African aesthetics — across the continent

To speak of African aesthetics is immediately to acknowledge the diversity that the name conceals — the continent holds within it traditions as different from one another as they are from anything elsewhere, and any account of African creative sensibility must resist the generalization that flattens into caricature. What is recoverable are particular traditions: the Yoruba insistence on balance and completeness, the Dogon cosmological geometry, the praise-singer's relationship between beauty and social truth. Each of these is a full aesthetic philosophy, not a regional variation on something more central.