A Name That Records a Deed
Akyaawa Yikwan belonged to the Asante royal house and lived through the most turbulent decades of the kingdom's dealings with the coast. The second part of her name is itself a commemoration: it refers to the blazing or opening of a path, given in recognition of what she achieved. In a political culture that named people for what they had done, this is about as clear a statement of significance as the record offers.
Her career has been reconstructed principally by Ivor Wilks, whose study of her life drew together Asante oral traditions with the British records of the 1831 negotiation. Before that work she appeared in the documentary record largely as an unnamed or barely named member of an Asante delegation. She is a good illustration of how much can be recovered when the two kinds of source are read against each other, and of how much is lost when only one is used.
The Situation in 1831
The 1820s had gone badly for Asante on the coast. The victory at Nsamankow in 1824, in which the British governor was killed, was followed by the defeat at Katamanso in 1826 at the hands of a broad coalition of coastal and southern states supported by British and Danish contingents. Neither side had the capacity to finish the war, and both had reasons to end it. Asante needed the trade roads to the coast open; the British establishments needed trade to move and had no appetite for another campaign.
The British side was led by George Maclean, president of the merchant committee that then administered the forts, a man who preferred arbitration to expeditions. The Asante side needed an envoy with standing at court, the authority to speak for the Asantehene, and the judgement to concede what had to be conceded.
The Embassy
Akyaawa Yikwan led the mission that travelled to Cape Coast and concluded the treaty in April 1831. Its terms were not favourable. Asante renounced claims of overlordship over a number of southern states, agreed that disputes would be referred to the British authorities on the coast, and gave sureties: a substantial deposit of gold left at Cape Coast, and young members of the royal family sent to the coast to be educated as guarantees of good faith.
In exchange, Asante obtained the thing that mattered most in Kumasi: an agreement that the roads to the coast would remain open to Asante traders. The kingdom's prosperity depended on moving kola, gold and other goods to the coastal markets, and a closed road was more damaging than a lost claim of suzerainty over a distant state.
Why a Woman Led It
Asante political structure gave women of the royal matrilineage a defined and substantial role. The Asantehemaa, the queen mother, was a constitutional office with a decisive part in the selection of a new Asantehene and a recognised right to counsel him. Royal women held stools, controlled property and headed lineage segments. What was unusual about Akyaawa Yikwan was not that a woman held authority but that a woman was sent abroad to negotiate with a foreign power, which was normally the work of male officeholders and okyeame. Contemporary British officials seem to have found it surprising; the Asante court evidently did not consider it improper.
What the Treaty Achieved
The settlement of 1831 held for over thirty years, a longer peace than any other arrangement between Asante and the coastal establishments in the nineteenth century. It made possible the commercially minded reign of Kwaku Dua I from 1834, and it created the conditions in which the Dutch mission under Jan Verveer could travel safely to Kumasi in 1836–37 to negotiate the recruitment agreement for the East Indies army. Without the peace Akyaawa Yikwan helped conclude, that mission would not have been attempted.
Remembering Her
Akyaawa Yikwan is not a household name outside specialist history, and the gaps in what is known of her are real: dates, the details of her household, the internal debates at Kumasi that produced her instructions. What is well established is the central fact — that the Asante state entrusted a difficult and consequential negotiation to a woman, and that she brought it to a conclusion that served the kingdom for a generation. For a period in which African women appear in European documents mainly as anonymous figures, that is a substantial thing to have on record.
