Owo Foro Adobe, the snake climbs the raffia palm, states a genuinely striking natural image as its proverb: a snake, an animal with no limbs and no obvious means of climbing, nonetheless ascends a tall, difficult tree through patient, careful, repeated movement rather than through any physical advantage a climbing animal would ordinarily need. Willis reads the proverb as praising exactly this gap between apparent capacity and achieved result, diligence and prudent, steady effort succeeding at a task that looks, given the animal's evident limitations, close to impossible, a message about method and persistence mattering more than natural endowment.
Willis notes some renderings show the snake's body coiled fully around the palm's trunk in a continuous spiral while others show only a partial ascent, a compositional choice he treats as an artistic variation rather than a meaningful difference, since either version communicates the same central image of gradual, patient climbing against apparent limitation. Willis records the partial-ascent form as somewhat more common on smaller stamps, where a full coiled spiral is harder to render legibly. Willis treats this as ordinary craft variation rather than a meaningful difference between two competing readings of the proverb.