There’s something special about jewelry that carries a story-pieces that hold meaning, tradition, and purpose. That’s exactly what makes Krobo glass beads so fascinating. In this article, we’ll explore the rich history of bead making in Ghana, focusing on the Krobo region and its unique contributions to this ancient craft.
The Origins and Cultural Significance of Krobo Beads
Krobo beads originate from the Krobo region of Ghana, West Africa. Today, the main manufacturing area of glass beads is in Ghana. The majority of beads in Ghana are made in by the Ashanti and Krobo people in the Krobo region. The art of bead-making in Ghana dates back centuries and is deeply rooted in cultural traditions, spirituality, and identity.
Beads still play important roles in Dangme society, in the Greater Accra region of Ghana, be it in rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, or death. Besides being used as personal ornaments, recycled glass beads in Ghana have an important cultural, religious, and social significance. Originally, beads were mainly worn by traditional kings of chiefs and queen mothers to display their social status and wealth during ceremonies, rites, rituals, and the most traditional Ghanaian festivals.
In the past, beads were also used as currency and symbols of status, with more elaborate designs worn by royalty and the wealthy. Their use today has extended well beyond their ancestral usage, becoming part of the Ghanaian identity and lifestyle, and reaching a worldwide audience. They’re an essential part of the Dipo rites, a traditional puberty rite of passage in Ghana for young girls.
If we take a look at the history of waist beads in Ghana, we find one of several regional glass bead making traditions in West Africa, and all of these traditions evolved over many centuries in the context of long distance trade. Transcontinental trade over the Sahara from the 8th century and ocean-going trade from the 1480s transferred finished beads as well as raw materials for glass bead production. They also introduced knowledge of various methods of working beads and glass.
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Ghanaian powder glass bead making dates back to centuries of master craftsmanship. Bead making in Ghana was first documented by John Barbot in 1746. Krobo bead making has been documented by european "academics" actively in the 1920s.
The Krobo Bead-Making Process
One of the most fascinating aspects of Krobo beads is the meticulous handcrafting process that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. The process begins with gathering discarded glass bottles and broken glass.
Krobo glass beads are handcrafted, recycled glass beads made by artisans in Ghana’s Krobo region. The bead-making tradition has been passed down for centuries, making these beads a piece of cultural heritage. Each bead is made using recycled glass bottles, crushed into powder, and fired in handmade clay molds.
The glass is carefully crushed into a fine powder using traditional grinding stones. The powdered glass is poured into handcrafted clay molds, shaping them into individual beads. The molds are placed in a kiln, where intense heat melts and fuses the glass powder into solid beads.
Tools Used in Bead Making
Bead making is still done mainly at an artisan level in hundreds, if not thousands of small shops, with relatively simple equipment and tools following traditional methods. Many more tools are involved in the process of bead making, these are just a few of main interests:
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- Kiln: Building a kiln is one of the first steps in bead making. The kiln is constructed from clay formed by termites for the colony structures. The kiln allows the molds in which beads are made, to be placed to be fired.
- Clay mold: Molds give shape to the beads.
- Wooden Paddle/Bat: Used to shape and dress the clay mold.
- Kaolin: A soft, earthy, usually white clay mineral used to coat the mold to prevent the glass from sticking to the clay mold.
- Tin funnel: Funnels are used to tip powder glass or frit into the molds. Different sized funnels help to keep glass colors separated and to control the amount poured.
Global Mamas uses beads that are handcrafted by the Global Mamas Krobo Bead Cooperative from the small town of Odumase-Krobo in Ghana’s Eastern Region. Here, many of the Krobo locals engage in making beads from their own homes.
How African Krobo Glass Beads Are Made
Styles of Krobo Beads
There are four main styles that the bead makers use. These styles include clear/translucent beads, powdered glass beads, painted glass beads, and seed beads.
There are three distinct styles of modern Krobo powder glass beads:
- Krobo "Writing" beads
- Fused glass fragment beads which are being made by fusing together fairly large bottle glass or glass bead fragments. These beads are translucent or semi-translucent and receive their perforations, as well as their final shapes, after firing.
- Beads composed of two halves (usually bicones, occasionally spheres) that are being created from pulverized glass. The two halves are being joined together in a second, short firing process.
The "Mue ne Angma" or "Writing Beads", conventional powder glass beads made from finely ground glass, with glass slurry decorations that are being "written" on and fused in a second firing.
Akoso beads Older Ghanaian dry core powder glass beads, dating from the 1950s, are the Akoso beads, which were also manufactured by the Krobo. The most common colour of Akoso beads is yellow. There are also green, and rarely blue or black specimens. The glass surface is often worn away at the ends and around the beads' equator, exposing a grey core. The most prevalent decorations, preformed from strips of hot glass, were applied in patterns of criss-crossed loops, longitudinal stripes and circles. Glass from crushed Venetian beads was used for making the glass powder, and the decorative patterns were made of glass derived from Venetian beads, or from small whole Venetian beads such as so-called green heart and white-heart beads.
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Krobo powder glass beads are made in vertical molds fashioned out of a special, locally dug clay. Most molds have a number of depressions, designed to hold one bead each, and each of these depressions, in turn, has a small central depression to hold the stem of a cassava leaf. The mold is filled with finely ground glass that can be built up in layers in order to form sequences and patterns of different shapes and colours. The technique could be described as being somewhat similar to creating a sand "painting" or to filling a bottle with different-coloured sands and is called the "vertical-mold dry powder glass technique". When cassava leaf stems are used, these will burn away during firing and leave the bead perforation. Certain powder glass bead variants, however, receive their perforations after firing, by piercing the still hot and pliable glass with a hand-made, pointed metal tool.
The 5 Types of Beads
- Powder Glass Bead: Powder glass beads are made using pulverized glass. Powder glass is obtained by crushing used bottles or scrap glass with a metal mortar and a pestle. The pulverized glass is then sifted to obtain a fine powder glass. The powder glass is mixed with ceramic pigment to obtain different colors. Inspired by European striped drawn glass beads, these are produced using vertical-axis moles one by one. After filling the beads chambers with powder glass, a needle-like tool is used to make channels in the powder along the bead chamber walls, which are then filled with contrasting coloured powder glass.
- Bodom Beads: Bodom beads are the ancestors of present-day powder glass beads in Ghana. They are a type of powder glass beads once produced exclusively for chiefs and queen mothers used in diverse rites, ceremonies and festivals. The word bodom means dog in the Akan language, as the Bodom bead seems to “bark” to be noticed. Those of a certain age and design are valuable and often considered to have magical or medicinal powers. They are used with pride in ceremonies, including funerals, and in traditional festivals and gatherings. They are passed down through generations as a valuable heirloom. Although yellow is the preferred color by chiefs and queen mothers, nowadays Bodom beads are made in a variety of colors.
- Translucent and Opaque Glass Beads: Translucent beads, known locally as Korli, are made from crushed glass, which is also called frit. After the bottle or scrap glass has been washed and dried, it is broken into smaller pieces to fit into the desired mold.
- Glazed, Painted or Written Beads: These type beads are created by painting designs on either plain powder glass, translucent, or opaque glass beads. A mixture of powder glass, powdered ceramic dye/pigment, and water is used. They are very popular as this method can provide a much richer variety of designs than the powder glass beads.
- Seed or waist beads: These are made with the same technique as the regular powder glass beads with the size being the only difference. The mold has small holes. And a tiny cassava leaf stalk is placed in each one. Once the cassava leaf stalks are in place, powder glass is poured to fill all holes.
Abompe: A Key Beadmaking Site
Abompe is the current bauxite beadmaking site in Ghana and the hills of the Kwahu Plateau above the village are pocked with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pits dug in search of the raw material. To determine the age of the beadmaking industry in the region, people in Abompe and other villages were interviewed and related stories that suggest the first beadmakers were following the example of people in or around Bepong, a village on the plateau above Abompe.
Three areas of bauxite pits on the Kwahu Plateau were investigated to see if there was physical evidence of ancient mining; those currently used by Abompe people and those previously dug by Bepong and Adasowase people. Four boulders with polished upper surfaces were found in the Abompe mining area and are believed to represent large-scale bead polishing. Caves where miners occasionally stay overnight were explored and evidence of bead production in the form of chipping waste was found. Pit counts by transect at Odumparara Bepo, the Abompe mining area, suggest the presence of possibly as many as 4,700 pits.
Visiting the Cedi Bead Industry in Krobo
In Odumase Krobo, lives an internationally-recognised and well-respected master bead maker, Nomoda Ebenezer Djaba, better known as Cedi. Cedi’s Bead Industry has been in the Cedi family for hundreds of years and today we invite you to discover the art of bead making in Ghana. Cedi’s Bead Industry is located in the capital of the Manya Krobo Kingdom, a quaint township nestled at the foot of the Akuapem-Togo mountains in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
If you want to meet the man himself, as well as discover and learn more about the beautiful and ancestral craft of bead making in Ghana, you should know that it’s approximately a 1h30 min drive from Greenviews, our complex of luxury apartments in Accra.
The visit costs 150 ghs per person. It starts with a 15 minute presentation by Cedi, where he introduces himself, how he got into bead making, the different types of beads, how each bead is made and a small demonstration of the powder glass bead making. He then takes you on a brief tour around all the steps of bead making (the kilns and polishing process). You then get to try bead making yourself!
The Society of Bead Researchers
The Society of Bead Researchers is a non-profit scientific-educational corporation founded in 1981 to foster historical, archaeological, and material cultural research on beads and beadwork of all materials and periods, and to expedite the dissemination of the resultant knowledge. 22: 3-12.
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