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Frobenius in West African HistoryAuthor(s): J. M. ItaSource: The Journal of African History, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1972), pp. 673-688Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/180761Accessed: 09/10/2009 18:53

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Journal of African History, xIII, 4 (1972), pp. 673-688 673 Printed in Great Britain

FROBENIUS IN WEST AFRICAN HISTORY

BY J. M. ITA

A CALL for the re-examination of Frobenius's works has been made in several articles by Dr Milan Kalous.l In this essay, it is my concern to support the call for a re-examination. But at the same time it is necessary to point out that the reasons justifying such a re-examination are quite other than those which have been advanced by Dr Kalous. Indeed his somewhat uncritical approach to Frobenius is unlikely to elicit the sober kind of re-appraisal which is required, and the very exuberance of the claims made may lead other historians to reject them.

For example, Dr Kalous states in at least two of his articles2 that Frobenius 'predicted' the discovery of the Nok culture. Yet in the passage of 'Und Afrika Sprach .. .' to which Kalous refers, Frobenius wrote only as follows:

It is even possible that one day, somewhere on the coast or inland, in the forests or among the lagoons, a site will be discovered where older, less autonomous, less harmonious art forms [than those found at Ife] will be excavated.3

This statement is so sweeping that it can be said to have 'predicted' almost any archaeological find between the Atlantic Coast and the Sahara.

Moreover, though Dr Kalous implies that Frobenius's work is neglected (which is certainly true), he seems to be unaware of reasons why this should be so, or unwilling to concede that there may be any reasons for objecting to Frobenius's work on methodological grounds. In this essay I wish to suggest that in spite of the shortcomings of Frobenius's archaeological and

1 E.g. Milan Kalous, 'Some Hypotheses about the Art of Southern Nigeria' in Afrika und Obersee, I969. Bd. LII, Heft 2, and 'Frobenius, Willett and Ife' in the . Afr. Hist. ix (1968), no. 4. For a bibliography of Frobenius's work up to 1932, see 'Das Schrifttum von Leo Frobenius' contained in Leo Frobenius: ein Lebenswerk aus der Zeit der Kulturwende (Leipzig, 1933) compiled by Rhotert, van den Steinen and others. For a more recent bibliography see that at the end of Freda Kretschmar's Leo Frobenius (Cyclostyled. Inter Nationes, 1968).

2 Kalous, Some Hypotheses . .., 8, and 'Frobenius, Willett and Ife', 66I. 3 Frobenius, Und Afrika Sprach ... (Volksausgabe), 2 vols. (Vita, Deutsches Verlag-

shaus, Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1912-13), I, 319-20. (This is the German popular edition. The same publisher also produced the scholarly edition (Wissenschaftlich erweiterte Ausgabe) containing much additional material and appearing in 3 volumes. Unfortunately, the English translation The Voice of Africa, trans. Rudolf Blind (Hutchinson, London, 1913) is a translation only of the popular edition, and most of the material contained in vol. 3 of the German scholarly edition is omitted. Elsewhere in this article my quotations are from the German scholarly edition-abbreviated UAS.)

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anthropological methods, his work is of value to the West African historian. Unfortunately, Frobenius's theories about the remote African past-in particular his 'Atlantic' theory of West African culture-have received much attention, to the detriment of his actual observations and actions in Togo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. It is the observations and actions which matter. What happened in Togo in I908, or in Ife in 910o is now 'history' rather than anthropology and should concern the historian of early twentieth century West Africa. Of course, the historian will need to examine Fro- benius's statements critically in order to assess their reliability, but only in the same sense as he would have to assess the reliability of any other historical document, bearing in mind the particular bias of the writer.

My purpose in this article is to consider Frobenius's methods and actual observations as distinct from his general ideas. A discussion of the latter will be found in my article 'Frobenius, Senghor and the Image of Africa'.4 However, it will be almost impossible for the reader of the present article to assess the significance of Frobenius in West African history without some knowledge of the assumptions on which Frobenius's work is based, and of the ideological framework within which he applied his methods and obtained his data. It will therefore be necessary for me to preface my examination of Frobenius's methods with a brief recapitulation of those of his ideas which are most relevant to the West African scene.

Frobenius was a man of his day in that he never questioned the right of European powers to their African colonies; nor did he ever envisage the emergence of independent African states. Colonial rule, therefore, is taken for granted. But it is difficult to understand Frobenius's work in West Africa unless one understands that much of it is conceived within the framework of an attack on Indirect Rule. Unfortunately, this fact is seldom recognized, because it is explicitly stated only in Vol. III of the scholarly edition of Und Afrika sprach5 and is not included in the English translation, The Voice of Africa. Frobenius divides the peoples of West Africa (and indeed of Africa as a whole) into 'Hamites' (i.e. state-forming peoples) and 'Ethiopians' (non-state-forming peoples). He argues passionately that the policy of governing non-state-forming 'Ethiopians' (such as the Tiv) through the agency of state-forming 'Hamites' (such as the Hausa) should be discontinued. It is essential to stress that for Frobenius-unlike many German ethnologists-the division of peoples into 'Hamitic' and 'Ethio- pian' had nothing to do with race or colour, but was a purely cultural classification. Within the West African context both groups are equally black. In Frobenius's view the 'Hamitic' state-formers had been rendered lazy by their reliance on slave labour, while the 'Ethiopians' were hard- working and vigorous. He argues that they should be trained, so as to make them,

4 In Modes of Thought, eds. Robin Horton and Ruth Murray (Faber and Faber. Forth- coming).

6 See note 3 above.

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an essential part of our valuable and productive colonial empire, since they are the most significant labour force in our African colonies.6

There is, in Frobenius's work, a strong bias towards idealizing the 'Ethio- pians' and denigrating the 'Hamites' in an effort to show that the former are too good to be governed through the agency of the latter, but should, as Frobenius says, 'be taken under our leadership'.7 Thus, Frobenius's admiration for the 'Ethiopians' is strongly coloured by his belief in their usefulness to the colonial power. Of the peoples discussed in the present essay, the Kabre are classified as 'Ethiopians'; the Yoruba are not explicitly classified, as Frobenius worked on them before his system was fully developed; but they are undoubtedly 'state-formers', and Frobenius regarded their culture as a 'degenerate' survival from a more noble past. This seems to approximate them to the category of 'Hamite', and perhaps explains how Frobenius manages to admire Yoruba culture while rather disliking the people themselves.8

In addition, Frobenius regarded the 'Hamites' as 'akin to' the French and the Anglo-Saxons, while the 'Ethiopians' were akin to the Germans.9 And as I have tried to show in 'Frobenius, Senghor and the Image of Africa', Frobenius's statements about the 'Hamites' vis-a-vis the 'Ethio- pians', tended, particularly after I9I8, to be a projection of German resentment of the Anglo-French victory in the First World War.

Aspects of Frobenius's thought such as those outlined above may well have discouraged scholars from paying serious attention to the data Frobenius collected in the field. If so, this is unfortunate. An examination of Frobenius's data on the 'Hamites' shows that they have very little connexion with the 'conclusions' supposedly derived from them (the latter being an expression of what Frobenius felt about the French). Hence, the erroneous nature of Frobenius's conclusions springs from a failure in logic, arising from his identification of the 'Hamites' with the French; so the incorrectness of the 'conclusions' proves nothing as to the correctness or otherwise of the observations themselves. Thus, historians may reject Frobenius's 'Hamitic'/'Ethiopian' dichotomy, and his Atlantic theory of Yoruba culture (as indeed the present author does); and nevertheless find, on examination, that many of his empirical observations appear to have been surprisingly reliable.

Since the objections one may have to Frobenius's generalizations and conclusions are largely irrelevant to his actual observations in the field, I propose, in this article, to ignore them, and to confine myself to discussing, in some detail, the objections which may be made to his anthropological and archaeological field-method-with particular reference to Nigeria and

6 UAS, III, 5-6. 7 UAS, in, loc. cit. 8 Frobenius, The Voice of Africa, I, I86-7. 9 Frobenius, Schicksalskunde (Weimar, 1938), 163. Das Unbekannte Afrika (Beck,

Munich, 1923), 79, and Vom Kulturreich des Festlandes (Wegweiser Verlag, Berlin, I923), II8.

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Togo. An assessment of these objections will help towards a critical evalua- tion of Frobenius's work as historical source material. Apart from this, even the actual defects of Frobenius's methods should be of interest to the historian. For example, as we shall see, Frobenius destroyed a considerable amount of archaeological evidence in Ife. It is of undoubted value to the historian to know where, and in what circumstances such evidence was

destroyed, and what kind of evidence was most liable to destruction, so that he is aware of where the gaps in his knowledge are likely to be.

In order to understand why modern Anglo-American anthropologists generally ignore Frobenius's work, it will be necessary to discuss some of the developments in this discipline in the twentieth century. One may crudely summarize the situation by saying that anthropologists dismiss Frobenius because the theoretical framework of anthropology has changed radically since Frobenius's day. Consequently his approach is no longer felt to be relevant to current problems in anthropology; similarly, advances in excavation techniques have led modern archaeologists to discount much of the work that was done before these techniques were evolved; but the reasons which led both groups to dismiss his work deserve to be discussed in some detail.

In reading accounts of the history of anthropology, one generally sees Frobenius described as an 'ethnographer'-a term which hardly any modern anthropologist would apply to himself, but which was commonly used in Frobenius's day. In describing the anthropologists (or 'ethno-

graphers') of this period, Audrey Richards writes that they were:

mainly interested in studies of the distribution of customs and artefacts which would show the contact of one people with another, and hence make it possible to reconstruct the movements of peoples from one region or continent to another.10

This description highlights two elements which were central to Frobenius's

approach, viz.

(i) that being concerned with the origins of peoples and civilizations it involves hypothetical reconstructions of past history (very often of pre- literate societies);

(ii) that it was comparative, involving the study of widely different areas

(often in the hope of tracing the cultures found there back to a common

origin, or of deriving from them knowledge about 'universal human

nature'). In Frobenius's case, the comparative method implied a universalist

approach rather in the modified sense that he believed it would lead him to an understanding of the development of 'Human Civilization' as such.

Contrary to popular belief, Frobenius did not hold that cultural 'diffusion'

10 Audrey Richards, 'Bronislav Malinowski' in The Founding Fathers of Social Science (ed. Timothy Raison). Penguin Books (I969), I89. See also Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Mentor Books Reprint, I953), 44.

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necessarily implied a mass migration of peoples. He considered that some- thing like cultural 'seepage' often took place across ethnic boundaries." But apart from this, Audrey Richards's characterization of what I shall call 'the ethnographic approach' is a faithful description of Frobenius's attitude.

After the First World War, revolutionary changes in the theoretical framework of anthropological studies led to a rejection of the historical and comparative approaches and an abandonment of the interest in origins which had underlain the dispute between 'diffusionists' and 'evolutionists'.l2 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown argued that since there was no scientific way of

verifying hypotheses about the historical past of pre-literate societies, the only valid way of studying such societies was synchronically, i.e. by studying the society as it existed at a given time, and explaining how it functioned as a whole-customs being interpreted in terms of their contribution to the maintenance of the total social structure.13

The Functionalist school, as it was called, under the guidance of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski has dominated British anthropology since the thirties. The majority of well-known contemporary British anthropologists were trained by Malinowski or Radcliffe-Brown or their disciples; they have been brought up to reject the historical and the comparative approach-in other words everything that Frobenius stood for. It is therefore easy to see why they refuse him serious attention.

But, however misguided some of Frobenius's historical reconstructions may have been, the total rejection of the historical approach can only be a hindrance to modern anthropological studies. One of the most urgent problems confronting the anthropologist or sociologist today is undoubtedly the study of social change. Since social change must, of necessity, take place over a period of time, it cannot be understood at all if the diachronic approach is rigidly excluded. In Africa in particular (as in other under- developed countries) the problem of national development is such that the indigenous scholar is virtually compelled to concern himself with social change. African scholars, therefore, will probably (quite rightly) continue to reject any brand of anthropology which scorns the diachronic approach, and thus excludes from its programme the study of social change. They can also afford to ignore any Functionalist attacks on Frobenius if these are based only on the fact that his approach was 'historical'. Clearly, the Functionalists were right to insist that pre-literate societies (or, indeed, any other societies) could not be understood as a sort of 'rag-bag of savage

11 Frobenius writes: 'Since no people is without contacts an exchange generally takes place at the [cultural] boundaries. Thus a culture can gradually spread [literally "seep"] further without any significant movement of peoples.' Frobenius, Erlebte Erdteile: Ergebnisse eines deutschen Forscherlebens (abbreviated EE.), 7 vols. (Societaits-Verlag, Frankfurt, I925-30), I, 270. See also Iv, 372.

12 Audrey Richards, op. cit. I89-90. 13 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, first published 1932 (New York,

I964), vii. See also David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology (Columbia University Press, I953), 284 and John Beattie, 'A. R. Radcliffe-Brown' in Timothy Raison, op. cit. I80.

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customs' surviving from the past; and that an attempt must be made to understand them as functioning social systems. But the fact that a society is a system does not mean that it never changes. On the contrary, it changes as a system, i.e. the changes are not random or piece-meal but are all inter- connected. It follows that social change can be adequately studied only if the synchronic and diachronic approaches are used in conjunction with each other.14 While there can be little doubt that both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski came to realize this,15 some of their over-zealous disciples still seem to be throwing out the diachronic baby with the hypothetical bath- water. In any case one cannot ignore the possibility that certain hypotheses about the past, which were formerly untestable, may now have been rendered verifiable by recent advances in archaeological technique.

Linked with the Functionalist devotion to the synchronic approach was their insistence on field-work. As Audrey Richards, in her description of pre-Functionalist anthropologists, notes:

It was generally taken for granted that the anthropologist was the theorist who stayed at home, while others such as missionaries, travellers or administrators collected facts for him in the field.16

Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski insisted not only that anthropologists should make their own observations in the field; they also stressed that these observations should be conducted over a long period of time, that the anthropologist should learn the language of the people whom he was studying; and should, as far as possible, participate in their social life. As we have already seen, the 'arm-chair' method cannot, with any justice be ascribed to Frobenius, although his field work methods certainly did not fulfil the requirements of the Functionalists.

In attempting to assess Frobenius's field methods, I must make it clear that, judged by modern standards they were defective; in fact, after the First World War they were defective judged by the standards of his own day. But the question we must ask ourselves is, were they so defective as to justify us in dismissing all Frobenius's work as worthless? It appears to me that they were not.

The defects of Frobenius's method of collecting anthropological material are fairly evident even to the layman. Frobenius, for example, generally records stories and oral traditions without mentioning whether he collected them at first or second hand, and without stating the language in which they were told to him. Thus, in the introduction to Volkserzahlungen und Volksdichtungen aus dem Zentral-Sudanl7 (which contains Hausa and Nupe

14 See Bidney, op. cit. I98, 248 and 249. 15 Bronislav Malinowski (ed. Phyllis Kaberry) The Dynamics of Culture Change (New

Haven, 1945), 36. 16 Audrey Richards, op. cit. I89. 17 Frobenius, Atlantis: Volksmderchn und Volksdichtungen Afrikas, 12 vols. (Eugen

Diederichs Verlag, Jena. 192I-8), ix (Volkserahlungen und Volksdichtungen aus dem Zentral-Sudan), 7.

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stories as well as some from Nikki-Borgu) Frobenius describes the stories in section VIII as having been recorded in Jebba, by his pupil and assistant Albrecht Martius 'with the help of an interpreter trained by us'. He does not state what was the mother tongue of the interpreter. Nor does he state the language into which he translated the stories. But assuming they were translated into English or Pidgin, they were then presumably re-translated into German for the purpose of Frobenius's book. Under these circumstances it is likely that the stories, as recounted by Frobenius, represent a somewhat garbled form of the original. Moreover, Frobenius attempted to provide a theoretical justification for this procedure. In Erlebte Erdteile, vol. 3, he states that in using European languages, African Negroes 'immediately transform them into a kind of Pidgin'. To speak Pidgin, however, means 'to use a European language in an African way'.18 It follows, therefore, according to Frobenius, that a Pidgin translation 'reproduces a Negro original in a Negro way'. This statement would seem to imply that all African languages are the same. Yet Frobenius goes on to say:

Anyone who examines the examples of [oral] folk tradition numbering well over a thousand, and compares them with one another will find that the oral traditions of various peoples differ from one another markedly. If this is clear in [our] version, this is due to our use of trained interpreters in whose English or French version the variations in style are clearly recognizable.19

It is difficult to see how both these statements can be true. If 'Negro languages' are to be adequately rendered by a comparatively uniform 'Pidgin' it is difficult to see where the alleged differences in style come from. If, on the other hand, there are marked differences in the style of the English or French translations, these are more likely to be due to the mother tongue of the interpreter, than to that of the original narrator. In any case, one would like to know more about the methods by which Frobenius's interpreters were trained. As we shall see later in this essay, Frobenius's interpreter in Ife was guilty of deliberate mistranslation, and Frobenius appears to have been at the mercy both of the deliberate and of the in- advertent errors of his interpreters.

Frobenius's method of collecting other types of data was often equally haphazard. Many of his informants were seamen, exiles, or slaves who had been long separated from their own people, and one finds that Frobenius frequently accepted data on the customs of a given tribe on the un- corroborated evidence of one of its exiled members. Even when he spoke to numerous members of a given ethnic group, his information was generally collected during a very short stay in the area. Thus, Frobenius's work on the Kabre of North Togo, which was fairly typical of work in other areas, was collected during six weeks of the dry season of I908-9. Clearly, it would be difficult for him to form an adequate picture impression of the working of Kabre society in such a short period. Since Kabre agriculture

18 EE., III, 32. 19 EE. III, 33.

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was based on an elaborate system of soil conservation and water retention by terracing in a hilly area, it is evident that a Kabre farmer's activities would be very different in the rainy season than in the dry. Yet Frobenius never saw Kabre society functioning in the rainy season, but relied entirely on what he was told about it.

But although the defects of Frobenius's method are evident, this does not mean that everything he says about the Kabre should be dismissed with contempt. Frobenius was among the Kabre in December-January I908-9. As Cornevin has pointed out,20 this was barely seven years after the final 'pacification' of the area-the revolt of Ketao having been put down in April 1902. The expedition against Ketao had been the last of a series of punitive expeditions carried out by the Germans in Togo as follows:

in 1898 against Soumdina in I890 against Boufale in 900o against Tchitchao and Lama Tessi in I901 against Lama Tessi in 1902 against Ketao.

It can readily be seen that Frobenius's data may provide unique written evidence about the life of the Kabre immediately after their 'pacification'. And as the number of Kabre now living who remember the period before

1908 must be infinitesimal, it is not likely that much fresh information can now be elicited from Kabre sources (though one hopes that a last minute attempt may be made to interview any Kabre speakers who remember Frobenius's visit to Togo). Whatever British anthropologists may think of Frobenius's methods, his work on the Kabre will be worth re-

examining-for if any of the information he collected can be proved reliable, it will be of great value-if not to anthropologists, then to historians of

Togo in particular, and of West Africa in general. It is noteworthy that Jaques Delord, a Protestant missionary who has

been active in Togo since 1939, and has been studying the Kabre language and people since 1946, has thought it worthwhile to publish an annotated French translation of Frobenius's work on the Kabre. The translation

appeared in Le Monde Non-Chrdtien, no. 59-60, Juillet-Decembre 1961 with an introduction by Robert Cornevin.21

It is true that Delord has the following remarks to make about Fro- benius's account of some of the sexual customs of the Kabre:

One cannot help being astonished at the elaborations and generalizations of Frobenius, who, in many cases has been a victim of the African sense of humour or has been taken in by a phantastic answer [given by the Kabre] to a question [they] judged to be indiscreet or grotesque.22

20 Robert Cornevin, 'La Connaissance des Kabre depuis Frobenius' in Le Monde Non- chretien, no. 59-60 (Juillet-Decembre, 196I), 95. 21 See note above.

22 Jacques Delord, in Le Monde Non-chrdtien, no. 59-60, 98.

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However, in the main, Delord found it necessary to correct only minor

points and questions of linguistic detail (of which he is undoubtedly a more

competent judge than Frobenius). Moreover, in summing up Frobenius's information, Delord says that 'the sociological description is remarkable' and that:

in spite of omissions due to a stay in Kabiye which was undoubtedly too short, and in spite of some errors in the interpretation of accounts which he received from his informants, Frobenius understood the Kabre.... [there follows a characterization of the Kabre]. Finally, he was able to appreciate the role played in their educational system of an age grade system carried to the extreme limit.23

Though Frobenius was never a Functionalist, he certainly did not describe Kabre life as though it were a 'ragbag of customs'. He relates such features as the manufacture of hoes and the age grade system to the terraced agriculture practised by the Kabre, and however unmethodically, or even unconsciously, has in fact depicted Kabre life as a functioning social system. From Delord's evidence it appears that Frobenius's data on the Kabre are at least worth re-examining. Pending further information, preferably from Kabre sources, it seems reasonable to suppose that Frobenius's data on the Kabre of 1908-9 were, in the main, reliable-indeed that they were much more reliable than his methods would lead one to expect.

From our discussion of Frobenius's work on the Kabre, it appears that the defects of Frobenius's methods were definitely not so great as to vitiate all his findings. What is needed is not a wholesale dismissal of Frobenius's ethnographic work, but a careful re-examination of it and a sifting of information. It should, for example, be possible to check much of what Frobenius says about the Tiv, the Nupe (in so far as he deals with their social organization as distinct from an unverifiable reconstruction of their past) and about many other peoples.

Whatever the defects of Frobenius's anthropological field method, they were less serious than his defects as an archaeologist. However, before dealing with his excavation methods, it is worth considering the way he obtained artefacts, which, though they might be of some antiquity, were not necessarily dug out of the earth. British and American archaeologists generally condemn Frobenius for being a 'collector' rather than an archaeologist. Africans may be inclined to criticize him not only for his archaeological method, but also for the general methods by which he secured the finds which he took with him to Germany.

One may take as an example Frobenius's work in Ibadan and Ile-Ife in I9Io. Even ignoring the criticisms of other writers, we can see, on the basis of Frobenius's own evidence, that his methods of obtaining artefacts were somewhat unscrupulous. However, one should bear in mind that in this

23 Delord, ibid. 172.

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respect Frobenius was no more unscrupulous than many of his contemporaries. It was, in fact, the sacking, and wholesale looting of Benin by the British in i897 which had first drawn Frobenius's attention to the quantity of antiquities which existed in Tropical Africa. In Auf dem Wege nach Atlantis, Frobenius complains that he had previously asked Bastian (the anthropologist, and founder of the Berlin Anthropological Museum) for financial support to enable him to collect bronzes. Bastian had refused to believe in the existence of such bronzes. Frobenius continues:

A few years later the English stormed Benin which had previously been in- accessible, and found beneath the dust and mould, the whole magnificent splendour, lying in heaps in every corner. And Bastian's successor [as Director of the Berlin Anthropological Museum] subsequently had to spend enormous sums in order to acquire a fraction of those treasures which I could probably have succeeded in acquiring [at an earlier date] fairly easily without having to spend hundreds of thousands.24

From the above it seems clear that Frobenius's expedition to Ife, was partly motivated by a desire, as it were, to 'get even with' the British by seizing the antiquities of Ife before they had a chance to do so. Thus, one of Frobenius's main preoccupations in Ife was speed in the removal of artefacts. It was unfortunate, too, that Frobenius tended to regard his efforts in Ife with some complacency, since circumstances encouraged him to judge his methods, not by the standards of other archaeological expeditions, but by comparison with the methods of the British military expedition to Benin.

In extenuation of Frobenius's collecting method, one must bear in mind the fact that the only way he was able to finance his early expeditions was by obtaining the financial backing of German anthropological museums. These museums made him grants of money on the explicit understanding that he should bring back items for their collections. For example, his second expedition (starting from Dakar and passing through St. Louis and then up the Senegal, from there to Bamako and Timbuktu, and then south- wards through Togo) was financed not only by the German Colonial Office, but by the Rudolph-Virchow-Stiftung and the Leipzig Anthropo- logical and Geographical Museums.

In the first volume of Und Afrika Sprach, in which Frobenius describes how he set out for Ife, he writes:

I just had to endeavour to muster a good collection for my museums.2

Frobenius was fully aware of the disadvantages of this system of financing his expeditions. When he received a donation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to

24 Frobenius, Auf dem Wege nach Atlantis; Bericht fiber den Verlauf der zweiten Reiseperiode der DIAFE in den Jahren I908-o0 (Vita, Deutsches Verlagshaus, Berlin- Charlottenburg, 191 ), II.

26 UAS. I, 49.

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finance his expedition to the Saharan Atlas of 19I2-14, Frobenius com- mented with obvious relief:

On this expedition I was, for the first time, free of the burdensome obligation of covering the cost of the expedition by assembling [Museum] collections.26

It is therefore clear, that during his earlier expeditions Frobenius was, of

necessity, a 'collector', since he could not otherwise have financed his

expeditions at all. Even if the necessity of making collections is conceded, Frobenius's

method of making his purchases was not over-scrupulous. In Ibadan, for

example, Frobenius had at first failed to obtain much for his collection through the elders and responsible persons in the city. But, he records:

We then began to lay siege to some of the poorer old devils. Silver began to clink. In the hours of darkness, the shame-faced poor sent what I needed so much- the first good items for the collection. But when a poor fellow such as these wanted to dispose of a good example of ancient workmanship, and his better-off relatives heard of it, they made secret efforts to prevent the sale. Rich men, who were at other times totally indifferent to the fate of their poor starving relatives, now gave them large sums to prevent them from alienating the family property.27

It must have been evident to Frobenius, that this clandestine method of procedure was an incitement to theft, or at least to the alienation, by private individuals, of what was, in fact, family or communal property. Admittedly, Frobenius did, on occasion, return objects, if it was convincingly demon- strated to him that they had been stolen. But as far as possible, he avoided any embarrassing enquiry into the provenance of his purchases. He thus incurs some responsibility for encouraging or even originating the tradition of shrine-robbing and the theft of antiquities which has since become so disastrously prevalent in Nigeria.

Frobenius accuses Partridge,28 the Acting Resident of Ibadan of maliciously trying to prevent him from obtaining antiquities from Ife.29 Yet on Frobenius's own evidence, and even before the intervention of Partridge, it is apparent that the inhabitants of Ife parted with their antiquities only unwillingly. Frobenius writes:

And when, just before our [first]30 departure from Ife I undertook a further

26 Frobenius and Obermaier, Hadschra Maktuba: Urzeitliche Felsbilder Kleinafrikas (abbreviated HM). (Akademische Druck-und Verlagsanstalt, Graz, I963), 2. (This is a photo-mechanical reprint of the edition published by the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich, in 1925). 27 UAS. I, 50.

28 Charles Partridge, the Acting Resident, had formerly been stationed on the Cross River. He was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society and author of a book entitled Cross River Natives; being some notes on the primitive pagans of Obubra Hill district, Southern Nigeria; including a description of the circle of upright stones on the left bank of the Aweyong River (Hutchinson, London, 1905). 29 UAS. i, 68-9, 105-6, 112-26.

30 After leaving Ife once, Frobenius was recalled by Partridge, and had to return to Ife where his collection was inspected. The occasion here referred to is his first, not his final departure.

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count of the objects acquired we found that of the 620 pieces which we had collected I40 were missing. It was clear... that these thefts were exclusively of indigenous Yoruba artefacts. But while we were in Ife, not a single knife, fork or spoon, not even the slightest thing was purloined from our equipment. It was as if these good fellows thought they had a perfect right to take back from me, what they themselves had offered to me for sale.3'

Frobenius seems to regard this as evidence of the rascality of the Yorubas, but, if anything, it is evidence of the reverse. In any case, Frobenius un-

doubtedly took advantage of the extreme poverty of some people ('poor devils' as he calls those in Ibadan) to persuade them to sell objects whose value they did not recognize, or objects which they may have valued, but which they were compelled by poverty to sell, or objects which were not even theirs to sell. Even if certain inhabitants of Ife did pilfer back certain

things which they had sold to Frobenius, this does not excuse Frobenius's own methods which, from the start seem calculated to encourage theft.

Frobenius's method of obtaining the head of Olokun is also, on his own evidence, open to serious criticism. According to Frobenius, the priest's family had already agreed to sell the head, but the priest, after accepting f6 (the price agreed) seemed unwilling to hand over the head, because it was feared to incur the displeasure of the Resident in Ibadan, i.e. Part-

ridge, whom Frobenius accuses of trying to thwart his plans in Ife.

... I told them [the priest and his family] that I would take the responsibility for it, as the Resident in Ibadan was my friend. (This was the only lie I told in the matter, and the full extent of the falsity of my statement was not known to me at the time.)32

After further negotiations, the details of which are too lengthy to repeat here, Frobenius was told:

that the Oni agreed that I could keep the head of Olokun but that in exchange they [the inhabitants of Ife] should receive an exact copy which I was to send to them through the D. C. Oshogbo.... I emphatically stressed, that it had been agreed in detail that we [Frobenius's party] should keep the original and that the Oni should have the copy. But Bida [Frobenius's interpreter] afterwards admitted to me, that, in order to make negotiations easier and for the sake of convenience, he had, in true Negro fashion, reversed the conditions in his translation.33

In other words Bida had told the Oni that the original would be returned to Ife, and the replica retained by Frobenius. It is true that Frobenius was not aware, at the time, that the Oni was being duped. Nevertheless, the Oni was being duped on Frobenius's behalf, and by Frobenius's employee. Apart from this, it is by no means clear that Frobenius condemned the

32 UAS. I, 100.

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33 UAS. I, I02. 31 UAS. I, 8I.


fraud.34 Nor, apparently, did the episode convince Frobenius of the un- wisdom of relying on interpreters. In any case, Partridge's subsequent intervention was not as unwarranted as Frobenius makes out.

Though Frobenius's general method of procedure is open to objection, his actual excavation methods are open to even more serious objection. Describing the excavations which he arranged in northern Ife, Frobenius writes:

and at this I called upon the [local] people themselves to dig in those areas, where, according to tradition, an ancestor god had descended into the depths of the earth; they were to bring me everything that they found, since I would buy even such things as broken potsherds lying around which might seem meaningless to them. This suggestion brought success.35

In other words there was no preliminary survey, either of individual sites or of Ife as a whole, no concerted effort to see that the finds were not damaged by blows of the spade or pick, no record of the stratification of the site, nor of the relative position of the finds in the matrix-nothing which might have enabled Frobenius or subsequent archaeologists and historians to date the objects, or to determine their use in such cases where this was not obvious. While one may rightly be critical of the fact that Frobenius removed the objects to Germany, thus depriving Nigerians of part of their cultural heritage, the damage done by Frobenius's exporting the articles is not necessarily irreversible. The articles in the Linden Museum or elsewhere have at least not been destroyed, and are accessible to African scholars, if not to the ordinary African citizen. But the damage done by Frobenius's haphazard excavation methods is irreversible and represents a permanent loss to scholarship. It is surprising, indeed, that African historians or archaeologists have not condemned Frobenius more roundly, since it is their field of study (not that of Anglo-American anthropologists) which has suffered as a result of Frobenius's recklessness.

The destruction of archaeological evidence (unlike the removal of the objects found) can hardly be excused on the grounds that such destruction was commonplace in Frobenius's day. It would be meaningless to blame Frobenius for not using archaeological methods which his contemporaries had not yet discovered. But Frobenius's archaeological method (or lack of it) at Ife, was haphazard even by the standards of 191o. Comparatively sophisticated stratigraphic techniques were being used by J. J. A. Worsaae in the investigation of Danish peat moss sites as early as the i85os.36 Yet

34 It has been variously suggested that the Head of Olokun now in Nigeria is a copy. See Leon Underwood, The Bronzes of West Africa (Tiranti, London, 1949), 3, and Leon Underwood and William Fagg, 'An Examination of the so-called Olokun Head of Ife, Nigeria' in Man, XLIX (I949), 1-7. It seems at least possible that Frobenius, on being recalled to Ife, left a copy in Ife and kept the original, though if so, the question of what happened to the original afterwards is obscure. 35 UAS. I, 88.

36 See Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (Routledge, Kegan and Paul, London, I968), 146.

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Frobenius not only failed to use any such techniques in Ife, but did not even regularly supervise the digging himself. However, it should be borne in mind that, on a number of sites in Ife, mud for building houses has been excavated, built up into houses, allowed to collapse, and then re-in- corporated into new houses. And this has happened not once, but con- tinuously over centuries. Consequently remains from quite different

periods may be found mixed at the same excavation level. On sites such as these there would have been little stratigraphic evidence for Frobenius to destroy.

It thus appears that what is needed is not condemnation of everything Frobenius did, nor uncritical praise of him for having 'discovered' the art of Ife, but a more balanced assessment involving an awareness of the destructiveness of some of his excavations there. In fairness to Frobenius one must bear in mind that his more professionally responsible work was done, not in Ife, but during his later expeditions, particularly those to the Sahara. On these expeditions he was freed from the obligation of 'collecting' for museums and was able to record evidence without destroy- ing it. He thus avoided the destructiveness which marred his work at Ife. Frobenius's contribution to Saharan studies was undoubtedly the most valuable aspect of his work. In so far as the present article has confined itself to Frobenius's early work in West Africa, it has necessarily dealt with the more negative aspects of his work, and, taken alone, is in

danger of doing less than justice to him. This preliminary assessment of his early work needs to be counterbalanced by an appreciation of his later work in the Sahara. I hope, therefore, in a separate article, to show that here Frobenius did pioneering work in a field which is now generally recognized as being central to the study of African history and pre- history.

Clearly, more work needs to be done before the importance of Frobenius for the study of modern West African history can be justly assessed. My present article is merely an outline-based mainly on Frobenius's own statements-of the nature of some of the material which needs to be checked. What is now needed is independent evidence. For example, the accuracy of Frobenius's accounts of his methods in Ibadan and Ife could still be checked by Yoruba-speaking research workers, who might interview any elderly people still living who came into contact with Frobenius's expedition. (These people would be able to give us some idea whether or not undue pressure was put on people to sell artefacts.) As I have already suggested, an attempt should be made to check Frobenius's account of his work among the Kabre of Togo. A similar attempt should be made in Nigeria by Tiv and Hausa speakers; many important aspects of Frobenius's work in Nigeria could best be re-examined by speakers of Nupe-in particular, an effort could be made to elucidate the history of Bida (Frobenius's interpreter), whom one assumes to have been of Nupe origin,

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though he first met Frobenius in the then French territory. An enquiry into the circumstances in which Frobenius's colleague Martius collected tradi- tional oral material in Jebba, together with an independent inquiry into the material itself, would cast further light on the accuracy or otherwise of the versions produced by Frobenius. Useful information may perhaps also be obtained from surviving German members of Frobenius's expedition now living in Germany or the United States. All these enquiries need to be carried out immediately. In ten years time the opportunity may have been lost for ever.

A further important tool for checking Frobenius's account of his observations and activities is to be found in the Nigerian Archives. According to P. E. H. Hair31 these contain a correspondence in English between Frobenius, the Oni of Ife's secretary, and 'the local D.O.' which shows events in Ife in a somewhat different light from that in which they are depicted by Frobenius. If the results of all these enquiries could be collated and compared, we should have some knowledge of the degree and kind of reliance that can be placed on Frobenius's observations in Nigeria and Togo. This, in turn, would probably be a reasonable indication of the degree of reliability of Frobenius's observations in the vast areas of West Africa through which he travelled in the years I907-I2.

SUMMARY

The article as a whole argues that the observations of Leo Frobenius in West Africa between 1907 and I912, though they are commonly ignored by Anglo- American archaeologists and anthropologists, contain material which is of value to the historian of early twentieth-century West Africa. The author examines Frobenius's methods and observations in the light of his own statements (some of them in works which have not been translated into English or French) and suggests various outside sources which could be used to check the reliability of Frobenius's accounts.

The attitude of Anglo-American anthropologists is explained in terms of developments in anthropological theory since the First World War.

The article examines the defects of Frobenius's anthropological method, as exemplified by his work among the Kabre of North Togo shortly after their 'pacification' by the Germans; and suggests that the observations themselves may be more reliable than Frobenius's method would lead one to expect.

The article then considers Frobenius's archaeological method as exemplified by his work in Ife, argues that he was somewhat unscrupulous in forcing the sale of artefacts, and also, that by failing to keep adequate site records or even to supervise the digging himself, he destroyed a considerable amount of archaeological evidence at Ife. Historians should, however, study his work in Ife to note where such destruction has taken place, and what kind of evidence has been destroyed.

31 p. E. H. Hair, in a letter published in Ibadan, July 1970, I02. Hair suggests that Frobenius would have had ample opportunity of making a copy of the Olokun Head.

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The article suggests outside sources, both oral and written, which might enable historians to check the veracity of Frobenius's account of his own method, and also the reliability of the observations themselves. Finally, it is suggested that an assessment of the reliability of his observations in Togo and Nigeria might be generally indicative of the reliability of his observation throughout West Africa in the period I907-I2.

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