Akoma, simply "the heart," is one of the more directly legible Adinkra pictographs, sometimes drawn plain and sometimes with a small cross at its center. It stands for patience, good will, and the emotional endurance required to love and to forgive over a long relationship, rather than for romantic feeling alone. It appears often on cloth given at engagements, weddings, and reconciliations, where its message of sustained tolerance is directly relevant to the occasion.
Facts
Origins
Place of OriginThe Akan-speaking region of West Africa, chiefly the Asante and Gyaman kingdoms in what is now Ghana and eastern Ivory Coast 2 Place of OriginThe stamping of adinkra cloth centres on Ntonso and the towns north of Kumasi, where each symbol is cut into a calabash stamp and printed with a dye boiled from tree bark and iron slag 1 Meaning
Literal Meaning Famous SayingTwi: Nya akoma, literally get a heart, meaning have patience; its negation, onni akoma (has no heart), means to be impatient. This root idiom is independently attested in general Twi-language reference material beyond the Adinkra-specific literature. 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseAdinkra symbols are reproduced worldwide on goods made outside Ghana and outside the Akan tradition, where the proverb the symbol carries is usually not reproduced with it. The hand-stamped cloth trade at Ntonso now competes with screen-printed imitations of its own designs. 1 Partially Attested
Famous SayingA longer proverb is also attributed to this symbol: Se wonya abotre dwa ntetea a wo hu ne nsono (roughly, if you have the patience to peel the bark of a tree, you will see what is inside). 1 Attributed to Willis via a single secondary citation; not independently corroborated. Learn More
Akoma: A Symbol Close To A Picture Of Its Own Name
Akoma, the Akan word for heart, is drawn as a stylized heart shape, one of the small number of Adinkra symbols whose form is close to a direct, recognizable picture of its own name rather than an abstracted or proverb-encoded design, which Willis notes makes it unusually legible to outside viewers unfamiliar with the wider corpus's more indirect visual logic. Its meaning centres on patience, tolerance, faithfulness and endurance, qualities the heart is read as the seat of in Akan thought much as it is in many other traditions, and Willis records the symbol functioning specifically as an emblem of an enduring, loving and faithful disposition rather than of romantic love narrowly, a broader emotional and moral register than the heart shape's modern global association with romance alone might suggest to an outside viewer.
Willis notes the plain heart form of Akoma is visually simple enough that carvers reproduce it with very little variation between stamps compared to more elaborate Adinkra designs, and this simplicity is part of why it functions well as a component within compound symbols such as Akoma Ntoaso, where two nearly identical heart shapes are joined rather than redesigned.
Gifts, Loyalty, And A Companion Symbol For Two Hearts Joined
Akoma appears on cloth given as gifts and worn at occasions meant to affirm loyalty, commitment and enduring goodwill, including within marriage and close kinship contexts, though Willis is careful to record its meaning as the broader virtue of patient faithfulness rather than as a courtship symbol specifically. A closely related design in the same corpus, Akoma Ntoaso, links two heart forms together and is recorded separately in this atlas, extending the single heart's virtue of endurance into the specific claim of a bond or agreement formed between two parties; Willis treats the two as a deliberate pair, the simple Akoma naming an individual quality and Akoma Ntoaso naming what happens when two people or groups holding that quality come together, rather than as two unrelated designs that happen to share the heart motif.
Willis records that Akoma cloth is sometimes given specifically as a gift marking reconciliation after a quarrel, a use that reads the heart's patience and endurance as extending to the specific virtue of forgiving and continuing a relationship despite past conflict, an application distinct from, though compatible with, its more general reading as loyalty and faithfulness.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Akan, Cultures Akoma, the heart, represents patience, good will and the endurance of a loving, faithful heart.
Akoma, the heart, stands for the patience and emotional endurance required to love and forgive over a long relationship.
Originated In
Related To
Akoma Ntoaso is built from two or more linked Akoma hearts and commonly appears alongside the single Akoma on the same cloth.
Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan pairs naturally with Akoma, forming a small cluster of Adinkra symbols devoted to romantic loyalty.
Sources
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