Linguist Staff

 

The Linguist Staff is from the 19th century to the early 20th century. It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This gold covered staff was created to serve like a badge for an okyeame, which is a high ranking adviser to an Asante ruler. The position of okyeame comes with a set of responsibilities. These responsibilities include meditation, judicial advocacy, political troubleshooting, and the preservation and interpretation of royal history. The okyeame also engages in verbal discussions on behalf of the chief and his visitors. They repeat the words of visitors to the king and then delivers the kings response back to the visitors. 

The imagery on the Linguist Staff is a spider on its web being held up by two figures.  This image represents the proverb, "No one goes to the house of the spider to teach it wisdom." The spider is meant to be a symbol for respect to a person with great oratorical and diplomatic skills. The rest of the staff is composed of a long wooden shaft carved in two interlocking sections and a separate ornament attached to the base. It is completely covered in gold foil. Most of these staffs were carved of wood and covered completely with gold foil. They were said to be modeled after the cane that was used by the very first court linguist who was a woman who carried a cane because of her old age. The staffs comonly illustrated proverbs that asserted the ruler's legitimacy and capabilities or praise the linguists experience.

The office of the okyeame is believed to be centuries old and the use of wooden linguist staffs is believed to be a more recent development. Before the late 19th century, linguist staffs were just simple canes. The Asante kingdom was formed around 1700 under the leadership of Osei Tutu. Osei Tutu brought states together that had grown wealthy and powerful because of the area's lucrative trade in gold. The Akan peoples were a society that had no written traditions. Instead they placed an enormous emphasis on speech.