Adinka Symbols

The following list is a culmination of adinkra symbols gathered during personal research. The list of links to below lead to the
meanings of the symbols. The symbols are also available in our boutique, displayed in our lamp, gift sets and individual items.

In any extensive study on symbols, the Adinkra symbols have to be included. People all over the world have a love for speaking with symbols. The reason for this is due to the fact that symbols speak to a part of our mind that word's do not. Whether we create them consciously knowing this, or have an inate attraction to them from their subtle connection to the human make-up may no be important. They work to reach those inner landscapes which we need them to reach. They survive across generations and people pour life and meaning into them, giving them a life that survives past that of the human flesh. What it is that lives within them is called many things. The simpliest and most universal would be that consciousness lives in them, a consciousness of a people. In this sense, they are magical. On the outer level they appear to look like something we can define, but life is always subtle than that. Akoma looks like a heart, but it is than a heart. It is a a living breathing principle that is universal in scope. If we never spoke about love, concern, caring, and compassion, we would know that it is something that lives within us. Akoma is a wise symbol in that it say "Have heart in your stomach." It knows that these things which the heart symbolizes is not in the chest but in the solar plexus. We feel it in a different part of our body then what the picture represents on the outer level. But, the heart chakra is the stimulator of the good, which expands to both a feeling center and thinking center. If it were not for symbols and the wisdom of the ancients and the ancestors, we would not have the invisible library. As words are printed in a book, so is wisdom stamped upon a seal.

In the actual context of the cultural values and use, Adinkra symbols are symbolic patterns with metaphorical meanings used to decorate colorful patterned cloth in West Africa, particulary Ghana. The meaning of the symbols are said to be from an array of different areas of life. These include such topics as proverbs of the people, noted historical events, expressions of particular human attitudes, animal behaviors, plants and abstract shapes of inanimate and man-made objects. The experiences of a people became recorded on clothe. One modern author coined this use of symbolic language “Clothe as a Metaphor.”

The fabrics often differ between those made for local use and those that are exported. The fabrics produced for overseas markets are said to be more 'sanitized' symbology, not having the deeper philosophies and ways of the people being passed to the world at large. The Asante are a people who are known to be storytellers back through their lines of ancestry. It is there that one finds the intricacy of life and symbol merging more completely together in union. The clothes will be found to be abundant with hidden meanings, the wearers making posed statements with the symbology.

In my personal summation, I found the fact that the Ashanti people did not commercialize the inner teachings of the symbols gave an added glimpse at the tradition's universal aspects in how personal and cultural soul walks are often a private affair and not pontificated and disseminated as public knowledge in indigenous and secret societies. Silence truly does offer a cultivation that has to be lived to be known, and even knowing 'that' is of great value. In the quiet spaces, the symbols can be studied, meanings absorbed, the ancestors heard. Such beauty is magnified and found like a buried treasure in our own backyard. It makes the word ‘discovery’ bring a chuckle when contemplated in this regard. We discover that which was already there.