Akofena

Akofena, the sword of war, is drawn as a stylized ceremonial sword, and Willis records its meaning as courage, valour and legitimate state authority, a reading grounded directly in the sword's historical role as a central object of Akan state regalia rather than as a weapon in ordinary combat use by the time the symbol's meaning had stabilized. Ceremonial swords of the type Akofena depicts were, and in reduced ceremonial form remain, central to Akan chieftaincy: they are used in oath-taking, in the formal installation of chiefs, and as a mark of an office holder's legitimate authority to act on behalf of the state, so the symbol's association with valour is inseparable, in Willis's account, from its association with the specifically legitimate, state-sanctioned use of coercive force rather than force in general.

Willis distinguishes the ceremonial ekyempim and related state swords that Akofena's design generalizes from ordinary edged weapons of the same historical period, noting that a ceremonial sword's blade is typically less suited to combat use than to display and ritual function, so the ceremonial object the ram symbol of courage draws on was already, by the time its meaning stabilized, more a mark of office than a working weapon.

Akofena appears on cloth and regalia connected to chieftaincy and state authority specifically, alongside Adinkrahene, Ohene Adwa (the king's stool, recorded separately in this atlas) and other symbols of formal political office, forming a recognizable cluster within the corpus concerned with the legitimate exercise of power rather than with personal, domestic or purely devotional themes. Willis notes that actual ceremonial swords, as physical objects rather than as cloth stamps, continue to be used in documented Akan state ceremony today, including in oath-swearing before a chief, which places Akofena among the smaller number of Adinkra symbols whose real-world referent is not only historical but a still-living element of contemporary Akan governance and ceremony.

Willis records that reproductions of Akofena, both on cloth and as small decorative metal or wood objects, are commonly sold to visitors as souvenirs referencing Ghanaian chieftaincy generally, a commercial afterlife he distinguishes from the symbol's continuing, non-commercial ceremonial use within actual chieftaincy institutions. Willis is careful to keep the two uses distinct in his own account, treating the souvenir trade as evidence of the symbol's recognizability rather than as any diminishment of its standing ceremonial role.