Duafe

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.

Duafe is used on cloth and in decorative contexts associated with women specifically, including cloth given or worn in connection with courtship, marriage and domestic life, where its combined message of beauty, care and hygiene as marks of a good wife speaks directly to the gendered social expectations Willis records the symbol as encoding within its historical Akan context. As with several of the corpus's more explicitly gendered symbols, this atlas records the value Duafe names as a documented historical social expectation rather than as an endorsement of that expectation by the atlas itself; the symbol is described here as evidence of what Akan tradition has historically valued and communicated through cloth, a fact about the culture's history rather than a standard imposed on a reader today.

Willis records that carved wooden Duafe combs, as physical objects distinct from the cloth symbol, remain produced and sold as craft items in contemporary Ghana, often marketed to visitors alongside other Akan carved goods, so the symbol's underlying object has a continuing, documented material culture alongside its cloth representation. This continuing market for the physical comb, distinct from its reproduction as a cloth stamp, is one of the clearer cases in the corpus of an Adinkra symbol's source object remaining an ordinary living craft good.