KUNTUNKANTAN

Letter to the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo Discussion Group wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com googlemail.com I had earlier drawn attention in this forum to what I have described as a breakthrough in Adinkra research. Adinkra is a system of graphic symbols created by the Akan of Ghana and developed in succeeding centuries to the present day. The symbols primarily represent social philosophy and metaphysical conceptions. They are used in both sacred and secular contexts, on clothing, in architecture and as variety of design roles beyond those. Google search would suggest that it is one of the most pervasive of African communication systems since it emerges in various countries and contexts in and outside Africa. My earlier posts had presented claims by Kofi Abua-Iyen,a lecturer at the University of Legon to have developed a exploration of Adinkra symbolism that incorporates and extends significantly its symbolic potential. Certain paradoxes emerge, however,

The depth at the centre of Kuntunkantan becomes for Atua Kofo the matrix where the splinters of this Face are encountered.The play of darkness in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks becomes an expression of the notion of Blasphemy at the heart of existence, but blasphemy, not as a defiance of the sacred but as an affirmation of a mode of being that is totally Other in terms of the criteria by which human understanding of order is organised. The lady at the extreme right of the painting, supposedly St.Anne, purportedly pointing at the Child Jesus, to Atua Kofo, has an angularity of posture that suggests that beneath the elegant folds of the exquisitely coloured drapery is hidden, not the body of a woman but the body of a centaur, having the body of an animal but the face of a human being, as attested by the animal crouch of the body, or at least something that only seems to be human but in reality is something that if we were to see in its true nature, would repel sight with an abhorrence

The womb of Iya Nla, the chthonic power which resonates in the cosmic force of the Odu, is the emptiness at the centre of the tray which is the physical template of Ifa divination and which represents the dialogue between various forms of being in Ifa. An Emptiness both physical and NonPhysical, seemingly void yet alive with intense fecundative power. This LivingVoid is the space at the centre of Kuntunkantan where the convergence of the dance of circles constitutes the play of the possibilities of being, where the movement of the sea, the rhythms of earth, sky, rain, sun and moon, the oscillation between Life and Death, the patterns shaped by the transformations of all beings, within and beyond life, human and animal, plants and spirits, and those enigmatic beings who are neither human, animal, plant, nor spirit, but who, at times, are related to them, resonate in tune with the drumming, dancing, and feasting going on in the rambling palace of Iya Nla . Gbogbo ilu ni mbe l’

The interlaced circles of Kuntunkantan, to Atua Kofo, represented a sublime home for the flexible and yet vast intersection of possibilities that is Ifa. The dance of circles emerges as the dialogue between the selves of the human being through the Odu. The entire structure of circular forms in unceasing motion around a centre that integrates them all evokes the play of meanings between the human self in its double but united selves and between these and the universe of possibility represented by the human world, and the world beyond the world immediately accessible to human beings but which shapes it, the world where dwell the Orisa, the underlying animating forms of the universe. She also visualised the circles of Kuntunkantan as representing the actualisation of human possibility through the four basic lines from which all possibilities in the Ifa system are developed. Extrapolating from the traditional framework, Atua Kofo saw these four basic lines as evoking the divisions of

Or Ifa could be understood as a book, which contains within it all possibilities of existence. Each chapter represents a particular structure of possibilities. But what book is made up of chapters which are words developed from the symbolic significance of numbers along with being alive and conscious? The chapters are not simply an inert compilation of words but are themselves living forms, entities which have their own sense of direction, and whose origin and the larger part of their significance is unknown to their human collaborators, the Ifa priests. How was she to represent, in a memorably simple but graphic manner, Ifa’s dialogue between various universes of being? Its symphony of voices speaking across various worlds of existence which speak to each other though the instruments of the system, the Odu, instruments which are wondrous in being both forms of the human mind and non-human forms? How does one recall with graphic force the fact that in Ifa, the various selves o

A keen sensitivity to the architectonic power of Ifa, the sense it gives of a form extending into infinite space but which is shaped into intelligibility through numerical and verbal configurations, led Atua Kofo to interpret the Ifa system in terms of Kuntunkantan so as to integrate her understanding of Ifa through a simple but powerfully evocative symbol, a symbol recalled with ease but which would encapsulate Ifa’s vast universe of explicit and implicit meanings. She had been pondering her experiences with Ifa and was amazed by the manner in which the system developed a complex architecture of meaning, like a building with an infinite number of rooms, but, which, paradoxically, can be viewed as a single building, whose outline could be discerned and its structure mapped and explored, if one looked at it from a particular angle. What she also found particularly impressive was the development of vast complexity, of infinite possibility of meaning and interpretation, from a very s