A Second, Darker Reading The Tradition Does Not Set Aside

Willis records that Epa also carries an uncomfortable historical resonance with the era of the transatlantic slave trade, an association he discusses directly rather than setting aside, since the same instrument of restraint that stands for a justice system's fairness in one register also recalls, in a Ghanaian coastal historical context that includes former slave-trading forts, a use of bondage that had nothing to do with justice at all. Willis does not treat this as undermining the symbol's more common legal reading but as a second, darker layer of meaning the same object can carry depending on the historical context a viewer brings to it, and he records both readings as genuinely present in how the symbol is discussed rather than treating one as the sole correct interpretation.

Willis records that discussions of Epa in contemporary Ghanaian commentary sometimes explicitly separate its two readings for a modern audience, distinguishing law-and-order use of the symbol from any implied endorsement of historical bondage, a clarification he treats as a reasonable modern response to a symbol whose object happens to carry two genuinely unrelated historical associations rather than a correction to an error in the tradition itself.