Agriculture, herding, and artistry were important to the West African, but the concept of private property was not widely accepted. The land belonged to the community. The core of West African society was the family. Interestingly enough, most of the African tribes constructed their families along matrilineal lines--the family tree was traced through the mother. On the whole, the West Africans were a mixture of various stocks by the time of the slave invasions. Centuries of interbreeding had produced Africans of varying shapes, colors, and features. Although they spoke many languages, they approached a semblance of linguistic unity in that only four of the African languages had been reduced to writing before the coming of the white man. Whatever their tongue or color the West Africans were a deeply religious people. No greater injustice has been done to a people than that committed by spurious American historical and anthropological writings which suggest that African religion should be written off as infantile animism. On the contrary, the West Africans had developed complex answers to such major tribal inquiries as “What is man?” “Who is God?” “What is life?” and “How final is death’s sting?” At rock bottom, the religion of West Africa embraced a concept of “Life Forces.” The “Life Force” of the Creator was present in all things animate and inanimate and was viewed as a particularized but microcosmic fragment of the Supreme Being, God, Who created the earth. As Lerone Bennett, Jr., suggests, this African concept of God as a vital force in everything bears a striking resemblance to Henri Bergson’s “élan vital.” Religion formed the center of West African life. Every event took on religious meaning. And there is no telling what towering civilization might have blossomed and survived there had the white man not made his intrusion. _Africans as Moslems_ The character of this work demands that we examine the impact of Islam on the black Africans, particularly on those of the West Coast, if we are to understand and evaluate the current preachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.