INTRODUCTION

Before presenting a sketch of the general characteristics of the musics to be found in Central Africa, such as their social functions and their relations with language and with dance, let us remind the reader, when approaching traditional African cultures, to be wary of relying too much on the rationality inherent in Western thought, with its tendency to distinguish and to categorise.

I have shown elsewhere that in African civilisations the world is almost invariably apprehended in the multiplicity of its aspects as a dynamic ensemble, as a coherent whole displaying a diversity whose elements are not only not mutually exclusive but rather tend to complement each other. All of these elements are linked by a multiplicity of bundles of relations internal to a universe which implies no separation of the metaphysical from the physical (Arom 1974: 3–6).

Consequently, the notion of art, and that of musical art in particular, in sub-Saharan Africa depends upon quite other mental categories than it does in the West. As Senghor observes: