"The conventional notion that Africans failed to employ the wheel because of lack of initiative or intelligence is intellectually unsatisfactory, not so much because it is racialist as because it is circular: Africans are supposed to have ignored the wheel because they were unenterprising, and the evidence that they were unenterprising is that they failed to adopt the wheel."

---Robin Law, “Wheeled Transport in Pre-Colonial West Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 50, no. 3 (1980), p. 257