The past few days I have been searching for very powerful women in African history and to my surprise they are numerous all over the continent.
It comes as a surprise when you are dealing with a continent that is heavily patriarchal. We complain about women not being empowered, fair enough, there is a lot of truth in that. But what can women learn from history to re-evaluate ourselves and pick ourselves up. These women were power houses. They fought for their communities’ interests mostly during the colonial period!
Today I am looking at Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana. She was popularly referred to as Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa. Like Mekatilili of Kenya, she was in the forefront in the fight against colonial powers in her native Ashanti community in Ghana.
Asantewaa was born in 1863 in the Edweso clan of the Ashanti Kingdom. She rose to be the queen of the clan. The Ashanti kingdom was one of the many powerful African Kingdoms. This kingdom was established in the 1700s and covered western and central Africa; what is known today as Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo.
The kingdom consisted of clans ruled by paramount chiefs. And it is from the paramount chiefs that the king of the Ashanti was selected. The golden stool is the symbol of the Ashanti kingdom. And it is believed that a spiritual leader summoned the golden stool from Heaven and landed on the lap of the first king of the kingdom; King Osei Tutu I.
And it is during the colonial period that the British exiled the King and other leaders at the time who failed to yield to their rule. And in 1900 the British governor general ordered a meeting with the Paramount chiefs of the Ashanti and stated that the release of their King and other leaders was on condition that the Ashanti surrender the golden stool, as a sign of submission to the British.
Yaa Asantewaa was appalled by the audacity of the British. It is said that she was the gatekeeper of the golden stool. She is quoted as saying;
No white man could have dared to speak to a leader of the Ashanti in the way the Governor spoke to you 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 white men. We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields."
And to the battlefields it was. Yaa Asantewaa rallied up five thousand troops to fight the British. Asantewaa was eventually caught and exiled to the Seychelles were she remained for 20 years and eventually died. But that was the beginning of the internal stir for independence that led Ghana to be the first state in Africa to receive independence in 1957.
