ABSTRACT:
My direct engagement with arts in Ghana occurred during four days in 1967, when I stayed with Roy and Sophie Sieber in Legon. In 1972, I spent six months researching festivals and arts of personal adornment, among other forms. In 1973, after my return to University of California, Santa-Barbara (UCSB), I held a seminar on Ghanaian art, which led to seven students traveling to Ghana for fieldwork in summer, 1974. Observing his exceptional research among the Fante, I invited one of the students, Doran Ross, to collaborate on what became a traveling exhibition and book, The Arts of Ghana, organized by the Museum of Cultural History, UCLA in 1977. Ross and I returned for more research the following two summers and one fall. We identified objects to display from European and American collections and divided up topics to write about for the book, which addressed the arts of the entire nation, a somewhat risky venture by two rather inexperienced scholars.
Aba a wo guo no, ɛno ara na wo bɛtwa.
The seeds you plant and nurture are bound to yield the crops you harvest.
My first encounter with Ghana was a brief few days’ visit on my way from what was then Biafra to New York, staying with Roy and Sophie Sieber in Legon in the summer of 1967. I also made my way to Kumasi, where I purchased a batch of gold weights I hoped were not fakes.1 Later, in 1972, when diverted from continuing Igbo research with a fellowship to southern Nigeria, by socio-political uncertainties there, the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me to shift my focus to Ghana. Once there, Ghanaian art forms known only from the few then-available publications both assaulted me with their aesthetic vibrancy and, as I traveled and learned more, crept up on me by surprise: their vast numbers and varied object types. Colorful, throbbing festivals piqued my aesthetic sensors; frontomfron drumming entranced. Splendid gold regalia was magnetic, while adinkra and other motifs with associated proverbs intrigued. Miniature yet powerful gold weight sculptures were fascinating. An exploratory trip up the west side of Ghana and across the nation’s northern border teased my appetite for, to me, previously unknown architectural styles, decoration, and building types, while Lobi shrines begged exploration. These events and forms were all new and exciting. Ghana was wholly different from Igboland. I was captivated; my photographer’s eye was sharpened by processions and myriad colors and objects, plus the “dancing” of cloth garments. The warmth and generosity of Ghanaian people captured my heart. Six full months to explore and discover Ghana in 1972—I was hooked.
A few tentative seeds were planted then for the somewhat brazen, then-quite-risky venture that resulted in The Arts of Ghana exhibition and book.2 I witnessed and photographed the splendidly dynamic and complex royal Akuropon Odwira festival; a Fante Atranbir celebration in Amomabu featuring a 100-plus-foot-long asafo flag (see cover, The Arts of Ghana); a gay, kaleidoscopic outing of fancy dress masqueraders, with unique brass band music, in Elmina, followed by a trip to Enchi in Aowin country, where my doctoral student, Pat Crane, was studying funerary terra cottas still in situ. After seventeen months of research among the egalitarian Igbo five years earlier, working with hierarchical Akan people was an adjustment, yet it was facilitated by public Ga and Akan festivals that welcomed visitors (Figure 1). I saw other, more egalitarian Fante festivals as well: asafo military company members paraded, wearing imported cotton trade cloth sewn into dozens of colorful costumes, and appliquéd flags were danced—a contrast to royal gold regalia and kente. During those six months in Ghana, I did ten days of Lobi research, living with a Birifor family, and later, made an extended trip again to the far north with my mentor and friend Douglas Fraser, where we documented several distinctive architectural styles, plus basketry, pottery, and leather decoration so visible in that region. I lived with my wife and three young boys in the Kuku Hill section of Accra in an apartment owned by the Ghana National Museum, whose then director, Richard Nunoo, encouraged those early efforts. So, having sampled the daunting diversity of Ghanaian arts and plunged into a few topics, more seeds of the later exhibition project were tended. During those months, tilling the ground, I found that I liked that fruitful Ghanaian soil, even the constant dust of the far north savanna.
Nana Kwaku Ewusi VI, paramount chief of Abeadze Dominase, dancing for his subjects in a palanquin at the annual yam festival. Photo by Herbert M. Cole, 1974.
Those seeds germinated in Winter, 1973, in my “Arts of Ghana” seminar at UCSB for an uncommonly large batch of graduate students wanting to pursue African arts. And the sprouts grew when seven of them, including Doran Ross, and I raised money for a summer of Ghanaian arts research on the ground. Each person chose a different topic: Fante canoe decoration; Fante military shrine (posuban) architecture and sculpture; gold weights and brass-casting technology; personal decoration, especially beadwork (Figure 2); domestic pottery and terra cotta sculpture; kente and adinkra cloth, among them. After that summer, observing Doran’s meticulous yet passionate fieldwork techniques and his virtually professional camerawork, asking him to work with me further was an easy choice.
Fante priestess with shell beads, Cape Coast. Photo by Herbert M. Cole, 1974.
That summer of 1974 was followed by two more in 1975 and 1976 extending into the fall, with Doran and I, living and working mostly together and at times apart, reaching into many corners and all sorts of topics later covered, more or less fully, in the book. We attended several Fante Akwambo festivals (one on the chaotic day Ghana shifted driving to the right side of the road), documented with slides, black and whites, and video. In the summer of 1974, I was honored by being enstooled as an honorary asafo captain, carried off, aloft, from the main plaza in Gomoa Degu as captured in Doran’s memorable photograph (Figure 3). Through the kindness of Professor Kwabena Nketia, then teaching at UCLA, we gained access to Asante paramount chiefs who generously had all their regalia, including gold jewelry (Figure 4), laid out for us to document in palace courtyards, and often these kings modeled the rich kente and other prestige cloths in their treasuries. We did not enter stool-rooms but one day, when Doran went to the Mampong palace, I found a man who took me into thirteen different Asante shrines, most dedicated to Tano and his many avatars, but also three given to witch-catching. In Kumasi, Doran and I met and talked with the great artist, Osei Bonsu, and Doran made plans for further interviews (see Ross 1984). We took a ten-day trip to the north (and a few shorter ones), visiting the Muslim paramount chiefs of the Wa, Dagomba, and Mamprusi, the latter sporting an Akan-derived silver pectoral: a crocodile head eating a mudfish. We came away from that visit with two roosters tied by their feet in the backseat of the car, “dashed” to us by the Mamprusi king. This reception was fairly typical of the gracious cooperation we enjoyed in our research. We were not able to see any important northern ceremonies or masquerades, and rarely were we able to enter northern shrines with figural sculpture, except among the Ghanaian Lobi.
The author being hoisted aloft by colorful members of Gomoa Degu’s Company No. 1, just before being carried to a nearby house for his enstoolment as an honorary Asafo captain, asafohene. Photo by Doran H. Ross, 1974.
Edweso (Ejisu) state regalia laid out for Doran and me in a palace courtyard. Photo by Herbert M. Cole, 1976.
During these field trips, Doran and I outlined the book, divided up sections to write, arguing about what to include, attempting to cover all the arts from personal decoration to major sculpture and architecture, north and south; it was a constant challenge. We later realized that we did not give the arts and architecture of northern Ghana, so very different from those of the Akan and other southern peoples, the space and effort they deserved. We also argued about and made a decision, since debated and sometimes regretted, to exclude modern and contemporary arts from our already overly ambitious purview. We, however, looked at a lot of modern art, especially in Accra, and even interviewed several active artists such as Ablade Glover, Oku Ampofu, and Kobina Bucknor. Yet, the last chapter of the book did cover important European influences both early and quite recent.
By early 1975, the late George Ellis, then associate director of the UCLA Museum of Cultural History (later the Fowler), agreed to schedule The Arts of Ghana for Fall, 1977, to coincide with Ghana’s twentieth anniversary of independence.3 We applied for and received a large NEA grant and several smaller ones, and I made a six-nation trip to England and Europe to identify fine and unusual Ghanaian art forms in public and private collections. Doran continued his careful, detailed historical research, finding early mentions of many art forms still being used. It worked out, somehow, that Doran’s and my interests and skills were complementary. At that time, I was the “lumper,” seeking truth-telling general statements, whereas Doran was a meticulous “splitter,” finding minute variations and cataloging many dozens of motifs and proverbs. I coined the phrase “the verbal-visual nexus” in Akan arts, for instance, while Doran collected hundreds of examples across a dozen object types and several varied materials.4 Doran, with his multiple catalogs and archives of every aspect of Akan arts, compiled over many years (and now housed at the Getty Center), was always a terrific splitter yet, and perhaps needless to say, he became a fine lumper as well as an excellent writer, as revealed in his many articles and later volumes on arts in Ghana. In the 1970s, I was more interested in figural sculpture and its spiritual dimensions, while Doran was more focused on royal and Fante military arts, the latter often secular. The planted Ghana garden sprouted quite a few shoots and blooms in the final analysis.
The exhibition had objects from 103 lenders, a number virtually impossible these days due to high shipping and insurance rates. Still more improbable, 34 lenders (more than 100 objects) came from Europe. More than 500 objects were included in the UCLA Wight Gallery display, including five recently carved sculptures from a Kumasi workshop later documented by Ross and his Fresno State University mentor, Ray Reichert, in their 1983 essay, “Modern Antiquities” (Ross and Reichert 1983). They chose that delightful oxymoron title for their 1983 article on those faking operations, its master carvers and other workers. We also illustrated a Kamba maternity figure (from Kenya!) and made other mistakes in our ignorance or rush to meet deadlines. In truth, both of us were pretty green, newcomers in attempting to mount a major exhibition and write a large book that sought to reveal Ghanaian arts in some of its great depth. We made more than a few errors.5
Over the many years since that 1977 effort, Doran meticulously cataloged all our myriad mistakes of omission and commission, a list numbering into the hundreds as he returned to Ghana year after year, deepening and broadening his, and in publications, the world’s knowledge of Akan arts especially. Several times while Doran was still the Fowler Museum director, I urged him to bring out a revised edition of The Arts of Ghana, which I insisted would be authored, this time, by Ross and Cole. For reasons unclear he never undertook that task, which is really a shame as it truly would have been a far richer, deeper volume than the first one, and this time not printed in such a ridiculously small font. Doran might have seen such a new edition as too daunting, but I doubt that; he was never one to shrink before a daunting task for an exhibition or book. Maybe he felt, rightly, that in his many articles and books in subsequent years he corrected many of our early mistakes, but even if that is true, and it is, the world would have happily embraced a huge new color-plate-filled Ross and Cole volume on The Arts of Ghana.6 That would be a substantial, large, and colorful flower garden.
Footnotes
↵1. Two large gold weights from that purchase, a leopard eating an animal, and a man blowing an elephant tusk trumpet, were shown within two days, first to Roy Sieber, who said they were authentic and fine sculptures, then to William Fagg at the British Museum, who said he doubted both as old authentic gold weights. Several years later, I showed them to Tim Garrard, who affirmed Sieber’s positive assessment. See Cole 1976.
↵2. I cannot recall the exact moment I decided to seriously pursue art in Ghana for an exhibition and book, but there were surely subsoil stirrings toward the end of my six months’ research on the ground in 1972.
↵3. The exhibition later traveled to Minneapolis and Dallas.
↵4. Many Akan visual forms (e.g., counselors’ staffs, gold weights, forowa, adinkra cloths, asafo flags and “cloths of the great,” among others) have multiple representational or abstract motifs that are often linked with proverbs and other aphorisms, and wise Akan people are adept at seeing this linkage. One of my favorites, for example, is a counselor’s staff topped by gold-leafed carvings of rooster and hen, which calls up the proverb, “The hen knows very well when it is dawn, but she leaves its announcement to the rooster”—a not-so-subtle statement about gender roles. Akan arts are unusual in West Africa in having thousands of such links between verbal and visual expressions. See Cole and Ross 1977, 9.
↵5. I refer to these errors in tribute to the 1983 Ross and Reichert article in a recent essay on questions of authenticity in the huge corpus of akua’mma, see Cole 2021.
↵6. See Quarcoopome and Silverman (2022, 25) for a full list of Doran Ross’s publications.
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