A big hello to all my loyal and new readers, it is always a pleasure writing to you guys, truly. Today, we will be covering the topic of the “Adinkra symbols”. Yes, this topic has been way overdue and it is finally here! There are many articles out there, as well as numerous scholarly books... but because I needed this article to be highly accurate, I made it my duty to visit the library of Legon University for this one (yea this girl does not play!). But all I could find was their names, meanings and proverbial explanations… and that was simply not sufficient enough for me.

As a researcher, I have learnt that we africans, and in particular our ancestors, did not just draw up random symbols simply because they wanted to… but I believed that there must have been a reason for designing a symbol a certain way, a reason for why the symbols look the way they do. I was interested in all the above and so much more. I wanted to know the linguistic and semiotic explanations of all these symbols, and by that I mean I wanted to truly understand their names (down to the very root) and find correlations between their symbolism and their visual structures. And after long (and I mean very long) and extensive research I am finally pleased. I have to tell you though, this article was by far the most tedious one I’ve written so far. Simply because the analysis time of each symbol varied so much. Some symbols took me 5 minutes, some took me a couple of hours, and some even had the audacity to be so insanely complex and abstract that it literally took me a couple of days to my biggest frustration (yea... struggle did get that real!). But I got nothing but love for you guys so taking one for the team here (smiling). I am finally satisfied with the results and I'm anxious to share these with you, so do get comfortable.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=599063183615212&id=516541005200764

Got any pics of the symbols