10 Wars That Were Started For Stupid Reasons
5. A Really Nice Chair (Great Britain Vs. The Ashanti Empire, 1900)
If there's one thing European countries liked to do back in the day, it was chop Africa up into little pieces and sit on them pretending to be king. The British were doing this to a region called the Gold Coast, where Ghana is today.
The people who already lived there were the Ashanti Empire and Britain sent a chinless yahoo named Sir Frederick Mitchell Hodgson to get them on-message in 1900.
Unfortunately for the British, Hodgson was an idiot. He rocked up to the town of Kumasi and told everyone the Queen of England was now in charge. He also noticed a really nice golden stool and angrily asked why he, as the Queen's representative, wasn't sitting on it.
The stool was a spiritual object to the Ashanti, and was said to contain the spirit of their nation, ancestors and those yet to be born. To suggest Hodgson's colonial buttocks should caress the embodiment of their people was so offensive to the Ashanti that the War of the Golden Stool kicked off on the spot. The war ended, 'happily', with the Ashanti maintaining a veneer of independence.