AKWABA

Goddess

In the Akan culture of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, the akua'ba, also spelled akwaba or akuba, is a ritual fertility figurine. Its name translates as the child of Akua, after the legend of a woman named Akua who, long childless, carried a wooden statuette consecrated by a priest until she conceived. Carved above all among the Ashanti and the Fanti, these effigies are recognised by their great flat, discoid head, a stylisation of the Akan ideal of beauty — a high, oval forehead gently flattened in early infancy. Young women wishing to bear children carry them against the back or at the waist, tend them and dress them like real children, in a logic of sympathetic magic aiming at a happy pregnancy and beautiful offspring. The Akan word akwaaba means, moreover, welcome, which explains the frequent association of this name with hospitality and the home. The akua'ba thus belongs more to the ritual object and the symbol of motherhood than to a constituted deity, even though it strongly embodies the values of fertility and of the continuity of the lineage.