Benin art has been practiced without interruption for centuries, and Von
Luschan says that it is "of extraordinary significance that by the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local and monumental art had been
learned in Benin which in many respects equaled European art and developed
a technique of the very highest accomplishment."[24]

Summing up Yoruban civilization, Frobenius concluded that "the technical
summit of that civilization was reached in the terra-cotta industry, and
that the most important achievements in art were not expressed in stone,
but in fine clay baked in the furnace; that hollow casting was thoroughly
known, too, and practiced by these people; that iron was mainly used for
decoration; that, whatever their purpose, they kept their glass beads in
stoneware urns within their own locality, and that they manufactured both
earthen and glass ware; that the art of weaving was highly developed among
them; that the stone monuments, it is true, show some dexterity in
handling and are so far instructive, but in other respects evidence a
cultural condition insufficiently matured to grasp the utility of stone
monumental material; and, above all, that the then great and significant
idea of the universe as imaged in the Templum was current in those
days."[25]

Effort has naturally been made to ascribe this civilization to white
people. First it was ascribed to Portuguese influence, but much of it is
evidently older than the Portuguese discovery. Egypt and India have been
evoked and Greece and Carthage. But all these explanations are
far-fetched. If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence of
indigenous civilization, it is the west-coast Africans. Undoubtedly they
adapted much that came to them, utilized new ideas, and grew from contact.
But their art and culture is Negro through and through.