BACK IN THE DAYS OF EMPIRE, THE British did not know quite what to make of the wondrous works of art. Thus in 1897 when troops of the punitive expedition sent out by London entered Benin city to seize control of and "pacify" what is now southern Nigeria, they discovered statues, plaques and masks so exquisitely designed and so expertly fabricated that the invaders concluded the trove could not possibly be the product of what the colonial mentality judged to be an unsophisticated people. Inventive theories were devised to explain the works. Perhaps the ancient Egyptians--or even a lost tribe of Israel--had had a hand in casting them. Back in London, art experts took one look at the clean, naturalistic lines in the African busts and declared that the works reflected the undeniable influence of classical Greek sculpture.

We now know that the Benin bronzes (as they are called even though they are made largely of brass) have nothing to do with Jews, Egyptians or Greeks and everything to do with an indigenous and brilliant artistic tradition stretching back to at least the 15th century, when powerful kingdoms ruled West Africa. But a century after the European scramble for the continent, controversy continues to hound African art.

For the past two months, tens of thousands of viewers have been trooping through more than 20 art galleries and museums around Britain to view the offerings of Africa95, an ambitious festival of art and culture gleaned from the shores of Tripoli to the desert of the Kalahari. "The image of Africa we get from television has been of drought, starvation and warfare," says John Mack, head of the Museum of Mankind, the ethnography department of the British Museum. "Africa95 is showing that a lot is going on in Africa which is very positive and very lively."

And yet the exhibitions have reopened a rancorous debate over the validity of African art. This time the question is not who created the art--Africans clearly wielded the chisels and brushes--but whether European critics and scholars can appreciate and understand art forms that spring from a tradition so different from that of the West's art-for-art's-sake mind-set. At the same time, the exhibitions renewed the divisive debate among contemporary African artists who are laboring to discover what role, if any, Western art should play in their creativity.

At the center of Africa95--and much of the controversy--is a mammoth exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts called "Africa: the Art of a Continent." No one denies that the show is a triumph of assembly. Seldom have so many spectacular pieces of African art been brought together under one roof. More than 800 works, displayed in 13 large galleries in the academy, chronicle the diverse art history of a sprawling continent: 4,000-year-old alabaster statues from Egypt; the Lydenburg heads from South Africa, dating from AD 500-700; and case after case of dramatic wooden carvings from the 19th and 20th centuries. The sweep is impressive. Rock paintings from Namibia demonstrate that artists were at work in Africa thousands of years ago. Intricate gold weights from Ghana recall the sort of delicate whimsy of Japanese netsuke carvings. Predictably, many of the most astounding treasures in the show are the ominous wooden creations--masks, figurines, reliquaries, stools, heads, screens, altar mounts--carved not as art but as conveyors of religious power. A six-headed healing figure from Zaire, for example, was a receptacle for bijimba--substances such as the hair of twins that are thought to hold magical qualities. A wooden female figure from Sierra Leone was used by the leader of a women's society at initiation rites for young women.

Much of this sense of spirituality, however, is lost in the Royal Academy exhibits. The objects are bathed in spotlights and viewed in darkened rooms in what seems to be an attempt to elevate them to the state of high art. The effect is stunning. The works are wonderful to observe, but they are stripped of their context. Identifying labels are brief and inconveniently located off to the side of massive display cases. "The Royal Academy show is so colonial," says Sokari Douglas Camp, an accomplished Nigerian sculptor whose works are on exhibit at the Museum of Mankind as part of Africa95. "The Academy completely misses how religious and respected these things are. What makes them wonderful is not their design but their power. We believe that they have the power to make you mad or to heal you. They are not just for art's sake. The objects are beautiful, and the show is awesome, but it is a dead show."

Portrait painter Tom Phillips, the member of the Royal Academy who organized the show, is unfazed by the criticism. The Royal Academy, he insists, is not a museum but an association of artists. His main consideration was to produce a show of "the fantastic, beautiful and moving things found in Africa." He selected the objects because he personally found them glorious, not because they highlighted didactic points in art history. If visitors want scholarship, says Phillips, they can study the detailed research on every item found in the excellent and weighty (3.15 kg) catalog.

But not everyone was dazzled by the show's artistic merit. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times, attacked the exhibit in his column as "a mass of diverting junk." He chided the academy for "taking the domestic objects of African town and village life and putting them on the walls that have hung Titian and Rembrandt...These works [from Africa] are not in the same class of the 'art' of Europe and Asia."

Clementine Deliss, the artistic director of Africa95, calls Jenkins' criticism "blatantly racist." The splendor of the Royal Academy exhibition is undeniable, she argues, an opinion echoed by most London art critics. Says Deliss: "The show will make people realize that African art is part of global art history." Not only does the classic art of Africa--the metalwork of Nigeria, the surrealistic carvings of the Kongo people of Zaire, Djenne terra-cottas from Mali--have a beauty comparable to Celtic or Chinese art, but it has also been inextricably linked to Western art by the influence it had on 20th century Abstract Expressionism. Every art student knows the ofttold tale of Picasso's 1907 visit to the Musee du Trocadero, where he first saw the simple lines of the African statuary that would guide him and others in the formulation of Modernism.

The circle of influence has now come back around. The modern art movement in Europe and America, which found inspiration in traditional African art, now holds a critical sway over African artists. "We are always looking toward Europe so that we can create things that are modern," says Flinto Chandia, a young sculptor from Zambia whose work is being shown in Britain as part of Africa95. Ethiopia's Gebre Kristos Desta and Achamyeleh Debela, whose pictures are on display at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in a large retrospective of contemporary African art, have created brilliant modern works that are international in theme and devoid of "African" art. But some African artists are uncomfortable with what they derisively call "derivative art." They have been struggling to create a form of modern art that is identifiable as African. In the late 1950s, for example, a group of Nigerian artists devised an approach called "natural synthesis" that tried to blend Western techniques with indigenous impulses. Since then, in Nigeria and dozens of other countries, artists have been fiddling with the formula. The results are often noteworthy. "They do not work in isolation, any more than European artists do," says Catherine Lampert, director of the Whitechapel. "African artists observe what is going on in art everywhere. The big advantage they have is they can draw from the strong subject matter that is all about them. They are not short on ideas." Indeed, some of the most powerful works at the Whitechapel reflect the region's social and political upheavals: wars, revolutions and, recently, the aids epidemic. Allan Birabi's The Luwero Triangle (1984) is a surrealistic view, grotesque with bodies and skeletons, of the battle the rebels fought against the second Obote regime in Uganda. South African artists Sam Nhlengethwa and Alfred Thoba both produced forceful--and quite different--works representing the 1977 murder of antiapartheid campaigner Steve Biko.

Africa95, says Nigerian artist Ndidi Dike, "should be the beginning of a new creative burst for us because it will get us recognition for what we do. It will break down preconceived ideas about what African art is supposed to be." Which is, of course, precisely what the Benin bronzes did 100 years ago.