The single Akan phrase most associated with Nyame, Gye Nyame, meaning except for God or unless it be God, has travelled far beyond the proverb it began as. Rendered as one of the adinkra symbols, a system of stamped and woven visual motifs used traditionally on cloth to carry a proverb or idea in compressed graphic form, Gye Nyame's swirling, interlocking design is now printed on kente and adinkra cloth worn at funerals and formal occasions, carved into stools and other regalia associated with Akan chieftaincy, worked into church and public architecture in Ghana, and reproduced internationally, including in African diaspora jewellery, tattoo art and academic and cultural institutions seeking a recognisably Akan emblem of divine supremacy.
The proverb behind the symbol asserts that nothing exists or happens except through, or apart from, the supreme being, a statement of God's ultimate sovereignty over all events, however small or catastrophic, that functions in everyday Akan speech as both theological claim and expression of resignation or trust in the face of the unpredictable. Gye Nyame's spread as visual shorthand for Akan religious identity, well outside the households and shrines where Nyame is invoked by name, shows how a spoken proverb about a remote, withdrawn creator became, through the adinkra system, one of the most widely reproduced single images associated with Ghanaian culture as a whole.