intentional or unintentional—are too often consonant with interpretive formulations which automatically assign a diminished valuation to the ethnographic significance of “blacks” or “black Africans” in general. In his impressive survey of the role of discursive factors in the codification of white supremacist ideals in the pre-and post-Enlightenment age, Cornel West argues that a combination of scientific investigation, Cartesian epistemology (wherein Descartes’ emphasis on the primacy of the subject