Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873–1938), the autodidact son of a Prussian officer, was a pioneering art collector and ethnologist in the field of what would now be called “African Studies”—a field which he, more than any other figure, helped to develop. He collected copious terracotta and bronze sculptures of intricate and skilled West African craftwork from the medieval period—which he exhibited in Europe to the amazement of the Europeans—and his various travels through Yorubaland, the Niger valley, and even Sudan, allowed him to observe the customs and belief–systems of various tribesmen, which he recorded with what appears to be near–accuracy. He rendered stories and myths from the African tribes into German in his work Paideuma(1921), a book which influenced the likes of Oswald Spengler, Ezra Pound, and even W. B. Yeats (through Pound's description [YVEC135]), and effectively created a body of knowledge available to other academics and writers, both African and European, including the Senegalese writer Léopold Sédar Senghor, who admired the fact that Frobenius had raised the estimation of African culture in the eyes of the rest of the world.

However, his legacy was an extremely flawed one. As Graham Huggan has written, his theory that light–skinned “Hamitic” Africans were superior to dark–skinned “Ethiopian” Africans was probably a projection of his own Teutonic disdain for the French, and was certainly very racist in tone. His belief in an African Atlantis (VA1349)—in which the original Yorubaland, before it became “negrofied” (VA1318), constituted the mythical kingdom of Atlantis described by “Solon” in Plato's Republic(VA1345)—is based on very flimsy, amateurish evidence, and is used to cement his belief in the superiority of light–skinned over dark–skinned people, constituting a refusal to accept that sub–Saharan Africans could have been responsible for their own sophisticated sculptures (VA1 318). Likewise, his belief that this same civilization spread eastwards through the Mediterranean before classical times to leave the traces of the original Yoruban religion in Etruscan culture via the symbol of the “Templum,” or crossroads, shows all the hallmarks of an amateur archeologist and anthropologist, gleefully lighting upon isolated coincidences (such as the fact that the ram was used to represent both the Yoruban god Shango and the Egyptian god Ammon [VA1224]) to demonstrate the proof of his own wishful thinking.