The birth of a market for African art within Africa is a welcome sign of renaissance for one of the world's richest visual traditions. It has been reported recently that Nigerians are becoming more and more interested in collecting pre-modern African art. Oil wealth is going partly into art, and dealers in traditional carvings claim they are seeing new interest from local collectors.

Not only does Nigeria have an affluent elite, it also has what is arguably Africa's greatest art history. The country's heritage includes the brass casts of Benin and the compelling portrait heads of Ife. Wood carving, too, was at its most powerful in the forests of west Africa before European colonists in the late 19th century tore African culture apart. Even as art dealers started selling African masks in Europe, rapidly making the continent's art an inspiration for artists like Andre Derain, missionaries attacked the traditional belief systems embodied by such works.

Today, the threat to traditional African art comes from a complex pattern of modernity, neglect and ideology. Global art dealers still sell it. The highest praise of the international art world, however, is reserved for modern African art, and recycled materials are more highly rated critically than handmade carvings. There tends to be an assumption that modern African art has to be urban and industrial, just like art created by other continents this century.

It is just as oppressive to impose such an aesthetic ideology on Africa as it is to impose it on British art. There are still figurative painters in Britain, and there are pockets of traditional art (and life) all over Africa, for instance among Fante fishermen in Ghana, whose wooden boats are traditional art objects. Ghana also invented the modern folk art of painting coffins in the shapes of cameras, fish or bottles in recent decades, although it has yet to become a well-established tradition.

It is good news that Africans are collecting Africa's stupendous heritage of art. The respect for African art that was once a byword of modernism has decayed, and Africa needs to remind the world of its beauty and power.