Goldweight representing a drummer

If this goldweight was intended as a drummer with talking drums (ntumpane), he would be standing behind a pair of tall drums propped up away from him at an angle of 450, which he would beat with two elbow-headed drumsticks. Akan languages have tonal speech patterns which lend themselves to being transmitted in the form of drum phrases; messages can be sent rapidly by this means, and ‘talking drums’ were an important part of a chief’s establishment. There is a proverb referring to the skill and wisdom of such a drummer: ‘If the drummer Nyanno is skilful in drumming he drums for the Asantehene, not for ordinary people’ (Cole and Ross, 1977: 80).

Despite the absence of the drums, the treatment of the head shows that the modelling was done by a fine craftsman. Some goldweight mutilations arose out of the need to change a Portuguese weight to an Islamic one; the Portuguese scale of weights operated from the mid fifteenth to the mid seventeenth century.

Margaret Carey, 1997

Entry taken from Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Vol. 2: Pacific, African and Native North American Art, edited by Steven Hooper (Yale University Press, 1997) p. 137.