President Senghor sees the critical standards of African art as originating from the nature of the black soul, and the black soul as originating from the environment that gave it life. These standards, long unknown to the white world and now exerting influence in contemporary art, will henceforth play a more integral role in the art world.

A country, like a continent, can be described in myriad ways. Manuals of all kinds can tell us, in color, about the relief of a place's landscape, the itineraries of its major passageways, its economy and history, its vision of God and the Universe, its understanding of time, and its desire to preserve, for its dead, timeless caverns nestled among the ages.

But history, geography, ethnography, and anthropology all fall short in depicting, in all of its fullness and nuance, man's journey on this planet.

Before it even occurred to man to arrange...

You do not currently have access to this content.