Àṣẹ, the Spiral and Oriki: African Verbal and Visual Philosophical Expressions as Inspirations in the Philosophy of History: Taking Forward Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba A New History: A Few Words
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
A Few Words
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Inspired by the achievements and possibilities of Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History, this essay lays foundations for a philosophy of history inspired by Yoruba thought in dialogue with other African systems of thought.
Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History haunts me through its achievement and its promise. Its description of its purpose is spellbinding and its execution of that purpose, compelling.
I wonder, however, about the degree to which that deeply inspiring statement of purpose has been actualized. Ogundiran's work re-constructs Yoruba history in a way that dramatizes the progressive emergence of Yoruba thought from its geographical, social and economic contexts, and the influence of that thought on those socio-economic iterations.
From my exposure so far to Yoruba history, this seems to be the most salient ideational contribution of that book to accounts of that history. Within this central ideational structure may be found his strikingly illuminating readings of central conceptual nodes in Yoruba thought and its social contexts, such as his account of the principle of complementary duality and his development of a philosophy of Orisa cosmology integrating the present, the past and infinity.
The expressive force of Ogundiran's accounts of the dynamism of Yoruba history, represented by narrative design and poetic luminosity communicated through imagistic vividness and metaphoric force, qualities generating imaginative immersion and reflective power, would itself be a great achievement, but his ideational complexes summing up central points of the crystallization of this story make the work even more memorable.
Did classical Yoruba thinkers reflect on the significance of human experience as a temporal progression? Did they develop any insights on the factors that shape this dynamic? Did they construct any conceptions about the ultimate direction, if any, of this motion from the past to the present and the future?
From my exposure to Yoruba philosophy so far, these aspects of Yoruba thought are not highlighted in the literature, which may be seen to be still at the stage of developing its foundations, presenting and clarifying its concepts and working out their immediate and more extensive implications, a goal to which this essay hopes to contribute, enabling more expansive developments through further engagement with the ideas presented.
Yoruba conceptions of the significance of history and of how to explore history are obvious from the questions I presented above, depending on how one interprets what is already known about Yoruba thought. These ideas from Yoruba thought are also better appreciated in relation to interpretations of similar concepts and to other ideas from other bodies of African thought.
What is Yoruba Thought?
Yoruba thought may be understood as the body of ideas developed in what is now known as Yorubaland as it exists in Nigeria and contiguous geographical expressions divided by colonial borders, the diffusion of these ideas to the African diaspora and the development of these conceptions by different peoples in various parts of the world.
Hence, Yoruba thought is represented as much by its traditional expressions, central to which is Orisa cosmology and its best known epistemic vehicle, Ifa, as by all those who develop these traditional bodies of knowledge, from Ogundiran on Orisha cosmology, to Kolawole Ositola on relationships between memory, time and knowledge, to Margaret Thompson Drewal's conceptualization of Ositola's ideas in terms of the image of a spiral, to Wole Soyinka's correlative image of the Abyss of Transition, to Olabiyi Yai on dynamism in relation to Ori theory of the self, and Yai, Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal and Karen Barber on Yoruba oriki discourse as strategic to relationships between conceptions of the nature of beings and the development of these natures through time, at the intersection of ideas of immediacy and permanence, of essence and expression, temporality and infinity, ultimate origination and temporal expression, ideas and their shapers representing Yoruba and non-Yoruba people pursuing common goals, engaged in a united enterprise, the study and development of Yoruba thought.
The names and ideas listed in the paragraph immediately above represent the circumference of my current understanding of this field, invoking ideas and thinkers of particular significance to what I understand as Yoruba philosophies or conceptions of history, but not including thinkers from the African diaspora represented by African-America and the diffusion of these ideas to Cuba and South America, as well as their expression in Francophone Africa, areas significant for Yoruba thought but about which I am less informed.
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The spiral, as imaged above by Nigerian artist Fidelis Odogwu Eze. is a useful motif for understanding and further developing conceptions of history from African thought.
The spiral image may represent a perception of human life as both cyclical and potentially transgressive of repetition.
This cyclical and creatively transgressive rhythm is demonstrated in ideas of reincarnation, in the understanding of life as a recurrence expressed in terms of new features, of the coinherence of the predictable and the unpredictable, the anticipated and the unanticipated, a recurrence enabling consistency within change and therefore ensuring ultimate stability and the possibility of coherent existence, of cosmos instead of chaos, of the capacity of interpreting the present in terms of its actualized and unrealized possibilities as deriving from or breaking from a past in which they are nevertheless embedded, a journey represented by the illumination enabled as well as symbolized by the sun as physical luminary and cognitive symbol, as the human person journeys towards possibilities of infinity existing within the present moment at the intersection of matter and spirit, temporality and infinity, adapting Margaret Thomson Drewal's interpretation, in Yoruba Ritual, of babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa-Kolawole Ositola, on intergenerational transmission of cognitive vocations in Yoruba knowledge systems, the Cross River Nsibidi symbol of the spiral as employed by artist Victor Ekpuk, Igbo Uli spiral symbolism, Benin Olokun igha-ede symbolism and the symbolism of the Yoruba origin orisa or deity Eshu in terms of both the co-existence of contraries and dynamic motion enabled by àṣẹ, the principle of individual identity and unique creative possibility.
The evocation of spiral motion in Eze's piece may represent motion as both circular and transcendent of the circular as the multiply coloured flakes constituting the spiral and dispersed from it or coagulating within it may suggest the myriad insights and possibilities emerging from this spiral motion.
Ogundiran's powerful use of Yoruba proverbs in The Yoruba may be understood in relation to such a spiral conception of history. Proverbs mediate between the past, the present, the future and the infinite by seeking to encapsulate insights from the past through often imagistic forms understood as having perennial significance, igniting new sparks of cognitive value when adequately employed in new contexts.
They are therefore powerful vehicles of narrative exposition and interpretation, as Ogundiran demonstrates, expressions of a system of knowledge which seeks to encapsulate all possibilities through methods sensitive to new unfoldings as developments of ancient matrices.
''Towmorrow is different from today, so the babalawo divines everday'' goes a Yoruba expression suggesting the dynamism of reality within the context of seeking to understand phenomena through the convergence of the entire spectrum of possibilities that shape reality, as Yoruba origin Ifa divination may be described.
This orientation suggests a hermeneutic, a philosophy and practice of interpretation, privileging unceasing sensitivity to the novel, to the emergence of new possibilities in the convergence of influences within the armbit of time, a creativity represented by the calabash symbolism evoked by the empty centre of the opon ifa, the Ifa divination platform and cosmological symbol, a centre where the odu symbol permutations emerge in divination, and which, adapting Shloma Rosenberg on a name for the supreme creator in Yoruba thought, ''Olodumare'', ''Owner of Odu'', ''the calabash of never ending possibilities, the matrix from which each moment is born'', a hermeneutic defined by the intersection of individual and group identity and the contexts of existence, within the convergence of predictability and unpredictability navigated through degrees of access to creative orientations, as Yoruba ori theory, Igbo chi theory and Kalabari teme and so theory, the latter as interpreted by Nimi Wariboko, may be correlated in terms of Ifa hermeneutics and with the idea of Eshu as a central interpretive agent within this hermeneutic, a hermeneutic that could be helpful in developing a historiography, a method of studying history.
Michael Afolayan
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Michael Afolayan
Augustine
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