African American Culture

Culture, which is a word that is very difficult to define, is very much engrained in the African people. The culture and art of African people expresses values, attitudes, and thoughts which help to represent the products of their past experiences and it also provides a way of learning about their history. Throughout this paper, you will learn about the culture and art of Africa and its people.
As we begin to think about Africa and its, we must also consider how Western perceptions of "race" and "racial" difference have influenced our notions about the history of Africa. These ideas, which have usually stood out against the presumed inferiority of black peoples with the superiority of whites, arose in Western societies as Europeans sought
For Iliffe, the factor which most strongly shapes the character of African cultures is the African environment. Iliffe believes that Africans inhabit an environment whose aridity, infertile soils and profusion of diseases create particularly difficult challenges for humans. He sees the history of Africa as a process by which Africans surmount these challenges through agricultural innovation and sheer hard work. Of course, other historians disagree with the views of Davidson and Iliffe, and instead seek other factors which help to explain differences between Africans and other human societies. Thus part of the task of students who study African art is to ask themselves whether they see in it expressions of values and ideas which are unique, or whether they see manifestations of a common human
Djenné was situated advantageously, for aside from its location on the Niger -- a great navigable river rich in fish -- it also lay within the Niger's "inland delta," where annual floods carry moisture and fertile silt onto farmlands. A town had already developed here by the 3rd century BC, and over succeeding centuries would become the hub of a steadily-expanding trade network. Initially, Djenné served as a market for local products from the inland delta and adjacent areas, but by about 400 AD it had begun attracting traders from distant desert and forest regions. Thus Djenné has changed our understanding of West African history by showing that long before Islamic North African merchants began regularly traversing the Sahara, already West Africa had developed trading networks which facilitated exchanges of products from desert, savanna and forest