013-1%20Melz.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaa_Asantewaa
https://yaaasantewaa.co.uk/history/
