Dwennimmen: Two Horns, One Ram

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.