of trade became all
important for the future--the exportation of slaves and the importation
of guns and gunpowder.

West African manufacturing demonstrated a considerable amount of skill in
a wide variety of crafts. These included basket-weaving, pottery making,
woodworking and 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 u