NToNSo Adinkra Village (TUES 3/14)

Today Ray arranged to show us around Kumasi a bit more.  We started the morning at the Ghana Armed Forces Museum.  The museum is built around the Kumasi Fort that was originally built as an Ashanti palace in 1820.  It was destroyed by British forces in 1897 and rebuilt in 1874.  The granite blocks it is built from were hauled all the way from Cape Coast by porters.

The British took over the fort after WWII and converted it into a museum.  The museum is full of artifacts that belonged to Asante warriors but also military items from the many forces that tried to conquer Ghana before they won their independence, including the Japanese.  Most of them were in search of the country’s famous gold, in fact Ghana used to be called the Gold Coast.  We saw the area where the gold was stored and marked deceptively as boxes of explosives.

Next we headed out of town to Ntonso Adinkra Village to learn about the history of the Ashanti symbols. These symbols have traditional meanings and are embedded in cloth, pottery, carvings, etc.  Many of them are linked to proverbs.  We first learned how the black dye is made from the Badie tree bark and water, and we tried our hand at the process.  After burning, soaking, pounding, and boiling, the dye is syrupy thick and permanent on fabric.  We then had the opportunity to create an Asante banner with our own stampings.  I made one for my classroom that had the symbols of wisdom, leadership/greatness, adaptability, and beauty.

The craftspeople don’t just make dye and stamp fabrics, they also weave the fabrics on site.  I tried my hand (and feet!) at it, and it was a lot of work!  This loom has foot pedals you have to put between your toes and you are using your whole body to coordinate the process.  It was really cool!

We stopped at a roadside stand for some roasted plantain on the way back into town.  The stand was also selling palm fruits.  These fruits are used for cooking oil, and a different type of oil is extracted from the palm for soap.  The famous traditional Ghanaian food, red red, is red because the beans are made with palm oil.  Palm wine is also made from the sap of the tree, it is served fresh (non-alcoholic) or fermented.  We have seen lots of palm oil plantations each time we have traveled out of the city.  Palm oil is the most important agricultural crop of Ghana, but these plantations are an environmental issue, since many of them are managed in a way that is unsustainable.  They lead to deforestation, loss of biodiversity., overuse of water and water pollution.   The majority of palm oil farms are small farms that are largely unregulated and therefore, the overall impact is yet unknown in Ghana.  FYI, palm oil is in MANY of our snacks produced in the US, because it is cheap and it gives us good "mouthfeel," making our food seem extra creamy.  Palm oil can be sustainably sourced, there is a website that can help you check out the companies whose products you use (www.rspo.org)