C.- VOTIVE FIGURES

The statues, offerings, votive figures and exvotes are not in Africa an offering dedicated to God or to the gods for a benefit received or the supplication through which they are asked for a grace. The votive figure is usually a statuette, mainly of wood and rarely bronze, which does not exceed twenty-five centimeters. They are small figures, male or female, usually carved with quite coarseness, sometimes by the owners themselves, who are the object of family cults. These protective figures of the family are the object of worship in the family altars. They receive offerings and libations and offerings in exchange for some favor, family protection, a cure, a good harvest, hunting or fishing, protection from a danger and very often the fertility of the fields and of the woman is demanded. They are kept in the altars and family sanctuaries. They represent some ancestor. It is not the exvote or offering dedicated to a higher being, it is that being superior to that which is made an offering, usually an illustrious ancestor, a deity or some being in relation to the cosmogony of the ethnic group. On the contrary, the bronze figurines that appear in the areas of Bandiagará in Dogon territory and in some other places in Africa are not votive figures in the African sense but true votives.