African song, dance, and music have largely been reduced to tools for entertainment. They have been stripped of their intellectual and philosophical power. The Community Conservation Congress sought to showcase these art forms from a more sophisticated perspective by highlighting the value they carry in transmission of indigenous knowledge systems, documenting people-nature relationships, histories, struggles over land and natural resource, social interactions, and livelihood systems. There was extensive use of African music instruments majority of which are derived from nature. This was another way of the congress emphasizing that - we are nature and nature is us.