ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the intersections of ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality shaped Yaa Asantewaa’s ascendancy to power in late nineteenth-century West Africa. In particular, it will interrogate the ways in which the historiography on Yaa Asantewaa has explored questions of gender, nationalism, and leadership during the late nineteenth century. I will trace the nodes of inquiry that guide existing scholarship on this remarkable woman while probing how her life story shepherds new motifs beyond the classic themes that have dominated the literature on African women warriors of Asantewaa’s era. I will utilize recent frameworks that have influenced approaches to African women’s mobility during the colonial era and how we might apply such notions to earlier time periods. A critique of the scholarly emphasis on masculine geographies and mobility that dominate the literature for this time period is an essential component of my analysis. In recent years, historians of Africa have begun to embrace alternative geographies as an analytic category for unearthing the complex life histories of under-studied women as well as prominent figures. Shifting the analytical categories we use is a starting point for nuanced analysis that foregrounds the diverse histories of African women and in this case, those who went to war.
