Featuring Mary Osei-Oppong and Andy Mills.
A transcript for this episode is available on the episode webpage.
Recorded, edited and produced by Hollie Wade, Charis Sandison and Eva López-López.
Featuring Mary Osei-Oppong and Andy Mills.
A transcript for this episode is available on the episode webpage.
Recorded, edited and produced by Hollie Wade, Charis Sandison and Eva López-López.
Curating Discomfort Podcast Episode 3 – Mary & Andy discuss an Asante gold dust box
Zandra
Hello and welcome to Curating Discomfort. This podcast comes to you from The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. I am Zandra Yeaman, Curator of Discomfort. On today's episode Mary and Andy discuss an Asante gold dust box.
Mary
Hello. My name is Mary Osei-Oppong. I am a Curating Discomfort team member in the Hunterian museum. I am a qualified teacher of Business, Education, Computing Science. Also a chartered teacher. And I taught for 22 years in Scotland secondary schools. I have integrated well in Scottish society and as a community activist. I wrote a book in 2020, and straight after the launch, a couple of week later, the, EIS, the Education Institute of Scotland featured it in the Scottish Educational Journal. Soon after that, the European Trade Union Committee for Education, also used it to promote the teacher inclusion campaign. So far it is doing well. My book is called “For the Love of Teaching: the Anti-Racist battlefield in education”.
Andy
Hi, my name is Andy Mills. I'm the Curator for Archaeology and World Cultures at the Hunterian and I've been here for two and a half years now, so I'm responsible for the entire World Cultures collection. So I look after all of the art from Africa, from Asia, from the Pacific, and also from North and South America as well.
So the object that we've selected to talk about today is the gold dust box made by Asante Brass smith from Ghana in West Africa. So this beautiful object came into the museum in 1931. It was bequeathed to us by Mrs. F.A. Stewart. We don't know anything else at all about how Mrs. Stewart acquired the box or how it came to her in Liverpool. So it's a classic example of what we often have with World Cultures collections in museums where we know who we got the object from, but we don't know how they got it at all or how it ended up in Britain. As you can see, it's made from brass that's been cast. So... Asante brass work is mostly achieved through a lost wax casting process. The object itself is originally sculpted in usually wood and then over-modelled with wax into the final shape. And then clay is impressed to make a mould from the wax shape which when the clay mould is then fired, the wax disappears, drops out of the mould, and then brass can be cast in the clay mould that's left behind. So this is how it's made.
We don't really know how old is. We think the brass castings started in the Asante Kingdom about 1400 A.D. and ran all the way through to today. We know that this was collected probably in the late 19th century or the very early 20th century, but we have absolutely no idea how old it is. And it's particularly difficult to date brass objects, obviously, because you can't do radiocarbon dating or any of those scientific techniques that you would normally expect to use if you were an archaeologist. It’s very difficult to say how old it is: it could be 600 years old, it could be 150 years old.
Mary
When I saw the Asante gold dust box on Hunterian Museum Collections, the following came to mind. Countries in West Africa were named according to what was traded most and as it happened in Ghana, at that time, gold was in abundance so the British named Ghana, “Gold Coast”. The gold dust box, as Andy said, normally the finish is in a brass colour, but a lot of work goes into that. And it was first cast by the Asante Empire, as Andy mentioned, and also has exterior feature with significant meaning, for example, like ‘two heads are better than one’, or ‘birds of the same feather flock together’, something like that and its Just a proverb, an Asante proverb. Gold Dust means, Gold in the Akan Language is ‘sika, and dust is ‘futuro’. So gold dust is . ‘Sika Futuro ‘And it was the currency of the Asante Empire. It was not only a means of wealth and a way of displaying status, but also a spiritual substance. Because like the Asantes, and so, the wealthy people do. That’s where maybe I think the people digging the grave and taking whatever they wanted. Because those days so many many years ago, maybe 15th or 16th century, when people died, they buried them with gold. That showed their wealth and the status of the person and now wealthy people, maybe not the gold dust, but something made from gold would be buried with the person. So that is the significance. It's not just the currency aspect of it, but also what it means to people of Asante or maybe Ghana as a whole.
To make sure that the Asante kingdom benefited from the natural resources, there was the war known as the Asante War. And...for the British to gain total control, when the Asante King that was Prempeh the first was sleeping during the night, they captured him and all his household and they exiled them. That happened in 1893. 3 years later, I think, in 1896 they exiled them to the Seychelles. 3 years later they brought the king Prempeh the first back but without his household – just him alone. When he came, the British government built a big palace for him, but he vowed that he would never step foot in the palace to live there until he has paid every penny of it - and that’s what happened. And after paying all the money that was used to build the house, he went to live there.
So this is something that maybe, by the way I'm from Asante, I’m an Asante person, so I'm part of all this that I'm speaking to you. You can say that he became a victim of the forced colonialisation of territories in Africa, because a lot of things happen and it's all down to what Africa they have, and Europeans want to grab everything for themselves.
So now even when you go to the Asante capital which is Kumasi, the story of King Prempeh being exiled is told there if you visit. And I repeat he was exiled to Seychelles, and so some of their household, I suppose they died, but their offspring, they are all there and they have the name Prempeh.
Nowadays we see the gold dust box without the gold dust. And I always ask “where is the gold dust? And who owned the gold dust?” or who owns it?
So that's a long story, but I felt I had to tell the story of the war, why that happened.
Andy
So when the British seized the Asante kingdom one of the first things that they did was to introduce paper money and coinage into the Gold Coast colony, the Asante Colony and the other colonies in that part of West Africa. And by doing that, they short-circuited the local economy. So they were able then to start extracting gold in enormous quantities. And so all of the paraphernalia, technology and art that was created in that part of West Africa around storing gold dust, around trading gold dust, became superfluous because the British had replaced it with this imported system of currency.
So like lots of other museums in the UK, we have as well as these beautiful gold dust boxes, we also have scales for weighing gold dust. We have scoops for measuring out gold dust and we have a very large collection of Asante gold weights, which are some of the most beautiful artworks that were ever produced in West Africa.
Every single one of them is different and as Mary says, they all have rich proverbial meanings in them and they are beautiful miniature works of art, every single one of them. And after the British had destroyed the traditional economic system, in the Asante Kingdom, then the main value to people of those objects became selling for paper money and coinage. So an awful lot of white settlers in the Gold Coast colony and in the Asante colony and the other colonies in West Africa bought them when they were living there, when they were working in the British Colonial Service and that kind of thing.
And so that's how a lot of those objects ended up coming back to the UK and then ending up in museum collections like ours.
Mary
I think, just like Andy said, earlier on, when you enter the museum, there's no labelling indicating the significance and the symbolic nature of the country of origin or the source country and what actually it means to the people of that country.
It just lists who donated the item or specimen and the person – their name etc. at times, where it came from is a bit vague. So I believe that the labelling system needs to change. We have to look at it and see how best we can take it forward. And even, I believe we have discussed this, to allow visitors, tourists who come in to let them have a room to write something down or tell a story because it means something.
For example, as a Ghanian and Asante, and I am somebody quite interested I know I've lived in the UK for 40 years more than Ghana, but I'm so invested in my history. So as soon as I entered you showed me the box, for example, with the miniature of the king’s stool and the rest of it, it wasn't even arranged properly, it wasn't in a structure where I would say it's respected. So if somebody comes in, see the gold dust box just sitting at a corner somewhere, to me, we are showing disrespect to the item and also people's feelings.
So if we can label it that people come in, they see and they can connect relate to the item, I think it will be beneficial to the visitors and also the Hunterian Museum.
Andy
Yeah I completely agree. I think that one of the biggest problems with museums is the way that we present information in terms of one single explanation for what an object on display might mean. And often we are very ignorant about the nature of objects, their cultural significance like Mary says, their proverbial meanings, you know? Those things often have not been written down or if they are written down they are not written in English and therefore very often people working in museums aren’t aware of those sources of information. So the only way that we can really start to create meaningful interpretations of museum objects is to try and draw in as many different perspectives and voices as we can. And that’s the only way we can overcome that kind of inadvertent feeling that we can create in some visitors that their cultural heritage is being disrespected. That’s never the intention but if you’re ignorant about the meaning and significance of something then it’s inevitable that you’re going to offend people.
Mary
I think that the labelling system is very very important and the museum understanding the significance of the collection that they keep. And also like every country, even Britain, we have a system of kingship if you like, queens and a structure. So maybe they should think, in terms of that structure. If whatever is there, if they don’t know, ask people. Maybe, what they have here? How can we display it? That is also part of it, that people come in and see for example, if an Asante king’s stool is sitting at the bottom of the pile, that is an insult, so… Just learning, how we are all learning. It’s a learning process and every little bit helps. I think my hope is for all of us to learn together to bring about a change for better, for the next generation to continue without fear or favour.
Andy
Yeah I think what I really want to do is try and make these changed understandings about the collections we have from Ghana visible in the documentation that we have about the objects, in the exhibitions that we do and the displays we put on so that there is enduring and meaningful change.
Mary
For me it has been beneficial because 1) I’m learning and also I’m getting to know how they keep the collection. Before then I didn’t have any idea that there would be a database somewhere and also I remember the last events when we talk about human remains and the repatriation of it and what have you. I learned a lot because if you are not involved in museum work, it’s something that’s at the back of your mind. But for me, that process kind of invoked what I knew from my childhood and the feelings that maybe I had buried for a long time also came to surface and made me think about my ancestors and people who are living now. Like when I was growing up we talked about these things, our elders narrated all the stories to us but sometimes you doubt it, is it true? is it not? So for me I have that kind of common saying. For example my grandfather told me all the stories. He told me, my mother, my father. So ‘ve learned a lot. And also I’ve kind of…I don’t even know how to put it, it’s… I have respected my history. I respected it before, but I respect it now more than ever because it has taught me that my ancestors went through a lot. Without dangers and also with hard work they kind of rose and did what they needed to survive. And when I think about it sometimes I felt sorry for my ancestors, for what they have been through because it has kind of… it has effected everybody, including myself. Also it has given me the urge to continue with this and help in any way to make things better for the country the source country, being Ghana or wherever that might be, and also for The Hunterian or any other museum.
Andy
Yeah I totally agree with what Mary says. The experience for me has been about the history and understanding our history. You know I’ve travelled to lots of different places in the world and talked to a lot of people, from countries that used to be British colonies and very often the experience that I have had is of people believing that the British will know the history of what their ancestors, the British people, did in those countries. And, we don’t. We aren’t taught it in school and we should be. But I think there’s a shame there for a lot of British people and a denial that they don’t want to know what the British were doing all round the world 150, or 100 years ago. So this for me has been very much about learning our part of that history and the impact of the British people in what became Ghana later. That’s been very powerful.
Zandra
Thank you for listening to the Curating Discomfort podcast. This episode was brought to you by The Hunterian at University of Glasgow.
Production, sound and editing were done by Charis Sandison, Holly Wade and Eva Lopez-Lopez.
The Hunterian, 2022