Where did Adinkra symbols originally come from and which group of people first created them?

The fuller story has several threads, and they converge on the same region.

One oral tradition holds that the symbols were originally created by the Bono people of Gyaman, and that their king, Nana Kwadwo Agyemang Adinkra, designed or formalized them, naming the system after himself. Legend says the symbols were revealed to him in his dreams.

King Adinkra was eventually defeated and captured by the neighboring Asante people, reportedly because he had copied the "Golden Stool," the sacred Asante royal throne said to have descended from the heavens. After his defeat, he was killed, his territory was annexed, and the symbolic cloth patterns were taken by the Asante as their own. The guild of designers who had created the symbols in Bono were forced to teach the Asante the craft, and King Adinkra's own son, Apau, passed the knowledge to a man named Kwaku Dwaku in a town near Kumasi.

The claim that Gyaman invented them is contested

The Gyaman-origin tradition has been complicated by the historical record. The war in which the Asante are said to have learned Adinkra from Gyaman began in 1818, yet the British explorer Thomas Bowdich visited Kumasi two years earlier, in 1817, and personally documented Adinkra cloth already being produced there. He even brought a physical example back, which sits in the British Museum today. That suggests the Asante had their own relationship with the symbols before the war, whatever the Gyaman connection may have been.

A separate account points further back: the Akan people, who inhabited what is now Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, had developed significant weaving skills by the 16th century, with a town called Nsoko, now known as Begho, serving as a major weaving center.

How the symbols were made and what they carried

The original method was to cut a pattern into a calabash gourd and use it as a stamp on fabric. The ink, called adinkra aduru, was made by boiling the bark of the Badie tree with iron scraps. The symbols represent objects that carry messages about traditional wisdom, historical events, human behavior, animal behavior, plant life, and the shapes of objects around them.

Over time, all Akan peoples, including the Fante, Akuapem, and Akyem, adopted Adinkra symbols as a central part of their culture. They continue to evolve to this day, with new symbols reflecting historical events, technological changes, and shifts in Ghanaian life.