Tabouret

Seat with a large base and short strongly concave foot, ending with a flat base. The seat with long slightly concave and short convex sides, is decorated with carved animal figures, separated in the middle by a double zig zag motif: on the one side a tortoise and a crocodile, on the other a bird of prey.   On the foot there is a snake.

Amongst the Ashanti, famous stool carvers, the stool of the family chief was sacred: in their absence, it was put in the middle of the house, to symbolically indicate their presence. The presence of the tortoise could, on the other hand, be taken back to the Dogon, who considered this animal sacred. The snake is a commonly recurrent theme in religious circles of the Western African ethnos, highlighting the sacredness of a chief, to whom this stool surely belonged.