Is there someone in your life you are in conflict with — someone you haven't quite resolved things with — and yet your lives are still deeply intertwined? A sibling. A former partner. A colleague you can't avoid. A community you're frustrated with but can't imagine leaving.
Most of us, if we're honest, have at least one. Someone we are tangled with — not just emotionally, but practically. Someone whose choices affect our life whether we like it or not. Someone whose flourishing and whose failure are, uncomfortably, bound up with our own.
The Akan looked at that exact situation — the one you just thought of — and drew two crocodiles sharing a single stomach.
One body. Two appetites. One unavoidable truth.
Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu
Pronounced foon-toom-foo-NEH-foo den-chem-foo-NEH-foo · Unity in diversity · Shared fate · Democracy and interdependence
The symbol depicts two crocodiles joined at the stomach — one shared belly between them, two distinct heads facing outward. They are the same creature and they are not. They have the same hunger and they fight over food anyway. Everything one swallows feeds them both, and neither of them acts like it.
The Akan proverb that accompanies this symbol is precise about the absurdity of this: the Siamese crocodiles share one stomach, yet they fight over food. It is not a condemnation. It is an observation — delivered with the dry clarity of people who have watched this exact dynamic play out in families, in villages, in courts and councils, across generations. We know you're fighting. We're simply pointing out what you appear to have forgotten.
The symbol does not ask the crocodiles to stop being different. It does not ask them to share nicely or to stop wanting. It asks something harder: can you see what is actually happening here? Can you see the stomach you share, even now, in the middle of the fight?
In Akan society, this was a symbol of democratic life — of what it means to govern, to coexist, to build something together with people who are genuinely different from you and who genuinely disagree with you. It was not naive about conflict. It was, instead, clear-eyed about consequence.
Shared fate is not a feeling. It's a fact.
Here is what makes this symbol uncomfortable in the best possible way. It doesn't ask you to feel connected to the people you're in conflict with. It doesn't ask you to soften your position, or forgive before you're ready, or pretend the disagreement isn't real. It simply points at something that is already true whether you acknowledge it or not.
You share a stomach. That's not a metaphor for how you should feel. It's a description of what is already the case. The person you're fighting with — in your family, your workplace, your community, your country — their wellbeing and yours are already entangled. Their failure costs you. Your victory over them may cost you more than losing would have. The stomach doesn't care who won the argument. It receives everything.
The fight is real. The grievance may be entirely legitimate. And the stomach is still shared. Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu holds all three of these things at once — and refuses to let you drop any of them.
This is the symbol's great maturity. It does not resolve the tension by pretending the crocodiles are the same, or by asking them to become the same. It resolves nothing, actually. It simply makes the situation legible — and in doing so, it hands you back the choice about what to do with it.
The stomach you share but rarely name
Think about where this dynamic lives in your own life right now. Not in the abstract — but specifically.
In the family
The inheritance dispute that has cost more in legal fees and broken relationships than the inheritance was ever worth. The sibling standoff that has run so long nobody quite remembers the original wound. The parent and adult child who are both, separately, suffering — and who could alleviate each other's suffering immediately, if either could find the way to begin. The stomach is shared. The food is going to waste.
In the workplace
The team fractured by internal competition — individuals so focused on who gets the credit that nobody notices the project deteriorating. The colleagues who would each rather see a plan fail than see the other succeed. At some point the stomach — the shared outcome, the collective result — stops being fed at all. And both crocodiles go hungry.
In the wider world
Communities, cities, nations — divided along lines that feel absolute and irreconcilable, each side convinced that the other's loss is their gain. And underneath all of it: the shared stomach. The economy, the environment, the infrastructure, the social fabric that everyone depends on and that nobody can maintain alone. The crocodiles fight. The stomach waits.
In every case, the symbol isn't asking you to make peace immediately or to abandon your position. It is asking you to be honest about what the fight is actually costing — not just them, but you.
Why Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu is the symbol of this moment
We are living through a period of profound fragmentation. The tools that connect us have also, somehow, made it easier than ever to forget what we share. To curate our world until the other crocodile is no longer visible — only their head, only their teeth, only their appetite, which looks so different from ours.
But the stomach hasn't gone anywhere. Climate. Public health. The economy. The long-term wellbeing of the communities, families and institutions we all depend on. These don't organise themselves along the lines of our disagreements. They are simply there — receiving everything, regardless of who won the argument.
The Akan did not invent this symbol to make people feel good about each other. They invented it to make people see clearly. And clarity — the uncomfortable, unglamorous, non-negotiable kind — is exactly what shared fate requires.
You cannot win a war against yourself. The crocodiles can exhaust each other fighting — or they can eat. The stomach doesn't wait forever.
Who came to mind when you started reading this?
You don't have to name them here. But if someone surfaced — a person, a group, a relationship that has been quietly costing you — that's the symbol doing its work. Funtumfunefu Denkyemfunefu has a way of making the invisible stomach suddenly very visible.
Leave it in the comments — even if it's just "I know exactly who this is about." And to explore this symbol alongside the other 72 Adinkra symbols — each with its own name, origin, and full meaning — visit our Adinkra Symbols Hub.
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