ABSTRACT
With many works referring also to varied traditions of the creation, to belief in an after-life, to native veneration of elements of the natural world, and to the practice of magical arts, virtually all the main elements of traditional West African religion were reported in the eighteenth century. West African culture had more sinister connotations than the lethargic inefficiency which could be ridiculed as it was condemned. The portrayal of lecherous Negroes in Elizabethan drama was a modern manifestation of a stereotype dating back to Classical works on Africa. By the mid-eighteenth century distinctions between Hottentots and Negroes were stressed in every kind of travel literature. In the eighteenth century many observers and all the large scale geographical surveys asserted that Negroes believed in a supreme deity; and several reiterated Ogilby’s references to ancestor spirits or discovered the belief independently.
