Ghana's Glass Beadmaking Arts in Transcultural Dialogues

Ghanaian powder-glass beads first captured my attention in 1990, when closely examining a strand of Asante waist beads purchased in Kumasi’s Central Market. Looking at the complex designs of different colored glasses, I was struck with the realization that each bead had been skillfully and painstakingly crafted. This seemingly humble and largely unexamined art merited closer study and greater understanding (Fig. 1). I worked with Christa Clarke, Senior Curator for the Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum, to develop the 2008–2010 exhibition “Glass Beads of Ghana” at the Newark Museum to introduce the general public to this largely overlooked art (Fig. 2). The following study provides a more in-depth examination of Ghanaian glass beadmaking history and contemporary practice. Ghana’s glass beadmaking arts are arts of engagement with the wider world, from their seventeenth-century beginnings to contemporary practices. The Ghanaian glass beadmaking tradition is one of several regional glass beadmaking traditions in West Africa, and all of these traditions evolved over many centuries in the context of long-distance trade. Transcontinental trade over the Sahara from the eighth century ce and ocean-going trade from the 1480s transferred finished beads as well as raw materials for glass bead production and introduced knowledge of various methods of working beads and glass. Interregional trade provided networks for sharing local and transcontinental beadmaking technologies. Bead artists in the coastal and southern regions of modern Ghana created their own distinctive mold-form powder-glass beadmaking processes from widely shared knowledge of drawn powder-glass bead technologies of West Africa’s interregional and trans-Saharan trade centers, in much the same way that the distinctive Ewe and Asante kente traditions developed with the spread of West African strip-weaving technologies. With the beginnings of European maritime trade in the late fifteenth century, an increasing volume of glass beads and glass goods were shipped to trade centers along present-day Ghana’s Gold Coast,1 stimulating the growth of local beadworking and powder-glass beadmaking industries. The flourishing coastal trade achieved a more direct engagement between European merchants and trading communities than had been possible with the trans-Saharan trade, and enhanced European abilities to ascertain and respond to local West African consumer preferences. This interactive trade environment also facilitated the impact of the demands of Gold Coast consumers on European product design and production, a two-way dynamic similar to the trade in African-print textiles (Nielsen 1979; Steiner 1985). In the Gold Coast bead trade, such interactions went beyond a simple paradigm of African consumers and European producers and led to the development of an ongoing transcultural dialogue between Gold Coast and European bead artists that was mutually influential on West African and European bead design. The dialogic nature of this artisanal relationship becomes especially clear in examining practices of cross-cultural imitation, in which Gold Coast artists developed local powder-glass versions of European trade bead designs, and European beadmakers developed their own facsimiles of popular West African bead forms. In late twentieth and early twenty-first century Ghana, new forms of engagement with the wider world are driving profound changes in Ghanaian glass bead production and marketing. Innovations in the form of new “translucent” and painted glass beads and beadmaking techniques, which have largely replaced long-standing mold-formed powder-glass design processes, have been spurred on by contemporary beadmakers’ creativity and initiative in cultivating new local and international markets.

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