Dwennimmen

Dwennimmen, literally ram's horns, is drawn as two curled horns joined at their base, belonging to a single animal rather than to two facing rams as the design's paired curls might first suggest, a reading Willis is explicit about correcting since the joined-base structure is the detail carrying the symbol's whole meaning. A ram fights with force when provoked but is also, in Akan proverbial tradition, understood as a humble animal despite its evident strength, submitting readily where submission is due; Dwennimmen's proverb accordingly reads strength and humility together as a single, non-contradictory ideal, the capacity for real force paired with the self-restraint and humility not to deploy it needlessly.

Willis places this pairing among the more explicitly ethical of the sixty core symbols, less a description of a natural or social fact than a stated standard of conduct a wearer or the community around the wearer is meant to be reminded of. The ram, dwennini in Akan, also carries broader associations with masculine strength and leadership in Akan proverbial speech beyond this one symbol, and Willis notes several other sayings involving rams circulate alongside the Adinkra corpus without all of them having a dedicated cloth stamp of their own, Dwennimmen being the ram-derived saying that did acquire one.

Because it states a leadership virtue rather than a purely personal one, Dwennimmen recurs on cloth associated with chiefs and other figures holding real coercive authority, where the combination it names, power that could be exercised paired with the humility not to overreach, speaks directly to the ethics of holding office among the Akan; Willis records its use alongside Adinkrahene in some chieftaincy-associated cloth programmes, though the two symbols carry distinct meanings and are not interchangeable. It is also worn more broadly at funerals and other occasions where a reminder toward humble strength is thought fitting, following the general pattern by which an originally leadership-coded Adinkra symbol widens into everyday devotional and commemorative use over time, the same broadening Willis documents, to varying degrees, across several of the corpus's more overtly ethical designs rather than treating Dwennimmen as an isolated case.

Willis notes the joined double-horn design of Dwennimmen is sometimes rendered with the two curls closer together or further apart depending on the carver, a stylistic range that does not affect the reading of the two horns as belonging to one ram rather than two separate animals, the detail Willis treats as essential to the symbol's meaning.