Adinkra Symbols: The Akan Proverbs Painted on City Walls

Adinkra symbols were never meant to be permanent.

The version most people meet first is very permanent indeed: three storeys of acrylic on a gable end in Brixton or Bed-Stuy, a gold pendant, a tattoo on a forearm, a laptop sticker. But the thing being copied is a hand-cut stamp pressed into cloth with a dye that runs the moment it meets water. Adinkra cloth, traditionally, is not washed. It is stamped for an occasion — most often a funeral — worn, folded, and kept. The old pieces that survive survive because nobody took them near a river.

That is not an argument against the murals. It is the argument for them.

The stamps come from a small town outside Kumasi

Adinkra is Akan. The Akan are the largest ethnic group in Ghana, the Asante (also spelled Ashanti) are the best-known Akan people, and Twi is the language most of the names come from. The word itself is usually read as carrying nkra, message — cloth as a farewell, a message sent when someone leaves for the ancestors.

In one telling, widely repeated, the cloth takes its name from Nana Kwadwo Adinkra, a king of Gyaman — border country between what is now Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana's Bono region — who was defeated by the Asante in the early nineteenth century, his patterned cloth carried back to Kumasi. Versions differ on the details, and the motifs are almost certainly older than the war that gave them a story.

The making is still done in Ntonso, north of Kumasi, and it is slow. Bark from the badie tree is pounded and boiled down for hours with iron slag until it thickens to something close to black: adinkra aduru, adinkra medicine. The stamps are cut from a piece of calabash gourd, with sticks pushed into the back for a handle. The printer works over cloth pegged flat, rules it into panels with a comb dipped in dye, then presses the stamp, lifts, presses again. The colour of the cloth tells you the occasion before any symbol does — dark browns and reds for mourning, white for thanksgiving, birth, a life completed well.

What Adinkra symbols actually mean

Each one stands for a proverb, not a word. Gye Nyame, the most reproduced of them all, is usually given as "except for God", and it compresses a longer saying: nobody alive saw the beginning of this creation and nobody will see its end, except God. Dwennimmen, the ram's horns, carries the observation that the ram fights hard and still submits — strength that includes humility. Sankofa carries a sentence about return: it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.

So adinkra is not an alphabet, and you cannot spell your name in it. This matters because the claim turns up constantly online. West Africa does have a graphic system of that kind — nsibidi, developed by the Ejagham and their neighbours in southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon, with signs that combine to record messages — and adinkra is a different animal: a repertoire of sayings in visual shorthand, closer to a proverb collection than to writing.

The one-word gloss is where the meaning leaks out. A chart that says "Akoma: patience" has kept the label and thrown away the sentence, and the sentence is the whole content. Ask two carvers and you may get two sayings for the same stamp, both correct, because the stamp points at a proverb and proverbs have neighbours.

Five you have probably already seen

The set was never closed

Carvers in Ntonso still cut new stamps. Printed catalogues disagree with each other about how many symbols exist — one book gives you dozens, another runs to hundreds — and the disagreement is not sloppiness. A closed, countable canon is what you get when a tradition has stopped. Adinkra keeps acquiring stamps because people keep needing to say things.

It also keeps acquiring places. In Lower Manhattan, the African Burial Ground holds the remains of hundreds of enslaved and free Africans from the colonial city; one coffin lid bore a heart-shaped design worked in iron tacks, which many read as Sankofa. Archaeologists still debate whether that identification holds. What is not in doubt is what happened next: the reading became load-bearing. Sankofa became the site's emblem, then a fixture of Black American life — the title of Haile Gerima's 1993 film, a shape on graduation stoles, on tattoos, on the covers of books about going back. An Akan stamp crossed the Atlantic, waited a couple of centuries, and picked up a new job. That is not a departure from the tradition. That is the behaviour of the tradition.

From a three-inch stamp to a thirty-foot wall

Two things change in the scaling, and only one of them is obvious.

The obvious one is line. A calabash stamp gives an edge that starves and thickens as the dye runs out; a projector and a roller give a clean vector, and clean reads as corporate. Some muralists chase the wobble back in by hand.

The second is repetition, and it is the bigger loss. On cloth a symbol almost never appears alone. It appears forty times, in a ruled panel, next to a panel of something else — the meaning arrives as a chorus, one saying set against its neighbours. A mural usually shows one symbol, three storeys tall, by itself. That turns a proverb into a logo. The painters who have handled the cloth tend to give the grid back: they repeat the stamp across the wall, keep the comb lines between panels, let the edges break. You can spot the difference from the pavement.

What a wall cannot fix

The printers in Ntonso sell to a local market and to whoever walks in. The mural in another country, the tote bag, the phone case, the streetwear drop — none of it sends anything back. Ghana's copyright law treats adinkra as national folklore and, on paper, asks non-Ghanaians to seek permission for commercial use; outside Ghana, enforcement is close to nonexistent. Anyone selling the symbols is working in that gap, whether or not they know it.

Then there is accuracy, which travels worse than the images. Charts get copied from charts. Sankofa's bird gets flipped in layout so that it faces forward — the one thing that bird must not do. And adinkra gets used as a generic stand-in for Africa on walls celebrating communities with no Akan connection at all, which is a strange fate for signs whose entire value is that they are specific: Akan, Ghanaian, from a named town, in a named language.

Names and terms

• Akan — the largest ethnic group in Ghana, also present in Côte d'Ivoire.
• Asante (Ashanti) — the Akan people centred on Kumasi.
• Twi — the Akan language the symbol names come from.
• Ntonso — the town north of Kumasi where adinkra cloth is stamped.
• Adinkra aduru — the near-black dye, badie bark boiled down with iron slag.
• Gyaman — the kingdom in the origin story, in today's Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire border region.
• Nsibidi — a separate graphic system from southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon; unlike adinkra, it records messages.

One thing to do this week

Pick the single symbol you already recognise — the one on your friend's tattoo, or the pendant, or the wall on your way to the station. Find its Twi name, then find the saying behind it, and do not stop at the one-word gloss on the first chart you land on. That is ten minutes, and it changes what you are looking at from decoration into an argument somebody was making.

Then look at the wall again and count. If the symbol repeats, the painter knew the cloth.

Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi — spellings vary — it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot. Akan, in Twi, and permission enough.