Leo Frobenius the Believer

- Posted: 01.Nov.2007.




Crystalpunk touched lightly on Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), the great german inventor of Africa, before and judging on Frobenius' wikipedia page he too is worth a biography.

1) He was a correspondent of Pound and his ideas would end up in the Cantos.

2) He collected 4700 objects, which suggests pure mania.

3) He thought to have found Atlantis in Nigeria.

The three Mossi masks above were shot by Frobenius in Burkina faso/Upper Volta in 1907.

In 1935 Time wrote about the Manhattan exhibition of the Frobenius collection and said about the man:

The Frobenius collection is one more example of the productive possibilities of the single-track mind. In 1886, when Leo Frobenius was a small Berliner of 13, he had made up his mind he was going to be an anthropologist. At 15 he had become such an expert on the American Indian that he amused himself compiling technical errors in the Leather Stocking Tales. He wrote a dissertation on the ethnographic significance of Marco Polo's travels. Before he was 20 he had had to work as a farmer and clerk, but by the time he came of age he had hammered his way onto the staff of the Bremen Museum.

In the late 19th Century, scientists were so puffed with the importance of their contemporary culture that discussion of prehistoric art remains discovered in Belgium and France, with their implication that a respectable culture had flourished in glacial times, was subtly but systematically suppressed. It was then held that Stone Age culture died when the ice receded northward for the last time. Leo Frobenius did not believe "anything so essentially alive could vanish so completely." He coaxed, cajoled and corn-pelled his elders to back his theory that Stone Age men had taken their chisels and paint brushes down into Africa after the last glacial period, and on his first expedition to North Africa in 1912, Professor Frobenius opened up the richest continental deposit of cave paintings and engravings.