Who is the real Yaa Asantewaa

It’s unclear what the true story is yet, or, whose account is the truth but a new photo has emerged online, challenging the widely popular image we have all known to be that of Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti female warrior of Ghana.

In a tweet referenced to a verified Twitter account, @MacJordaN, and also shared from the @Ashanti_Kingdom, it shows two images – one of the more popular Yaa Asantewa as we have come to know it, and another showing a less popular picture of an old woman.

The new photo however has a caption under it that reads, “Ohemaa Yaa Asantewaa … Mother of Ejuso who led the Ashanti warriors against the … in 1900.”

The original post from @Ashanti_Kingdom had the caption, “An American Girl Theatre Arts Student poses as Yaa Asantewaa in a bulletproof war jacket and combat holding a gun and this image has gone all over the world with some people thinking that the picture is real Yaa Asantewaa.”

There is no doubt that there remains a lot of contradictions in our histories as a people and if this is anything to go by, it adds up to the tall list.

Already, there had been recent calls for a textbook circulating in the Ghanaian market to be recalled, with threats from some Ewe groups to burn down the books, after it was identified that the book presented a lot of distortions in the country’s history.

In the book titled “Golden English” and published by Badu Nkansah Publications, negatively characterizes Ewes and Ghana’s first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

The book has meanwhile been recalled with an apology from publishers, but it goes to lend a lot of credence to the continuous calls for Africans (Ghanaians for that matter) to endeavour to rewrite a lot of the histories that we have all grown up to know particularly because most of them were not written by our people.

This Yaa Asantewaa revelation surely adds to the growing list but will it be the last that we will be seeing?

Looks like we’ve been lied to all these years by this history books. I still can’t believe this.

So, the true image of Ohemaa Yaa Asantewaa is on the left and the right is of an American theatre student posing as her. https://t.co/4AavqaAuQH pic.twitter.com/GiCDbFpcis— MacJordan (@MacJordaN) March 15, 2021

source: Ghana Web