The War of the Golden Stool

In March 1900 the British governor of the Gold Coast addressed an assembly of Asante chiefs at Kumasi and asked why the Golden Stool had not been produced for him to sit upon. He appears to have taken the stool for a throne, the seat of a deposed king that a conquering power could now occupy. In Asante understanding it is nothing of the kind. The stool holds the sunsum of the nation and is sat upon by nobody, the Asantehene included, so the request was not a hard bargain or an insult to a defeated ruler but an act of sacrilege proposed in public. The chiefs left without answering.

Asante tradition holds that the council then hesitated, and that Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother of Ejisu, spoke to shame them into resistance and took charge of the rising herself. The fighting that followed besieged the British fort at Kumasi for months. It ended in defeat, and she was deported with other leaders to the Seychelles, where she died. The stool itself was never surrendered. It had been hidden, and when it was later found and stripped of gold by men who came upon it, those responsible were punished under Asante law. The episode is the clearest case in Asante history of a war whose cause was a religious object rather than territory or trade, and it is remembered in Ghana in those terms.