Adinkra Patterns as Educational Tools

From left to right: rotation, scaling and reflection transformations.courtesy of Ron Eglash

At first every image I showed them was interpreted as if it was an adinkra symbol – like when I showed them an example of reflection symmetry in Mangbetu design, they related it to the pattern “Wo nsa da mu a,” a symbol of democracy. It took me a long time to get them to understand that I was interested in the abstract concept of reflection symmetry (and my own fascination with their symbol interpretations didn’t help). But by the end of the day I had their explanation for the difference between linear and nonlinear spirals, as well as their translations in Twi for three geometric transformations (reflection, rotation and scaling), plus a really beautiful cloth made for me on the spot, to illustrate the transformations.