Coquet, Michèle. Arts de cour en Afrique noire [Court Arts in Black Africa]. Paris: ABiro, 1996.

African royalties, such as the ones found in the East and the West, engaged artists’ services. Royal power relied on arts to build itself, spread and impose their own aesthetics. In these societies with no writing, symbols of sovereignty, such as crowns, headdresses, scepters, thrones, etc., are real works of art that fully participate, through their diffusion, to the extension of royal power.

[Source: Decitre.fr, adapted and translated from French].