Through African Eyes

Attending "Through African Eyes" was a very good experience that I got to go to. It was about an exhibition that is going to be at the DIA. I learned that the exhinition is going to be about cutlural exchanges between Africans and Europeans over 500 years. African art is very important to African people. It shaped their society and every sculpture the Africans had meant something very important to their way of life.

For the Africans that thought that whiteness were spirits to be feared. They thought Europeans were mysterious strangers becayse they came and went during short trade visits. Africans often saw European technology as magical, mysterious and welcome. Europeans were carried by African shoulders. Europeans called Africans monkeys. Being called a monkey was the most stereotyped name to the Africans. Europeans also had traders of enslaved Africans. There was absence, silence, shame, and disbelief. Absence was slave trade, silence was when Africans were kidnapped and enslaved, shame was when Africans enslaved other Africans. and disbelief was when slaves were taken away across sea, but no one thought the stories were true.

Africans became to be exposed to or learned the European system of education, which was based on reading and writing. Africans used oral traditions to share knowledge and information about their pass to other generations. Today African artists now create art that looks back on the colonial period, with critical commentary.

I think that going to this persentation about Africa helped me understand about the African culture and how it was hard for people back then to work and do something that they did not want to do. I learned that people learned other traditions from other cultures and did not always learn from their own.