"With these emblems,
you have proved that us moderns can add
to the legacy of the ancestors."
PROFESSOR ATTUKWEI OKAI, POET
The Abëtëi Emblems were created by Ishmael Annobil, the Ghanaian poet, award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and photographer, to revive the lost Gadangme art of emblem making, which had been a crucial counterpart of the their unque tradition of Abëbuu (proverbialism). In essence, the Abëtëi restores a vital pillar of Gadangme philosophy, sacrament and ritual. They are a rare historical phenomenon.
For this audacious revival, Annobil coined both proverb and emblem, in the manner of the art of Abëbuu he had been privy to in his youth. The aesthetic of the Abëtëi is also totally Gadangme, informed by a deep understanding of the traditional Gadangme line or aesthetic, snippets of Annobil’s subliminal memory of the lost emblems, poetic recall, and something even bigger: an ancestral calling. The first cycle of Abëtëi constitutes 44 original emblems and 40 original proverbs by Annobil, and 4 traditional proverbs from the Gadangme canon. He continues to develop more Abëtëi.
EXPLOITATION
Abëtëi is expected to establish a rapid foothold alongside the impressive Ashanti Adinkra emblems, which have served the Gadangme people and the entire PanAfrican world as surrogate ideography for all purposes, including ritual. It will be given expression in textile design, jewellery, architectural adornment, and heraldry, as have the Adinkra emblems.
VALIDATION
The Abëtëi owe a lot to the interpretive agency and poetics of Nii Abeka Nai-Tete, the US-based Ga crypto-historian, whose pioneering research into the pre- and post-migration history of the Ga people, from Kush to Ghana, places him at the cutting edge of the Ga revival. He guided the creative process where it mattered, and invoked the ancient, totemic context, replete with a veritable language of diplomacy and ritual.