As in Europe, there are professional sculptors in Africa as artists who mainly make custom made to order. Then there are the artisans who make in small series always repetitive motives and there are what is called in Germany Schrebergartenschnitzer. Hobby carver for gnomes and garden dwarfs. The African counterpart is the farmer, who smokes pot nicely in the dry season and then carves ancestors and spirits as a sideline, because there is a demand outside of Africa. Mostly of people who want to have authentically primitive figures of happy people closed to nature in their living room, so that the primitive, nature-loving feeling may rub off on them.

Whether Lobi from Burkina Faso or Moba from Togo, in most cases they are garden dwarfs from small-scale production or freaky drafts from a broad farmer, whose wife constantly scolds him and says: "This pagan shit will not stand on my compound to scare the poor kids, look, you'll scrounge that fast to the next best European, who else wants that, and by then put that stuff in the holy storeroom. "

"Oh yes, here, the sauce of yesterday, a lizard fell into it, nobody eats anymore, you can have it to pour it on the holy spirit."

In Germany there are women who do not like stuff like that as well. They even do extra study so they are authorized to bring the scraps back to Africa. Therefore, the farmer prefers not to sign, otherwise they come to him to unload it again. The anger with his wife would be inevitable. Still, there are some very strange Europeans who spend almost their entire lives collecting names of carving people and asking questions as to whether this or that character is from him or his uncle. Depending on the mood, the answer is yes or no, and the moment when this strange person with his strange questions wants to take a picture showing the stoned farmer next to his gnome is also very nice. Many farmers were already discovered for a career in an ethnological museum and hyped there as a famous artist.

Since a garden gnome is profane in Germany and a garden gnome from Africa sacred, a collector of African garden gnomes would never mix it with every day objects. That would be some kind of blasphemy that was invented by ethnologists and is now being recited by female ethnologists. "Oh my god, evil white men have stolen the holy garden gnomes out of colonial power, or at least put the poor carver under pressure to sell his holy items more cheaply as it was later offered on the evil capitalist market - desecration, oh Lord, acceptable guilt, and atonement too. "

In addition to the many garden gnomes that are described as genuine and authentic, the above figure is even more genuine and much more authentic and by a true artist. As we all learned from a swedish Miss Greta, the climate will change so much that we all have to fear. Not so the farmer of the Moba ethnic group in northern Togo. This figure, pictured above, has been in the onion fields of the family patriarchal lineage of Kofi Moussa the Elder since the sixteenth century. At that time, one of his ancestors visited another uncle further north, who had a direct connection to a fourth Sirius' side star. From there came the prophesied news that one day more water would fall from the sky. "Make a figure and make a hole funnel at the top that will hold exactly may be 200 cubic centimeters of water and look and let your child's children look and I tell you it's getting wet!"