Nkuruma Kesee, big okra, takes as its image an ordinary vegetable grown unexpectedly large, and Willis reads the choice of okra specifically, rather than a more visually striking fruit or animal, as central to the proverb's point: okra is a genuinely humble, everyday crop, and precisely because it carries no prior association with grandeur or importance, an outsized specimen of it makes an unusually clear demonstration that value and potential are not always announced by outward appearance or by a thing's ordinary reputation. He notes this is one of the more understated compositions in the whole corpus, an unremarkable vegetable rather than a sword, a stool, or a mythic animal, which he treats as deliberately fitting the modest, easily underestimated theme the design is built to illustrate.
Willis notes this deliberate ordinariness of subject sets Nkuruma Kesee apart even from the corpus's other plant-derived designs, Aya's fern and Wawa Aba's seed, both of which draw on plants specifically noted for an unusual, striking property, hardiness or resilience, rather than on a plant valued for being entirely unremarkable until the proverb's twist is applied to it. Small in every sense but the one that matters.