Tabono

Tabono, oars or paddles, depicts a set of paddle forms arranged around a shared center, evoking a canoe crew rowing together toward one destination, and Willis reads the radial composition itself as carrying meaning beyond mere decoration: paddles arranged symmetrically around a common point visually enact the coordination the proverb describes, each paddle stroke individually modest but combining, when synchronized with the others, into forward motion no single paddler could achieve alone. He notes this compositional logic, individual elements gaining their force specifically through coordinated arrangement, recalls Nkonsonkonson's chain, though Tabono's paddles depict active, ongoing coordinated effort rather than the chain's more static image of interconnected strength.

Willis notes the number of paddles shown radiating from the centre varies between carvers, most commonly rendered as a set of four, a count he treats as a matter of established convention rather than one fixed by the proverb itself, which specifies coordinated group effort without naming a required number of participants. Willis records this conventional count as widespread enough to function as the default expectation among carvers even though the proverb's own wording leaves the number open.

Willis records Tabono used to praise teamwork and shared labour directed toward a common goal, its canoe-crew imagery giving it particular resonance in coastal and riverine Ghanaian communities where cooperative paddling was, and in some contexts remains, a genuine, practically necessary skill rather than only a figurative image; he notes fishing and river-trade communities specifically provide the symbol's most literal real-world referent among the corpus's cooperative-labour designs. He distinguishes Tabono from Woforo Dua Pa A, which describes help given by bystanders to someone already engaged in a worthy effort, noting Tabono instead depicts every party as an equal, simultaneous participant in the same shared labour rather than one helper assisting another's separate undertaking.

Willis records Tabono used on cloth commissioned for cooperative societies, trading associations and communal work groups specifically, a documented institutional application that places it, alongside Kuronti Ne Akwamu, among the corpus's symbols with a demonstrable modern civic and organizational life beyond individual or family cloth. Willis treats this documented civic use as placing Tabono among the corpus's more institutionally active symbols in contemporary Ghanaian associational life.