Dame Dame: A Checkers Board Turned Into A Claim About Cleverness

Dame Dame takes its name and its checkered pattern directly from a traditional Akan board game akin to draughts or checkers, and Willis records the symbol as one of the more purely abstract and geometric designs in the whole Adinkra corpus, a repeating grid of alternating squares rather than a picture of any object, animal or scene, closer in visual logic to Nkonsonkonson's repeating chain than to the pictorial designs that dominate most of the sixty core symbols. Its meaning follows from the game itself: intelligence, foresight, and the shifting strategy required to win at a contest of calculation, applied by extension to cleverness and skilful judgment in ordinary life well beyond the game board.

Willis notes the pattern's squares are occasionally rendered with alternating light and dark shading typical of a real checkers board, and occasionally left as an unshaded grid of equal squares, a difference he attributes to individual carvers' stylistic choices rather than to any difference in how the symbol is meant to be read, the strategic-thinking meaning holding constant either way. Willis treats Dame Dame as belonging, with Nkonsonkonson, to the smaller set of Adinkra designs built from pure repeated geometry.