Name of Artifact: Staff of Office: Ceremonial Stool, Chain, and Swords Motif (Okyeame Poma)
Original Country: Ghana
Year of Production: Ca. 1930
Material: Wood and gold foil
Dimensions: 63 7/8 in. (162.2 cm)
Current Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Background Information:
This staff of office, known as Okyeame Poma, was created by an Asante artist in southern Ghana around 1930. Locally mined gold, conceived as the materialization of the sun and life force, has been highly valued in West Africa. It was the resource most sought after by traders crossing the Sahara as early as the eighth century, and early commentators described the glittering courts of West Africa. Gold was cast into regalia for local elites, although few pre-nineteenth-century examples survive.
The sale of gold to European merchants along the Atlantic coast from the end of the fifteenth century led to the rise of powerful centralized Akan polities. Across these centers, an equivalency developed between rich visual motifs and elegant spoken language. Adansi, founded about 1550, is where the institution of okyeame, or court linguist, is said to have emerged. This erudite master of oratory served as the formal spokesman and lead adviser to a chief. The imagery crowning the gilded insignia he carries at major public events visualizes hundreds of Akan proverbs. The specific proverb (or its equivalent) depicted in this finial is not recorded.
The work was likely sponsored by the British colonial government of the Gold Coast to be awarded to a chief. A photograph documents the staff being used by a titleholder in 1957 at the festivities marking Ghana’s independence. The imagery of the finial features the celebrated Golden Stool, which descended from the heavens when Osei Tutu, chief of Kumasi, unified the Akan people around 1670. The three Akan swords chained to that seat of power relate to the Joint Provincial Council of Chiefs, a body whose head oversaw the governance of three distinct provinces in the years preceding independence.