Yaa Asantewaa and the Golden Stool: The 1900 Siege of Kumasi

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On March 25, 1900, British governor Frederick Hodgson stood before Asante leaders in Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool so he could sit on it. The British had occupied Asante since 1896 and exiled King Prempeh I, and Hodgson also claimed debts dating from the 1874 war. To the Asante, the stool, said to have descended from the sky in the late 17th century, held the sunsum, the soul of the nation's living, dead and unborn. When the male chiefs met him with silence, Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu, declared that if the men would not fight, the women would.

Drawing on the matrilineal networks the British overlooked, she raised about 20,000 warriors. After Captain Cecil Armitage was ambushed searching for the stool, the British held out in a stone stockade 50 yards square while the Asante cut the telegraph, blocked food and built 21 log barricades in the forest. Hodgson broke out toward the coast in June, and Major James Willcocks relieved the fort in mid-July. Asante was annexed in 1902 and Yaa Asantewaa exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921, but the stool was never captured.

The besieged fort held 18 Europeans and about 500 colonial troops, reportedly two days from surrender when relief arrived.
The forest barricades stood six feet high and ran hundreds of yards, with loopholes for marksmen.
A Guernsey newspaper in July 1900 reported a battalion of female warriors in her army.
In March 1901 David Lloyd George told Parliament the hunt for the stool was like a quest for the Holy Grail.
Road laborers uncovered the stool in 1921 and stripped some ornaments, and an Asante court sentenced them to death before the British commuted it to exile.

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