Nyame

Nyame is the supreme being of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, the sky god and creator, known by many praise names, including Onyankopon, the Great One, and Odomankoma, the eternal one, the infinite. He is the source and sustainer of all things, the high god above the many lesser spirits (the abosom) and the ancestors, and Akan thought and language are rich with references to him: a great many proverbs invoke Nyame, and the Akan say that no one need point out God to a child, for the knowledge of the supreme being is held to be innate. A well-known Akan myth accounts for why this supreme god, though acknowledged as the origin of everything, is now felt to be distant from the daily affairs of human beings. It is said that Nyame once dwelt close to humankind, just above the earth, so close that an old woman, pounding her fufu (or, in some tellings, reaching up in some daily task), repeatedly struck him with her long pestle.

Wearied or offended by these blows, Nyame withdrew far up into the sky, out of reach; and though the woman tried to build a tower of mortars to climb back up to him, the tower fell, and God remained on high. The story explains, in a homely and human way, the sense that the creator, while supreme and acknowledged, is remote from the immediate concerns of life, which are more often addressed to the nearer spirits and the ancestors. The Akan are a living people with a rich religious and philosophical tradition, and Nyame remains central to their thought and speech, the supreme, eternal creator of the sky, the ultimate source of all things, honoured under his many praise names.

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.