In 1900, a British governor stood before the leaders of the Ashanti Empire in modern-day Ghana and demanded their most sacred object: the Golden Stool, believed to hold the very soul of the nation. The men in the room, battered by exile and Maxim guns, leaned toward surrender. Then a woman in her sixties took the floor, shamed the assembled kings for their cowardice, fired a gun into the air, and was named supreme commander of a 5,000-strong fighting force. Her name was Yaa Asantewaa, and she had spent most of her life as a farmer.

This episode follows her rise through the matrilineal power structures of Akan society, from cultivating crops near Ejisu to serving as Queen Mother, and finally to leading the deadliest of all the Anglo-Ashanti wars. It is a story about what happens when imperial arrogance collides with a culture it never bothered to understand, and how a military defeat can still become a lasting spiritual victory.

• Why the Queen Mother was no figurehead: co-executive of the state, head of the courts for women’s affairs, controller of the agricultural economy, and kingmaker with the power to nominate the next chief
• The council speech that changed everything, where she offered to trade her undergarments for the battle garments of men too frightened to fight
• The six-month siege of the British fort at Kumasi: log stockades immune to small arms, severed telegraph lines, and a garrison reduced to eating rats
• The great deception at the heart of the surrender, when the Ashanti handed the British a fake stool while the real one stayed hidden in the forest, preserving the nation’s spirit until Ghana’s independence in 1957