Tourism and Technology

On the way to the Kente Festival, we made two stops. One stop at Cedi Beads, a factory that makes glass beads and buttons like those I’ve shown before in villages where we have agents and clients. The factory uses pretty much the same techniques on a slightly larger scale. It’s not really a high volume factory, but rather a small operation not too dissimilar from the villages except that they have brilliantly made it a tourist stop and incorporated a tour which turns into a sales opportunity. With a few more stops like this, Ghana could be well on its way to being a tourism destination.

The second stop was at an antique shop alongside the road. On a Saturday at mid-day, on the way and less than an hour from a major festival, the shop was closed and we had to send a ‘small boy’ to find the shopkeeper. This is the flip-side of the bead factory. Not all shopkeepers have figured out how to maximize their business from the tourist trade.

Anyway, I loved Cedi Beads for many reasons. The first was that the name reminded me of the children’s book, C D B, which begins CDB DBSABZB (See the Bee. The Bee is a Busy Bee) and continues on in alphabetic fashion. It is a favorite of dear friends, so the factory instantly touched both my funny bone and my heart. The billboards and advertising also demanded admiration so all in all it was a lovely visit.

There are four types of glass beads made in Ghana. Recycled, Transparent, Powdered with the design in side, and Powdered with the design painted on the outside. All are made from used glass – windows, bottles, etc. – pounded to varying levels of granularity.

Recycled and transparent are made with glass pounded to chips. Transparent beads have all chips from the same glass, where recycled are a mix of chips from all types and colors of glass – the leftovers, if you will.

The beads that are made from powder are much more involved. The glass is pounded with mortar and pestle, then shaken through a sieve, separating the larger from the smaller pieces. Both are pounded and filtered again and again until the glass is a fine powder like talc. As I felt it between my fingers I couldn’t help but think that no matter how much it felt like talc, it was still glass and people were handling it, pounding it, and breathing it day in and day out.

Once the powder is ground to the right consistency, it can be colored, using small amounts of colored powder dye, thoroughly mixed into the glass powder. The powder is then loaded into molds. These molds are made from termite clay (see post at XXX for a photo of Leslie in front of a termite mound), which is a combination of the very clay-heavy soil here and termite saliva and processing enzymes that give it a consistency well suited to high-temperature firing. The molds are coated with a fine powder of river silt, which is also in powder form and prevents the glass from sticking to the mold, sort of like flouring a cake pan, I suppose.

For the beads with the design inside, different colored glass powder is layered into
the mold to form the design as shown in this video – resulting in a bead like the one in the subsequent still photo.

For the beads with the design on the outside, a single color of glass powder is used. After the bead has been fired and cooled, the design is painted on the outside using a paste made of glass powder and the beads are fired again to meld the design on the bead.

When beads are finished and cooled, they are polished by being rolled over and over in the hollow of a rock in water full of the same river silt used to powder the molds. As the river carves the mountain, the water and rock gradually smooth and polish the beads.

This factory also made some glass buttons which were very fun. Max and I went a
little crazy picking over their selection.

The antique shop was a bust. Although a representative of the shopkeeper finally arrived, he wasn’t empowered to really discuss price with Max, so no transaction was made – despite the fact htat Max was more than ready to buy. In the meantime, Whit surreally went back to the car to read the New York Times on his cell phone (!?) while he waited, and I, at his suggestion, walked down by the nearby river which offered a lovely view of a bridge that could have been anywhere in the world.
XO