Weight

Although often identified with the Asante, the most numerous and best known of the Akan peoples, weights for measuring gold dust were made and used throughout Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. For more than five centuries, from about 1400 to 1900, Akan smiths cast weights of immense diversity. Their small size made them portable and easy to trade. Each weight was cast individually in the lost-wax method. What resulted was a unique piece, but one that had to be a specific weight to function. The shape or figure of a weight did not correspond to a set unit of measure: a porcupine in one set could equal an antelope in another, or a geometric form in a third. For important transactions, gold dust was placed on one side of a small, handheld balance scale, a weight on the other. Each party to the dealing verified the amount of gold dust using his or her own weights. Weights may act as display pieces implying wealth in both the size of individual weights and the number owned.

Some figurative weights evoke well-known Akan proverbs, and more than one proverb may apply. This is perhaps particularly true of animal weights. This weight depicting a turtle or tortoise can exemplify the qualities of independence and self-sufficiency as in the proverb "Because the tortoise does not like to belong to any clan, it always bears its coffin along with it."

Cast copper alloy figurative weight in the form of a tortoise with a cross design incised on its back and front legs curving towards head and back legs curving inwards.

Eliot Elisofon, New York, -- to 1973

Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa's Arts, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., November 4, 2017-ongoing

Artful Animals, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., July 1, 2009-July 25, 2010

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