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Akorite?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Milan Kalous
Milan Kalous
Affiliation:
Frobenius Institut, Frankfurt
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Extract

All the many definitions and descriptions of the akori bead published in the last five hundred years have proved inadequate. They appear either pedantically narrow, so that only a hundred years later or a hundred miles away beads also unquestionably called akori by West Africans by their very existence disprove such ‘precise’ characteristics, or, the other extreme, so broad as to be historically useless and logically unsatisfactory. Since all the akori records must be viewed as historical sources more or less reflecting the real situation in the past, we can hardly blame their authors for the akori puzzle; there must have been something wrong in the naming mechanism, in the factual relationship between the word and the thing. It is the main point of this article that the akori phenomenon originated in the existence of various types of natural glass in North and West Africa. An archetypal human attraction to this strange and rare substance can be observed in several culturally very different areas of the world. Understandably, at a later stage people made talismans and beads of this presumably protective material, yet the primeval veneration paid only to the mysterious matter, now under a more sophisticated but basically accidental form, remained the same. It was primarily this matter alone which West Africans tried to discover, test and obtain in European-imported artificial glass after 1500. The complex akori ‘problem’ is a telling and fascinating historical and logical expression of contact between different cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 203 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

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143 Even if I did not call exactly for them, I did point out, more than ten years ago, that Frobenius in 1910 knew approximately as much about Ife glass industry as the leading Ife expert in 1967 (Kalous, Milan, ‘Frobenius, Willett and Ife’, J. Afr. Hist., ix, 4 (1968), 662Google Scholar) It does not seem that the situation has changed very much since then.

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