Just as one affixes trimmings to clothes
and badges to hats, so it behooves every one of us
to write in silent marks.
ANDREA ALCIATO (Circa1523)
EMBLEMS – THE GEOLOGY OF MIND AND SPIRIT INTERFACES
The fact that the African mind has a genetic propensity to see through a spiritual matrix has often irked social and physical scientists, including anthropologists. This is simply because science cannot accept the obvious source of it: cosmic connexion. So they often point to poverty (of material, intellectual and philosophical resource), as a way round the it, although they see this connexion clearly in the atavism of the African Diaspora, which surfaces automatically whenever deeper perceptions and solutions are needed.
For his part, the social scientist prefers the notion of poverty as an ‘ascetic’ trigger, whereas the physical scientist feels jittery about establishing any accord with anything bordering on irrationality (hocus-pocus, in other words). At heart, they both miss the fundamental, day-to-day philosophical logic of the African: the congenital sense of the Deity, regardless of wealth or the lack of it, that is. Thus both parties miss out on how Africans became the founders of abstraction.
When an African artist is called to articulate that philosophical logic into emblem, he/she faces the task of coining a visual language that approximates the interface between the spiritual and the material. It is also necessary to achieve a transcendent modernity that informs and directs effectively, if the moral code embodied by the emblem is to be heeded. That artist is therefore not 'possessed' by their own will but by a collective societal invocation.
The most important challenge arises when the artist is faced with the requirement to make seemingly absolute statements, despite his/her normal dependence on flux. However, there occurs a moment when truth becomes universally absolute, quite akin to the veracity of the clay a sculptor uses—it is what it is.
For my part, I was influenced as a child by the inscriptions on canoes at Accra Beach, and the spontaneous coinage of proverbs by Gadangme elders at family meetings. The underlining oratory struck me as expressionistic codes; complex and alluring, vigorous, and very daunting to would-be profligates. I saw them echoed in those canoe inscriptions, though in that milieu they were also talismans for weathering storms. That no one cared to formally put words to or elucidate the meanings of those inscriptions tormented my young mind daily.
However, when at eleven I became a poet, these codes walked in with me, forcing my adopted English language to submit to them. Of course, there was also the well-documented canon of Ashanti Adinkra emblems, which gave me the perfect benchmark to base my internal discourse and external projections on. Yet I could never live down the artificial chasm between Gadangme oratory and ideography caused by extraordinary intellectual neglect. It would take a poem I'd written for the beleaguered Gypsies, in 2003, to wake me to the task of creating GaAdangme emblems. Even then, it was mainly a noumenal exercise:
While attempting to create illustrations for that poem, ROMA, it dawned on me that I was actually expressing Gadangme thought and poetics around their legendary concept of total hospitality. Because I knew the Gadangme would harbour the Gypsies if they encountered them. Thus awoken, forty-four emblems and original proverbs came through me over a period of seven days, and then stopped suddenly. Soon afterwards, a Gadangme historian and friend, Nii Nai-Tete, informed me that the so-called canoe inscriptions where in fact an ancient Gadangme form of writing, called Kpamo (or testamental or covenantal writing).
In recent years, new works have come through, and they are tending to reference existing proverbs from the ancient Gadangme canon. This pointing backwards bodes well for a Gadangme renaissance, because when it's all done, Gadangme children will have a real 'bargaining chip' for their discourse and debate with fellow Ghanaians and the world at large. This is my most fervent wish.
ISHMAEL FIIFI ANNOBIL
2016, London, UK