African Resistance to Colonial Conquest

African resistance to the European colonial advance was practically universal in its geographic extent, though extraordinarily diverse in its concrete forms: direct military resistance, diplomatic strategies of balancing rival powers, and religious or prophetic movements of cultural opposition. The Ashanti Empire, in present-day Ghana, resisted Britain militarily through a series of prolonged conflicts across the nineteenth century, culminating in the War of the Golden Stool (1900), led by the Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa after Britain demanded the surrender of the sacred Golden Stool, a symbol of Ashanti sovereignty. The Mandinka leader Samory Touré built, during the 1870s and 1880s, the Wassoulou empire in West Africa, successfully applying scorched-earth tactics and local modern-weapons production to resist the French advance for nearly two decades, until his definitive capture in 1898.