An Asante ceremonial stool, carved from a single piece of wood, with strips of beaten and repoussé silver decoration. The up-curved seat with a raised silver disk at the centre, on five supports, the central one pierced with small squares and with a silver fetter or 'shackle' enclosing the base; the outer four supports carved, fretted and enclosed by three silver bands each. All on a rectangular base which is painted on the underside with a scrolled design.

The silver decoration of this ceremonial stool marks it out as a mmaa dwa or 'woman’s stool'. It is a lavish replica of the stool used by the Queen Mother of Mampon, one of the few royals permitted to embellish a stool in this way. Ceremonial stools were one of the most potent expressions of Asante power, but most took their form from the foremost symbol of the Asante kingdom, the Golden Stool (Sika Dwa Kofi), which according to tradition descended from heaven in the seventeenth century. Stools of mmaa dwa form differed in having five straight pillars beneath the seat instead of a central column and two curved supports.

This example was prepared by Asante woodcarvers and silversmiths for the wedding of Mary, Princess Royal, in 1922. An acompanying note declared that it 'contains all the love of us Queen Mothers and of our women', bound 'with silver fetters, just as we are accustomed to bind our own spirits to the base of our stools.' The anthropologist R.S. Rattray, who was stationed on the Gold Coast at that time, wrote that the stool had been consecrated with a mixture of egg and soot, and carefully painted on its underside. This ceremony was intended to endow Princess Mary with long life. (R.S. Rattray, Ashanti, 1923, pp. 297-298).