The Yombe, like other ethnic groups in Africa, often depict motherhood in art in the form of large-breasted nursing women, whether in carved wood, lost-wax bronze, ivory, stone or terracotta.

The Yombé are a Melano-African ethnic group of the Kiyombe ethnic-linguistic group, a dialect of Kikongo, the language of the Kongo, made up of some 350,000 people equally divided between Angola, Congo Brazzaville and Congo Kinshasa.

The theme of motherhood is universal and recurrent in art throughout black Africa. African maternity statues do not usually express the emotional bonds between mother and child, as they symbolise the fertility of women and the earth, belong to the domain of the sacred and are often displayed on an altar. The mothers are in a hieratic position, very well sculpted, while the child, often a small adult, is barely sketched, especially the body, and there are almost never any glances between mother and child.

In many African ethnicities, the left side of the body is associated with the sacred: in most black African maternity wards, the child is positioned to the left of the mother or suckling from the left breast.