Queen Mother as a Religious Office

Yaa Asantewaa's authority came from an office, not from an emergency. In Akan states succession is matrilineal, and the ohemmaa, usually rendered queen mother, is the senior woman of the royal lineage. She is not the ruler's wife and often not his mother. Her functions are constitutional and ritual at once: she nominates candidates for the stool from her lineage, she may publicly rebuke the ruler in council, and she holds her own stool with its own attendants and its own obligations towards the ancestors. At the level of the whole union the equivalent office is the asantehemaa. Akan thought supplies the reason such an office exists.

Personhood in the Akan scheme, as Kwame Gyekye sets it out, is composed rather than simple, and lineage is transmitted through the mother, so the woman who heads the lineage holds the thread by which the ancestral dead are joined to the living. Ritual duty towards those dead is hers. When the Golden Stool was demanded, the person best placed to say what the demand meant was the officeholder responsible for the lineage's relations with its ancestors. Reading Yaa Asantewaa only as a wartime leader mislays that, and mislays the wider point, which is that Akan religion assigns senior women a standing office rather than treating them as an exception to a male one.