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• Ayensu, Edward S, Ashanti Gold, The African Legacy of the World's Most Precious Metal, Ashanti Goldfields, 1997
  • 68    EARLY ASHANTI PANNING TECHNIQUES
  • . . . women and children worked along the river banks and coastal shorelines panning for gold.  Some would plunge beneath the surface of rivers and streams to scoop up gold-bearing material from the river beds, others would dig pits in the sands and gravels that were exposed as the river level dropped.
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  • The pan used was usuallly a flat-bottomed vessel with a wide mouth, and a mixture of gold bearing sand or gravel and water was swirled around inside it.  By using a swirling and tilting action, the panner gradually separated the lighter materials, such as the sand and grit, from the heavier gold.  These materials were tipped over the edge of the pan, and at each stage the remaining mixture was transferred to smaller and smaller pans as the separating process continued.  Usually a panner had a set of four or six of these wooden bowls of graded sizes ranging from about 60 cm to 15 cm in diameter.
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  • Sometimes a smaller pan was used inside a much larger one to ensure that not even a speck of gold was accidentally lost: panning requires great skill and is very hard work. The final bowl was sometimes dyed black so that the remaining gold dust was easier to find.  Usually this was done with the aid of a feather and the particles of gold were then carefully placed in some handy container such as a snail shell or quill.   The Ashantis were certainly very expert at panning and they extracted vast quantities of gold by this method. . .
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  • 70    Shallow mining was the main way of extracting gold from below the earth's immediate surface.  For digging a wide variety of holes, shafts, ditches and tunnels to reach gold close to the earth's surface, the Ashanti used only the simplest of tools.  The main ones were sturdy digging sticks fitted with pointed or broad bladed iron tips, the type of tip used depending on the hardness of the material to be dug out. . .
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  • Some of this shallow mining was done individually or by small family groups, but where the gold was plentiful hundreds, even thousands of people might be involved at the same site. There are accounts of as many as 4,000 people working at a mining ditch 0.5 km long. . .
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  • Where the Chief used his own slaves to win gold, he would appropriate it all himself. . .
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  • 71    SINKING A SHAFT
  • Shafts were so narrow that miners could brace themselves between their walls in the descent.  Usually steps were cut into the shaft's sides to help miners climb up and down . . . At the bottom, the shaft opened out into a more or less circular chamber as more of the rock and soil was dug out.  This was pulled up to the surface in baskets, calabashes or wooden containers tied to the end of fibre ropes.  The men then ground the soil to a fine powder on a slab of granite, and the powdered ore was collected in calabashes and washed by the women in order to obtain gold. . . The bases of two shafts might eventually be joined by a horizontal tunnel.
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  • 72    DEEP MINING
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  • By the 19th century, some Akan gold miners were tunnelling deep into the earth, going down 30 m or more and then driving sideways in order to extract gold-bearing quartz.  When the British started to explore the gold-producing areas of Ashanti in 1896, for example, they were astonished to find a mine that followed a reef into a hillside for 75-90 m, with huge galleries, timbered throughout their length.
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• Lovejoy, Paul, Caravans of Kola: Hausa Kola Trade 1700-1900, OUP
  
  • Asante was on a `bimetalic' monetary standard (gold and cowries) in which gold was the key. The state maintained large monetary reserves in gold, as symbolised in the Golden Stool and other regalia and including the Treasury's Great Chest, which when full contained 200,000 oz., and other stores. The other circulating medium, cowrie shells, was confined to the northern provinces, i.e. those parts of the state in direct contact with other parts of West Africa, including the Central Sudan, where cowries were current. Thus, Asante represents an interesting example of a state maintaining two currency systems within its own territories - gold in the metropolitan region and on the coast, and cowries and gold in the northern provinces. In fact the state appears to have maintained a fairly successful control over gold exports, so that in effect the northern provinces used only cowries. Hence the Asante currency system was a curious example of a `bimetalic' system, gold in the area where it was produced, and cowries in the export sphere for kola. The Asante state was, therefore, within the cowrie zone of its major trading partners in the north and north-east, but restricted the movement of traders and use of the currency to the northern territories.
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  • In addition to state domination of gold production and trade, this policy was seen as necessary in order to compensate for losses resulting from  the decline in revenue from slave exports.

   

• Park, Mungo  Travels in the Interior of Africa 1799 (notes)
  • 447    Gold dust.  About the beginning of December, when the harvest is over and the streams and torrents have greatly subsided, the chief appoints a day to begin gold washing and the women ...(are ready)   A hoe, or spade for digging up the sand, two or three calabashes for washing it, a few quills for containing the gold dust are all the implements needed.   On the morning of their departure, a bullock is killed for the first day's entertainment and a number of prayers and charms are used to ensure success.  
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  • 449    The most common and profitable mode of washing is practised in the height of the dry season by digging a deep pit, like a draw well, near some hill which has previously been discovered to contain gold.  The pit is dug with small spades or corn hoes and the earth is drawn up in large calabashes.  As they dig through different strata of clay or sand, a calabash of each is washed by way of experiment,  In general when they come to a stratum of fine reddish sand with some small black specks therein, they find gold in it.  They send up large calabashes full of sand for the women to wash.  A portion of sand or clay is put into a large calabash and rinsed with water.  The woman shakes it and gives it a rotary motion, first gently then more quickly until a small portion of sand and water flies over the brim at each revolution.  Sand is allowed to settle. Water is poured off.  Coarse? sand near the top is removed by hand.  Repeated until the water is nearly clear.  Residue at the bottom is examined and grains of gold picked out.  Gold dust kept in quills, stopped with cotton.  Washers display quills in their hair.  Negroes weigh gold in small balances which they always carry around with them.

   

OTHER REFERENCES

Explores the goldrush in late nineteenth century Ghana in all its dimensions: land, labour, capital, traditional African mining, technology, transport, management, the clash of cultures, and colonial rule. Dumett reviews  the controversy between himself and Emmanuel Terray concerning the extent to which traditional mining was based on slave labour. He concludes that "there were at least three different ways or organizing gold production in Akan traditional gold mining" but that "this does not rule out the occasional use of royal slaves to mine for gold, especially in the more centralized states such as Asante and Gyaman."

Garrard, Timothy F. Akan Weights and the Gold Trade. London: Longman, 1980.

Stuart J M, The Ancient Gold Fields of Africa (in The Gold Coast to Mashonaland, London, 1891)