African Beads and Ornaments

Selective Notes About Beads

Beads are fascinating from their significant function in the global economy and in cultural history. For millennia beads have described mankind’s attraction to commodity and trade. Archaeological evidence has uncovered African beads from most parts of the continent. Environmental factors, the availability and distribution of raw materials as well as exposure to Islamic and European culture and technology has influenced African bead making. Beads are made from many different materials such as eggshell, clay, mineral gemstones, glass, and gold, wood, metal and organic things, like nuts, seeds and teeth. Ghana’s Asante people fabricate gold beads from the lost wax casting process.

As adornment, beads are fine jewelry, regalia of ceremony and royalty and are used for medicinal purposes. Large quantities of beads have been buried in tombs of the noble and in African slaves’ coffins as veneration to the ancestors. As legal money, beads were bartered to buy humans, gold, and ivory during the Atlantic slave trade. Even a portion of New York was purchased with beads. Intrigued by a dazzling robin’s egg blue bead at the African Bead Museum during a recent visit, I discovered it to be Russian Blue, once traded for Africans during the African Holocaust. I was shocked when Dabls revealed such tragic information. A popular bead within Africa based on its symbolic reference to female fertility is the cowry shell. They first came to Egypt and the Arab trading center of Fostast near Cairo after the defeat of the Byzantines.Through continued distribution cowries crossed the Sahara to western Sudan, to later be distributed by Dutch and English merchants through the Guinea Coast ports of West Africa

Ornamental and symbolic beadwork has traditionally announced ethnic identity, age group, marital status and station in society. Culture in Africa is dramatically linked to beads, probably more so than elsewhere in the world. Beads are the main component of everyday dress among Africans. Beads represent a communicative value system which proclaims religion, political affiliation and artistic attitude. Centuries past, when Portugal traded coral beads to Benin, kings made tunics and shirts with them. The beaded garments were so heavy they restricted the king’s mobility; thus he could not walk without assistance. For Ndebele women of South Africa, beaded aprons, capes and shawls attest to stages of female maturity.

Much earlier, mothers in Angola (Central Africa) put strands of ostrich egg shell beads around a female baby’s waist, adding strands as she grew. Unmarried Turkana girls in East Africa wear goat skin shirts adorned with ostrich eggshell and glass beads which are gradually lengthened as they reach marrying age. Among other East African patriarchal pastoral groups where arranged marriages occur, Sambura men think women do not have enough beads until their chins are supported by their necklaces. Girls and women garner multiple strands of tiny beads as beautification. For the Massai female, the focal point of adornment is an array of flat circular beaded collars constructed with leather and wire