Adinkra, Nsibidi, Uli: Three West African Symbol Systems

"African patterns" is not a design language. It is a shipping label put on hundreds of unrelated ones.

Three systems come up constantly in contemporary design, usually mixed together by people who have not noticed they do completely different jobs. Here is the difference.

Adinkra — Akan, Ghana

What it is: a set of stamped symbols from the Akan people of Ghana and eastern Côte d'Ivoire, traditionally printed on cloth with carved calabash stamps and a black dye.

What it does: each symbol stands for a proverb or an aphorism. Gye Nyame, the most reproduced of them, means roughly "except for God" — a statement about the supremacy of the divine. Sankofa, the bird turning its head backwards, carries "go back and get it": retrieving what was left behind is not shameful.

The important part: adinkra symbols are statements. Each one is a compressed sentence. Wearing adinkra cloth was historically tied to funerals and specific occasions, and the selection of symbols said something.

This is why scattering adinkra symbols across a garment for texture reads badly to anyone who knows them. It is the equivalent of a t-shirt covered in randomly chosen English proverbs in an attractive font. The forms are beautiful, which is exactly what makes the misuse easy.

Nsibidi — Cross River, south-eastern Nigeria

What it is: a system of graphic signs originating with the Ejagham peoples of the Cross River region, and used by Efik, Ibibio and Igbo communities. It appears on cloth, calabashes, skin, walls and in gesture.

What it does: this is the one closest to a script. Nsibidi signs encode meanings and, in combination, communicate specific content — love, conflict, a judgment, a warning, the terms of an agreement. Some signs were public. A significant body of it was restricted, known to members of particular societies such as Ekpe, and deliberately not legible to outsiders.

The important part: nsibidi has a literacy attached to it. Part of it was designed to be unreadable to you.

That is a genuine constraint on a design studio, and it is the one most often ignored. Reproducing signs whose meaning is restricted — when you cannot read them and cannot know what you have written — is not a stylistic choice. It is putting unknown text on someone's chest.

Uli — Igbo, south-eastern Nigeria

What it is: a tradition of drawing and painting, historically by Igbo women, on the body in a dye from the uli seed, and on the walls of compounds and shrines in earth pigments.

What it does: it is ornament in the strong sense — composition, not vocabulary. Uli is curvilinear, asymmetric, confident, and built on line weight and the deliberate use of empty space. Motifs come from the world around it — spirals, crescents, plant forms, python markings — but a uli composition is not a sentence. It is a drawing.

The important part: uli has a grammar rather than a dictionary. The rules are about line, balance and negative space, and they are rules you can genuinely learn and work in.

Uli is also, notably, an art form that was already modernising on its own terms. The Nsukka school at the University of Nigeria — Uche Okeke and those who followed — took uli's line into contemporary painting deliberately, as a formal language, decades ago.

How we use this

Our position is narrow on purpose:

• Uli is a language we work in. Its grammar is about line and space, it was explicitly developed as a contemporary formal language by Igbo artists, and it is the closest thing to our own heritage. Most of what we draw comes from here.
• Adinkra we reference by name or not at all. If a symbol appears, it is because the piece is about that proverb, and the proverb is stated. Never as texture.
• Nsibidi we do not reproduce. We cannot read it. That is a sufficient reason.

The general rule: if you cannot say what a mark means, you cannot put it on a garment. That single test removes most of what makes "African-inspired" design embarrassing.

Why it is worth the trouble

Because the alternative is worse for everyone, including the design.

A symbol used without its grammar loses the thing that made it worth stealing. Adinkra shapes are compelling because centuries of people compressed real arguments into them. Strip the argument and you have a nice circle.

Working inside a system is harder and slower than borrowing from it. It also produces something you can defend, and something that still looks right in five years.

The colour side of the same argument is in why rust runs through Igbo design.