Africa is built with mud.
Throughout the continent, the mud molds the shape of the life of Africans. His villages, his houses, his utensils, his stables, his barns ... and also his toys.
I met the child of this photograph in southeast of Burkina Faso. I advanced with the car on a dirt track and I could see him while he crossed it. He walked slowly and pulled a string in which they aligned, one after another, a series of small ways, impossible to identify from distance.
I stopped to talk with him and turned out that the forms were Cebu cows - the most frequent cattle in the area - made in mud. Very timidly, he told me that he was his author. I asked him to show them and they seemed beautiful. In each of them everything was faithfully reproduced: the cornice, the hump, the legs ... the result was a coarse but suggestive volume. And very fragile, since the mud had not gone through any cooking process.
His father arrived, smiling and happy for the praise that I was giving his son's work. It was not surprising to know that, while the child passed his time playing with his own flock on a scale, his older brothers grazed, far from the town, the cattle of the small family herd.
I remember that I thought that, perhaps, the child got, thanks to the little magic of his simple toys, staying together with his brothers. And emotionally link with its more than likely destiny.
Pepe Navarro
