When a British governor demanded the Golden Stool — the sacred object the Asante held to embody the soul of their nation — and the king was in exile, an older woman shamed hesitant chiefs into fighting. Queen mother of Ejisu in present-day Ghana, Yaa Asantewaa led the 1900 War of the Golden Stool, the last major Asante revolt against British rule. The rising was crushed; she was captured and died in exile in the Seychelles in 1921. Her documentary record is thin, and Ghanaian nationalism has reworked her image heavily, making the woman and the symbol hard to separate.
A British governor sat in the Asante capital in 1900 and asked a roomful of chiefs to hand over a golden stool. He thought it was a throne, a thing a ruler sits on. To the Asante it was something else entirely, a sacred object believed to hold the very soul of their nation, never sat upon, never surrendered. The chiefs went silent. Their king was already gone, shipped into exile by the British. According to the stories told afterward, an older woman rose and told the men that if they would not fight, the women would. Her name was Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of a small Asante district. The war that followed was the last great Asante stand against conquest, and it was lost. She finished her life on a far island in the Indian Ocean.