Museguide special entry; serpents are significant

It's a wonder nowadays that so many African city kids had never set their eyes on a snake except for big screens and T.V's, many had a refined mentality regarding serpents courtesy of ill orientations conveyed through some mediums especially Bollywood series and films.
Snakes is highly significant when it comes to art and craft and also played an important role in our food web even though religiously(Islam and Christianity) 'a good snake is a dead snake'.
In the case of art and craft, the snakeskin is quite useful in many aspects. For example, snakeskin is widely used in producing leather bags, belt, necktie and watch band as the snakeskin is soft and light and its natural pattern is beautiful. China was the first country that used snakeskin to make instruments, such as urheen.
In our food web snakes are very useful. All snakes eat rodents for the most part.  Rodents carry a variety of diseases and destroy millions of dollars worth of crops a year.  One snake could eat 2-4 mice or rats a month.  Presumably if at least 1 mouse eaten is female, then that takes another few hundred baby mice out of the population.  Australia worked to irradicate many of their venomous snakes and they ended up with a rodent overpopulation that was completely out of control.

Snakes are reptile covered in a skin of supple, living scales; legless; with staring eyes that never blink or close; a flickering forked tongue; and, sometimes, fangs that deliver toxic venom. Though, Snakes crawl around legless with a poisonous head but yet it has a greater significance specifically for the black race.
We mustn't progress from here without clarifying the symbols represented by snakes to different sets of tribes gracing this black nation.
In Africa the chief centre of serpent worship was Dahomey, but the cult of the python seems to have been of exotic origin, dating back to the first quarter of the 17th century.
By the conquest of Whydah the Dahomeyans were brought in contact with a people of serpent worshipers, and ended by adopting from them the beliefs which they at first despised. At Whydah, the chief centre, there is a serpent temple, tenanted by some fifty snakes. Every python of the danh-gbi kind must be treated with respect, and death is the penalty for killing one, even by accident.
Danh-gbi has numerous wives, who until 1857 took part in a public procession from which the profane crowd was excluded; a python was carried round the town in a hammock, perhaps as a ceremony for the expulsion of evils.
Mami Wata also is a water spirit or class of spirits associated with fertility and healing, usually depicted as a woman holding a large snake or with the lower body of a serpent or fish. She is worshipped in West, Central, and Southern Africa.
Snakes venom are used in treating variety of diseases as well cancer, low sexual performance, diabetes and all forms of skin problems. It also signified healing power of medicine. The snake's venom is associated with the chemicals of plants and fungi that have the power to either heal, poison or provide expanded consciousness (and even the elixir of life and immortality) through divine intoxication. Because of its herbal knowledge and entheogenic association the snake was often considered one of the wisest animals, being (close to the) divine. Its divine aspect combined with its habitat in the earth between the roots of plants made it an animal with special properties connected to the afterlife and immortality. Asclepiu, the god of medicine and healing, carried a staff with one serpent wrapped around it, which has become the symbol of modern medicine.
Courtesy Yusuf Abdulqoyum.