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Duafe: A Comb Carved For Care As Much As For Use

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Duafe: A Comb Carved For Care As Much As For Use

Duafe is a wooden comb, drawn with a handle and a row of teeth in a design close to a direct picture of the physical object it names, and Willis records its meaning as feminine beauty, hygiene, love and care, the qualities associated in Akan tradition with a good wife specifically, a gendered reading tied closely to the comb's actual domestic and personal-care use. Wooden combs of the type the symbol depicts were common personal and household objects across the Akan-speaking region, often carved with additional decorative detail beyond their plain practical function, and Willis notes that the comb's combination of an everyday practical object and a carefully finished decorative one mirrors the symbol's own combination of a practical virtue, hygiene and care, with an aesthetic one, beauty, in a single reading.

A closely related symbol in the corpus, Duafe's frequent visual pairing on cloth alongside Mmusuyidee, the fern-frond symbol of good fortune and the removal of misfortune, recorded separately in this atlas, reflects a broader Adinkra convention of pairing a specifically feminine-coded design with a general blessing symbol on cloth intended for women's ceremonial wear. Willis records this pairing as one of several documented conventions by which Adinkra cloth composed for a specific gendered occasion combines more than one symbol to build a fuller, more particular statement.

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