Akua'ba Fertility figure

The akua'ba expresses the mother's wishes for her future child's beauty and well-being: the flatness of the high, round head for the flatness she will induce by massaging her infant's soft skull, the ringed neck, a sign of beauty, health, and prosperity in Akan culture, the beads symbol of material prosperity, and above all the small breasts – because a baby-girl is preferable to continue the matrilineage, in a Asante society, in which inheritance was through maternal line.