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Ancient History

These Elderly People Peaked During their Twilight Years and Changed History

Old - An elderly Bishop Hugh Latimer on his way to the stake
An elderly Bishop Hugh Latimer on his way to the stake. Davenant Institute

A Stirring Speech

Governor Hodgson. E-bay

Nana Yaa Asantewaa continued on, and stirred up her tribe to stand up against the British. “How can a proud and brave people like the Ashanti sit back and look while white men take away their king and chiefs, and humiliate them with demand for the Golden Stool? The Golden Stool only means money to the white man; they have searched and dug everywhere for it. I shall pay nothing to the Governor. If you, the chiefs of Ashanti, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments.

Is it true that the bravery of the Ashanti is no more? I cannot believe it. It cannot be! If the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we, the women, will. We will fight the white men until the last one of us falls in the battlefields“. The old Queen Mother put an exclamation mark on her badass speech when she grabbed a gun and fired it into the air. The effect was electric. The speech fired up the audience and whipped the embers of Ashanti resentment into a massive blaze of resistance.

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A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.

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