Symbols & divination
Adinkra and nsibidi, Ifá and the oracle's tools, dreams and omens — the systems by which meaning is written, cast, and read across the continent.
Children of Blood and Bone: What the Film Trailer Owes the Òrìṣà
The fight over the Children of Blood and Bone film trailer is not a fight about whether Hollywood got the òrìṣà right. It cannot be.
The Negative Father Archetype: Mwindo, Yennenga, and Longar
A chief seals his newborn son inside a drum, has the drum bound shut, and pushes it out into the river. He has already tried a grave.
Adinkra Symbols: What the Akan Signs Mean on City Walls
On a plywood hoarding outside a shuttered bank, someone has painted a bird the size of a door. Its body faces forward, its head turned all the way back, and in its beak is an egg it has lifted from…
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Nigerian Novels and Film
Ben Okri opens The Famished Road with a river that becomes a road, and a road that stays hungry because it was once a river.
Children of Blood and Bone: Film Adaptation Announcement and the Orïsha
The number I wrote down was ten. I had the trailer running in one tab and a dog-eared paperback of Children of Blood and Bone face-down beside the keyboard, and I did the small, slightly obsessive…
Children of Blood and Bone: Inside a Film Adaptation Announcement
A teaser plays before whatever you actually queued up. Ninety seconds, a drum figure under the studio logo, and a single word held on screen long enough to read: Orïsha.
Adinkra Symbols in Stone: How Ghana Buries Its Great Men
Drive west out of Accra along the coast road, past Kasoa and the roadside furniture stalls, and at Gomoa Mpota you come to a building that does not look like a tomb.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Who Narrates
Late in Atlantics, a line of young women leave their beds in a Dakar suburb and walk to the house of the developer who never paid their boyfriends. Their eyes have gone white.
Adinkra Symbols: What Akan Cloth Says on a City Wall
The first one most people meet is a curl of black lines that looks like a knot tied in the air: two hooks facing away from each other, joined at the base.
Children of Blood and Bone: What a Film Adaptation Announcement Can and Can't Do for Orïsha
The advice comes around with every trailer, and it came around again with this one: a big enough movie will finally teach the world about African religion.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Àbíkú and Ọgbanje
Two hundred and fifty-six. That is the entire sign system of Ifá, the divination tradition of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo — and one of the deepest reservoirs that African…
Adinkra Symbols in Urban Murals: The Sentence Behind the Sign
The advice comes with so much goodwill that it feels rude to test it. Put the symbol in the work. You paint, or you letter, or you shoot, and somewhere behind you there is Ghana — a parent, a…
Not sure where to start?
Begin at Origins. Every other thread makes more sense once you know how each people says the world began.