Leo Frobenius on African History, Art, and Culture

Frobenius' pivotal works on African culture represented a landmark in ethnography. His writings, when discovered by young African intellectuals in the early 1900s, reverberated through the community of Africans in search of cultural legitimacy. Frobenius was credited with giving Black Africa back its soul and its identity in the early part of the last century.His contributions and observations laid the groundwork for the concept of negritude, advanced by Leopold Sedar Senghor, who would later serve as president of Senegal - an expression engendered by Frobenius' work that developed hand in hand with the self-determination of the Harlem Renaissance.This collection was originally published in Germany and edited by Eike Haverlund, the 1971 recipient of the Haile Selassie prize for Ethiopian studies.