Female Figure (akua'ba) (late 1800s–early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Female Figure (akua'ba) (late 1800s–early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

An infertile woman would be advised by a priest to commission such a sculpture and care for it as if it were her baby. With the aim to induce fertility, or to ensure the birth of a healthy and beautiful daughter, the akua'ba figure is carried on the woman's back inside her wrapper. After a successful birth, the figure is placed in the priest's shrine as an offering, or it is given to the newborn as a toy.

Object facts

• Title: Female Figure (akua'ba)
• Date: late 1800s–early 1900s
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Ghana, Fante-style maker
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: Wood, hair, resin, and bone
• Dimensions: Overall: 42.9 x 4.6 x 5.1 cm (16 7/8 x 1 13/16 x 2 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1975.158

A detail from the museum

Akua'ba are always female, both because Akua’s first child was a girl, and because the Akan and Fante societies are matrilineal, meaning that it is women that extend the family line.

Collection credit

Gift of Katherine C. White

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fagg, William. African Tribal Images; the Katherine White Reswick Collection. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1968.
• Petridis, Constantijn. South of the Sahara: Selected Works of African Art. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003.
• Petridis, Constantine, "African Art Revisited", Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine. Vol. 43 no. 09, November 2003

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.