Yaa Asantewaa

Born around 1840 in Besease, Yaa Asantewaa rose as Queen Mother (Ohemmaa) of Ejisu in the Ashanti Confederacy — a position of real political and spiritual authority, custodian of the stool’s traditions. When the British exiled Asantehene Prempeh I in 1896 and then, in 1900, Governor Hodgson demanded the Golden Stool itself, the remaining chiefs wavered.

Legend holds that she seized a gun and fired before the council, shaming them: if the men would not fight for the Stool, the women would. She took command of an Asante force that besieged the British fort at Kumasi for months — the War of the Golden Stool, the fiercest resistance the British faced in the region.

Defeated by superior firepower, she was captured and exiled to the Seychelles in 1901, where she died in 1921. Her body was returned to Ghana years later. Today she is everywhere in Ghanaian life: a museum at Ejisu, schools and a girls’ school bearing her name, her image on currency, and a permanent place as Africa’s great warrior queen.