Winning essay: Gold Beneath the Stool

The Northern Miner and the World Gold Council this spring opened the GoldQuest International Student Challenge, inviting students around the globe to submit essays about gold. A panel of experts assessed submissions based on creativity, insight and originality. 

Sylvester Avane’s essay “Gold Beneath the Stool: Ghana and the Metal That Made Memory” stood out for its depth and the way it connected gold to history, responsibility and a thoughtful vision for the future of the metal and mining. Avane is a PhD student in mining engineering at the University of Arizona.  

He wins an all-expenses-paid trip to attend the Xplor Conference in Montreal, taking place October 27–30. The Miner and the council will be covering his flights, hotel accommodation and meals during his stay.  

Before Ghana was Ghana, it was a rumour shining across the desert. 

Long before ships came to the coast, gold moved northward from the forests and riverbeds of West Africa, crossing the Sahara in the hands of traders who carried salt, cloth, beads, leather, and stories. To outsiders, our land became a golden imagination: a place where the earth itself seemed to sweat wealth. But for the Akan and other peoples of this region, gold was never only a thing to be weighed. It was authority, ancestry, beauty, diplomacy, and warning. 

Gold shaped Ghana because it taught society how to organize power. Among the Asante, gold dust was currency, but it was also language. It settled disputes, sealed marriages, honoured chiefs, and measured obligation. The goldweights used to measure dust were not plain tools; they were miniature philosophies. A crocodile, a bird, a knot, a proverb cast in brass, each object said that wealth without wisdom was incomplete. In this way, gold did not merely enrich civilization. It disciplined it. 

The Golden Stool remains the boldest example. It is not a chair. It is a nation made visible. Believed to contain the soul of the Asante people, it shows how gold could rise above decoration and become sacred political architecture. Empires elsewhere placed gold on crowns; the Asante placed it beneath sovereignty itself. That difference matters. A crown glorifies the head of one ruler. A stool remembers the body of a people. 

Yet gold also brought danger. The same metal that carried dignity attracted conquest. European forts along the coast were not built because Ghana was empty, but because it was valuable. The Gold Coast became a name stamped by outsiders, reducing forests, kingdoms, families, and futures into one glittering appetite. Gold opened trade routes, but it also opened wounds. It connected Ghana to the world, but often on terms written by greed. 

Today, gold still sits at the center of Ghana’s economy, but its meaning is unsettled. It builds reserves, creates jobs, and feeds industries. At the same time, illegal mining scars rivers, poisons soil, and turns inheritance into dust. The old question has returned in a harsher form: will gold serve the people, or will the people be sacrificed to gold? 

The future demands a new imagination. Ghana should not remain only a place where gold is extracted. It should become a place where gold is interpreted, refined, designed, and philosophically owned. Our museums, jewelry, technology, education, and environmental laws should tell the world that gold is not just a commodity beneath our feet. It is a civilization’s mirror. 

Gold shaped Ghana, but it must not define Ghana narrowly. Its highest value is not its price. Its highest value is what it reveals: that a society becomes truly rich only when it can turn the glitter of the earth into justice, memory, and shared dignity.