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.
Narrated by AI. Some Ghanaian names and places will not sound the way you say them.
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.