West Africans do a lovely carved thing of several people together, so that you can collapse the carving into something like a cylinder for storage, but when you open it up, their arms go out and their legs go in and across and you get a kind of hourglass figure, with the top = bowl that you can put things in and the bottom = the legs supporting the bowl part. All carved from one piece of wood. It makes a bowl you can't put soup in, but you can rest another bowl INTO it and it kind of makes a raised trivet. Great wedding gifts. Not sure if Ivorian per se or generic West African... but I'd like to hear more too...