Art is the most eloquent statement any people make about themselves. People all over the world have, for millennia, used art to represent their systems of religious belief, their ideas about political power, to record their history, to describe important events in their lives and the lives of their communities. Art reflects social, economic, and educational systems. This is as much true in Europe and America as it is in Africa. The result is that, by studying art we are able to understand a great deal about the people who made it, or commissioned it.
Art is a primary document for understanding other people, both our contemporaries and our ancestors.
It is as valuable a resource as are the written documents of the past for understanding why people do things as they do. We understand that to most students, Africa and especially African art seem very different, very strange, very abstract, and often very difficult to understand. We have been exposed to the popular literature, films, and television news about Africa as much or more than the students we want to reach, and so we understand what the common misconceptions are about Africa. The greatest barrier we face in overcoming these misconceptions is the idea that African art is exotic, strange, abstract, incomprehensible. Because these works of art don't look like the kind of art students are used to seeing in popular media or in our own museums, students assume that they can never understand what they are seeing, what the objects mean, or who made them.