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 its own spine. Underneath, in steadier letters than the bird got: SANKOFA.

Two people stop. One grew up in Kumasi and hears her grandmother's voice, a whole sentence in Twi with a scold in it. The other is nineteen and knows the shape from a hoodie. Adinkra symbols are doing this all over the world at the moment — the same mark landing as a full quotation for one reader and a good logo for the next.

That gap, between a sentence and a shape, is most of what is happening to these Akan signs right now: on gable ends and roller shutters, on graduation stoles, in the corner of album art, tattooed on forearms in cities where nobody speaks Twi. The shapes are travelling beautifully. The sentences are not always travelling with them.

What most people do with Adinkra symbols

Somewhere near the start of almost every one of these projects, there is a chart.

You have seen it. Forty or sixty small black forms in a grid, each in its box, each with a name in italics and a single word beneath. Sankofa — return. Gye Nyame — omnipotence. Dwennimmen — humility. It hangs in classrooms and community centres. It gets screenshotted into brand decks, tattoo consultations, and the notes app of a muralist who has three days on a lift and four storeys of brick. The chart is the interface. Pick a shape, read the word, use the shape.

And a great deal of good work comes out of that, so let's be fair about it first.

These forms were built for reproduction long before anyone put them on a wall. A carver in Ghana cuts them into a piece of calabash gourd about the size of a matchbox, fixes it to a few sticks for a handle, and a printer presses it into cloth by hand, over and over, in rows. That job writes the design rules: closed forms, thick strokes, strong symmetry, no fine detail, nothing that collapses when the ink spreads. Which happens to be the exact specification for a mark that has to read from a moving bus — or at forty pixels across, as somebody's profile picture. The stamp was a printing technology. It ports.

So the shapes turn up twelve feet tall beside a barbershop, on the shutters of a Ghanaian grocery, along a sports hall wall painted over a summer by teenagers and one paid artist, on the sashes of graduating students in cities with long-established Ghanaian communities — London, Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, Hamburg — and in Accra and Kumasi themselves, where they are not a rediscovery at all, just the local visual language turned up loud. None of that is a problem. A wall that says Gye Nyame to a street that recognises it is doing what the mark has always done: making a statement in public that literate neighbours can read.

The problem is narrower and more specific. It is what the chart cannot carry.

An adinkra stamp does not stand for a word. It stands for a saying. The shape is a bookmark, and the single italicised gloss underneath it on the poster is a title, not the text. Sankofa is a bookmark for a sentence about going back for what you left behind; the word "return" is what you get when you compress that sentence until it fits under a picture. Nobody did anything malicious. Compression is just lossy, and the part it loses is the part that was doing the thinking.

The second casualty is occasion. Adinkra is, first and most, cloth — and cloth is worn to something. Broadly speaking, dark cloths dyed deep brown or black belong to mourning and funerals, red to close grief, and white to celebration, thanksgiving, and church. The colour tells a gathering what kind of day it is; the stamps tell them what the wearer wants said on it. Usage varies by family, town and lineage, and people will tell you different rules in different places. But a symbol lifted off cloth and printed on a mug arrives with all of that stripped out — which is fine for a mug, and worth knowing before anyone claims the mug is traditional.

The third is the label. A mural captioned ancient African symbols has already lost the thing that matters. They are Akan: from the Twi-speaking peoples of Ghana, with deep roots in Asante and in Gyaman, a kingdom that straddled what is now the Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire border. They are not pan-African, not a continental alphabet, and not anybody's runes. Naming the people takes four extra words and is the entire difference between respect and decoration.

What do Adinkra symbols actually mean?

Each stamp stands for a proverb, a maxim, or an epithet in Twi. The mark is not a letter and not a word — it is a reminder of a complete sentence that a Twi speaker can supply from memory. That makes "meaning" the wrong frame. Wearing one is closer to quoting than to labelling. The shape is the citation; the proverb is the content.

Gye Nyame (roughly jeh n-YAH-meh) is the clearest case. The chart says "omnipotence." The phrase itself means "except God," and it is the tail end of a longer saying usually given as: this great creation is old beyond memory; nobody alive saw its beginning and nobody will live to see its end — except God. "Omnipotence" is not wrong. It is just the label on a jar somebody emptied.

Read down that right-hand column and something becomes obvious. These are arguments. Compact ones, about authority, cooperation, memory, and the limits of human knowledge — the kind of thing any tradition builds its ethics out of. The one-word column is a filing system. The right-hand column is the tradition.

What the record actually suggests

The origin story is contested, and honestly so

In Twi, adinkra is commonly glossed as farewell or parting — the cloth of goodbye, which fits its long association with funerals. In one widely repeated telling, the name traces to Nana Kwadwo Adinkra, a ruler of Gyaman defeated by Asante forces in the early nineteenth century, with the cloth and its making passing to Asante afterwards. It is a tidy story, and researchers have long been sceptical of how tidy it is; the craft plausibly predates the war it is credited to. Versions differ. That is not a gap in the record so much as the normal condition of oral tradition, and a piece that hands you one version as settled fact is telling you less than it appears to.

The making is a craft with an address

Ntonso, a town in Ghana's Ashanti Region north of Kumasi, remains the centre of adinkra printing. The dye, adinkra aduru, is made by boiling bark — from the badie tree — down over hours with iron slag until it thickens to a dark, tarry paste. Cloth is pegged out flat. Before any stamps go on, the printer rules the cloth into panels with a broad wooden comb dragged through the dye, leaving the striped divisions called nwomu. Then the stamping, block by block, filling each panel.

What that describes is composition. The printer chooses which stamps and in what arrangement, and a finished cloth reads as a paragraph rather than a badge. Any argument about whether contemporary artists are "changing" adinkra should start there, because arranging the marks to say something new is not a modern liberty. It is the job.

The set was never closed

There is no fixed, ancient count. Carvers have gone on cutting new stamps, and the corpus visibly grew across the twentieth century as new subjects and new sayings earned marks. The comprehensive chart everybody uses is itself a modern object — a compilation, assembled and published within living memory, useful and real but not an inherited scripture.

This is the fact that reframes the whole anxiety about street art. The tradition has never been a closed archive that reinvention threatens. Reinvention is its ordinary metabolism. The meaningful distinction is not old versus new but inside versus outside: a Kumasi signwriter inventing a composition works among people who can read the sentences and will say so if the sentence is wrong. A studio in another country working from a screenshot has no such correction available. Same act, different accountability.

They are not occult, and Nyame is not a secret

Several of the best-known marks name God directly — Gye Nyame, Nyame Nti, Nyame Dua, the last of which refers to an actual object, a forked post holding a vessel, standing in some Akan compounds as a sign of God's presence. Akan religious thought holds Nyame as the supreme creator, with the abosom — deities bound to rivers, land, and lineages — and the nsamanfo, the ancestors, closer to daily life.

But adinkra is not liturgy. The marks are proverbs in visual form, and Ghanaian Christians and Muslims use them without any sense of conflict; Gye Nyame appears on church signboards, on taxis, on shop fronts, above doors. The occult framing that occasionally attaches to these shapes abroad — the assumption that a striking geometric mark from West Africa must be a sigil — is imported, not local. It comes out of the same missionary-era habit that relabelled every West African deity a demon, and it survives mostly because the people repeating it have never asked a Ghanaian.

Sankofa's second life belongs to the diaspora now

The bird on the hoarding has a history that is not only Ghanaian. Sankofa entered African American cultural vocabulary powerfully in the late twentieth century, carried in part by Haile Gerima's 1993 film of that name, and it has been doing steady work ever since in Black studies programmes, graduation ceremonies, community centres, and memorial design. At the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, where the remains of free and enslaved Africans were unearthed in 1991, a heart-shaped mark found on a coffin lid was widely identified as a Sankofa symbol; other researchers have read the mark differently, and the identification remains debated. The memorial that stands there carries the symbol regardless.

That is not misuse. It is a second tradition, with its own eighty-odd years of history and its own claim, growing from the same root. It does mean that Sankofa in Harlem and Sankofa in Kumasi are relatives rather than twins — the diaspora reading leans toward recovering a severed past, the Akan proverb toward the ordinary sense of going back for something you dropped. Both are true. Neither corrects the other.

The part that is not celebratory

A carver in Ntonso earns a carver's living while the shapes he cuts sell worldwide on fast fashion, phone cases, and print-on-demand posters, with nothing flowing back. Ghana has legislated against exactly this: its copyright law places folklore under national protection and requires permission for commercial exploitation, including by foreign users. How much that means in practice, across borders and on platforms that ship a hundred thousand tote bags a month, is another question entirely.

And there is a harder problem underneath it, which no statute solves. Nobody can grant permission on behalf of the Akan, because nobody owns a proverb. There is no office to write to. What is left is the ordinary discipline of attribution: name the people, name the language, learn the sentence, pay the carver when a carver is involved. Unglamorous, and about as far as good faith can get you.

Names and terms

• Adinkra (ah-DEEN-krah) — stamped cloth of the Akan, and by extension the individual marks stamped on it; the word is commonly glossed as farewell.
• Akan — a group of peoples of Ghana and eastern Côte d'Ivoire, including the Asante, Fante, Bono and Gyaman, sharing closely related languages and traditions.
• Twi (chwee) — the Akan language in which every adinkra saying lives.
• Ntonso — the town in Ghana's Ashanti Region, north of Kumasi, that remains the heart of adinkra printing.
• Gyaman — the Akan kingdom on what is now the Ghana–Côte d'Ivoire border, tied to the contested account of adinkra's origin.
• Adinkra aduru — the printing dye, boiled down from tree bark with iron slag until it thickens.
• Nwomu — the comb-drawn lines that divide a cloth into panels before stamping.
• Nyame — God, the creator, in Akan thought; named directly in several of the best-known marks.
• Abosom — deities associated with rivers, land, and lineages, below Nyame in Akan cosmology.
• Nsamanfo — the ancestors, honoured in Akan practice today.

What I actually do

I write about belief systems, which mostly means I spend my working life trying not to shorten things.

My first rule with adinkra is about sentences, not shapes: before I use a symbol's name in a piece, I find the saying it carries and write the saying down first. If I cannot find one — if all that exists is the chart's single word, repeated verbatim across twenty sites that copied each other — I leave the symbol out. Not because the word is necessarily wrong, but because a gloss with no sentence anywhere behind it is usually somebody's summary of somebody's summary, and I have been burned by those.

Second, I name the people and the language in the same breath as the mark. Akan. Ghana. Twi. It is four words and it is the whole difference between citing a tradition and borrowing a graphic.

Third, when I can, I get a Twi speaker to say the proverb out loud, and I record it. Twi is tonal, and a proverb is a spoken performance with timing in it; the version on the page is a transcript of something that was never meant to be silent. I mangle the tones every time. I do it anyway, because the moment I stop hearing the sentence, I am back to reading a picture.

Fourth, a thing I refuse: I don't use these marks as decoration in my own work. No adinkra as bullet points, no Gye Nyame as a section divider, no fern-leaf Aya filling white space at the end of a column. If I am going to quote somebody, I should quote them where the quotation is doing work, not use their sentence as furniture.

Fifth, I photograph the walls, and I write the cross-street and the date on the back of the print, because murals get painted over faster than anyone documents them.

Which is how I know that the bird on the hoarding came down in the spring, along with the hoarding. I still have the picture in a folder. On the back of it I wrote out the whole thing — Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi, it is no shame to go back and fetch what you have forgotten — because "return" would have fitted on the line easily, and I did not want it to fit.