Good as Gold

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

Science, The Smithsonian, Tony Cohn, Art19, African American History And Culture, Exhibit, Dc, Exhibits, Pop Culture, Zoo, National Museum, National Zoo, Natural History, Air And Space, Smithsonian, Postal Museum, History Of The World, History, Sidedoor, Museum, Washington, Society & Culture, American History

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2019

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Glittering treasures, gleaming coins, and eye-catching jewelry…gold can be all of these things, but in some parts of the world it's also an enduring link to the past. Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, takes us on a journey through West Africa to learn how gold was the foundation for massive empires—and his own family—and how it continues shining brightly in West African culture today.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Helima Shaw.
0:18.9	Gold brings a lot of things to mind. Money, jewelry, a fire-breathing dragon, snoozing on a pile of glittering
0:26.7	treasure. But for Gus Kaysley-Haford, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
0:33.9	Gold is a time machine.
0:35.2	He has a doctor in African history,
0:40.9	so his appreciation for gold is academic but it's also personal.
0:45.8	Gold is very important in particularly West African history but for my family it had a very critical part to play in bringing us together that my grandfather
1:00.1	he was he was a trader but one of the areas in which he was a trader,
1:03.0	but one of the areas in which he was most successful
1:06.0	was in the trading of gold.
1:08.0	When Gus's grandfather would return home from these long trips,
1:12.0	his mother remembers him coming through the door and then bringing
1:16.3	from his pocket a little satchel full of gold nuggets and gold dust in tiny bags.
1:25.8	And he would give my mother a small nugget
1:30.6	that she could take away and she could have made into a piece of jewelry just as a
1:36.7	remembrance of that particular journey. So over a period of time, my mother built this small collection of jewelry, each piece that was connected
1:50.0	to a different trip that my grandfather had made.
1:53.6	Gus's family has moved a lot over the generations.
1:57.3	He was raised in the UK where his parents moved from West Africa.
2:01.8	And his grandfather migrated to West Africa from the Caribbean.
2:05.7	Gus's grandfather was Creole of European and African ancestry and he descended from people
2:11.6	who were enslaved in Barbados.
	...

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