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. It turns up on barbershop shutters and phone cases, on hoodies, on the tailgate of a van in a neighbourhood nobody would call Ghanaian. Its name is Gye Nyame, and among the Akan of Ghana it carries a whole sentence — "except for God". It is the best-travelled of the Adinkra symbols, a family of stamped emblems from Akan cloth that has spent the past two decades climbing off fabric and onto walls.

The climbing is the interesting part. How a mark travels tells you what the people moving it think it is: a decoration, a relic, or a sentence. So here is the split, honestly. What most of us do with these shapes. What the record around them actually says. And what I do now, having spent a good while doing the first thing.

What most people do

The usual route starts with a search for "African symbols" and ends at a chart. Sixty or so icons in a grid, each with a single word printed underneath: Strength. Wisdom. Unity. Love. You pick the one whose word matches the mood, and you send it on — to a tattooist, to a muralist scaling up a gable end, to a designer laying out a record sleeve.

The chart is the problem, and it is a quiet one. It hands over the shape and withholds everything that makes the shape mean anything: the people, the language, the town, the cloth, the sentence. Very often the chart does not say "Akan" or "Ghana" anywhere on it. It says "African", which is about as useful as filing a Welsh dragon under "European folk art".

The second common move is gentler and flattens just as hard. It puts the marks behind glass. You can hear it in the way they get introduced — ancient, timeless, the wisdom of the ancestors — always in the past tense, as though the last person who understood them died a century ago. A carver in Ntonso who cut a stamp last Tuesday would be surprised to learn this.

Neither move is malicious. The charts are what is easy to find, and most people reaching for these symbols are reaching toward something rather than away from it. But both produce the same object at the end: a shape with the sentence taken out of it.

What the record actually shows

Where do adinkra symbols come from? They are Akan — from Ghana and the eastern edge of Côte d'Ivoire, among the Asante, Bono, Fante and related peoples, whose language is Twi. And they begin not as icons but as printing. Adinkra is a cloth before it is a symbol set: lengths of fabric divided into a grid with comb-drawn lines, then stamped by hand, each stamp carved from a piece of calabash gourd with a handle of bamboo splints. The ink, adinkra aduru, is boiled for hours from the bark and roots of the badie tree until it runs thick and near-black. The town most associated with the craft is Ntonso, north of Kumasi, where carving and printing are still working trades rather than demonstrations.

The name is usually read through nkra, the Twi word for a message — adinkra as the message left behind on parting. That reading suits the cloth's oldest use: dark cloth, in deep browns and blacks, worn at funerals and through periods of mourning. Lighter and white versions came to be worn on festive days. Both are still worn, by people who are not thinking about symbolism when they put them on.

How the cloth came to the Asante is a matter of tellings. In the account most often repeated, they took it from Gyaman after a war early in the nineteenth century, along with the name of the defeated king, Nana Kofi Adinkra. Other accounts hold that the stamping craft is older than that war and the story attached itself afterwards. Versions differ, and it is better to say so than to pick the tidier one.

Here is the part the charts lose. An adinkra stamp is a compressed proverb, not a word. Sankofa — the bird with its head turned backward, an egg in its beak — is not "heritage". It is a sentence: Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi, roughly, there is nothing wrong with going back for what you have forgotten. Dwennimmen, the ram's horns, is not "strength"; it is strength that still bows, the ram that fights hard and yet goes quietly when it must. The symbol is a knot tied in a rope of speech, and the rope is Twi.

The museum framing misses something else: the set is open. Carvers have added stamps across generations, and designers add them now. Glosses shift a little between one printer, one teller, one family and the next — which is what you would expect of a language, and not at all what you would expect of a sealed archive.

You can watch that openness working. In Accra, the Chale Wote Street Art Festival has been turning the walls and streets of Jamestown into a gallery since 2011, and adinkra-derived work appears there the way any visual language appears among the people who speak it — not as heritage signage, but as material. In the diaspora, Sankofa has become the most reproduced of the lot: on community-centre signs, on skin, on the letterhead of organisations whose whole purpose is returning for something.

Names and terms

• Akan — a group of peoples of Ghana and eastern Côte d'Ivoire, including the Asante, Bono and Fante.
• Twi — the Akan language the proverbs are spoken in (roughly chwee).
• Ntonso — the town north of Kumasi known for adinkra printing.
• Adinkra aduru — the near-black stamping ink, boiled from badie bark.
• Gye Nyame — "except for God"; the most widely reproduced of the stamps.

What I actually do

I name the people before I name the symbol. Not "the African symbol Sankofa" but "the Akan symbol Sankofa", and where the sentence allows it, Ghana too. It costs three words and it puts the mark back with the people who made it.

I look for the proverb before I use the shape. If I cannot find the Twi sentence behind a stamp — only an English mood-word from a chart — I leave that stamp out of whatever I am writing. That rule has cut a lot of material, and everything it cut was decoration.

I ask where the image came from. A stamp carved in Ntonso and a vector traced off a wallpaper site are not the same object, even when they print the same. When I am looking at a mural, the question I hold is not whether it is beautiful but whether anyone who grew up with the cloth was in the room while it was planned.

I write about the practice in the present tense, because it is present. And I do not claim standing I do not have: I am a writer who reads and asks, not a carver, not an elder, not anyone's authority on what a family's cloth means to them.

The Akan have a line for the whole business of going back carefully for something: Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. There is a strip of stamped cloth pinned above my desk, dark brown, the grid lines slightly wobbly and two of the stamps sitting a hair off-register where the printer's hand moved. When people ask what it means, I have got into the habit of giving them the name of the town before I give them the name of the symbol.