Yaa Asantewaa (1840-1921), the queen mother of Edweso (Ejisu) state, one of the component states of the Asante Union, located 10 mi (16km) east of Kumase, is the best known of the few heroines in Asante history. She rallied the Asante against the British in 1900, and the Anglo-Asante war of that year is named after her.
Short, stout, and very dark with small eyes, she was born at Besease in the Edweso state, probably during the 1840s or 1850s, while the exact date she became queen mother is not known, she was by then no longer young, she was certainly on the stool at the time of exile of the Asantehene, Prempeh I (q.v), in 1896. She had two children, Nana Ama Serwaa of Boankra and Kofi Teno. Kofi Teno became the Edwesohene (ruler of Edweso), and was called Nana Afrane Kuma. He played a leading role in the civil wars in Kumasi in the 1880s that resulted in the enstoolment of Prempeh I in 1888.
Yaa Asantewaa acquired her fame and enviable place in Asante history primarily because of the role she played in 1900 in the last of the Anglo-Asante wars, often called the Yaa Asantewaa war. Among the Asante rulers who were exiled with Prempeh I was her son, Afrane Kuma, and Yaa Asantewaa could not forgive the British for this. Moreover, as a proud Asante, she could not accept the reduction of the Asante Empire to the status of a British dependency. From the time of the deportation of Prempeh I onwards, she and her followers therefore worked persistently to instigate rebellion among the other Asante rulers and chiefs. The British governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson (term of office 1898 – 1900), played into her hands when at a meeting in Kumasi in April 1900, he asked for the Golden Stool to be brought to him so he could sit upon it. This sacrilegious request, together with his demand for the payment of interest on the war indemnity imposed on the Asantehene, together with the search that was mounted for the Golden Stool by the governor, produced feelings of resentment and humiliation throughout the Asante nation. Taking advantage of those feelings, Yaa Asantewaa successfully pressed home her plans for a revolt against the British and herself assumed the leadership of the revolt when it broke out in April 1900.
After the British, including Governor Hodgson and his wife, had been besieged in the fort at Kumase, the revolt was suppressed in July1900 by a British expeditionary force. Among the leaders of the revolt who were captured and sent to join Prempeh I and his group in exile in Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean was Yaa Asantewaa. She died in Seychelles after a short illness, probably in 1921.
A. A. BOAHEN
