In our imaginary journey to survey the styles of African sculpture, we find ourselves following quite naturally the path of the first European discoverers sailing from Portugal in the fifteenth century. As we shall see, these explorers were by no means indifferent to the native art which they found there in full flower. Our own introduction to it, soon after we round Cape Verde, is no gradual or gentle one, for the very first cluster of art-producing tribes—in Portuguese Guinea and along the neighbouring coast of the Republic of Guinea—is dominated artistically by what is surely the most powerful and uncompromising of all African images: the great nimba mask of the Baga..