Black Experience | Page 9

iron-working. Archeological evidence
shows that West Africans were making pottery and terracotta sculpture
as much as two thousand years ago, Three- dimensional forms seem to
have held a particular interest for West African artists. During the last

century, art critics have gone beyond considering this art as "primitive"
and have begun to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. In fact, in recent
years, African art has had considerable influence on contemporary
artists.
The two forms of African art best known outside Africa are music and
the dance. African music contrasts with European music in its use of a
different scale and in concentrating less on melodic development and
more on the creation of complex and subtle rhythmic patterns.
Musicians used to view African music as simple and undeveloped, but
now musicologists admit that African rhythms are more complex and
highly developed than rhythms in European music. Africans like to
sing and to develop songs for all occasions: religious songs, work songs,
and songs for leisure. African singing is also marked by the frequent
use of a leader and a chorus response technique. African dance, like its
music, builds on highly complex rhythmic patterns. It too is closely
related to all parts of the African's daily life. There are dances for social
and for ritual occasions. The most common use of the dance was as an
integral part of African religious rites.
African religion has usually been defined as fetish worship-the belief
that specific inanimate objects are inhabited by spirits endowed with
magical powers. While this view of African religion is partly true, it
obscures more than it clarifies. The fetish is believed to have some
powers of its own, but, in general, it derived them from its close
association with a dead ancestor. Behind the fetish was the religion of
ancestor worship, and the fetish is better understood as a religious
symbol. Ancestor worship was also part of the African's strong family
ties and his powerful kinship patterns. Behind the realm of this fetish
and ancestor worship lay another world of distant and powerful deities
who had control over the elemental natural forces of the universe.
While this religion might be described as primitive, it cannot be viewed
as simplistic. It involved a series of complex ideas about fetishes,
ancestors, and deities which required a high degree of intelligence.
The intricacies of theology, law, medicine, and politics made it
necessary to develop a complex system of oral education. Europeans,
who tended to identify knowledge with writing, had long assumed that,
because there was no written language in early Africa, there could be
no body of knowledge. After the arrival of Islam, Arabic provided a

written form within which West African ideas could be set down.
Only recently have scholars become aware of the libraries and the
many publications to be found in West Africa. Two of these books
were responsible for providing historians with detailed information
about the customs and social structure of the area. One was the Tarikh
al-Fattiish, the chronicle of the seeker after knowledge, written by
Mahmud Kati in the early fifteenth century. The other was the Tarikh
al-Sudan, the chronicle of the Western Sudan, written by Abd
al-Rahman as-Sadi about the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The society of West Africa was stratified in several different ways. It
was divided in terms of differing occupations: farmers, merchants,
priests, scholars, laborers, and a wide variety of craftsmen. The social
ranking assigned to these occupation divisions varied according to the
importance of each occupation.
Society was also divided in terms of clans, families, and villages. At
the same time, there was a hierarchical division based on the varying
degrees of political power each group exercised within its society.
Some had the power to become chiefs and rulers. Some had the right to
choose and depose rulers, and others could limit and define the rights
of the rulers. However, almost everywhere there was a clear trend
toward increasing centralized authority and decreasing popular
participation. The centralization of power in West Africa never reached
the extremes of absolute monarchy which occurred in Europe, and there
was never the same need for revolutionary social changes to revive
democratic participation within African society.
In an old Asante ritual, connected with the enthronement of a ruler, the
people pray that their ruler should not be greedy, should not be hard of
hearing, should not act on his own initiative nor perpetuate personal
abuse nor commit violence on his people, While the right to rule was
generally passed on from generation to generation within a single
family, the power did not immediately and automatically fall on the
eldest son within that family. Instead, another family had the power to
select the next ruler from among a large number of potential candidates
within the ruling family. If the ruler