Cedi Beads: The Beadmaking Process

All the beads are made from glass bottles which would otherwise be thrown in a ditch or field.  There’s no official garbage collection yet in Ghana nor are there any recycling plants.

The bottles are pounded down to very small pieces with a metal pipe inside a large plastic bucket.

Worker safety is not yet a concept that has been taught in Ghana, and they do this without using goggles to protect their eyes from flying shards.

The pieces are then placed in molds before being melted in small ovens.

There are various styles of molds to produce beads of varying shapes and sizes.

The molds are made on site with clay from termite mounds, giant homes termites build for themselves from the red clay earth.  Beadmakers have found that termite clay resists heat from the ovens better and makes the molds less prone to cracking.

Termite mound in northern Ghana

They believe it has some connection with the saliva the termites produce to construct their homes.

Cedi Beads

One of the best areas for bead shopping in Ghana is the Odumase-Krobo area, a string of villages that stretches from Somanya to Kpong in the Eastern Region.

Next stop was Cedi Beads. It wasn’t very far from the Agomanya market, maybe 20 minutes away.  Even with the help of the beautifully hand-painted sign, the turnoff is easy to miss if you’re not watching carefully.

The grounds were very pretty. Lots of palms and other trees were interplanted among the open air workshops. The people there were as friendly and welcoming as everyone who had written an internet article about the place had said. I was encouraged to photograph freely.

I can’t call Cedi Beads a factory, because it’s not mechanized in any way.  This is another local industry that produces traditional crafts without the aid of electricity.

There are several workshops, again open air but covered with tin roofs.

In each area there were three or four people working on one of the beadmaking processes.

After an initial flurry of picture taking of the grounds and buildings right after our arrival, we settled here in the plastic chairs for the beginning of the beadmaking tour.

Agomanya Bead Sellers

It didn’t seem all that hot until I got out of the car and started walking around. The sun was out, and even though I was wearing my lovely $3 straw hat from Sirigu village and ducking under the shade as much as possible, I was soon sweating like crazy. I don’t sweat much under normal circumstances, until it gets to about 90 degrees. When it feels like it’s raining under my clothes, I know it’s really hot.

Although it was a regular market day, a lot of stalls in the beads area were empty. Saturday is also funeral day in a lot of the villages, Sammy informed me, because more people are able to attend funerals on a Saturday than during the week when they may be working. So maybe the bead stalls in the Wednesday market are more active.

We had seen one funeral procession and several funeral services on the way to the market. The services were all held near the roadside under trees and tarps, and a lot of the people were wearing red and black, which are the traditional funeral colors here, so it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on. I wondered how many of the bead sellers were at those funerals.

Despite the fact that about half or more of the stalls in the bead area were empty, there was still a fairly dazzling selection.  I was surprised to find only one vendor selling amber beads, the enormous yellow copal ones above. I was looking for small ones, so I passed. Wish I had noticed the smaller red ones a little to the right at the time.

New beads were very reasonably priced at the Agomanya market. Typical price for new beads were two bracelets for one cedi. The exchange rate at the time was US$1 = 1.5 Ghana cedis, so the two-bracelet strands were only about seventy cents. I got three different two-bracelet strands plus three strands of small recycled single color glass beads at two cedis per strand.

Vendor untying the strands of blue beads which I was about to buy.

All you had to do was decide on a color. They had every color you’d ever need.

It was almost overwhelming, in the very best way.

Got a chevron bracelet strand for 8 cedis. The woman insisted it was antique, but I doubted it. They looked new, but I wasn’t about to argue the point with her. I liked the beads, the price was reasonable and that was all that mattered.

Don’t think Edna and I spent a full hour buying beads when we were ready to go back to the car.  If it hadn’t been so brutally hot, I know I could have stayed much longer. Now, many months later, as I’m able to take the time to really study the beads at length in the photos I took, I’m kicking myself for what I didn’t buy!

On the way back to the car, I bought some bottled water for Sammy and Veronica and a 1.5 liter bottle for myself. They only drank a little, but I drained the entire 1.5 liter bottle well before we got home.

Agomanya Market

One of the best areas for bead shopping in Ghana is the Odumase-Krobo area, a string of villages that stretches from Somanya to Kpong in the Eastern Region. The village of Agomanya has a twice-weekly large bead market, a pilgrimage I had to make.

Saturday Sammy drove us to the Agomanya bead market. They have a RAV4, so we were quite comfortable. It was a nice drive of about two hours, and the countryside we passed through very attractive with banana trees, mango groves and rolling hills.

From Somanya to Agomanya, just as the Bradt guide said, it was a string of villages with no separation between them. It’s a nice area, not too populated but with plenty of commerce and taxis. I even saw one bank with an ATM. I liked the area very much.

One small portion of the large and busy Agomanya market

The Agomanya market was very busy, and Sammy couldn’t find a place to park. Edna and I got out while Sammy looked for a parking spot. Veronica stayed in the car with him and the twins.  Edna and I would catch up with them later.

Buying Cloth at Makola Market

In Accra’s Makola Market area, we checked out a number of cloth shops. No luck finding any gauze cotton material I was hoping for so I could get a pair of pants made, so after asking at a half dozen shops, I gave up. A lot of the currently popular wax prints I didn’t care for, either the design or the color, but finally Edna showed me to one area where there were a half dozen cloth sellers that had some batiks and prints I really liked. Prices for 4 yards of a good quality batik was 8 cedis (roughly US$3 a yard). I ended up buying three different batik pieces for Edna to make me tunics.

Vendor displaying the olive batik cloth that I bought.

Then I bought one three-yard olive batik piece for a wrapper, which is what they call it when you just wrap the cloth around yourself like you would a towel. If you wrap it up high under your arms, you can wear it as a dress, and if you wrap it around the waist, it becomes a skirt. No buttons, ties or zippers. You just wrap, tuck, and go. The cloth for the wrapper was also 8 cedis for the three yards, but apparently it was really good quality.

Had lunch in an open air restaurant in the market area. Most restaurants and businesses are open air because it’s so hot here all the time.

It’s really only banks and the occasional shop here and there that are closed up and have air conditioning. Most small commerce takes place by the roadside in ramshackle sheds or shacks made of local materials with thatched roofs. In the inner city, you’ll still see ramshackle sheds and shacks all over the place, but there are also market areas which are mostly covered and the businesses are in stalls, like you’d see at a US flea market. You have to watch where you’re going at all times because sidewalks are broken, holes are uncovered, there will be steps up or down of varying heights, and there will be streams of people carrying huge loads on their heads who need to squeeze past you.

But back to lunch. Had a nice lunch of grilled chicken and jollof rice which didn’t have too much red pepper. Tips are not expected, and if you leave one, you should give it directly to your server rather than leave it on the table for someone else to grab. A fifty pesewa coin, which is half a cedi (about 35 cents) is what I was told was an acceptable tip and was always received happily.

We then went to Edna’s shop where I picked up the clothing I had given her for repairs and alterations a few days before when she came to the house to take my measurements. She hemmed my wrapper while I waited.  In a few days, when the tunics which she would make with the cloth bought today are finished, she would bring them to the house.

Edna lives in downtown Accra, and her dressmaking shop is downtown, too. After she determined that the taxi driver knew where the New Ashongman neighborhood was, there was no need for her to accompany me then have to turn around and spend another 12 cedis to go back home.  Since I had taken a short walk in the neighborhood a few days ago to familiarize myself with the area where Sammy and Veronica live, I was more confident that when the driver got close to the house, I would be able to direct him the last part of the way.

There seems to be only one main paved road that passes through most of the neighborhoods after you get out of downtown Accra. All other roads are dirt roads and pretty bumpy, so a beater taxi isn’t going to take any other road unless he absolutely has to. The driver was very good at finding his way from downtown all the way out to where Sammy and Veronica live.

This taxi driver didn’t drive too fast or seem to take any unusually insane chances, so I gave him a one cedi tip when he deposited me safely at the house. He was quite happy.

It was 8 am when Edna arrived at the house and about 2:30 pm when I returned.  I didn’t linger for any additional shopping or picture taking in downtown as I would have liked to, as I wasn’t eager to sit in traffic on a hot day in a car with no AC for two hours on the way home. In West Africa, you quickly learn that you can’t accomplish very many errands in one day.