Epa: Handcuffs Read As Law, Not As An Abstraction

Epa, handcuffs, takes as its form an actual instrument of legal restraint, and Willis is direct that this makes it one of the smaller number of Adinkra symbols whose meaning is read straightforwardly off the depicted object's real function rather than through an indirect proverb or animal analogy: a set of handcuffs stands for law and its enforcement because that is what handcuffs are, an image of the fairness of a justice system applied properly and the sobering reminder that freedom can be lost through one's own actions.

Willis notes the design communicates both halves of that claim together, law as protection and law as consequence, without the corpus resolving which reading a given piece of cloth is meant to emphasize. Willis notes some renderings show a single pair of cuffs while others show a longer connected chain of several linked cuffs, a variation in scale he reads as intensifying the same basic claim about legal restraint rather than introducing any separate meaning, the longer chain simply making the consequence of wrongdoing appear more extensive or more binding. Willis records the plain single-cuff form as the more frequently reproduced of the two across the sources he surveyed.