Volume 44, Number 7 · April 24, 1997
The Arts of Africa
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
I learned about art growing up in my hometown, Kumasi, the capital of Asante, an old Akan kingdom at the heart of the new republic of Ghana. There were paintings and drawings on our walls; there were sculptures and pots, in wood and ivory and earthenware and brass; and there were art books in the bookcases. But above all, my mother collected Asante goldweights: small figures or geometrical shapes, cast in brass, usually from wax originals, that had been used for weighing gold dust when it was our currency (as it was well into this century). The figurative goldweights are wonderfully expressive: they depict people and animals, plants and tools, weapons and domestic utensils, often in arrangements that will remind an Asante who looks at them of a familiar proverb. And the abstract geometrical weights, their surfaces decorated with patterns, sometimes use the adinkra symbols, which are found as well on Akan stools and funeral cloths. Each of them has a name—Gye Nyame, for example—and a meaning—in this case, the power of God. There is no established correlation between what one of these miniature brass sculptures looks like and what it weighs: each person knew his or her own collection. In short, the goldweights of West Africa are richly embedded in significances; and a representative sample of them was on display at the Guggenheim Museum last summer in the exhibition 'Africa: The Art of a Continent.'
Feature, 5899 words
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