Baoulé Colonée de Côte d'Ivoire. Part of over 50 years.

Colonizers have often been represented through institutional functions such as doctor, police, gendarme or judge. But African humor, the characters keep the skin black and hands in their pockets.

"Colon" art was born at the beginning of the 20th century following orders from colonizers or indigenous people who wanted to have figures "monitoring" the colonists. Anthropomorphic sculptures are dressed in "western" and covered with colors. We distinguish the colonist art before the second world war of the afterwards, until today. The trend is now to make highly stretched forms, designated under the term "threads" which are painted with very bright colors.

Several centuries after the first representations of European merchants and soldiers who carried out transactions with coastal peoples, the colonial presence deeply marked African statuary. In compliance with the canonical proportions in force in ethnic sculpture, the black man, armed, carrying the red chechia, the bolero and the puffy pants appeared. The powers conferred on him within the administered communities made a character whose good graces had to be attracted, including through the worship. Bambara in Mali, Baoule in Côte-d'Ivoire, Ashanti in Ghana, Kamba in Kenya or Makondé in Mozambique integrated him into the "pantheon" of land powers, in the form of wooden sculptures, often polychrome. They are part of what was called "the settlers" later. This term designates the statuettes which, through Africa, represented Western presence or influence. The production of this art form would then be generalized. It will be emptied of its religious character, under the effect of a Western commercial request in works of art and crafts. The authoritarian attributes of the skirmisher will fade from representation in favor of avatars of social success and other external signs of modernity.

The colonists represent a category of people with whom artists or their sponsors have been constantly faced in their daily lives: colonial administrators, soldiers, traders, missionaries.

At the beginning, the settlers were statuettes colored with vegetable dyes, representing whites as perceived by African craftsmen, through the filter of traditional aesthetic cannons. The sculptors then leave primitivism, to tackle representations more faithful to reality, not devoid of a lot of naivety, favoring detail to the anecdote. Rifle, hats, boots, fashionable clothes, plated hairstyles, bras, wine bottles ... Everything is good!

Collecting the colonists is like keeping the often naive look of Africa over Western man.