This iron finial depicting a person riding a horse would have graced the top of a spear. It was manufactured by an unidentified artist in the Sikasso region of present-day Mali. Although we can’t pinpoint the date of its production with certainty, blacksmiths in the area made objects using the same technologies as early as the 1300s. The equestrian figure is of the most important archetypes across Bamana-speaking communities in western Africa and is associated with military, political, economic, and spiritual power.

In 1960, the Museum for Primitive Art in New York (today forming the core of The Michael C. Rockefeller Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) organized an exhibition of 160 works from this region entitled Antelopes and Queens: Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan. The exhibition reinforced the paradigm termed "one tribe, one style," in which formal qualities were equated with entire geographic localities and/or ethnic communities.