From the Rustic to the Stratospheric: In Search of Toyin Falola
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
From the Rustic to the Stratospheric
In Search of Toyin Falola
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Abstract
A visual and verbal account of my experiences and reflections in relation to searching for and finding the house where the great scholar, writer and academic organizer Toyin Falola spent his particularly formative childhood and teenage years and early twenties.
This essay weaves
together biographical and autobiographical narrative and reflection with ethnographic observation in reflecting on how formative environments shape intellectual identity.
Drawing parallels
between my own bifurcated education—the formal training of the University of
Benin and the self-directed learning fostered by Benin City's libraries,
bookshops, and spiritual masters and sites—I reflect on Falola's account of
how the Ibadan Ode Aje neighborhood profoundly shaped his scholarly trajectory, resonating from his early years there fifty years ago into his scholarly and writing career up to the present, in comparison with my encounter of a few hours with the place in January 2025.
The
narrative chronicles my pilgrimage to Ode Aje following Falola's 73rd birthday
conference, documenting encounters with residents, architectural spaces, and
the lingering presence of Iya Lekuleja, the herbalist-mentor in Falola's first memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt representing Falola's decisive early encounter with a human embodiment of indigenous Yoruba knowledge systems and spirituality.
Through this journey, I engage fundamental
questions about the emergence of intellectual possibility: How does a scholar
operating "not beholden to the academy" nevertheless establish
himself at its pinnacle? What is the relationship between spiritual direction
and disciplined scholarship? How do places like Ode Aje—materially humble yet
epistemologically rich—generate the "organic epistemologies" Falola
champions as correctives to Western logo-centric thinking?
This project advances a relational philosophy of intellectual formation grounded in urban ecologies, autobiographical scholarship, and possibility theory. The essay concludes by reflecting on the convergence of human kindness and environmental ruggedness in contemporary Ode Aje, and on the perennial question of how individuals recognize and actualize the network of possibilities available at the intersection of self and environment.
All pictures and videos from Ode Aje are by me.
"The raw material from which a great artist built his universe."
Enid Starkie on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971.
Formative Contrasts: The University I Resisted and the City and University That Educated Me
My contrastive and complementary experiences with the University of Benin and the city of Benin have been strategic to who I am, to my identity as a person significantly defined by the quest for knowledge. This emergence of identity in relation to the influence of a city shaped my appreciation of Falola's account of the impact of the Ibadan Ode Aje neighbourhood on his cognitive development, leading me to visit Ode Aje to see the place that so shaped a powerful thinker and literary artist in his childhood to his twenties fifty years ago.
The university is the place I did not want to go to but was forced to attend, preferring to educate myself, because I saw the university as inadequate to my needs as a person seeking to subordinate all cognitive effort to the quest to grasp the ultimate rationale of existence, a person trying to understand why he is on a journey, the journey of life, the beginning, end and rationale of which he knows nothing, but a goal beyond the remit of the globally dominant Western academy represented by the Nigerian educational system.
The city was the theatre of my self education.
The city of Benin is represented by my family's library which began my initiation into diverse knowledge systems. This initiation was expanded by the city's bookshops and libraries.
These were complemented by my encounters with its indigenous African spiritual and Christian culture bearers and the inspirational potency of its churches, shrines, sacred trees, groves and Ogba forest, environmental markers evident up till I left there in 2003.
The university trained me in how to study and construct bodies of knowledge through my BA and MA there, skills further sharpened by working there for a time as an academic.
This combination of inspirational forces produced in me an identity similar to how Falola describes himself as an academic driven by spiritual orientations though operating within the intellectually focused character of the globally dominant Western academy in which he is a professor.
His scholarly, writerly and organization creativity inspires the question "how did he become the equivalent, adopting the English poet John Milton, of a person flying in the high regions of knowledge represented by his hundreds of writings on diverse subjects, effortlessly weaving together complexities of discourse, from history to literature, politics to art, the sky around him shimmering with possibilities of understanding yearning to be born?''
Falola's Ode Aje: A Recreative Crucible
He describes his multifarious creativity as due significantly to his formative experiences in Ode Aje:
Today, I held my elegantly produced book, 402 pp. Yoruba Metaphysics, a few hours after I spoke with Professor Bewaji and promised him a copy. The book was inspired by just one neighborhood in Ibadan, Ode Aje. I have written four books based on this area, within walking distance to Agugu, Aremo, and Ojagbo. Four books: three memoirs and one academic-cultural activist book.
Toyin Adepoju has pressured me multiple times to write on an iconic figure in the first memoir, Iya Lekuleja, but I am not your regular scholar driven by the academy. Since 1977, I have been a rule breaker and not a conformist. I disrupt the genres. It is the spirit that directs me on what to write at a particular time. Without the spirit, I don’t write anything. I cannot explain this, but this is how it works for me, a spiritual “journey” precedes anything I write. And as the spirit commands, words pour like rain, intellectual drenches that become a flood.
But why is it important to say Ode Aje? Because the Western academy has harmed us. We are blind, completely blind to indigenous epistemologies. We don’t see, we don’t hear, we don’t think. The starting point in connecting to the Western academy creates blind spots and intellectual damage. When I attended Professor Badejo’s 70th birthday celebration in Lagos, what I enjoyed most was the Apepe dance (I hope that’s the correct name). Badejo came alive, as if the ancestors sent him from heaven. He became a masquerade. This was the moment—the organic moment of self-realization. His energy came, as if he were in the gym. He danced like the possessed in a trance, lifted by higher forces beyond his physical form.
Ode Aje gave me a sense of authenticity, a knowledge that the Western academy can never provide. By age ten, I could read any text in Yoruba and had read all of Fagunwa's works [ a great writer in Yoruba]. Few know that I attended a madrasa [ an Islamic school ]. To write my third memoir [ Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of my Encounters with Islam ] , I had to relearn Arabic. Few are aware that I was part of a choir for eleven years. And few realize that I went to Igbale [ Egungun shrine] to assist the Egungun [ Yoruba spiritual and performative art representing departed ancestors returning to Earth to visit their descendants]. This background forms the foundation for four books.
To wise people, it should have been “Falola, can you teach us about this methodology?”
...
I thank Ode Aje,
as I now move to Ife, with a fourth memoir in progress and a possible book on
the University of Ife. A wise person seeks social relevance, the highest form
of success, greater than any award that one can ever receive.
...
My book on [ priest of the Yoruba knowledge and divination system] Elebuibon is now slated for production…The reward is monumental in terms of organic epistemologies and rejection of Western logo-centric thinking.
…
What is my next project? The power of unseen forces guides me. I am an agent of our ancestors. I am not beholden to the academy.
( From two email communications with private groups on September 13, 2025 and 10th November 2025)
Merging Diverse Worlds
I am moved by those words.
Here is a person, operating in terms of a relationship I am familiar with through my own experience, a relationship with a daemon, a personal numen, an inward controlling force beyond one's full understanding, describing himself as ''not beholden to the academy'', but who had succeeded in establishing himself at the pinnacle of that academy.
How does Falola do it, describing himself as guided by forces beyond the epistemic structures of the academy but employing those structures in creating his scholarly identity?
Practising meditation, seeking understanding within myself to answers to
the metaphysical issues I was exploring, a force awakened within me that lives on
knowledge, consumed by a hunger that cannot be adequately accommodated by
humanly created learning systems, hence, from studying in Nigeria to studying
in England, I became like a pot that eventually breaks under the pressure of
its own internal heat, spilling creative possibilities I would then struggle to
organize and express as best as I could on my own.
How had Falola entered the sphere of overwhelming spiritual direction he describes? How can a person become an agent of ancestors as he depicts himself as being? Did he absorb strategic information from Egungun culture representing the visits of ancestors to the Earth, information he adapted to himself, opening himself to preternatural creative powers?
What could one learn from him about the balance between inspiration and discipline, between mysterious direction and social contextualization, the movement from ideas to books, the oscillation between creative individuality, interpersonal collaboration and institutional integration?
Journey to Ode Aje: Seeking the Seedbed of Genius
I just had to go and see this Ode Aje, as a means of appreciating the seeding of possibilities emerging into fruition decades later, even if the Ode Aje of today may be far different from that of fifty years ago, when Falola was there between 1963 and 1975, from his tenth to his twenty third year.
On the 6th of January 2026, after attending the exquisite conference organized by Leeds City University Ibadan, celebrating Falola's 73rd birthday, I went in search of the house of Baba Olopa, that being the guidance Falola had given me as to how to find the house where he spent those particularly formative years as described in his memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story and Malaika and the Seven Heavens.
I encountered a physically rugged environment in terms of the spatial possibilities created by urban development, a rich concentration of people within rough landscapes, ancient houses looking almost primeval in their stubborn resistance to moving beyond what may be described as the emergent modernity they represent.
It shares with Ipodo in
Ikeja-Under-Bridge near where I live in Lagos, the dynamism of human
activity, the density and velocity of small scale commerce and the vehicular
busyness that make that location one of my favourite places in Lagos.
The atmosphere of autochthonous inhabitation, of people generationally
shaping as they are shaped by a space emanating from the relationship between
architectural and human density at Ipodo, of people seemingly
emerging from the earth on which they live, suffuses Ode Aje, although the
Ipodo streets may be all tarred, perhaps because Lagos is
richer than Ibadan and Ikeja is a very large area particularly strategic
in Lagos business and general commercial culture, a metropolitan hub of Lagos
as Nigeria's commercial and cultural capital.
A collage depicting the topography of some of the nearby streets, off the tarred main road, observed as I searched for ''Ile Baba Olopa'', ''the house of the elderly policeman'', as Falola described how to find the house in which he had spent the years covered by his three memoirs.
Kindness, along with the rugged character of the terrain, the density of houses in close proximity to each other amidst thick human physical closeness defines Ode Aje. An artisan offered that I keep my box of precious books at his corner workshop while I searched for the house of Baba Olopa. As I searched, I prayed that I would return to meet the box safe.
I was nowhere near the immense wealth of those two, but those books in the box, which I had spent the equivalent of more than half of my monthly income to acquire, meant everything to me. Some of them were also likely to be unavailable anywhere in Nigeria, the copies I had bought at Mosuro, the Booksellers, in Ibadan, likely the last or the last few copies in their stock, books of a kind I had not seen in the various Lagos bookshops across the length and breadth of the city. The brand new box, in its obvious attractiveness, had been bought to accommodate the large sizes and number of the books.
A collage showing two Falola books that were in the box, his Ibadan: Foundation, Growth and Change: 1830-1960 and his edited Victor Ekpuk: Connecting Lines Across Space and Time, their covers and spines juxtaposed to indicate their thickness. In taking those books to Ode Aje, a cycle was completed. The fruits of the seeds sown in the child who became an adult there returned to visit the place where the seeds were sown.
Finding the House: Architecture as Living Memory
On reaching the house to which Falola directed us, we met an old woman who recognised Falola from his online photographs which I showed her. She referenced his visit to the neighbourhood in relatively recent times and her memory of him as a child, pointing me towards the room at the back where he had lived.
She told us, however, to wait for Iya Tosin,Tosin's mother, who is
in charge of the house and who would provide much better information
about Falola in connection with the home. We were given her number by other
residents and we called her, mentioning Falola. Iya Tosin eventually
arrived and recognized Falola from his online pictures. She spoke with him
on my phone, upon which he explained my mission as a writer exploring his
life and work, leading to her allowing me to take pictures of
the house, as shown directly below.
On the left is Iya Tosin. The front of the house is pictured in the centre. To the right is a picture of the passageway in the centre of the house. Seated in the middle is the old woman who recognised Falola from his online pictures, recollecting his time there as a child and his relatively recent visit to the neighbourhood.
Watch and listen to Iya Tosin speak about Falola here.
I asked to be shown Falola's former room and I was led to the room shown directly below, now occupied by a tenant who let me take pictures of it.
''The breathing of humans is what sustains a house'' stated Iya Tosin in poetic Yoruba, as she explained the need to keep the house occupied even as its old occupants left. ''Without human presence, a house dilapidates", she concluded.
On the right in the collage of four pictures is the door. The other pictures are of the interior of the room and the window looking out of it.
The Providential Encounter with the Mysterious Iya Lekuleja
One of Falola's most powerful pieces of writing is his account of Iya Lekuleja, the female herbalist and spiritual adept who later became his mentor, as described in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth. In the former book he describes how he first met her in the Ode Aje house:
I was terribly scared when I first saw her in the early hours of the first morning at Ode Aje. She was short, about my height at over four feet but less than five. She had tied a wrapper around her waist, exposing her upper body. Her breasts were flat and so unnoticeable.
The smell from her tobacco pipe was very strong, stronger than the cigarette smoke that I associated with the big boys who smoked in hideouts, afraid of being caught by parents or other adults.
I greeted her, half prostrated, but she returned a casual greeting and went to the backyard where the bathroom and toilet were located.
She was different from any woman I had ever seen. Right away I told myself that I had seen an iwin, a spirit in human skin. She fit perfectly well into the many descriptions of an iwin that I had heard or read about.
The schoolbooks were full of stories of spirits and ghosts. Not only did I know many of the stories, but I was living among those who believed that the stories were true. Adults presented iwin as living beings with powers greater than theirs. Iwin could appear all of a sudden, from nowhere. The woman walked in my direction on that morning, but I had no idea where she had come from. She was definitely not a ghost. I had had an encounter with a ghost some four years earlier. That was also in the early hours of the day. I saw a man wearing a white gown. I told Mama One and others that I had seen my father, since that’s who I thought the man was.
I was bombarded with many questions, each person urging me to describe what I had seen and heard. I must have told them what they themselves had told me about my father. I was probably using the photograph in my head to answer the questions they posed. As I spoke, they all concluded that I must have seen the ghost of my father.
It was not I who reached this conclusion, but adults said that the man I saw was a ghost and I accepted it as true. I confirmed the story of Mama One that she, too, had seen the ghost a few times, in the same spot. It was another confirmation that the dead man was not far from the house and could appear at any time to those he loved. They wanted to be sure that the ghost had not given me a message to relay to them or even an instruction they must obey.
But what I saw on that morning at Ode Aje was no ghost. All moonlight stories portrayed an iwin as smallish and pipe smoking. I had seen one. An iwin could look ragged, naked, half-dressed. This woman was scantily dressed, with just a small wrapper tied around her body. There was not enough light for me to see her fully, to describe all her features.
An iwin revealed only small parts of itself and only in a short appearance so that no one would be able to capture the full picture. The woman spoke little; actually, she mumbled her response, as spirits did in their world. As she had appeared from nowhere, and the main door had been locked (I checked the door twice), I told myself that the woman was one of those iwin that came from the underworld. In moonlight stories and schoolbooks, spirits inhabit the forest, caves, tree hollows, the sky, and the underworld. I was fascinated by spirit stories, and the narrators,whether school teachers or adults, always made them sound believable.
In Ode Aje and many other parts of the city, many people, including the educated ones, did not see spirit stories as fantasies, the imaginative creations of fertile minds, but as events, episodes, histories, and reality.
Adults and children used objects to seal oaths, asking ghosts, spirits, and the underworld to punish them if they betrayed anyone. Iwin were among those unseen forces that overwhelmed the living, but they were not included in the list of beings and spirits to be worshipped.
Iwin were not like ghosts who could be venerated or the dead who appeared once a year as masquerades. Iwin were not part of the invisible essence of self, like the spirit that dominated the emere or abiku. No one worshipped an iwin, as one did a god or goddess, but they were dreaded beings. An iwin could be so evil that to see it could mean the end of one’s life. One iwin in a popular storybook was after one’s blood, the food she relied upon for survival.
Not all iwin were evil: many actually led one onto the path of success and wealth; others simply gave advice or wisdom. The one I saw did nothing; she simply walked away, not even removing the pipe from her mouth.
I chose to keep the discovery of the iwin to myself. When I had seen a ghost, I had been bombarded with too many questions, many of which I could not answer. I could only describe what I saw. I did not know whether this iwin was evil or good, and she did nothing to me.
In the stories,while many iwin walked away as this one had done, others engaged in a short conversation, even giving instructions. What I saw was big; what I had to say was small. Then again, I was new; I was yet to meet my new friends at school. I knew only a few folk in the household, and my friendship with Kola, my age mate, was only beginning.
The discovery of an iwin was my second research project in life, the first being the pursuit of rail lines and trains. The search for the train ended in my insertion into a mythical worldview, with the train turning me into an emere. The search for an iwin moved me far deeper into cosmology, the internalization of ideas bigger than the self, and an eye-opener to the world beyond. My wings began to grow, but my legs were too big to allow me to fly.
The next day I woke up early. I cannot say that I woke up at the same time since I was not using a clock to determine when to go to bed and wake up. No iwin showed up. Another two days passed, and nothing showed up. I was right: what I had seen was an iwin. This was true to type; like ghosts, iwin revealed themselves in their own time, without notice.
Then I told Kola, with whom I had developed a close friendship in less than a week. Kola said that I had made a big mistake in not asking the iwin for a wish. As far as he was concerned, he needed only a one minute encounter with an iwin.
We began to draw up a request list. Kola wanted the gift of invisibility, to be able to move around without being seen. With this power, he would turn into thin air to fight, take the best clothes from the Indian stores in the new city, watch the movies that I had told him about for free, and even perch on people’s heads and release his faeces on those who had offended him.
He would become a hawk and use his beak to pluck an eye or two from his enemies. When I told Kola about my wish, which was for the iwin to return me to Agbokojo, he heaped a series of insults on me, saying that the iwin already knew that I had nothing tangible to say, which was why she refused to speak to me.
He himself could deliver me to Agbokojo, he assured me, adding that if I paid him a small fee he would carry me on his shoulders so that the whole world could see me. I was convinced,and I revised my wish list: I needed the ability to fly, like birds and airplanes. Airplanes fascinated me, and no one had been able to explain the science of planes to me.
My father’s first son, Adewale, had become a hero due to his decision to travel to the United Kingdom and become a pilot. Kola was not convinced that the ability to fly was enough. “What would happen if you were trapped in a net?” he asked. I was preoccupied with revising my wish list, as I did other things at home and school.
She appeared again, like before, with the pipe and the smoke following her in the morning. Rather than even tying her wrapper around her waist she had simply thrown it over her shoulders, covering only half of her body. This time around, she did not even speak to me or reply to my customary greetings.
She walked away, toward the backyard. I was curious,and I hid behind a door waiting for her to walk back. As she did, still smoking her pipe, she entered a room. From the inside courtyard, facing the front entrance, the room was to the right.
I felt sorry for the occupant of the room, receiving a guest from the underworld so suddenly. Perhaps there was trouble. I hurried to wake up Kola and told him what I had seen. Half awake, he followed me so that I could show him the room. Kola hissed, pushing me so hard that I hit a wall, and said, “You did not see an iwin; you saw Leku, Iya Lekuleja.”
I had seen a human being, not a spirit! It was the word Iya (elderly woman) in his sentence that gave me an instant clue. I must have confused the knowledge in the books and stories with the reality of life, moving too fast between the realm of the underworld and the living,confusing the shells of peanuts with coffins.
Even then, I had no immediate idea what he meant by Leku. As Kola and I went about our ways and chores, I had to wait till after school to talk more. Had I jumped into a river without knowing how to swim?As far as Kola was concerned, everyone knew that the woman was mysterious, but I was the first to associate her with the underworld. I had not noticed her room, the first to the left on entering the house, as it was always locked.
Her room was well located, with windows opening onto the front veranda and the side yard. I never saw the windows open, and until the woman entered the room that morning I never saw the room open either.
The full discovery of
Leku led me to the mysterious world of herbs and magic, secrecy and
healing. She actually was an iwin [''a spirit in human
skin''] but not of the kind described in the literature. Indeed, no
literature, then or now, has been able to record, capture, and analyze the
women in Leku’s category. And half of what I later found out I cannot reveal.
By the time I could seek her permission to reveal her essence and quote her, she was long dead. And each time I feel like revealing the full essence I am tormented by an overpowering feeling of awe and danger.
The first time I
mentioned a small part of her secret at a seminar at the Institute of
African Studies at the University of Ibadan, I had a nightmare in which I was
pursued by a tiger that would have killed me if I had not awakened in
time. Most of my misfortunes, all my negative feelings, and my anticipation of
troubles I attribute to a part of me that desires to unlock what I know about
Leku. Perhaps I will, but not today, not even tomorrow. Nobody tells all he
knows.
( From A Mouth Sweeter than Salt)
The collage above shows, on the left, the back of the house, perhaps where Falola first saw Leku. The other picture is of children in the neighbourhood with the woman who led me to the place.
What are my impressions from this quest?
The convergence of human kindness and environmental ruggedness.
The amazing woman who insisted on carrying my heavy box on her head as she took me up a steep staircase and across rough roads in search of the house I sought.
Iya Tosin, repeatedly calling to make sure I had arrived safely in Osogbo, having left Ibadan late for the other destination.
All these people did all these without asking for anything.
What is one to make of the interstellar distance between his current existence and that environment, as represented, for example, by the picture below, of the celebration of his 73rd birthday on January 1, 2026 with his wife and friends in the elegance of his Lagos house?
The emergence of possibilities at the intersection of self and environment.
What insights may Falola's description of classical Yoruba conceptions of being and becoming at the level of humanity, of intersection between self and cosmos, between self and environment, in shaping the course of human life contribute to the questions posed by Wariboko's theory of existence as a network of possibilities?
The human being as a storyteller, unfolding the story of his life, part of the larger story in which he finds himself as part of the network of stories represented by other human lives, the entire complex a matrix of being and becoming enabled by possibilities ranging from the material, what is observable in terms of the workings of nature, and metaphysical, beyond those workings, and represented by questions of the ultimate source of this framework of possibilities.
Within such a context, a description adapted from Falola's account of Yoruba metaphysics in his book of that title, what qualities did Falola cultivate to build on his Ode Aje environment and move beyond it?
The concluding section of Counting the Tiger's Teeth presents a telling passage in his struggle for education:
I had previously registered as an external candidate for the Ordinary Level of the General Certificate Examinations of the University of London.
…
With one eye, I had been preparing minimally for this examination, spending more time on chemistry and biology, which required separate examinations on laboratory work. I had no access to any laboratory, but I figured out, after studying the examination pattern for ten years, that one could memorize the terminology, understand the steps, and reach the right conclusions. Thus, I understood the outcome of adding different chemicals.
The biology practical was far simpler, at least for me, as all I needed to do was memorize the entire contents of a 212-page book. That book and others, I had to steal, raiding the library of Lagelu Grammar School a few miles away from Ode Aje: A man climbs a thorny tree not because he is bold but because he needs to survive. There was a huge mountain in my path, and I could not sit down wishing for it to disappear. I must get up, climb it to the top, descend to the valley, hit the road to gather the firewood to warm my body in old age, and use my legs to ensure that my pocket is never empty.
( From Counting the Tiger's Teeth )
Those lines demonstrate demonstrate self knowledge, sensitivity to one's limitations and the barriers to overcoming those limitations. It indicates appreciation of how individual responses may enable one overcome the limitations of one's environment, a relationship between action and consequences creating the desired dynamism in the life of the individual, interpreting Falola's account through a reworking of Titilola Damilola's description of the Yoruba Ifa knowledge system ( Facebook post).
Does Falola's later donation of books to libraries in Nigeria and perhaps to that library he stole those books from as a teenager adequately address the problematic morality of his stealing those books because he had no money to commute regularly to the library and yet needed the books to pass his exams, as he describes his situation at the time in a personal communication?
''Ifa teaches that every action
has weight, imbalance creates consequences, harmony requires
responsibility, character (Iwa) is the foundation of destiny, and knowledge is protection", states Damilola.
Ènìyàn [ describes] how various physical and spiritual attributes
interact and function within the human body. Ènìyàn serves as a convergence
point for all the external, spiritual, and physical forces that shape and blend
into a person. It encompasses all the contexts that contribute to the nature
of one’s Ìwà [ A person’s unique identity]. These contexts then interact
through the infrastructure provided by Orí [ ‘’a metaphysical infrastructure,
personalized and unique to each person, that connects humans to the spiritual
and physical world, acting as a bridge to the supernatural forces, which
humans cannot fully comprehend. Orí, akin to the voice in
one’s subconscious or a personalized spirit guide, influences individuals
positively or negatively based on their Ìwà. Orí is somewhat separate from the
individual but also an integral part of them’’]. Individuals acquire
their agency and existence by manifesting these elements in their own choices,
ultimately forming their Ìwà.
(Toyin Falola, Yoruba Metaphysics, 2025, xiii).
How helpful could these ideas be in understanding Falola's journey from Ode Aje to the then University of Ife and from there to the University of Texas?
Yoruba metaphysics, in its general framework as described by Falola and its actualization in Ifa, as depicted by Damilola, may be seen as a dramatization of a version of Nimi Wariboko’s theory of existence as a network of possibilities, itself derived from the metaphysics pf the cognate Kalabari culture, and its divinatory techniques for advancing life’s possibilities, a goal also pursued by Ifa in its divinatory component.
These complementary conceptual frameworks facilitate appreciation of the contrastive and correlative trajectories of Falola and Ode Aje as distinct yet interconnected processes of actualization—each selecting, negotiating, and realizing possibilities from overlapping but not identical fields of options, characterized by varying degrees of convergence, divergence, and mutual exclusivity.
In doing so, this essay offers a model for understanding intellectual emergence and urban continuity as relational, contingent, and generative rather than linear or deterministic.
Intellectual Formation and Urban Ecology
Intellectual biographies are often narrated as stories of departure: the gifted individual rises from a bounded local world into the open horizons of global recognition. Such narratives obscure the persistent relationality between thinker and place. This article resists that model by examining Falola not simply as an intellectual who left Ode Aje, but as one whose scholarly identity continues to emerge in dialogue with it.
Ode Aje as a Formative Knowledge Environment
Ode Aje is approached not merely as a neighborhood but as an urban knowledge ecology—a dense convergence of markets, religious life, informal pedagogy, storytelling, and moral instruction. Its apparent ordinariness conceals its function as a site of epistemic apprenticeship.
Falola’s Writings and the Memory of Place
Through autobiographical reflections, Falola consistently returns to Ode Aje as a symbolic anchor. These texts reveal place not as a background but as an active participant in the formation of intellectual discipline, ambition, and cosmological imagination.
Ethnographic Encounter: The Neighborhood Today
Field engagement with Ode Aje demonstrates how the neighborhood has changed materially and socially while retaining recognizable patterns of communal life. Falola appears in local memory as both a departure and a presence—an emblem of what the neighborhood makes possible.
Possibility Theory and Actualization
Drawing on Wariboko, the article reads Falola and Ode Aje as parallel but asymmetrical actualizations within a shared network of possibilities. Their trajectories intersect, diverge, and resonate without collapsing into sameness.
Beyond Linear Narratives
Ode Aje is thereby situated as a threshold-space— functioning as a site where the local opens into the universal without dissolving into it.
Falola’s life demonstrates that transcendence does not negate origin. Instead, origin becomes a symbolic reservoir continually reactivated through scholarship, mentorship, and institutional creation. Intellectual history is depicted as a story not of escape from place, but of place-mediated expansion.The relationship between Falola and Ode Aje exemplifies intellectual emergence as relational, contingent, and recursive. Neither individual nor place exhausts the possibilities of the other.
Universities must learn again from neighborhoods, forests, shrines, and informal knowledge ecologies. A system of thresholds, not a pipeline; initiation, not credentialing; transformation, not consumption. Falola represents what happens when a knowledge space successfully externalizes one of its internal possibilities into global circulation.
Conclusion: The Breathing That Sustains
My pilgrimage to Ode Aje revealed a community where extraordinary kindness flourishes amidst material scarcity—the woman carrying my heavy box without request for compensation, Iya Tosin calling repeatedly to ensure my safe arrival in Osogbo, the child's elaborate gesture of respect. These encounters embodied the very indigenous values that Falola's scholarship seeks to preserve and theorize.
Iya Tosin's words echo with metaphorical resonance: "The breathing of humans is what sustains a house." Falola's work represents the breathing that sustains not just a physical house but an entire epistemological edifice, one that honors the wisdom of places like Ode Aje and figures like Iya Lekuleja. His four books emerging from this single neighborhood testify to the generative power of remaining rooted in indigenous knowledge systems while engaging global academic discourse.
The question remains open, as it must: how do possibilities emerge, and how do individuals like Falola recognize and actualize them? Perhaps the answer lies not only in abstract theorizing but in the concrete particulars of place, the mentorship of inspiring figures, and the inspirational force, exemplified by Falola's "spiritual journey", that is critical for creativity. As Falola declares: "I am an agent of our ancestors. I am not beholden to the academy." In that declaration resides a methodology that challenges, disrupts, and ultimately enriches our understanding of what scholarship can be.