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 grandparent, a passport you have not used — so take one of the Adinkra symbols, Gye Nyame maybe, the one on the pendant your uncle never takes off, and set it in the piece. The tradition stays alive because you used it. Heritage, carried forward.

I have watched that advice work. On a hoarding outside a train station, a Gye Nyame (jeh n-YAH-meh) the height of a door, painted in ox-blood red on cream, and a woman in her sixties stopping her trolley to look at it for a long moment before she went in for her train. And I have watched it fail, twelve feet to the left, where the same commission had put four other stamps in a row like a font sample, one of them upside down.

The advice is right about the half of the problem it can see. It is wrong about the half it can't.

The advice is right about the first half

These signs were built for public reading. They belong to the Akan peoples — the Asante of central Ghana above all, and the Gyaman, whose territory straddles what is now the Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire border. The account most often repeated says the cloth came to Kumasi as spoil after the Asante defeated a Gyaman king named Kofi Adinkra in the early nineteenth century; other tellings put the craft in Akan hands well before that. Versions differ, and the people who make the cloth are comfortable with that.

Go to Ntonso (n-TON-so), a town on the road north of Kumasi, and the craft is not a memory. Men and boys carve stamps from pieces of calabash gourd, fixing them to little bamboo handles that stick up like fingers. The ink is adinkra aduru, made by boiling the bark of the badie tree down with iron slag until it is thick and black and smells of tar. The stamp goes down on cloth marked into a grid with a comb, and the pattern builds by repetition, block by block.

Cloth like this is worn. Most traditionally at funerals — the deep-red and russet mourning cloths, and the white ones for a death that came at a great age, when a life is judged complete. A person walking into a funeral ground in stamped cloth is making a statement everyone present can read, about the dead, about God, about the family's standing. That is the point. The signs are compact, high-contrast and repeatable because they were meant to be legible across a compound at a glance.

And the set has never been closed. Carvers add designs. Some catch on and some don't, the way slang does. Anyone who tells you there is a fixed, ancient, complete list is selling a poster.

Where it breaks down: the sign is the short form of a sentence

Here is what the advice leaves out. Each stamp is the compressed form of a saying in Twi. Not an illustration of a mood — the short form of an actual sentence that people speak.

Sankofa (san-KOH-fah) is the one everybody knows: the bird with its head turned backwards, taking an egg off its own spine. It is not a picture that means "the past." It is the tail end of a proverb — Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi — roughly, there is nothing wrong with going back for what you forgot. San means return, kɔ go, fa take. The sentence is an argument about correction: you are permitted to turn around. Strip the sentence off and the bird becomes a vague gesture at nostalgia, which is very nearly the opposite of a claim about the right to change your mind.

Gye Nyame is stronger still. It means except for God — the end of a phrase about the one thing no living person has seen the beginning or end of. It is a theological position, stated flatly. It is currently the most reproduced of the group, on rings, on hoodies, on the back window of a Vauxhall Corsa on my street, and a great deal of that reproduction treats it as a shape with good balance. It has good balance. It also says something specific, and the person wearing it is quoted as saying it.

So the failure mode of the well-meant advice isn't disrespect. It's that a mural can carry the sign and drop the sentence, and end up with beautiful lettering in a language nobody on the wall is speaking.

What do Adinkra symbols mean?

Each one is tied to a proverb, a piece of history, or a saying about how to live, in the Twi language of the Akan. The meanings are not secret and not fixed: different carvers, families and books gloss them slightly differently, and a stamp can carry more than one reading. What follows is the common sense of six of them, with the thing they usually get reduced to when the sentence is left behind.

"African symbols" is not one language

The advice usually arrives in that plural, and the plural is where a lot of murals go wrong. Adinkra sit beside things that are not remotely the same kind of thing.

Nsibidi (n-see-BEE-dee) is a sign system of the Ejagham and neighbouring peoples of the Cross River region, in southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. Some of it is everyday. A significant part of it belongs to the Ekpe society, and those meanings are held by members, which is why you will not read them here: they are not ours to publish. Uli is the Igbo tradition of curving painted designs, made by women on walls and on skin, with its own grammar of line. Tifinagh is not a symbol set at all — it is an alphabet, used by Amazigh people across North Africa and the Sahara to write a living language. Painting a Tifinagh letter next to a Gye Nyame for texture is like painting a Greek delta next to a road sign because both are triangular.

The artists who get this right tend to go narrow and deep. The Ghanaian painter Owusu-Ankomah floods his canvases with adinkra until the figures are made of them, a decision about density rather than decoration. El Anatsui, before the bottle-cap hangings that made him famous elsewhere, took a chainsaw to wooden panels and cut West African signs into them, letting the tool's violence be part of the statement. Neither is quoting for atmosphere.

And sometimes the sign arrives from the other direction. In Lower Manhattan, at the African Burial Ground, a coffin lid was found with iron tacks arranged in a heart-shaped design. Many people read it as Sankofa; some scholars are careful to say we cannot be certain what the person who hammered it meant. Both things are worth holding at once. The reading matters to a lot of people; the uncertainty is part of the honesty.

What the wall actually costs

The celebratory version of this story stops before the invoice. Walls are owned. A mural is almost always a favour from a landlord, a line in a developer's public-art obligation, or a grant with a brief that asks for something bright and community-facing by the end of the month. The brief rarely has room for the proverb.

Paint on a south-facing wall goes chalky in a couple of summers, and nobody funds the touch-up. Buildings get sold. A piece can be primed over on a Tuesday morning by a contractor who was told the wall needed prep. And there is a quieter cost: a heritage mural raises the tone of a street, which raises the rent on the street, which moves out the people whose grandmother's cloth is on the wall.

There is a legal edge too. Ghanaian copyright law treats expressions of folklore — adinkra among them — as belonging to the nation, with a National Folklore Board handling permissions and commercial use by foreigners meant to be licensed. How much this is enforced abroad is argued over. But an artist selling Sankofa prints from a stall in another country is inside a live question about who is owed what, and the goodwill advice never mentions it.

A more honest version of the rule

So: not put the symbol in the work. Closer to this.

Carry the sentence with the sign. If you can't say what it says, in words, you are painting a shape. Name the people and the place — Akan, Asante, Ghana — so the wall doesn't imply that a continent agreed on one alphabet. Use one thing well instead of five for texture. Don't paint what isn't public, and when you don't know whether it is, ask someone who does. Where the meaning is contested, let it stay contested; a wall can hold "in one telling" better than you'd think.

My own version of this is small and slightly obsessive. When I write about a symbol, the Twi line goes at the top of the file first, before a single sentence of the piece, and it stays until I can point to where it came from — a carver, a scholar, a recording, somebody with a name. If I can't source it, the symbol comes out, and some very handsome shapes have come out that way. The line that has been taped above my desk longest is the Sankofa one: Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It has stopped me from writing three things I wanted to write, which is roughly what a proverb is for.