African dance is found all over the African continent, from the Sahara Desert to the Gulf of Guinea, from the mangled forests to the thorny bushes, in this part of Africa, as long as there are religious ceremonies and festivals, there must be music and dance activities. Music and dance activities are an important part of the life of black Africans. Come to the African continent, in front of your eyes is not only the bright sunshine and tall green tropical plants, and those intoxicating jungle horns and vibration of the African dance.
Africans are hospitable and curious about all outsiders. A French professional photographer Michel Yuyao took his wife, two cameras, driving a Land Cruiser to Africa, when they came to a village far away from Cameroon, all the black women in the village immediately surrounded Michel's wife, a white woman. The black women, "in a state of stupor and delusion, squatted in front of her in a circle, their decorative lips mumbling, words of admiration and praise with the sound of metal clanking out". The hospitable black Africans performed a ritual dance for them, the "Dance of the Trees," which Michelle describes as follows:
Those who were ready to join in the dance arrived one by one,......, and a long procession of the entire Faroese tribe unfolded along the foot of the mountain. The entire Faroese community spread out along the foot of the mountain in a long procession around the trees in the "Dance of the Trees". The people of the neighboring villages were all padlocked and rushed to watch. ...... Long and slow, the dance begins to reveal itself as an organized routine. Each dancer has taken his or her assigned place, a rare sight in these communal rituals where each individual can become the star of his or her own show. Only the many masked dancers - and who knows who is dancing underneath them - take the lead, but like all the others, they too must submit to the course of the dance and to the rhythm, all of which is dictated by the music, in a gradual progression.