posted
Not that he wasn't responsible for pillage in his own interest as much as in the service of Europe's colonial spirit, Frobenius rose above the common attitude of many ethnographers, who supposed that their pet African ethny under their study were somehow superior to and not to be ranked the same as the surrounding 'negroes,' in that he recognized civilization was no stranger to inner Africa.
This is to his credit snce he was originally of the opinion that the Yoruba, his pet African ethny, were but heirs, albeit legal heirs, of a heritage handed to them by other than a 'negro' people.
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posted
Tracking down Frobenoius' later statement that the "idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention," made after he had learned more about African Civilization since his introduction to it courtesy of the Yoruba (whom he thought were the factual basis for the Atlantis myth) isn't so easy.
quote: "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
Temple, Duke, and Notre Dame each have a copy of his Histoire de la civilisation Africaine but is there an English translation?
If not, then, This is a job for ... CotonouByNight-man.
posted
This is an earlier quote and is what sparked interest in Frobenius in another thread
Concerning Ife art he originally thought:
quote: 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.
quote: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: "idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention,"
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
And after further research admitted:
quote: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!
And then I composed the lead post of this thread with more from this later work to follow.
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quote: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: 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.
posted
Supplying Frobenius' "powerful defense of African civilization" for which he is better remembered and admired by English speaking and Francophone Africans from the Caribbean, the USA, and Senegal.
Perusing Jackson's Intro to Afr Civ lead me to the citation of Frobenius' statement that the "idea of the barbaric Negro is a European invention,". DuBois is the source for the English translations from Histoire de la civilisation Africaine, which in turn is from Back & Ermoat's French translation direct from Frobenius' original German work.
quote: "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.
to be continued . . .
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quote: "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.
quote:"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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Du Bois was so impressed that he named the West African chapter of his book Atlantis, persuant to Frobenius' complimentary, though mistaken, opinion that
quote: "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
And that just about wraps up all the relevant matrial at my disposal from Frobenius save the Dausi, and other African folklore which I have yet to conclude or post to the forum.
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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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quote: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?
The website is wrong about Napoleon blowing off the nose of the Sphinx though, it was taken down earlier because people were worshiping it
quote: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!"
You'll see the quote many times if you google it so he did say it
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