ABSTRACT
Much more than abstract theory was at work in depicting the Negro as an African with a culture to be condemned but a human potential to be upheld. Negro music and dancing were compared with western forms and rarely seen as an expression of specifically African traditions or aspirations. Yet the image of West African cultural inferiority which emerged by mid-eighteenth century was one which made David Hume’s oft-quoted hypothesis less ominous than it has seemed to historians. Praise for Negro pottery, metalwork, and the like could be whole-hearted because these crafts remained peripheral to European activities in West Africa. As with many aspects of Negro society, the image of culpable agricultural incompetence was sustained more by secondary works than by reporters. James Beattie concluded by minimizing the significance of the cultural inferiority of Africa and by attacking the ethnocentrism of his contemporaries.
