Jean Laude's work is not just another broad, generalized, vulgarized survey of the artistic and cultural heritage of black Africa, not just another civilized look at exotic and mysterious art in museums and private collections. African art objects had been mere data, documents, and curiosities when, a little more than half a century ago, we "discovered" African art; that is, we reacted aesthetically to it and exhaustively studied the African heritage in our museums in order to classify and record our impressions. We later realized that all we could possibly record was the history of our reaction to an art that we could apprehend only from the outside and will never be able to understand otherwise. The well-known poet, Jean Laude, was aware of this fact from the start.

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