Piragua

The rivers offer the basic food to the ethnic groups settled next to their banks. The river is its main source of wealth. Water in abundance, food and transportation. The river and river life preside over most of the population's activities. No wonder when an elder dies, in his pilgrimage to the world of ancestors, once the ritual precepts of his death have been fulfilled, it is the waters of the river that transport him to the afterlife. There will be no lack of offerings in their boats or prayerful attitudes. The river is alive, and it is life that binds material life to that of the spirit world.

Small canoe with three characters, a couple of notables and their rower. These canoes began to be made, by the procedure of lost wax, in the middle of the century XX copying others of greater size already pre-existing wood and snake skin. They seem to owe their inspiration to the migrations of Dogon throughout the century XV that, according to most of the hypotheses, left the Mandé for via the Niger River to reach its current location in the simes of Bandiagará. The pyragua has the form of crocodile, it is supposed to deceive crocodiles who infested the Niger, and the crocodile is one of the mythical animals, one of the first five animals of the creation. Greenish and brown patina. Brown color due, no doubt, to having been buried in the laterite that forms the soils of the West African.