Ghana’s Glass Beadmaking - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Ghana’s Glass Beadmaking
Arts in Transcultural Dialogues

Suzanne Gott

photos by the author except where otherwise noted

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Ghanaian powder-glass beads first captured

my attention in 1990, when closely examin-
ing 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 seem-
ingly 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 pro-
vides a more in-depth examination of Ghanaian glass beadmak-
ing history and contemporary practice.

Ghana’s glass beadmaking arts are arts of engagement with the
wider world, from their seventeenth-century beginnings to con-
temporary 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 con-
text 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 pref-
erences. 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 mutu-
ally 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 devel-
oped 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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The popularity of these new bead forms, along with determined
efforts to maintain Ghana’s unique bead heritage, are ensuring
the continuing vitality of Ghana’s glass beadmaking arts.

When examining or describing Ghanaian glass beadmaking in
the context of late twentieth and early twenty-first century pro-
cesses of transcontinental interaction, it may be wise not to use the
familiar and over-applied terms “global” or “globalization.” African
engagement with the wider world via satellite television, the Inter-
net, and transnational movement is a well-recognized feature of
contemporary African experience and artistic expression, which
has often been characterized in terms of “globalization.” Yet glo-
balization’s value as an analytical concept, as Cooper has observed,
is problematic: first, for the insupportable implication of “a single
system of connection … [penetrating] the entire globe”; and sec-
ond, the ahistorical position that wide-ranging interconnected-
ness is unprecedented (2001:189). Instead, Cooper has called for
alternative conceptions and approaches of a more modest scope,
which “look towards traditions of transcontinental mobilization
with considerable time-depth,” attending to both “the variety and
specificity of cross-territorial connecting mechanisms in past and
present” (2001:191, 212). An examination of the case of Ghanaian
glass beadmaking, past and present, within changing contexts of
transcontinental engagement and dialogue provides an opportu-
nity to articulate and develop this new approach.

Long-distance trade and new contexts of Meaning
Beads, by their nature as small, easily portable objects of
potentially high value, constitute an art form ideally suited for
long-distance commerce,2 and the development of West African
glass beadmaking has been deeply enmeshed in the dynamics of
trade and cross-cultural interaction (Fig. 3).

Glass beads were frequently mentioned in early Arabic
accounts of the trans-Saharan trade, as in a thirteenth-century
geographical encyclopedia describing traders’ wares of “salt,
bundles of pine wood, blue glass beads, bracelets of red copper,
bangles and signet rings of copper, and nothing else” (Levtzion
and Hopkins 1981:167–69). By as early as the eighth to ninth cen-

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1 powder-glass women’s waist beads, asante,
Ghana, late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
author’s collection.

2
installation from the newark Museum exhibi-
tion “Glass beads of Ghana,” 2008–2010, devel-
oped by guest curator suzanne Gott and christa
clarke, senior curator, arts of Global africa,
newark Museum. installation design: tracy Long.
photo: richard Goodbody

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3 Map of Ghana with historic sites and contemporary
beadmaking regions.
photo: courtesy of the n ewark MuseuM

4 Gold coast men dressed for battle wearing protec-
tive strands of beads and gold at their ankles and calves.
photo: Beschryvinghe ende historische verhael van het

gout koninckrijck van g unea (1912: pL. 6, facinG p. 90).

turies, glass beads from the Islamic world and Asia had become
popular commodities in the trans-Saharan trade, as revealed by
excavations at such entrepôts as Tegdaoust, Kumbi Saleh, and
Gao (McIntosh 2008:361; Insoll and Shaw 1997:15). The demand
for glass trade beads only increased following the eleventh- and
twelfth-century intensification of trans-Saharan commerce.

Venice, which would become the primary source of glass
beads for the African trade, began producing beads for export in
the eleventh century (Newton and Davison 1989:65). By the early
thirteenth century, Venice had emerged as the leading Euro-
pean beadmaker, with trade representatives for the trans-Saha-
ran trade stationed in principal ports of the Maghreb (Bovill
1995:105). Venetian bead production reached its maturity in the
fifteenth century, coinciding with the beginnings of European
maritime trade with West Africa.3

Portuguese development of the ocean-going caravel in the late
fifteenth century opened Africa’s Atlantic coast to long-distance
maritime trade (Parry 1966:22–23). An early European strat-
egy for gaining entry into the lucrative Guinea Coast trade was
assuming the role of middlemen in established coastal trading
networks. Through such transport activities Europeans became
aware of the akori, or cori, and beads the Portuguese called conte
de terra (“earth,” “ground,” or “native” beads)—West African
beads of great value and mysterious origins (Bosman 1967:118–
19; De Marees 1987:53, n.9). By the late fifteenth century, Portu-
guese ships were bringing “coris and sundry types of beads” from
the Bight of Benin to their trading fortress of Castelo de São
Jorge da Mina (with its nearby African settlement, later known
as “Elmina”) for the Gold Coast market.

tance overseas trade (Jones 1985, 1995; Alpern 1995; Law 1997).
Beads, like cloth, were an important trade good, so European
merchants expended considerable energy trying to determine
which beads would sell and fetch the highest prices. For “even
more than with cloth,” Marion Johnson observed, “the demand
for beads in any one locality was restricted to a few types, and
these were subject to the vicissitudes of fashion” (1976:17). A
list of proposed merchandise sent to the Netherlands in 1653 by
Dutch West India Company agents at Elmina, then center of the
Dutch Guinea Coast trade, requested 19,900 pounds of “Vene-
tian goods,” including lemon- and straw-yellow beads; white,
red, dark blue, blue lavender, and violet beads; striped “crystal”
beads; black and blue-violet beads with white stripes; and white
and blue-striped beads (Jones 1995:9–10, 178–80).4

European efforts to succeed in the competitive West African
market were aided by traders’ accounts detailing local customs,
including the religious dimensions of local adornment prac-
tices. The deeper spiritual significance of beads among peoples
of the lower Guinea Coast provided new contexts of meaning
that fueled local desires for trade beads, transforming European
beads from inexpensive trade commodities into highly valued
objects of power and protection.

In Pieter de Marees’s 1602 account of Gold Coast peoples, based
on observations made during a Dutch trading voyage to the lower
Guinea Coast, he described how beads figured prominently in
ritual practices of local priests and priestesses (1987:66), as well
as providing an important means of personal protection (Fig. 4).
Infants were adorned with protective amulets of beads and gold
(1987:25), while Gold Coast men, he found, generally wore:

… a string of polished Venetian Beads mixed with golden beads and
other gold ornaments around their knees, in nearly the same way as
young ladies in our Lands wear their Rosaries around their hands
…. [for battle] They take their Rosaries, with which they make their
Fetisso, and hang them around their bodies: they think that if they
wear them, their Fetissos will protect them and that they will not be
slain (1987:34, 89).

Trade records and ship manifests attest to the substantial
quantities of European glass beads transported via the long-dis-

Women would “hang around their Belts many little straw-wisps
on which they string beans and Venetian beads, regarding these

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also as their Fetissos or Sainctos” (1987:39). The wearer’s treat-
ment of such adornment attested to local beliefs in its spiritual
nature, since before an individual would eat or drink, De Marees
observed, they would “first give [their fetissos] something to eat
and drink” (1987:34).

Historical as well as more contemporary accounts of custom-
ary beliefs in southern Ghana reveal that certain highly valued
“genuine” or “precious” beads, like local gold in nugget form,
have not been regarded as products of human hands. As gifts
from deities of fertility and abundance residing, according to
different religious mythologies, in the earth, heavens, or sacred
waters, such “precious” beads and locally mined gold have been
viewed as both living and life-giving forces.5

According to Akan oral traditions, the origins of two of Gha-
na’s major historical powers are traced to the sacred stools of
precious beads or gold that descended from the heavens, con-
taining the spiritual essence of their peoples. For the Asante, the
very “soul” (sunsum) of their nation resides in Sika Dwa Kofi,
the Golden Stool “born on a Friday” (Kyerematen 1969:2–5). For
the Denkyira, whose political power preceded that of Asante, the
most sacrosanct of royal regalia was Abankamdwa, the Stool of
Precious Beads, which had the capacity to “call down a whirl-
wind” when moved without the performance of the required

(clockwise from left)
5 the adanse royal orator’s staff ahweneε nana
(“Great ancestral bead”), with a finial carved by osei
bonsu (c. 1927) depicting the adanse ruler as a “grand-
child of beads,” enstooled upon a platform, supported
by the great bead ancestress of adanse’s ruling Ekoɔna
matriclan. adanse fomena, Ghana. november 1976.
photo: doran h. ross

6 women’s waist beads for sale in kumasi’s central
Market, Ghana, 1990.

7
“edaa,” a longtime bead trader, demonstrating the
polishing and shaping of glass beads using a mixture of
water and sand. Labadi, Greater accra, Ghana, 1999.

customary rites (Darkwah 1999:63–64; Kyerematen 1964:18, 21).

The regalia of Adanse, the Akan state located at the mythic cen-
ter of Akan creation, includes a royal orator’s staff called AhweneE
Nana, “Great Ancestral Bead” (Ross 1982:62; Darkwah 1999:62).
The staff finial depicts the Adanse ruler as a “grandchild of beads,”
enstooled upon a platform supported by the great bead ancestress
of Adanse’s ruling Ekoͻna matriclan (Fig. 5). The ancestral bead is
represented by a long powder-glass encased iron rod, suspended
from a carved head. The powder-glass is embellished with charac-
teristic bead designs of trailed glass.6

Abͻdͻm (sg. bͻdͻm) is the Akan name for the most precious,
reproductively powerful beads, with the Ekoͻna clan’s bead ances-
tress an especially powerful bͻdͻm bead. During a 1999 interview,
the late Nana Akua Pokuaa, an Ekoͻna clan elder and retired queen

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(clockwise from top left)
8 Mrs. comfort amanor inserting cassava-leaf
stalks into the clay mold’s bead cavities in order to
form holes during the powder-glass firing process,
odumase krobo, Ghana, 1999.

nomoda ebenezer (“cedi”) djaba of cedi

9
beads industry, demonstrating the vertical-mold
powder-glass technique for producing a bͻdͻm
bead, odumase krobo, Ghana, 1999.

10 kwadjo Gomerdo of cedi beads industry firing
beads in a kiln constructed of termite-mound clay,
odumase krobo, Ghana, 1999.

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mother of Amoman, greeted a fellow clan member as a “child
of the Bͻdͻmmͻwua Bead.” The praise name Bͻdͻmmͻwua, an
honorific version of bͻdͻm enhanced by the addition of wua, or
wuu (“copious” or “abundant”), emphasized the miraculous repro-
ductive powers of this matriclan’s bead ancestress (Christaller
1933:578).7 The enlistment of beads’ generative powers in the pro-
motion of human fertility is a long-standing custom through-
out southern Ghana, being worn as women’s “waist beads” (bead
strands resting on the hips) usually comprising beads known to be
of local or foreign manufacture (Fig. 6).8

Kopytoff ’s influential essay “The Cultural Biography of Things”
(1996) proposed a more processual understanding of commod-
itization based in the recognition that objects’ meanings may
change, moving into or out of a commodity state, when adopted
into new cultural contexts.9 Beads, Trivellato observes, are among
the “favourite commodities selected to bear material and symbolic

values … [having] been repeatedly placed at the centre of social
rituals and ceremonies, granted magical and apotropaic properties
or considered as emblems of power and status” (1998:64).

The new contexts of meaning and value for trade beads among
Gold Coast peoples, combined with the abundance and variety
of glass beads imported through the maritime trade, stimulated
the growth and development of Ghana’s own distinctive “pow-
der-glass” beadmaking tradition.

earLy west african gLass BeadMaking
Ghana’s glass beadmaking arts, like West Africa’s other regional
glass beadmaking traditions, developed within an innovative
creative milieu stimulated by the region’s active engagement in
interregional and transcontinental commerce and consumption.
Long-distance trade stimulated new developments in West Afri-
can beadmaking by serving as a source of new glass bead forms

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11 horizontal-mold powder-glass beads produced by a
krobo beadmaker, late 1990s. collection of the newark
Museum, gift of suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.67.

12 women’s waist beads with nineteenth-century
powder-glass facsimiles of medieval Middle eastern eye
beads (lower right). collection of the newark Museum,
purchase 2007, 2007.66.70-72.

as well as providing raw materials in the form of glass beads and
scrap from the Islamic world, Europe, India, and Asia.

Trade centers, which attracted skilled artisans, served as sites
for the transmission and development of new glass beadmak-
ing technologies. For example, a glass bead from Jenné-Jeno,
dating from 300 to 800 ce, perhaps produced by reworking an
imported drawn-glass bead, may in fact be an early example
of West African powder-glass beadmaking achieved by rolling
out a heated, viscous glass mixture (Brill 1995:255). Excavations
of artisans’ quarters at Tegdaoust discovered ninth- to twelfth-
century evidence of drawn-glass bead production for local con-
sumption as well as southern trade (Vanacker 1979).10

At Igbo-Ukwu, of the more than 165,000 glass, carnelian,
and quartz beads recovered from the eighth- to early eleventh-
century ritual complex—the site’s only imported goods—the
majority are glass beads believed to originate in the Islamic
world (Shaw 1970:237–39, 280; Insoll and Shaw 1997:12; Davi-
son 1972:311). The discovery of certain blue-cylinder glass beads
exhibiting “dichroic” characteristics (the dark blue color appear-
ing green or greenish-yellow when held up to the light) also
prompted speculation that these beads may have been manufac-
tured locally from melted or pulverized imported glass beads or
glass scrap (Shaw 1970:229).

The most renowned center of early West African glass bead-
making was Ile-Ife. As a commercial power linking trans-

Saharan and coastal trade networks, it functioned as center for
both the production and export of drawn-glass beads from the
eleventh to early fifteenth centuries (Ogundiran 2005:150). The
preponderance of beads recovered from Ile-Ife are tubular and
circular beads of dark blue and dichroic blue-green glass known
as segi in Nigeria (Eluyemi 1987:203–13). Analysis of blue glass
beads discovered at the trans-Saharan entrepôts of Tegdaoust,
Kumbi Saleh, and Gao has shown these beads to be identical in
composition to beads found at Ile-Ife (Davison, Giauque, and
Clark 1971), suggesting that Ile-Ife beads may have been exported
northward as well as taken southward to coastal trade centers
(Horton 1979:107; Eluyemi 1987:219). Yet the discovery of similar
glass beads and beadmaking residue at trans-Saharan trade cen-
ters also suggests the possibility of a more widely dispersed West
African beadmaking technology.

Analyses made in the 1970s of Ile-Ife glass beads and glass
residue-encrusted crucible fragments from the ninth to twelfth
centuries concluded that the glass was of Islamic and Euro-
pean origins (Davison, Giauque, and Clark 1971:647, 655), sup-
porting theories that Ile-Ife’s bead industry was based on the
use of imported glass and glass beads for its raw material (Wil-
lett 1977:17–22). More recently, however, theories of local glass
manufacture (Onwuejeogwu and Onwuejeogwu 1977; Horton
1979:107-8; Eluyemi 1987:213), or “early primary glass produc-
tion,” have gained support through new techniques of chemical
analysis applied to Ile-Ife glass beads and beadmaking materi-
als. An unusually high-lime, high-alumina glass composition
unique to West Africa has been found for the dark blue drawn-
glass beads and some of the dichroic blue-green glass fragments

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13 Mosaic-bead sample card for the west african
trade (dated 1920), from the J.f. sick and company
sample card collection of the tropenmuseum,
amsterdam, courtesy of the tropenmuseum.
photo: irene de G root

from Ile-Ife, matching results of an earlier unpublished analysis
of Ile-Ife beads and certain beads from Igbo-Ukwu (Lankton,
Ige, and Rehren 2006; Davison 1972). This new evidence indi-
cates bead artists at both sites used locally produced glass as well
as imported glass in a manner similar to beadmaking processes
documented for twentieth-century West Africa’s only remaining
glass producers, members of the Fulbe masagá glass artists’ guild
in the Nupe city of Bida (Robertshaw et al. 2009:93–94).

the deveLopMent of ghana’s gLass BeadMaking arts
The history of Ghanaian glass beadmaking has involved two
distinct “powder-glass” processes based on the use of pulverized
imported glass beads and glass scrap: the drawn-glass technique of
entrepôts in the north and within the Sudanic caravan belt, largely
fallen out of use; and the mold-form technique favored in coastal
trading settlements, which remains a vital, continually evolving art.
In the northwestern Brong-Ahafo region, evidence of local glass
beadmaking was discovered at the archaeological site of Begho, a
trading town on the northern border of the Akan forest that grew
into a cosmopolitan commercial and artistic center linking the
Akan goldfields with Mande cities of the middle and upper Niger
valleys. In Begho’s artisans’ quarter, glass beads and beadmak-
ing residue dating from the seventeenth to early eighteenth cen-
tury were discovered, consisting of glass-encrusted crucibles and
roughly made blue glass beads thought to be of local manufacture.
Glass beadmaking residue in the form of solid-end “wasters” from
cane beads suggests Begho’s bead artists used drawn-glass tech-
niques similar to techniques employed in Ile-Ife and the trans-
Saharan entrepôt of Tegdaoust (Posnansky 1973:158; Davison,
Giauque, and Clark 1971:648–50; Eluyemi 1987:214–16).

After the beginning of the coastal region’s long-distance over-
seas trade in the late fifteenth century, European merchant ships
were able to bring a substantially greater quantity of glass beads,
bottles, and other glass objects than had been possible in the
overland trans-Saharan trade. As Johnson (1978) and Kriger
(2006:5) observed for the African textile trade, imported con-

sumption goods do not necessarily supplant indigenous artisanal
production, and this influx of European trade beads stimulated
rather than undermined local bead production. The flourishing
maritime trade provided Gold Coast beadmakers with new bead
forms and glass beadmaking materials that fueled the develop-
ment of a thriving local beadmaking industry, especially in the
coastal and southern regions.

aLtering and reworking iMported gLass Beads

in the south
Ghana’s glass beadmaking arts encompass a variety of pro-
cesses including the modification of pre-existing beads. Overseas
trade not only brought ready-to-wear beads, but pipe-beads that
were sold directly to coastal industries specializing in reworking
and polishing imported bead materials. Clues as to the nature
of early coastal bead modification processes are provided by
European traders’ accounts and archaeological excavations. De
Marees, in 1602, documented a well-established coastal industry
for the reworking and polishing of Venetian beads. In describing
this thriving local beadworking industry, he wrote:

… they take a great quantity of Venetian Beads of all sorts of colours,
but prefer one colour to another. They break them into four or five
little pieces, polish them on a stone in the way children polish cherry-
stones, string them on Tree-bark in bunches of ten, and trade exten-
sively in this commodity (1987:53).

De Marees identified several coastal trading centers, including
Ahanta, Wassa, Komenda, and Kormantin, where European
beads were purchased for local modification, polishing, and
trade (1987:80, 84, 177).

Grooved sandstone blocks believed to have served as “bead
abraders” used in the modification and “polishing” of imported
glass beads and/or locally produced beads of stone, shell, or glass
were discovered at Elmina, Ankobra, Sekondi, and Winneba
(DeCorse 1989:47–48). Among the more than 40,000 beads recov-
ered during excavations at Elmina, many European beads showed

16 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

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evidence of modification, particularly the polishing, or grinding,
of bead ends, including drawn pipe-beads broken into shorter
lengths and polished (DeCorse 2001:136–37), such as De Marees
had described in his 1602 account. Bead polishing and shaping
remained an important profession for coastal women until the
early twentieth century (Robertson 1984:104–105), which still pro-
vided some women with additional income in the 1990s (Fig. 7).

MoLd-forMed powder-gLass BeadMaking
The maritime trade brought substantial quantities of scrap
glass that Gold Coast beadmakers used to fabricate local pow-
der-glass beads, as well as colored beads that could be pulver-
ized for coloring agents. Seventeenth-century trade records
of one Venetian glassmaking firm document the production
not only of rosette (“beads”), but cannucce di vetro (“canes, or
rods, of glass”) for Portugal’s West African trade, which could
be used to embellish locally produced beads (Zecchin 1984).11
Glass goods recovered from a British or Dutch merchantman
shipwrecked off the coast near Elmina sometime between
1830–50 consisted of numerous glass bottles and monochrome
seed beads only suitable for use as coloring agents in the local
powder-glass bead industry (Hopwood 2009). The use of pul-
verized seed beads as coloring agents, which yielded a richer
color, continued until the 1970s.

It is difficult to determine when the coastal bead industry began
the actual manufacture of glass beads. Jean Barbot’s observations
from two voyages to the West African coast in 1678–79 and 1681–
82 may provide the earliest account of coastal beadmaking. In
the original 1688 French edition, Barbot describes Elmina bead
artisans who “also recast crystal and glass, taking considerable
pains.” Although Barbot drew freely on earlier published accounts,
including Dapper’s 1668 description of the coastal bead indus-

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(clockwise from top left)
14 striped powder-glass zagba (also, adzagba or adjagba) beads produced by a
master krobo beadmaker, late 1990s. collection of the newark Museum, gift of
suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.116.

15 a masterful combination of powder-glass striping and layering techniques
by a krobo beadmaker, late 1990s. collection of the newark Museum, gift of
suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.115.

16 J.f. sick and company catalogue page of bicone fancy-beads for the west
african trade (dated 1919–1926), from the J.f. sick and company sample card
collection of the tropenmuseum, amsterdam, courtesy of the tropenmuseum.
photo: irene de Groot

vol. 47, no. 1 Spring 2014 african arts | 17

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17 krobo bicone powder-glass facsimile of a Venetian lampwork fancy-bead
design (see fig. 16, bottom right), late 1980s. collection of the newark
Museum, gift of suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.59.

18 krobo “ananse” powder-glass bicone design in the black, yellow, green,
and red colors of the republic of Ghana’s national flag, late 1990s. collection of
the newark Museum, gift of suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.117.`

try (Jones 1986:220–21), Barbot’s use of the new term “recast” is
believed to offer the first written documentation of coastal bead
manufacture, and the first written indication of the development
of new mold-form techniques for the production of powder-glass
beads (Hair, Jones, and Law 1992:389, n. 36).

In general, archaeological evidence indicates the drawn-glass
method was the preferred technique in Ghana’s northern trade
center at Begho, as at Ile-Ife and the trans-Saharan entrepôt of
Tegdaoust, while mold-formed powder-glass beadmaking pro-
cesses are associated with Ghana’s southern and coastal regions.
Yet one must not draw too strong a geographical distinction
between the two beadmaking technologies. At New Buipe, a
seventeenth-century archaeological site northeast of Begho,
archaeologists found evidence of local artisans using clay molds
to produce beads of powdered glass—the favored technique of
the period’s coastal beadmakers (Lamb 1978). Nevertheless, the
greater volume of the coastal glass bead trade resulted in a con-
centration of bead artists and more active development of mold-
form techniques in Ghana’s coastal and southern regions.

In archaeological excavations at the coastal trading town of
Elmina, a substantial number of “clearly non-European” glass beads,
composed of glass chips or finely crushed, “powdered” glass, were
recovered from eighteenth-century contexts, providing evidence
of an active local beadmaking industry (DeCorse 1989:47–49).
The composite “glass-chip” beads were produced by mold-firing
fragments, or chips, of both imported and West African glass—a
continuing practice by contemporary beadmakers who create com-
posite beads from salvaged imported bead fragments.

Powder-glass beads, created by the fusion of pulverized or pow-

18 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

dered glass, appear to have been produced by processes quite
similar to the mold-form techniques of present-day Ghanaian
beadmakers. These beads, in “a wide range of decorative effects”
including inlays of imported bead chips and trailed glass (see Fig.
21 for an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century example), display a
mastery of beadmaking processes and decorative techniques that
indicate that mold-formed powder-glass beadmaking had become
a well-developed art in coastal settlements by the late seventeenth
or early eighteenth century (DeCorse 1989:48–49). The majority
of powder-glass beads were originally a light gold color, perhaps
reflecting gold’s special value among Gold Coast peoples.

The earliest ethnographic account of Ghanaian powder-glass
beadmaking, by Gold Coast British Inspector of Mines R.P.
Wild (1937), describes a 1934 visit to a beadmaking “factory” at
Dunkwa, in Ghana’s southwestern Denkyira region, operated by
Nzima artisans who had journeyed inland to produce and sell
beads at this Denkyira market town. The beadmaking processes
Wild described are very similar to those of contemporary Ghana-
ian bead artists (Figs. 8–10): the Nzima beadmakers used flat, one
to one-and-a-half inch thick molds “made from a good local clay
… [possibly containing] a high percentage of kaolin,”12 with circu-
lar vertical-axis bead cavities in a variety of diameters and depths
“as required to suit different sized beads” (1937:96). Centered in
the bottom of each bead cavity was a much smaller hole in which
the midribs or leaf-stalks of cassava “about the length of a safety-
match” were inserted, having been moistened and smeared with
clay in order to carbonize during the firing process, leaving a small
tubular hole in the center of each bead. Glass powder, obtained
by pulverizing different colored glass bottles and European glass
beads, was poured into the mold cavities in layers according to
the color and thickness desired. The filled molds were then placed

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when compared to the West African akori: the imitations melted
when subjected to the local test of placing questionable beads in
the fire (Mauny 1958:210). In 1603, Emanuele Ximenes, a Por-
tuguese businessman living in Antwerp, wrote to Italian glass
expert Antonio Neri for help in developing convincing imita-
tions of this unusual dichroic African “mineral,” which was the
color of lapis yet appeared yellow when held to the light, because
Dutch beadmakers’ attempts were unsuccessful.16

By the nineteenth century, Ile-Ife production and export of kori
beads had greatly reduced, and the Gold Coast terms agri, aggri,
aggry, or aggrey referred to a very different type of precious bead.
Descriptions of the Gold Coast aggrey suggest that these valu-
able antique beads were the intricately designed mosaic beads of
ancient Middle Eastern, Roman, or Islamic origin brought into the
region over centuries of trans-Saharan trade.17

French trader Marie-Joseph Bonnat, an Asante captive from
1869 to 1874, described “a kind of mosaic of ancient manufac-
ture” that Asante traders obtained from Salaga, which could also
be obtained “by digging in the earth …. known at the coast by
the name of ‘agri beads’” (1994:290–91). These ancient mosaic
beads, which surfaced from long-forgotten burial sites or under-
ground hiding places, became invested with new status as spir-
itually empowered “ground” beads of a value that encouraged
imitation by both Gold Coast and European beadmakers.

Thomas E. Bowdich, during his 1817 diplomatic mission to the
Asante capital of Kumasi, saw costly aggry beads of a “perfection
… superior to art,” which he attributed to Roman or Phoenician
manufacture: “some resemble mosaic work, the surfaces of oth-
ers are covered with flowers and regular patterns, so very min-
ute … that nothing but the finest touch of the pencil could equal

19 asante facsimile of a Venetian lampwork design
combining three powder-glass design techniques:
striping, layering, and the joining of separately fired
bead halves, late 1990s. collection of the newark
Museum, gift of suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.50.

20 detail of a sample card (dated 1930) displaying
bead #15826, a Venetian drawn-glass bead similar in
appearance to the colors and striped design of Gold
coast powder-glass designs, from the J.f. sick and
company sample card collection of the tropenmu-
seum, amsterdam, courtesy of the tropenmuseum.
photo: irene de Groot

on a charcoal fire and “covered all round with charcoal,” or in
“beehive” bread-making ovens. These firing methods (producing
temperatures from 600 to 800 degrees Celsius) created “sintered”
beads with a rough granular appearance, which were smoothed by
polishing the barrel and ends on flat stones.13

In 1937, G.E. Sinclair of the Gold Coast Administrative Service
documented an alternative, horizontal-mold powder-glass bead-
making technique at the Asante village of Goaso, eighty-six miles
west of Kumasi (Sinclair 1939). Instead of vertical-axis molds,
this Asante beadmaker used a grooved, horizontal-axis clay
mold to produce straight or slightly curved powder-glass “canes”
that could be broken into smaller bead lengths. This beadmak-
ing technique, which was “common in this part of Ashanti,” pro-
duced rough, yet “almost completely fused” beads (often with
stripes along the cane’s length), which would be smoothed on a
grooved stone prior to stringing. By the 1970s, horizontal-mold
beadmaking had become relatively rare; however, special beads
continue to be produced by Krobo beadmakers using horizon-
tal-mold techniques (Fig. 11).14

african Bead design and transcuLturaL diaLogues

of iMitation and inspiration
The Gold Coast maritime trade, which spurred the growth of
coastal beadworking and powder-glass beadmaking industries,
also fostered an interactive environment of trade and consump-
tion that stimulated both European and Gold Coast production
of facsimiles of prestigious local and imported beads.

European glass beadmakers’ earliest copying efforts were
directed toward creating their own versions of the West African
akori, the enigmatic dichroic bead worth its weight in gold in
local markets, now believed to be products of southern Nigeria’s
early glass beadmaking industry (Kahlous 1966; Horton 1979;
Eluyemi 1987).15 As early as 1504, Portuguese navigator Duarte
Pacheco Pereira described the inferiority of European copies

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vol. 47, no. 1 Spring 2014 african arts | 19

21 strand of akoso beads displaying some of
Ghana’s earliest dated mold-form powder-glass bead
designs, eighteenth to nineteenth century. collec-
tion of the newark Museum, gift of suzanne Gott,
2008, 2008.54.127.
photo: richard Goodbody

them” (1966:268). Local beadmakers, he was told, made powder-
glass versions of these precious ancient beads:

The natives pretend that imitations are made in the country, which
they call boiled beads, alleging that they are broken aggry beads
ground into powder, and boiled together, and that they know them
because they are heavier (Bowdich 1966:268).

Without firsthand observation of such beadmaking activity,
Bowdich remained skeptical; however, subsequent knowledge of
Ghanaian powder-glass beads and beadmaking history supports the
veracity of these early nineteenth-century accounts of local powder-
glass imitations of medieval Middle Eastern beads (Fig. 12).

Venetian beadmakers, following their mid-nineteenth-cen-

tury rediscovery of ancient “murrine” mosaic glass techniques,
began producing their own versions of ancient Middle Eastern,
Roman, and Islamic beads. By the late nineteenth century, these
distinctively patterned Venetian mosaic, or millefiori (“thousand
flowers”), beads were being created for an active West African
market, similar to European manufacturers’ production of wax-
print textiles for the African trade (Fig. 13).

According to an 1898 account by British colonial physician
Richard Austin Freeman, some European beadmakers unsuc-
cessfully attempted to produce convincing imitations of the
valuable ancient aggri:

An enterprising Birmingham firm, I was told, once obtained a num-
ber of Aggri beads and manufactured a quantity of imitations which
were so excellent that European experts were quite unable to distin-
guish them from the original models. These fictitious Aggri beads
were introduced on to the Gold Coast, but the fraud was instantly
detected by the natives (1967:400).

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22 detail of a sample card (dated 1910–
13) displaying beads #407–10, Venetian
lampwork versions of an akoso powder-
glass bead design dating to the eighteenth
century, from the J.f. sick and company
sample card collection of the tropenmu-
seum, amsterdam, courtesy of the tropen-
museum.
photo: irene de Groot

23 detail of a sample card (dated 1929)
displaying bead #15255, a Venetian lamp-
work version of a weathered Gold coast
akoso bead powder-glass design, from the
J.f. sick and company sample card col-
lection of the tropenmuseum, amsterdam,
courtesy of the tropenmuseum.
photo: irene de Groot

20 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

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dynaMics of iMitation and artistic innovation
As Rabine (2002) and Prestholdt (2008) have shown, consumer
goods and their circulation are well suited to revealing African
engagement in transcultural routes of interrelation. The recipro-
cal nature of transcultural processes of trade and consumption
are especially evident in Gold Coast and European beadmakers’
ongoing dialogue of cross-cultural imitation and inspiration.

The archaeologist Alastair Lamb, who admired and researched
Ghanaian powder-glass beadmaking (1976, 1978), observed that
many powder-glass bead designs “are clear imitations of European
types” (1976:39). In turn, European beadmakers sought out and
copied popular West African bead designs, “but often these Afri-
can designs were themselves copies of European originals.” The
question of who was copying whom in such cases, Lamb notes,
often cannot be definitively answered (1978:26). One conclusion
that can be drawn from this evidence, however, is the ongoing,
dialogic nature of Gold Coast and European bead design. In this
relationship of cross-cultural copying, Gold Coast artists devel-
oped powder-glass techniques to replicate European drawn-glass
and lampwork beadmaking designs, while European beadmakers
produced designs simulating powder-glass techniques.

(below)
24 “translucent” or “transparent” beads produced
from crushed, rather than powdered glass, tk beads
industry, amrahia, Ghana, 2007.

(right)
25 Mrs. Janet teye attaching translucent-glass
pendants to metal candle holders designed and
produced by her husband, dan doku teye, odumase
krobo, Ghana, 1999.

The creation of powder-glass versions of European beads
required the development of ingenious, painstaking processes
quite different from European drawn-glass or lampwork bead-
making techniques.18 For mold-form powder-glass versions of
lampwork Venetian “eye” beads, the beadmaker inserts precast
powder-glass “eyes” on the walls of each bead chamber while fill-
ing the chamber with glass powder.

Powder-glass beads inspired by striped European drawn-glass
beads are produced using vertical-axis molds. After filling the
bead chambers with glass powder, a needle-like tool is used to
make channels in the powder along the bead-chamber walls,
which are then filled with contrasting colored glass powder. A
curved stripe design can be produced by the subsequent twist-
ing of each cooling, fired bead (Fig. 14). Stripes can also be com-
bined with contrasting layers of colored powder to create more
intricate designs, demonstrating the sophisticated versatility of
the seemingly simple mold-form powder-glass process (Fig. 15).

Venetian lampwork bicone beads (Fig. 16), popular in the
Gold Coast trade since at least the mid-nineteenth century,
have their powder-glass counterparts. Mold-formed powder-
glass versions of this popular lampwork bead must be formed
in two conical halves which are fired and then joined together
for a final firing. Some powder-glass bicones produced in the

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1990s replicate long-established Venetian lampwork designs
(Fig. 17); however, other powder-glass bicones display a new, dis-
tinctively Ghanaian design element, a web-like “Ananse” design
(named after the spider-trickster of Akan folktales). This Ghana-
ian bicone design is produced using alternating layers of colored
glass, which are then pierced with vertical stripes. One expertly
made Ananse example was produced using glass powder in the
colors of the Republic of Ghana’s national flag (Fig. 18). A com-
bination of powder-glass design techniques—stripes, layering,
and the joining of separately fired bead halves—was used for one
particularly complex powder-glass version of a Venetian lamp-
work design (Fig. 19).

In turn, European beadmakers produced facsimiles of certain
powder-glass bead designs.19 An examination of the Tropenmu-
seum’s Sample Card Collection (dated 1910–58) of J.F. Sick and
Company, the primary bead distributor for the West African
trade, indicates an effort to produce Venetian lampwork versions
of certain powder-glass beads (Van Brakel 2007). One sample card
(dated 1930) displays a large, yellowish-gold, tubular bead with red
and green stripes, which is similar in appearance to the colors and
design of Gold Coast powder-glass beads (Fig. 20, bead 15826).

Yellowish-tan akoso beads are among the earliest examples of
Ghanaian powder-glass beadmaking (Fig. 21). One characteristic
akoso design, found among the powder-glass beads recovered
from eighteenth-century contexts at Elmina, features an inset
glass-bead chip encircled by a glass-cane trail. One J.F. Sick and
Company sample card (dated 1910–13) contains four Venetian
lampwork versions of this heirloom akoso design (Fig. 22, beads
407–10). Another sample card (dated to 1929) displays a lamp-
work version of another akoso style, featuring a crossed, trailed-
cane design in characteristic blue and brown colored glass (Fig.
23, bead 15255). The lighter ivory color of this Venetian akoso is
similar to the weathered coloring of antique akoso powder-glass
beads, suggesting that this bead could have served as a more
convincing imitation of antique akoso.

Sordinas, in researching Krobo beadmaking from 1959 to 1960,
found that local bead artists were very concerned about Euro-
pean copying of powder-glass bead designs. Beadmakers reported
that European competitors sent agents into local markets to learn
which locally produced bead designs were in fashion. These agents

22 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

26 painted glass beads drying in preparation for
the second firing to fix the painted ceramic-powder
designs, tk beads industry, amrahia, Ghana, 2007.

27 florence asare, director of tk beads industry,
with a display of translucent-glass beads in the fac-
tory showroom, amrahia, Ghana, 2013.

sent samples of popular local beads to European bead manufactur-
ers, who were able to mass-produce large quantities of these pop-
ular styles at a lower cost. This competitive atmosphere spurred
local beadmakers to develop new bead styles in an effort to thwart
foreign bead companies’ efforts to capture the powder-glass bead
market by “dumping” cheap European bead imitations of popular
local bead designs (1965:316).

new Bead forMs and BeadMaking techniques
During the twentieth century, powder-glass beadmaking
became centered in Ghana’s Krobo and Asante regions, with
Krobo bead artists eventually becoming the primary producers
and innovators in powder-glass beadmaking (Sordinas 1965;
Lamb 1976; Kalous 1979; Johnson 1979:80, 82; Francis, Jr. 1990,
1993; Haigh 1991). Ghanaian beadmakers continued to practice
and refine their centuries-old mold-form powder-glass design
techniques until the late 1990s, producing “designed” beads
that demonstrate the sophisticated artistry achieved through
mastery of this seemingly simple beadmaking technology (see
Figs. 11, 14–15, 17–19). In recent decades, however, profound
changes have taken place in bead production and consump-
tion, with new glass beadmaking forms and techniques largely
replacing long-established powder-glass design processes.
These innovations are the result of bead artists’ creativity and
commitment to maintaining the vitality of their unique glass
beadmaking profession.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, “designed” pow-
der-glass beads—in which designs are created by painstakingly
inserting different colored glass powders within the body of the
bead prior to firing—have become increasingly rare. In the mid-
1980s, a new, “translucent” or “transparent” bead form was devel-
oped (Fig. 24) using fragments of broken glass to create beads
retaining the translucence of glass, rather than the opaque beads
produced from finely powdered glass (Wilson 2003; Sutherland-
Addy, Aidoo, and Torda Dagadu 2011). The firing temperatures

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such as translucent-glass pendants created for candle-holders
designed and produced by Daniel Doku Teye (Fig. 25). In terms
of design, translucent-glass beads have a contemporary look espe-
cially appealing to international export markets. A necklace by
translucent-bead innovator Nomoda Ebenezer (“Cedi”) Djaba, for
example, was featured in The Global Africa Project exhibition and
catalogue (Sims, King-Hammond, and D’Alton 2010:145).

Ghanaian consumers, however, have not embraced the new
translucent beads to the same degree as have the export or tour-
ist markets. By 2013, translucent beads were primarily being
used as spacers or design elements in local bead jewelry featur-
ing “painted” beads, Ghana’s newest and most popular glass bead
form. Painted bead designs are inspired by nineteenth and early-
twentieth century European trade beads, which have become
increasingly rare and costly in Ghanaian markets, having been
bought by traders for the lucrative “African trade bead” market
of Europe and North America. The intricate designs of Venetian
mosaic, or millefiori, beads have been especially influential, yet
painted beads also display great freedom of creativity as bead-
makers develop imaginative new designs (cover). A major force
in the development of the new painted beads has been bead art-
ist Florence Asare, who with husband Ernest Asare operates TK
Beads Industry, located in Amrahia, north of Accra. The produc-
tion of painted glass beads has opened up new roles for women
in Ghanaian glass beadmaking. Women, traditionally the traders
in beadmaking families, have become leaders in painted-bead
design (Wilson 2003; Gilvin 2006; Sutherland-Addy, Aidoo, and
Torda Dagadu 2011).

Painted beads are created by painting designs on either plain
powder-glass or translucent-glass beads, using a mixture of glass
powder, powdered ceramic dye, and water. After the painted sur-
faces have dried (Fig. 26), each bead is placed back in the mold
and fired for an additional 20 to 30 minutes at low temperatures
of 300 to 600 degrees Celsius. Since their development in the late
1990s, painted beads have come to dominate Ghana’s local bead
market as well as gained prominence in the tourist and export
trades. Ghana’s long-established “designed” powder-glass bead-

for translucent beads are higher—800 to 1000 degrees Celsius, for
30–45 minutes—in order to melt the glass fragments. For these
more molten beads, a metal pick is used to form the bead hole and
shape the bead toward the end of the firing process.

The artistry of translucent glass-bead design finds expression in
a myriad of luminous colors. To produce translucent beads, artists
must use glass in the desired colors, such as blue, green, brown, or
clear bottle-glass. More unusual colors such as gold or pink require
the use of glassware in these colors. New translucent designs are
also produced by combining different colored glass fragments. A
few bead artists with contacts in Europe and North America have
also begun importing art glass to obtain rich new colors.

The creation of inventive new bead shapes is another distinc-
tive feature of translucent bead design. In addition, bead forms
have been developed to embellish other locally crafted items,

28 contemporary facsimiles of heirloom powder-
glass beads (left: royal necklace of akoso and bͻdͻm
beads; right: bͻdͻm beads) made by master bead-
maker cedi djaba, cedi beads industry, odumase
krobo, Ghana, 1999. collection of the newark
Museum, gift of suzanne Gott, 2008, 2008.54.119-1
and 2008.54.118.
photo: richard Goodbody

29 cedi djaba demonstrating beadmaking tech-
niques to a group of visitors, cedi beads industry,
odumase krobo, Ghana, 2013.

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vol. 47, no. 1 Spring 2014 african arts | 23

30 cedi djaba creating a bead with imported glass
canes and lampwork beadmaking techniques, cedi
beads industry, odumase krobo, Ghana. 2013.

31 detail of necklace of lampwork beads in bͻdͻm
and akoso designs by cedi djaba, cedi beads indus-
try, odumase krobo, Ghana, 2007. collection of the
newark Museum, purchase 2007 franklin conklin, Jr.
bequest fund, 2007.66.1a-h.
photo: richard Goodbody

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tial of Ghana’s growing tourist industry for offering new mar-
keting opportunities, including bead factories as destinations for
cultural tourism.

Ghanaian beadmaking has also served as a stimulus for local
development initiatives. The community development project
Skills Training and Entrepreneurship for Women, sponsored by
Everlove Tetteh, Queenmother Nana Ohemaa Esi Nisin VIII,
provides vocational training for rural teenage mothers through
an intensive handicraft program using local beads. The Ghana
Bead Society (GBS), established in 1995 to promote the apprecia-
tion and preservation of Ghana’s bead heritage and beadmaking
arts, is now partnering with Ghana’s National Vocational Train-
ing Institute (NVTI) and with the bead and bead jewelry busi-
ness Sun Trade Limited, established in 1996 by GBS founding
member Kati Torda, to propose a two-year national certificate
program to train Ghanaian youth in various beadmaking tech-
niques and in the crafting of bead jewelry. The curriculum, to
be developed by professional curriculum development consul-

making tradition has largely been eclipsed by the development of
the popular new painted beads, with most mold-formed designs
now replaced by painted facsimiles. Painted bead designs can be
produced more quickly and economically than “designed” pow-
der-glass beads, which require extensive training for mastering
the more labor-intensive powder-glass design techniques.

new directions in ghana’s gLass BeadMaking profession
Contemporary bead artists have been working to strengthen
and expand Ghana’s glass beadmaking industry. Their efforts are
supported by professional associations, such as the Ghana Beads
Manufacturers Association and the Krobo Bead Society, and
cooperative enterprises, such as the Ashanti Region’s Asuafua-
Asamang Co-op Beads Manufacturing and Marketing Society.

Beadmakers also work with NGOs. The most prominent is the
Ghanaian organization Aid to Artisans Ghana (ATAG), estab-
lished in 1989 to assist artists in Ghana’s craft industries with
product development, business management, and the cultiva-
tion of new local and international markets. Field coordinators
assigned to the Eastern and Ashanti Regions work closely with
local Krobo and Asante bead artists. ATAG also partners with
the US-based NGO Aid to Artisans in bringing product and
design consultants to Ghana and facilitating sales in US markets.
Ghanaian beadmaking gained UNESCO support as “tra-
ditional craftsmanship” under the initiatives for safeguard-
ing intangible cultural heritage. The 2005 UNESCO project
“Improved Traditional Bead Production and Marketing in West
Africa” funded a workshop on the Venetian island of Murano for
seven bead producers from Ghana and Mali “to improve … bead
production technology and marketing strategies… [and] estab-
lish an international network and to exchange knowledge.”20

In 2009, with funding from the European Commission’s Cul-
tural Initiative Support Programme, a Ghana International
Beads Festival was held at Odumase Krobo to promote the local
bead industry. The 2009 Beads Festival theme, “Tourism and
Handicrafts, Keys to Economic Growth,” highlighted the poten-

24 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

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32 chevron beads made by nomoda ebenezer
(“cedi”) djaba, cedi beads industry, odumase
krobo, Ghana, 2013.

33 painted facsimilies of early twentieth-century
Venetian bicone beads (cf. fig. 16), tk beads, amra-
hia, Ghana, 2013. author’s collection.

tants with the participation of NVTI, the Ghana Bead Society,
and Sun Trade Limited, will include textbooks and other teach-
ing materials, and provide instruction in the history and cultural
significance of beads.

the new generation of Bead artists
Ghana’s new generation of glass bead artists are reinvigorating
their profession with product innovations and explorations of new
marketing strategies. Two of the most prominent contemporary
bead producers are TK Beads Industry and Cedi Beads Industry.

TK Beads Industry was established in Odumase Krobo in 1989
by Florence Asare, reviving a family glass beadmaking tradition
that had ended with her father’s generation. A leading member
of the new generation of women bead producers entering the
traditionally male beadmaking profession, Florence Asare, as
previously noted, has been an important innovator in the devel-
opment of painted glass beads, Ghana’s newest and most popular
bead form.21

Now jointly operated by Florence Asare (Director) and her hus-
band Ernest Asare (Manager), TK Beads has relocated its bead
factory and showroom to Amrahia, on Accra’s northern outskirts.
TK Beads Industry (Fig. 27), which is especially well known for
its painted and translucent-glass beads, continues to develop new
beads and bead designs (see Figs. 24, 26, and cover). In 2010, Flor-
ence Asare also traveled to India, with NGO support, for a training
program to enhance Ghanaian glass beadmaking with production
techniques developed by India’s glass bead artists.

While TK Beads Industry continues to sell their beads in Ghana,
the majority of the company’s production is now geared toward
the international export market. They have distributors in the

United States, Europe, and other parts of Africa, and a commer-
cial website. Florence and Ernest Asare also market their beads at
trade fairs in South Africa, the United States, the Netherlands, and
other international venues. Another business strategy has been the
expansion of their factory grounds and showroom in Amrahia to
accommodate national and international tour groups and to host
beadmaking workshops and training programs.

Ghana’s most internationally renowned glass bead artist is
Nomoda Ebenezer (“Cedi”) Djaba,22 Managing Director of Cedi
Beads Industry, located in Odumase Krobo. Descended from a
long line of Krobo bead producers, he excelled from an early age
in powder-glass beadmaking techniques and in developing new
bead designs that attracted new customers at local bead markets.

Cedi Djaba has a highly developed mastery of classic powder-
glass beadmaking techniques, creating beautifully crafted exam-
ples of bͻdͻm beads, the most challenging powder-glass bead
form.23 His replicas of heirloom powder-glass akoso and bͻdͻm
beads are produced on commission for traditional rulers’ bead
regalia (Fig. 28; see also Fig. 9). In the mid-1980s, he was a key
innovator in developing the new translucent or transparent bead
form. As previously noted, one of Cedi Djaba’s translucent-glass
bead necklaces was selected for inclusion in The Global Africa
Project exhibition and catalogue (Sims, King-Hammond, and
D’Alton 2010:145).

Cedi Beads Industry produces five Ghanaian glass bead forms:
beads of recycled antique-bead fragments; bͻdͻm beads; designed

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akoso and bͻdͻm beads have taken the centuries of transcultural
dialogue between Ghanaian powder-glass beadmaking and Euro-
pean bead production to a new level in which this longstanding
dialogic relationship is expressed within the creations of this con-
temporary bead artist.

Cedi Djaba has also been a major force in promoting the devel-
opment and appreciation of Ghanaian glass beadmaking, both
in Ghana and abroad, acquiring an international reputation that
represents a new direction in Ghanaian beadmaking. He has been
invited to present demonstrations and workshops on Ghanaian
glass beadmaking at such prestigious institutions as: the Penland
School of Crafts, North Carolina (2006); the Corning Museum
of Glass, in conjunction with the 39th annual Glass Art Society
conference (2009); and the annual Santa Fe International Folk Art
Market, a nonprofit folk art organization in partnership with the
Museum of International Folk Art (2009–13).

changing Modes of Bead production
Within Ghana, beads remain an integral part of customary
practice and cultural identity;24 however, the past decade has
seen a significant shift in the types of beads produced and worn
in customary contexts and Ghanaian fashion.

Since their development in the late 1990s, painted beads—
copied or inspired by European trade beads and Ghanaian pow-
der-glass bead designs—have been increasingly embraced by
Ghanaian consumers. Painted beads constitute the overwhelm-
ing majority of beads produced for local wholesale and retail
markets, largely ending beadmakers’ long history of producing
powder-glass beads with mold-formed designs.25

The ascendancy of painted beads within contemporary Gha-
naian beadmaking is the result of several factors. In compari-
son with designed powder-glass beads, painted beads have the
advantage of being produced more quickly and economically
without requiring extensive training in mastering “designed”
powder-glass techniques. For most Ghanaian consumers, the
distinction between painted and designed beads is not signifi-
cant enough to merit paying more for the more labor-intensive
designed powder-glass beads. Painted beads, however, have a
more significant appeal as the bead form best suited to meet local
needs for affordable versions of heirloom trade beads, which
have become increasingly rare and costly in recent decades (Fig.
33, cf. Fig. 16).

The dramatic reduction in Ghanaian heirloom beads is the
result of two combined aspects of late twentieth-century transna-
tional engagement: the neocolonial World Bank and International
Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs imposed upon
many African nations, including Ghana, beginning in the 1980s;
and Western transcultural collecting. Since the 1980s, Ghana’s
troubled economy forced many women to sell their bead collec-
tions to bead traders for sale on the lucrative international bead
market as the “African trade beads” much sought after by Euro-
American collectors since the late 1960s.26 In other instances,
women’s heirloom bead collections have been lost because of
beads’ long history of spiritual associations. In fact, there are
accounts of overly zealous Christian family members, believing
heirloom beads to contain witchcraft, destroying women’s bead
collections by breaking the beads or throwing them into the fire.27

34 kati torda, a Ghanaian jewelry designer of hun-
garian descent, combines translucent-glass beads
with gold-plated bronze asante beads. sun trade
Limited., accra, Ghana, 2007. hair by charlotte Men-
sah. Model: Mamy barauti. courtesy of kati torda.
photo: eric don arthur

powder-glass beads; transparent- or translucent-glass beads; and
painted powder-glass and translucent-glass beads. In 1999, Cedi
Beads Industry moved to a new location in Odumase Krobo with
expanded factory grounds for a showroom and dedicated edu-
cational space, where Cedi Djaba presents beadmaking demon-
strations and hands-on workshops to Ghanaian and international
visitors and tour groups (Fig. 29).

As a contemporary Ghanaian bead artist, Cedi Djaba is unique
in mastering the art of lampwork glass beadmaking. In 1997, fol-
lowing lectures to the Boston Bead Society, he remained in Boston
for an additional two months learning the lampwork processes
made famous by Venetian beadmakers and adopted by contem-
porary international bead artists. Back in Ghana, with techni-
cal assistance from the Netherlands Management Cooperation
Programme, he developed a lampwork beadmaking studio with
technology suitable to a West African setting. In his Odumase
Krobo studio, Cedi Djaba creates finely crafted lampwork glass
beads which include designs inspired by heirloom powder-glass
akoso and bͻdͻm beads (Fig. 30). One such necklace, an elegant
embodiment of contemporary transcultural Ghanaian beadmak-
ing, is now in the collection of the Newark Museum (Fig. 31). In
2007, in a collaborative project with Nevada glass bead artist Art
Seymour, he also began producing contemporary chevron beads
in his Odumase Krobo studio (Fig. 32). Cedi Djaba’s lampwork

26 | african arts Spring 2014 vol. 47, no. 1

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Painted design techniques—capable of producing very color-
ful, complex designs inspired by Venetian “fancy,” and mosaic, or
millefiori, beads—are especially well suited to recreating the look
of the European trade beads whose design history, similar to that
of African-print textiles, was shaped by the tastes and fashions of
African consumers. As a creative response to challenges of late-
twentieth century transcultural engagements, painted beads pro-
vide a sustainable, locally produced bead form capable of satisfying
the needs of customary practice as bead regalia for traditional rul-
ers and Krobo nubility displays, as well as funerary presentations
of waist beads honoring a deceased Asante woman.28

Both painted and translucent glass beads are being crafted into
fashionable ways of expressing cultural pride and heritage, as in
the creations of Kati Torda, a Ghanaian jewelry designer of Hun-
garian descent and a founding member of the Ghana Bead Soci-
ety (Fig. 34). During her thirty-four years in Ghana, Kati Torda
has become a leading figure in Ghanaian and African bead jew-
elry design. At her bead and bead jewelry business Sun Trade
Limited, which she established in 1996, Kati Torda creates cus-

tom designs for individual clients, including two of Ghana’s First
Ladies. She also teaches classes and workshops in bead-jewelry
techniques and design. In 2013, she was invited to be a co-pre-
senter with Cedi Djaba at the Harare International Festival of the
Arts, where they presented workshops and demonstrations on
contemporary Ghanaian beadmaking and bead jewelry design
and a seminar on the role of beads in Ghanaian societies.

Kati Torda’s bead jewelry designs—featured in a variety
of Ghanaian and African fashion venues including the Miss
Malaika, Miss Ghana, and Face of Africa pageants, the fashion
shows and promotional ads of the Ghana-based textile compa-
nies Ghana Textile Printing (GTP) and Woodin, and interna-
tional fashion magazines such as New African Woman and Oh
Yes! Magazine—demonstrate the inseparability of Ghana’s bead-
making arts and contemporary African fashion.

Suzanne Gott is an art historian in the Department of Critical Studies at
the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Her research and publica-
tions focus on women’s visual culture in Ghana, with a particular interest
in fashion and performance. Suzanne.Gott@ubc.ca

Notes

I want to thank the many individuals and institutions

in Ghana, Amsterdam, and Venice that provided gener-
ous assistance and support for this research. In Ghana:
Kati Torda, Nana Tetteh Ordorkor Tummeh I, and
members of the Ghana Bead Society; Nomoda Ebenezer
(“Cedi”) Djaba; Florence and Ernest Asare; Mrs. Comfort
Amanor; Daniel Doku Teye and Mrs. Janet Teye; Antonio
Quarshie-Awusah and Edaa; Gilbert Amegatcher of the
KNUST College of Art; Madame Koseε and Mrs. Mary
Quaye of the Asuafua-Asamang Co-op Beads Manufac-
turing and Marketing Society; Mrs. Esther Esi Degbor;
Mrs. Jemima Bruce-Sackey; Mrs. Bridget Kyerematen-
Darko and Dan Quaynor of Aid to Artisans Ghana;
Poem van Landewijk; the late Nana Akua Pokuaa; Mrs.
Joanna Dofie; and Dr. Kofi Agyekum, Dr. Leonard B.
Crossland, and the late Drs. Yaw Bredwa-Mensah and
J.E.J.M. van Landewijk of the University of Ghana. In
Amsterdam: Dr. Suzanne Legêne and Koos van Brakel of
the Royal Tropical Institute’s Tropenmuseum. In Venice:
Gianni Moretti; Dott. Maria Pia Pedani of the Archivio
Storico del Comune di Venezia; and the directors and
staff of the Museo Vetrario di Murano and the Biblioteca
del Museo Correr di Venezia. Thanks are due to my col-
leagues Christa Clarke, Senior Curator, Arts of Global
Africa, Newark Museum, and Doran H. Ross, Emeritus
Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, for their
insights and advice. I also wish to express my gratitude
for funding to support my initial research, provided by
Indiana University School of Fine Arts Friends of Art
Research Travel Awards (1999, 2000) and an IU School of
Fine Arts Russell A. Havens Fellowship (2000).

In the early centuries of European maritime
trade, the region known as the Gold Coast extended from
Assine in the Ivory Coast to modern Ghana’s Volta River.
2 Graeber (1996) explores the particular value of
beads as objects of exchange and adornment for visible,
socially recognized displays of wealth and power.

For Mediterranean, Islamic, and Venetian trade

beads of this period, see Panini (2008) and Dubin (2009).
4 The European glass beads produced for the Afri-
can trade—first via trans-Saharan routes and then by the
coastal trade—were largely of Venetian manufacture. In
the early thirteenth century, Venice had emerged as the
leading European beadmaker. It was only later, during
the eighteenth century, that beads for the African trade

were being produced in many parts of western Europe,
frequently by expatriate Venetian beadmakers (Francis,
Jr. 1988:12, 23, 44). Despite concerted competition, includ-
ing seventeenth-century Dutch imitations of Venetian
glass beads, Venice retained its supremacy until finally
eclipsed by the ascendancy of Bohemian bead produc-
tion in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Van der
Sleen 1963; Francis, Jr. 1988:40).

For historical and contemporary studies of

customary beliefs in beads of supernatural origins and
powers within Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria, see Bowdich
(1966:266–68); Freeman (1967:403–405); Huber (1963);
Kumekpor (1970–71:108); Agyeman-Duah (1976);
Sarpong (1977); Euba (1981-82); Sackey (1985:185–87);
Nourisson (1992); Gott (2002, 2007). See Gott (2013)
concerning the supernatural dimensions of native gold
in Akan beliefs and practices, its spiritual affinities with
precious beads, and the affective impact of non-visi-
bility or concealment in intensifying the supernatural
powers of gold and beads.

6 Ross observes that the staff finial, dating to
1927 when Adanse was still subject to Asante rule,
“was carved to argue for independence on the basis of
historical primacy,” with four carved heads represent-
ing Denkyira, Asante, Asen, and Akyem—rival Akan
states whose origins lie in modern Adanse’s forest
regions—placed at the feet of the enstooled Adansehene
(1982:62). Ross also notes the similarity between the
Adanse staff ’s powder-glass encased iron rod and two
glass-encased iron staffs on display in the Prempeh II
Jubilee Museum on the grounds of the Ashanti Region’s
Centre for National Culture in Kumasi (personal com-
munication, July 2013). According to the museum staff,
the staffs were presented to young girls to indicate their
status as future wives of the Asantehene, the supreme
Asante ruler (interview, July 2013).

Interview with Nana Akua Pokuaa, July 1999,

Kumasi, Ghana. Translation by Dr. Kofi Agyekum,
Professor of Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon,
August 1999. The Amakom stool history recorded by
Agyeman-Duah (1976) also traces the ruling Asenee
clan’s origins to a bead ancestress known by the praise-
name Berewua, “copious” or “abundant” (aberewa, ‘old
woman or mother’). During her research on Asante
funerals, De Witte learned that Ekoͻna (or Ekuona)
clan members, also known as Ahweneε Nana mma

(“children” of the Great Ancestral Bead), wear precious
beads for official clan gatherings, including funerals of
important clan members, where clan sympathizers will
be seated beneath a funerary banner inscribed “with the
words ‘Ekuona abusua kuo, ahweneε mma,’ Ekuona clan
association, children of the beads” (2001:57).

See the following studies that address the sig-

nificance of women’s waist beads in southern Ghanaian
cultures: Ewe (Kumekpor 1970–71); Adangbe-Ewe (Van
Landewijk 1977); Fante (Sackey 1985); Asante (Sarpong
1977, Gott 2007); and Krobo (Steegstra 2005).

See Prestholdt for an examination of the “cultural

logics of consumer demand” that informed nineteenth-
century east African trade relationships (2008:8)

10 Although unable to obtain this source, Vanack-
er’s findings are presented in McIntosh (1984); McIntosh
and McIntosh (1988); and Insoll and Shaw (1997).

11 Saitowitz cites records from 1932 to 1955 from
the Società Veneziana Conterie reporting the shipment
of glass beadmaking rods, or “canes,” to African coun-
tries (1993:38).

12 Present-day beadmakers use termite-mound
clay—a special clay bound with termite-ant saliva that
withstands high firing temperatures—for bead molds
as well as their earthen kilns. Beadmakers usually coat
bead molds with kaolin slip to act as a separating agent
for the fired glass beads.

13 Powder-glass beads’ firing temperature of

600–800 degrees Celsius for 20–35 minutes is sufficient
to fuse the glass powder, yet not make it molten and
spoil the carefully fashioned powder-glass designs.
14 See Liu (1974a, 1984) for well-illustrated dis-
cussions of Ghanaian vertical- and horizontal-mold
powder-glass beadmaking processes.

15 Questions as to the nature and origin of the
akori have been the focus of considerable debate among
twentieth-century scholars. For various perspectives in
this debate, see Cardinall (1924–25); Mauny (1958); Jef-
freys (1961); Fage (1962); Kahlous (1966, 1968, 1979); Van
Landewijk (1970–71); Willett (1977); and Sackey (1985).

16 “7 Marzo 1603, da Emanuele Ximenes di Anversa

ad Antonio Neri,” Fondo Magliabechiano XVI, 116,
Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence. In 1959–60, Sordinas
documented Ghanaian coastal women’s long-standing
craft of altering imported European beads in a “cooking”
reduction-atmosphere process to produce more afford-

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able local versions of costly antique koli beads, a practice
that continued until the 1980s (1964:75–76).

17 A group of ancient mosaic glass beads recovered

from archaeological excavations at the trans-Saharan
trade center of Jenné-Jeno have been attributed to either
Ptolemaic and Roman sources dating from 300 bce to
200 ce, or Arabic sources dating from 300 to 600 ce
(Picard and Picard 1991:23, beads 82–92, 94).

18 For a description of the European drawn-glass

and lampwork techniques, see Sprague (1985:87–89,
93–94).

19 Manufactured facsimiles of locally crafted shell,
tooth, coral, and stone beads from Asia, Africa, and the
Americas are examined by Liu (1974b).

20 See the UNESCO project “Improved Traditional
Bead Production and Marketing in West Africa, Ghana –
Mali,” www.unesco.org/culture/ich/?pg=00114. Accessed
March 4, 2013.

21 See a 2002 interview with Frances Martey (Asare)

by Tanja Galetti in Wilson (2003:91–102) and the TK
Beads Industry website, www.tkbeads1.weebly.com.
Accessed February 22, 2013.

22 See a 2002 interview by Barbara Henderson in

Wilson (2003:103–109); and also Gilvin (2003).

23 See Liu, Ahn, and Giberson (2001) for a discus-

sion of possible historical bͻdͻm beadmaking tech-
niques, including a methodology proposed by Giberson
and Liu that was informed by observing the contempo-
rary bͻdͻm beadmaking techniques of Krobo master
bead artist Cedi Djaba.

24 Various studies have focused on the roles of

beads in specific Ghanaian cultures: Ewe (Kumek-
por 1970–71); Adangbe-Ewe (Van Landewijk 1977);
Dangme (Quarcoopome 1991); Krobo (Steegstra
2005); Fante (Sackey 1985); and Asante (Gott 2007).
Two recent publications take a broader perspective
on Ghana’s bead culture that includes bead producers,
traders, customary practices, and cultural and national
identities: Wilson (2003); Sutherland-Addy, Aidoo,
and Torda Dagadu (2011).

25 The artistry achieved in designed powder-glass
beadmaking during the final two decades of the twen-
tieth century, along with painted and translucent beads
from the late 1990s, is best represented in the collection
of the Newark Museum. The Museum collection also
includes examples of Ghanaian powder-glass vertical
and horizontal mold-form beads from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.

26 See Straight (2002) concerning the loss of Sam-
buru heirloom marriage beads to Western collectors. In
North America, African bead traders sell at major bead
expos such as the Tucson Bead Show and travel on a
circuit around the country selling to bead retailers.
Interview with Mrs. Joanna Dofie, Kumasi,

Ghana, July 2007. See Gott (2007:90–91) concerning
associations between women’s waist beads and witchcraft.
28 See Gott (2007) concerning waist beads’ signifi-
cance of in Ghanaian women’s life-cycle events, includ-
ing women’s funerary rites.

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