The Kenyan scholar J. Mbiti named two dimensions of the specific orientation of Africans to the past with terms taken from the Swahili language: sasa – now and zalgani – long ago. Sasa is a person’s awareness of his or her own existence, the time in which he or she is or has been participating. The older the person, the longer the period of sasa. The future has only a short value, there is no future “in itself”, thinking about the future is a very short projection of sasa on current needs. And if sasa is an autonomous micro-time, then zalgani is a macro-time, everything that has happened before the current moment, the “graveyard of time,” as J. Mbiti put it. However, this spectacular definition should not be understood literally, in the spirit of contemporary European culture, because the “graveyard of time” is alive, it is constantly present in the African present.

This orientation to the past, the constant interpenetration of sasa and zalgani, finds expression in various areas of traditional African cultures: in the field of religious beliefs and rituals, in the field of oral literature, in the field of art, and so on.

The cultures of the African continent have made a significant contribution to the treasury of world culture. First of all, jazz, born on the basis of African traditions, organically entered the context of European culture; its rhythms bring pleasure, so it made a lightning career and was immediately included in the classical repertoire. The emergence of African plastics in Europe was of the greatest importance for the world of artistic plasticity. The echoes of Black African culture can be found in the works of such great artists of the twentieth century as M. Vlaminck, A. Derain, G. Matisse, and, above all, Picasso. The latter managed to combine the two-dimensional perspective adopted in Western painting with the third dimension represented in the forms of African sculpture.

It was this combination that led to Cubism. Artists from the most abstract art groups took up the Cubist forms of African sculpture, and Cubism went down in the history of world culture as one of the most interesting artistic movements. African sculpture also became a source of inspiration for the works of representatives of German Expressionism – E. Nolde, E. Hirchner and others. The ability to synthesize, which characterizes the art of Black Africa, is still one of the directions of artistic search of the world culture. Such poets and writers as Guillaume Appolinier, Jean Cocteau, and others succumbed to the spell of African culture, and artistic circles enthusiastically greeted the collections of myths, poetry, and legends collected on the Black Continent by Leo Frobenius and later published in numerous books and articles. A number of other examples could be cited that demonstrate the life-giving influence of Black African cultures on world culture, but their significance for people of the twentieth century is clear.

La négritude is a concept that has developed over the past 60 years in the context of the worldwide struggle of peoples of color for freedom and unity. It represents the intellectual response of French-educated Antillean and Senegalese blacks to French colonial rule, in particular the policy of assimilation. Martinique’s E. Césaire first used the term “negritude” in 1935. In modern France, a dark-skinned person is called “black,” which used to be “negro,” which had a derogatory connotation, similar to the American “nigger.” E. Césaire deliberately based the term on a word that had negative connotations.

After being picked up and developed by the Senegalese intelligentsia, Negritude, for example, in the 40s and 50s, became a philosophical and historical manifestation of Africans’ aspirations for political and cultural freedom and self-realization. Since the independence of the French-speaking African territories, it has continued to serve as a vehicle for the expression of African aspirations in the modern world.

A leading ideologist of negritude, Césaire’s younger contemporary, L. S. Senghor (for a time the president of Senegal), interpreted negritude as a set of cultural values of Black Africa, and later formulated the concept: negritude is a set of civilizational values-cultural, economic, social, political-that characterize black peoples, or rather the Negro African world.

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All significant moments of human life: harvesting, funeral and wedding ceremonies, initiation of young men and women – are accompanied by the appearance of masks. It is believed that during dances and other ceremonial actions, ancestral spirits endow the wearer of the mask with their mystical power.

The material used to make masks is extremely diverse: it can be wood, bone, terracotta, or a combination of these materials with the addition of leather, fur, hair, feathers, plant fibers, teeth, beads, etc. The patterns on the masks are cut out and covered with paint, or simply painted, or made of beads and shells. Every detail of the ornament has a symbolic meaning. For example, a zigzag is the path of ancestors, a difficult path that must be walked with dignity so that the spirits of the ancestors are satisfied; a chess pattern represents the duality of the world, the opposition of good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, masculine and feminine. In order to enhance the expressiveness of the masks, artists use very peculiar techniques. For example, the eyes and mouth are made in the form of cylinders protruding above a flat surface, the nose is connected to the forehead, and the massive brow arches are enlarged with shadows around the eyes.

In general, African masks are characterized by a special internal rhythm, they are created in a certain “emotional key”.

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Creole languages were created by mixing French, English, Spanish or Portuguese with African languages.

In southern Africa, Afrikaans developed as a result of combining various local dialects with the Dutch language. In most African countries, one of the official languages is often a European language, the one spoken by the colonizers.

The art of Africa covers different regional areas, has several historical epochs, but constitutes a single artistic system. The original art of the African peoples developed mainly in western Sudan, on the Guinea coast and in the Congo. It was here that the artistic creativity of the peoples of this continent reached its highest flowering: sculpture, painting and architecture. African fine art is the art of West and Central Africa.

The art of the peoples of East Africa and northern Sudan, the regions where Islam was spread, has a different character. Its influence influenced the development of artistic culture, in which sculpture and painting were almost not represented. A special, local, Bantu-Indo-Arabic culture developed here, connected with Iran, India, and the medieval Arab world. However, both in the northern part of Sudan and on the east coast, the artistic creativity of the local African population was embodied mainly in folk architecture and wood carving.

Monuments of ancient African art were also discovered in South Africa. For example, in the Matopo Mountains in southern Rhodesia, in the 1920s, rock paintings of mythological content, scenes of agricultural and domestic rituals were found. Undoubtedly, these monuments were created by peoples of high culture who were already familiar with agriculture.

In the extreme south of the African continent, in the Dragon Mountains, and in the mountainous regions of Southwest Africa, numerous paintings and drawings have been discovered. The style, subjects, and nature of the images are very different, so it is likely that the rock paintings of South Africa belong to different eras and are monuments to the artistic creativity of different peoples.

Africa is considered the cradle of body art (the art of decorating the naked body). The artistic culture of its peoples has preserved many artistic traditions of primitive society. Therefore, inauthentic art forms associated with the ancient African beliefs about the beauty of the human body have become extremely popular on the Black continent. Tattoos, piercings, body paintings, and changes in the natural proportions of the human body are still widespread in the culture of African tribes.

Both men and women decorated their bodies for decorative purposes and to show their social status (for example, women had tattoos that could be used to determine their marital status, and men’s tattoos showed hunting skills or military victories). Also, for ritual purposes, cuts were made on the body and face in the form of sacred symbols, rubbing a mixture of ash and saltpeter into the wound. After the wounds healed, rough scars formed on the skin.

Piercing of various parts of the body was practiced as early as several millennia BC. Africans wore all kinds of metal earrings that were inserted into their ears, eyebrows, lips, and nose. In general, African tribes are the only social environment where a positive attitude towards piercings has remained unchanged for several decades.

The lands to the west of Egypt were historically called the Maghreb. In Arabic, Maghreb means “the country where the sun sets” or “the west”. Sometimes only the country of Morocco was called the Maghreb.

In the VII-VIII centuries, the countries of North Africa-Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco-were part of the Arab Caliphate. The art of these nations was called “Maghrebi” or “Moorish”.

The history of the terms “Moors” and “Moorish”, derived from the Greek word for “dark”, dates back to the ancient era, when the Moors were the indigenous Berber population of the ancient state of Mauritania, located in the northwestern part of Africa.

The first significant monuments of Arab-Berber architecture were created in North Africa in the late 7th century. Among them, the most prominent is the majestic Sidioukba Mosque in Kairouan (Tunisia), founded as the cathedral mosque of the city, which was considered “the most dry city of Islam,” its modern appearance was finally formed by the end of the 9th century. The appearance of the Kairouan mosque is characterized by the features of fortification architecture: the building is surrounded by blank massive walls, reinforced by buttresses, with a minaret in the form of a tall and powerful square tower. The main compositional core, a huge courtyard, is surrounded by marble and granite columns supporting horseshoe-shaped arches.

Very little is known about medieval painting in North Africa. Ancient manuscripts have survived, decorated with exquisite geometric ornamentation, dominated by gold and intense blue.

Applied arts, called “Spanish-Moorish”, reached a high level of perfection. Craft workshops produced brocade, expensive silk fabrics, ivory, earthenware, and beautifully decorated weapons. During the early Middle Ages, European countries received precious fabrics almost exclusively from the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as from Sicily and Moorish Spain.

The earliest products of Spanish-Moorish ceramics date back to the second half of the 14th century. These are the so-called Alhambra vases. Among them, the most perfect is the Fortuna vase.

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