The Weights: gold, proverbs, and the smallest sculptures in the world
For four hundred years the Akan measured gold dust with small brass weights, cast one at a time by the lost-wax method, and no two are identical.
The National Museum, Accra; Manhyia Palace Museum, Kumasi; the brass casters at Krofofrom, near Kumasi.
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The Weights: gold, proverbs, and the smallest sculptures in the world
For four hundred years the Akan measured gold dust with small brass weights, cast one at a time by the lost-wax method, and no two are identical.
Some are geometric. But thousands of them are tiny scenes: a man climbing a tree, two crocodiles sharing a single stomach, a bird looking backwards, a person carrying a load too heavy, a leopard with an antelope, a drummer, a shackled captive, a European with a musket.
They are not decoration. Each figure is a proverb, and the proverbs are the ordinary furniture of Akan speech. The two crocodiles with one belly, fighting over food: we suffer the same fate, so why do we quarrel? The bird with its head turned back to take an egg from its own tail — that is Sankofa, go back and get it, it is not taboo to return for what you forgot. That bird is now on a million diaspora tattoos, and it started as a proverb attached to a two-centimetre brass weight used for weighing gold dust.
A merchant's set of weights was thus also a set of arguments. Traders were said to select a weight for its saying as much as its mass, and to place it down on the scale in a way that made a point.
If you visit Ghana. The National Museum, Accra; Manhyia Palace Museum, Kumasi; the brass casters at Krofofrom, near Kumasi.
For four hundred years the Akan measured gold dust with small brass weights, cast one at a time by the lost-wax method, and no two are identical.
Some are geometric. But thousands of them are tiny scenes: a man climbing a tree, two crocodiles sharing a single stomach, a bird looking backwards, a person carrying a load too heavy, a leopard with an antelope, a drummer, a shackled captive, a European with a musket.
They are not decoration. Each figure is a proverb, and the proverbs are the ordinary furniture of Akan speech. The two crocodiles with one belly, fighting over food: we suffer the same fate, so why do we quarrel? The bird with its head turned back to take an egg from its own tail — that is Sankofa, go back and get it, it is not taboo to return for what you forgot. That bird is now on a million diaspora tattoos, and it started as a proverb attached to a two-centimetre brass weight used for weighing gold dust.
A merchant's set of weights was thus also a set of arguments. Traders were said to select a weight for its saying as much as its mass, and to place it down on the scale in a way that made a point.