Proverbs are an integral part of Asante Twi (the dialect of Akan native to the Asante people. Each proverb represents a moral tenant, and many reference a pantheon of characters from local folklore. In effect, proverbs are a kind of shorthand through which such abstract concepts such as mortality, sorcery, gender, experience, and duty can be invoked in just a few words.
Passed down over uncountable generations, many proverbs are so esoteric that they are unintelligible to those unfamiliar with the folklore they reference. As Sir Hugh Clifford writes in his preface to R. S. Rattray’s translation of Asante Proverbs: the Primitive Ethics of a Savage People,
‘Many of the aphorisms will be found to be somewhat cryptic, and it is rather daunting to find the curt dictum that“When a fool is told a proverb, the meaning of it has to be explained to him.” If this which is apparently axiomatic to the Tshi-speaking native of West Africa—be applied to the student of Mr. Rattray's book, few of us, it is to be feared, will escape conviction of folly.’ (Rattray, 1918)
In an era when ‘the Primitive Ethics of a Savage People’was considered an appropriate subtitle for this scholarly volume, wholesale condemnation of Asante morality based on the above discrepancy seems inevitable. Yet—to his credit, given the colonial zeitgeist in which he was writing—Clifford cautions the reader that the purpose of anthropology is to understand different cultures’ perspectives, not to pass value judgements on them:
‘Both [theories of wisdom], I think, should whet our curiosity, and neither should excite our derision. Our task is to endeavour to understand the workings of the minds by which these sayings have been evolved and of the minds which have adopted them as expressions of the collective experience of a people [emphasis added]’ (Rattray, 1918) .
Here, Clifford recognises that Asante proverbs comprise not a mere library of witticisms, but they are also manifestations of wisdom accrued over generations, and which continue to evolve to suit the present and future needs of their people. The fluidity of proverbs makes it especially difficult for outsiders unfamiliar with the society’s current events to understand their meanings. This effect is most starkly apparent in the number of proverbs that concern strangers, one of which directly references the inability (or possibly, unwillingness) of Europeans to understand Asante culture:
Ohoho ani akese-akese, nanso enhu man mu asem, na nea ode kurow aniwa ukete-ukete na oho mu asem [diacritical marks omitted].
A stranger may have big big eyes, but he does not see into what is going on among the people he is among, whereas the town's man, with little little eyes, he knows all the town's affairs (Rattray, 1918) .
Just as proverbs permeate the Asante oral tradition, so too does proverbial imagery feature prominently in their material culture. Whilst interning in Object Collections sections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, I had the opportunity and resources to learn about the museum’s collection of Asante artefacts, some of which are on display in the Lower Gallery. The PRM houses dozens of Asante gold-weights, many of which were carefully created to artistically represent the wisdom of the ancestral proverbs and folklore so central to Asante culture. Upon reading about the history of these gold-weights, the cultural significance of the imagery depicted through them became abundantly clear.
Intricately detailed and carefully curated, these hollow brass figures were cast by pouring molten metal into fired clay moulds. Once cooled, the figures were used as counterweights when measuring gold dust as payment in commercial transactions. Much like the weights used by miners in the California Gold Rush, the Asante weights were precision tools, and they were carefully calibrated to function in Ghana’s then entirely gold-based economy.
The process of moulding, casting, calibrating, and perfecting the finished product was so complex that only skilled metalworkers could produce the weights; thus, they were considered precious and powerful commodities. Like other African blacksmithing traditions, Asante metalworking was a mysterious and potentially dangerous process akin to sorcery. Blacksmiths were respected and feared, forges were located outside the village grounds, and many rituals and taboos had to be observed to appease the spirits during smelting. The Asante people’s choice to use such a mysterious and powerful material for the quotidian task of measuring indicates that—despite their utilitarianism—the weights were not considered mere tools, but important expressions of Asante culture and heritage.
The power inherent in the metal that comprises the weights is augmented by the forms that they take. The weights generally fall into one of two categories: geometric and figural. Geometric weights can take the shape of pyramids, cubes, spheres, discs, and any number of polygons, and they are often decorated with ornamental, Islamic-style motifs. Figural weights, in contrast, represent objects, animals, and people significant in Asante culture, especially those featuring in the multitude of Asante proverbs. It is these figural weights which we shall primarily examine as examples of folkloric encryption.
As Asante children mature, they learn the meanings of more and more proverbs from their elders, eventually becoming fully culturally-literate by the time they themselves are elders. An outsider, however, would have no way of learning the meanings of proverbs except by being taught, which requires first gaining the people’s trust. Thereby, Asante morality is both self-perpetuating (it is passed down through generations) and self-preserving (it cannot be learned except by those fully intrenched in Asante society, and thus cannot be easily altered by external intervention). Both of these features are important mechanisms in ensuring that the people’s wisdom is suitably protected, a useful asset in information security.
As well as protecting the integrity of the proverbs themselves, the inheritance of Asante wisdom also strengthens the structure of Asante society macroscopically. Firstly, the act of passing down folkloric knowledge from one generation to the next fortifies the Asante tradition of ancestor worship: the proverbs grant the ancestors immortality through memory. Moreover, the system through which elders bequeath wisdom to their juniors ensures that the most experienced—and thus most qualified—members of society have the most control over its affairs, a system which (theoretically) ensures greater political and economic stability.
Gold-weights such as those in the PRM’s collection not only ensure fairness in commercial transactions (as is their intended purpose), but lend physical form to otherwise abstract facets of morality. Their materiality is at once mystical and terrestrial, encrypted and apparent. They are tactile, multisensory reminders that ethics are as real and necessary parts of the world as any physical object. They are cultural codes, decipherable only by those who understand their cultural context and who appreciate their power.
Though it is doubtful that Asante proverbs would have been intentionally devised as mechanisms for transmitting secrets securely, further research is required to determine to what extent this phenomenon was intentionally exploited in a wider context, if indeed it was at all. I do not attempt to attribute authorial intent where there is none, but rather to suggest the possibility that cryptography today can reach beyond the scope of its modern applications in cybersecurity.
Though the information transmitted by exchange of these proverbs cannot be extracted in plaintext—as in conventional examples of cryptography—their meaning transcends the boundaries of language, encapsulating the visceral, emotional, uniquely human experience collected over innumerable generations of wisdom. That, I suggest, is the message encrypted not only in Asante culture, but in the wider spirit of human creativity as well.
Miranda Loughry
PRM intern summer 2018
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