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"When they arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and landed at Vaida [in West Africa], the captains were astonished to find streets well laid out, bordered on either side for several leagues by two rows of trees; for days they travelled through a country of magnificent fields, inhabited by men clad in richly coloured garments of their own weaving!

"Further south in the Kingdom of the Congo, a swarming crowd dressed in 'silk' and 'velvet'; great states well-ordered, and down to the most minute details; powerful rulers, flourishing industries--civilised to the marrow of their bones. And the condition of the countries on the eastern coast--Mozambique, for example--was quite the same."

Leo Frobenius
cited in
Robin Walker
When We Ruled

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quote:

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They were pieces of a broken human face .... Here were the remains of a very ancient and fine type of art .... These meagre relics were eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form directly reminiscent of ancient Greece and a proof that, once upon a time, a race, far superior in strain to the negro, had been settled here.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
Yes, but have you read enough of Froebenius to
know who he identifies as Atlantean and where he
believes Atlantis was located? And do you have the
exact Froebenius citation in Und Afrika Sprach were
he allegedly makes that racialist statement?

quote:

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"idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention,"

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That's the kind of statement I expect from Froebenius.


Césaire, Senghor, and their colleagues in the Négritude movement had been fascinated with Leo Frobenius, the German irrationalist whose massive ethnography, Histoire de la civilisation Africaine, provided a powerful defense of African civilization. See Suzanne Césaire, "Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilization [1941]," in Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow, pp. 82-87; L.S. Senghor, "The Lessons of Leo Frobenius," in Leo Frobenius: An Anthology, ed. E. Haberland (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973), p. vii; Jacqueline Leiner, "Entretien avec A.C."

Robin D.G. Kelley
Poetics of Anticolonialism
intro to
Aimé Césaire
Discourse on Colonialism
Monthly Review Press, 2000

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quote:

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
OK, my copy of Voice of Africa, which I recollect
being in two volumes, is unavailable but I did
dig up the citation and yes that quote appears
on page 89.

So I have to conclude that you're correct and somewhere
along the line Frobenius altered his original opinion about
what his negroes were capable of accomplishing.

Thanks for the lesson!

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quote:

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Originally posted by markellion:
This is an earlier quote and is what sparked interest in Frobenius in another thread


Concerning Ife art he originally thought:

quote:

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They were pieces of a broken human face .... Here were the remains of a very ancient and fine type of art .... These meagre relics were eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form directly reminiscent of ancient Greece and a proof that, once upon a time, a race, far superior in strain to the negro, had been settled here.

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http://artworld.uea.ac.uk/cms/index.php?q=node/1300

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quote:

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"When they [the first European navigators of the end of the Middle Ages]
arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and landed at Vaida, the captains were astonished
to find the streets well cared for, bordered for several leagues in length by two
rows of trees; for many days they passed through a country of magnificent fields,
a country inhabited by men clad in brilliant costumes, the stuff of which they had
woven themselves! More to the South in the Kingdom of Congo, a swarming crowd
dressed in silk and velvet; great states well ordered, and even to the smallest
details, powerful sovereigns, rich industries, -- civilized to the marrow of their
bones. And the condition of the countries on the eastern coasts -- Mozambique,
for example -- was quite the same.

"What was revealed by the navigators of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries
furnishes an absolute proof that Negro Africa, which extended south of the
desert zone of the Sahara, was in full efflorescence which the European
conquistadors annihilated as far as they progressed. For the new country
of America needed slaves, and Africa had them to offer, hundreds, thousands,
whole cargoes of slaves. However, the slave trade was never an affair which
meant a perfectly easy conscience, and it exacted a justification; hence one
made of the Negro a half-animal, an article of merchandise. And in the same
way the notion of fetish (Portuguese feticeiro) was invented as a symbol of
African religion. As for me, I have seen in no part of Africa the Negroes
worshipping a fetish. The idea of the 'barbarous Negro' is a European
invention which has consequently prevailed in Europe until the beginning
of this century.

"What these old captains recounted, these chiefs of expeditions -- Delbes,
Marchais, Pigafetta, and all the others, what they recounted is true. It can
be verified. In the old Royal Kunstkammer of Dresden, in the Weydemann
colection of Ulm, in many another 'cabinet of curiosities' of Europe, we
still find West African collections dating from this epoch. Marvellous
plush velvets of an extreme softness, made of the tenderest leaves of a
certain kind of banana plant; stuffs soft and supple, brilliant and delicate,
like silks, woven with the fiber of a raffia, well prepared; powerful javelins
with points encrusted with copper in the most elegant fashion; bows so
graceful in form and so beautifully ornamented that they would do honor
to any museum of arms whatsoever; calabashes decorated with the greatest
taste; sculpture in ivory and wood of which the work shows a very great
deal of application and style.

"And all that came from cuntries of the African periphery, delivered over
after that to slave merchants, . . .

"But when the pioneers of the last century pierced this zone of 'European
civilization' and the wall of protection which had, for the time being
raised behind it -- the wall of protection of the Negro still 'intact' --
they found everywhere the same marvels which the captains had found on
the coast.

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"In 1906 when I penetrated into the territory of Kassai-Sankuru, I found
still, villages of which the principle streets were bordered on each side,
for leagues, with rows of palm trees, and of which the houses, decorated
each one in charming fashion, were works of art as well.

"No man who did not carry sumptuous arms of iron or copper, with inlaid
blades and handles covered with serpent skin. Everywhere velvets and
silken stuffs. Each cup, each pipe, each spoon was an object of art
perfectly worthy to be compared to the creations of the Roman European
style. But all this was only the particularly tender and iridescent bloom
which adorns a ripe and marvellous fruit; the gestures, the manners, the
moral code of the entire people, from the little child to the old man,
although they remained within absolutely natural limits, were imprinted
with dignity and grace, in the families of the princes and the rich as in
the vassals and slaves. I know of no northern people who can be compared
with these primitives for unity of civilization. And the peaceful beauty
was carried away by the floods.

"But many men had this experience: the explorers who left the savage and
warrior plateau of the East and South and the North to descend into the
plains of the Congo, of Lake Victoria, of the Ubangi: men such as Speke
and Grant, Livingstone, Cameron, Stanley, Schweinfurth, Junker, de Brazza
-- all of them -- made the same statements: they came from countries
dominated by the rigid laws of the African Ares, and from then on they
penetrated into the countries where peace reigned, and joy in adornment
and in beauty; countries of old civilizations, of ancient styles, of
harmonious styles.

"The revelations of fifteenth and seventeenth century navigators
furnish us with certain proof that Negro Africa, which extended
south of the Sahara desert zone, was still in full bloom, in the
full brilliance of harmonious and well-formed civilizations. In
the last century the superstition ruled that all high culture of
Africa came from Islam. Since then we have learned much, and we
know today that the beautiful turbans and clothes of the Sudanese
folk were already used in Africa before Muhammed was even born or
before Ethiopian culture reached inner Africa. Since then we have
learned that the peculiar organization of the Sudanese states
existed long before Islam and that all of the art of building and
education, of city organization and handwork in Negro Africa, were
thousands of years older than those of Middle Europe.

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"Thus in the Sudan old real African warm-blooded culture existed
and could be found in Equatorial Africa, where neither Ethiopian
thought, Hamitic blood, or European civilization had drawn the
pattern. Everywhere when we examine this ancient culture it bears
the same impression. In the great museums -- Trocadero, British
Museum, in Belgium, Italy, Holland, and Germany -- everywhere we
see the same spirit, the same character, the same nature. All of
these separate pieces unite themselves to the same expression and
build a picture equally impressive as that of a collection of the
art of Asia. The striking beauty of the cloth, the fantastic beauty
of the drawing and the sculpture, the glory of the ivory weapons,
the collection of fairy tales equal to the Thousand and One nights,
the Chinese novels, and the Indian philosophy.

"In comparison with such spiritual accomplishments the impression
of the African spirit is easily seen. It is stronger in its folds,
simpler in its richness. Every weapon is simple and practical, not
only in form but fantasy. Every line of carving is simple and strong.
There is nothing that makes a clearer impression of strength, and all
that streams out of the fire and the hut, the sweat and the grease-
treated hides and the animal dung. Everything is practical, strong,
workmanly. This is the character of the African style. When one
approaches it with full understanding, one immediately realizes
that this impression rules all Africa. It expresses itself in the
activity of all Negro people even in their sculpture. It speaks out
of their dances and their masks; out of the understanding of their
religious life, just as out of the reality of their living, their
state building, and their conception of fate. It lives in their
fables, their fairy stories, their wise sayings and their myths.
And once we are forced to this conclusion, then the Egyptian comes
into the comparison. For this discovered culture form of Negro Africa
has the same peculiarity.



Leo Frobenius
Histoire de la Civilisation Africaine
translated by Back and Ermoat
Paris: Gallimard, 1936
6th edition page 56

in

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
The World and Africa:
An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history
New York: Viking Press, 1946
pp. 79, 156

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"Yoruba, with its channeled network of lakes on the coast and
the reaches of the Niger; Yoruba, whose peculiarities are not
inadequetly depicted in the Platonic account -- this Yoruba, I
assert is Atlantis, the home of Poseidon's posterity, the Sea
God by them named Olokun; the land of whom Solon declared:
'They had even extended their lordship over Egypt and Tyrrhene!"

. . .

I cannot finish without devoting a word or two to a certain
symptomatic conformity of the Western Atlantic civilization
with its higher manifestations in America. Its cognate features
are so striking that they cannot be overlooked, and as the region
of Atlantic African culture is Yoruba . . . it seems to be a present
question, whether it might not be possible to bring the marvellous
Maya monuments, whose dates have been deciphered by our
emminent American archaeologists, into some prehistoric
connection with those of Yoruba."

The Voice of Africa
London: Hutchinson & Co., 1913
vol. I, pp. 345, 348

in
John G. Jackson
Introduction to African Civilizations
Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1970

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
So my only question here is what other European scholar of that time became an exception to the racism of their peers?? Who else besides Frobenius acknowledged that Africans were not as feckless as was first thought? And what of Egypt? Did any Europeans of that time acknowledge Egyptian civilization to be African?

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Just think," de Volney declared incredulously, "that this race of Black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech! Just imagine, finally, that it is in the midst of people (i.e., Americans) who call themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery, and questioned whether Black men have the same kind of intelligence as whites!"

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