An extract from the writings of James Baldwin ( 1924 - 1987 ), an African American author. Here he discusses a speech by Leopold Senghor, poet and former president of Senegal in West Africa.

" One of the things ( perhaps the thing ) which distinguishes Africans from Europeans is the comparative urgency of their ability to feel.

The feeling and the perception, for the African, are one and the same thing. This is the difference between European and African reasoning: the reasoning of the African is not compartmentalized...

... the difference between the function of the arts in Europe and their function in Africa lies in the fact that in Africa the function is more present and pervasive, is infinitely less special, 'is done by all, for all'.

Thus 'Art for Art's sake', is not a concept which makes any sense in Africa. The division between art and life out of which such a concept comes, does not exist there.

Art itself is taken to be perishable, to be made again each time it disappears or is destroyed. What is clung to, is the spirit which makes art possible.

And the African idea of this spirit is very different from the European idea. 

European art attempts to imitate nature. African art is concerned with reaching beyond and beneath nature, to contact and itself become part of  'la force vital'.

The distortions used by African artists to create a work of art, are not at all the same distortions... of almost every artist in the West today.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but rather the reality of the force the thing contains.

Thus ( it may be that ) the moon is fecundity, the elephant force.

...the ( African ) work of art expresses, contains, and is itself a part of that energy which is life. "