A Proverb Against Judging By First Appearance

Willis records Nkuruma Kesee's proverb encouraging the recognition of worth in what looks humble or is easily underestimated, and by extension praising growth and generosity from modest beginnings, an application he notes covers both material fortune, a business or a person of modest origin achieving unexpected success, and the underestimated abilities of a person overlooked because of an unassuming appearance or background. He distinguishes this specifically anti-assumption reading from Aya's fern, which praises endurance and defiance under adversity rather than a mismatch between appearance and true worth, noting the two symbols draw on unrelated plant imagery to make genuinely different points despite both belonging to the corpus's broader plant-derived family of designs.

Willis records Nkuruma Kesee's proverb carrying a documented, continuing use in contemporary Ghanaian commentary praising unexpected achievement from a modest background, a use he treats as a direct, largely unchanged continuation of the symbol's original meaning rather than a significant modern reinterpretation of it. Willis records this continuity as one of the clearer cases in the corpus where a symbol's popular modern use closely tracks its original documented meaning without significant drift.