“For example, a man such as David Hume whose furthest journey from his native Edinburgh was France, or a scholar like Kant who was town-bound, literally speaking, in Konigsberg, and both of whom had no personal knowledge of Africa,

could have known nothing of any black writing for the simple reason that, with the

state of communication at the time, none was available to them. However, precisely

on this excusable ground of ignorance, the least you would expect from a man

described as the ‘greatest British philosopher’, is to suspend judgment or at least temper his conclusion by adverting to the contemporary condition of knowledge.”