Through the Arch of the Flying Tortoise: Mapping Toyin Falola’s Intellectual Ecosystem through Ọ̀pọn Ifá A Critical Survey of Falola-Related Activities, 13–19 July 2026 :Toyin Falola Studies Review No.1.: Complete Report
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Through the Arch of the Flying Tortoise
Mapping Toyin Falola’s Intellectual Ecosystem through Ọ̀pọn Ifá
A Critical Survey of Falola-Related Activities, 13–19 July 2026
Toyin Falola Studies Review No.1.
Complete Report
by ChatGPT
and Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
20th July 2026
Abstract
This essay combines an empirical survey of publicly discoverable activities involving Toyin Falola between 13 and 19 July 2026 with a visual and philosophical interpretation of his intellectual career. Its conceptual structure is generated through two images. The first is the sculptural arch identified as the Arch of the Flying Tortoise, created by Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Collective in the Ọ̀ṣun Sacred Forest at Òṣogbo. It represents passage, transformation and elevation beyond apparently fixed limitations. The second is a contemporary visualization of an ọ̀pọn Ifá, by Moyo Okediji, its circular form, radiating lines, central point and encompassing circumference suggesting an interpretive system for relating events, agents, temporalities and possibilities.
Within this conjunction, Falola appears as a traveller across geographical, disciplinary, institutional and imaginative worlds. The survey distinguishes his direct actions from those of scholars, universities, publishers, cultural institutions, media organizations and emerging intellectual networks responding to him. It also differentiates completed events and newly published writings from retrospective reports, republications, forthcoming programmes and works in progress.
The week’s principal developments included Falola’s keynote at the inauguration of the Alaafin Institute of Yoruba Studies; the University of Ibadan presentation of his book on Doyin Aguoru; his popular-social reflection on plural marriage; the critical reception of his Aguoru study; the intellectual afterlife of TOFAC 2026; the emergence of the Toyin Falola Disciples; forthcoming programmes at the National Open University of Nigeria and the Thabo Mbeki African School; and the promotion of Violence in the Postcolony, co-edited with Abikal Borah. Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju’s discussions of institutionalizing Falola Studies and constructing a digital transdisciplinary archive mark a further movement from studying Falola as an individual toward defining a field and building its research infrastructure.
Read through the two
images, these activities become more than a sequence of weekly notices. The
forest arch figures Falola’s movement between history, metaphysics, literature,
public policy and cultural activism; the ọ̀pọn Ifá organizes the week as a
field of intersecting agencies in which the present opens toward the past,
future and unrealized possibilities. Falola consequently emerges as scholar,
author, editor, mentor, convenor, public intellectual and centre of a
distributed intellectual ecosystem. The durability of that ecosystem will
depend on independent criticism, reliable documentation, inclusive
institution-building and the transformation of celebratory recognition into
verifiable scholarly production.
The entire text is researched and composed by ChatGPT. The theoretical frames of the Flying Tortoise and opon ifa hermeneutics are developed in their fundamental terms by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in the first part of this essay sequence but elaborated upon by ChatGPT.
The Governing Images
The Arch of the Flying Tortoise, attributed to Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Collective in the Ọ̀ṣun Sacred Forest, Òṣogbo: an image of passage, transformation and elevation within a forest reconceived as a microcosm of Yoruba cosmology.
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A contemporary visualization of an ọ̀pọn Ifá hermeneutics by Moyo Okediji. The central point, radiating lines, segmented circumference and Èṣù figure at the top suggest the convergence of temporal directions, interpretive possibilities and agencies within an encompassing field of being and becoming.
Contents
1. Introduction: Through the Arch of the Flying Tortoise
2. Scope, Period and Method
3. History as Path, Circle and Field of Àṣẹ
o The forest as a community of agencies
o The arch as passage and transformation
o Ọ̀pọn Ifá as a model of historical interpretation
o Falola as traveller through space, time and knowledge
4. Reciprocal Intellectual Recognition: Adepoju’s Annotated Republication of Falola’s Book-Dedication Essay
5. Documenting an Intellectual Community: The Audiovisual Afterlife of TOFAC 2026
6. Yoruba Knowledge as Philosophy and Public Policy: Falola at the Alaafin Institute
o Yoruba mythology as an intellectual system
o Indigenous knowledge and curricular equality
o Yoruba ecological philosophy
o Moral authority and political accountability
o The Ṣàngó–Ògún oath proposal
o Institutional and media responses
7. The Critical Reception of Falola’s Study of Doyin Aguoru
8. From Orature to Digital Culture: The NOUN–Falola Masterclass
9. Mentorship as Intellectual Recognition: The University of Ibadan Book Presentation
o Falola’s philosophy of scholarly succession
o Aguoru’s response
o Criticism, music and dramatic performance
o African feminist scholarship
10. The Afterlife of TOFAC 2026: Jatau David Polang’s Reflection
11. From Influence to Intellectual Lineage: The Toyin Falola Disciples
12. Falola and African Public Policy: The South African Governance Invitation
13. Constructing Falola Studies
- Institutionalizing Falola Studies
- AI-assisted research conversations
- The proposed transdisciplinary archive
- Opportunities, methodological requirements and risks
14. Falola as Popular Moral and Creative Writer: “Second Wife—Double Wahala”
15. A Forthcoming Scholarly Intervention: Violence in the Postcolony
- Falola and Abikal Borah as co-editors
- Falola’s individual contributions
- Authors, regions and themes
- Preliminary assessment
16. Media Circulation, Republication and Public Reception
17. Summative Assessment: Falola as a Distributed Intellectual Institution
18. Conclusion: Falola Studies beneath the Arch of Possibility
Scope, Period and Method
This survey covers 13–19 July 2026 inclusive, using Lagos time. It draws on institutional announcements, Falola-related platforms, publisher records, Nigerian media reports, professional and social-media posts and public discussion forums.
“Every item” refers to every publicly discoverable and date-verifiable development identified during the research. Private communications and unindexed publications cannot be guaranteed. Duplicate reports have been consolidated, while distinctions are maintained among:
- events that took place during the week;
- new reports about earlier events;
- forthcoming events and publications;
- republications and media circulation;
- discussions, responses and archival projects.
These distinctions are important because Falola’s contemporary presence is not produced solely through his immediate actions. It is also created through the activities of people and institutions that publish, review, interpret, honour, invite, criticize, document and organize themselves around his work.
Introduction: Through the Arch of the Flying Tortoise
The Forest as a Community of Agencies
Susanne Wenger understood the Ọ̀ṣun forest not as a passive background to human activity but as a living conjunction of water, vegetation, animals, spiritual agencies and creative consciousness. In the account reproduced on the back cover of Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger, she describes her identity as continuous with the river, trees and creatures of the forest. Creativity, within this vision, does not originate in the isolated human mind. It emerges through participation in a community of visible and invisible agencies.
This understanding provides a powerful entry into the study of history. History may be approached not simply as a procession of human decisions but as the outcome of encounters among people, societies, institutions, environments, inherited traditions and unrealized possibilities. Each participant brings a distinctive form of agency into the evolving configuration.
This ecological model of historical motion illuminates the week under review. Falola acted, but universities also acted. Scholars interpreted him; publishers organized his writings; artists dramatized the work of a scholar he studied; media institutions fragmented a complex lecture into striking public propositions; younger academics named themselves after him; and Adepoju began constructing Falola Studies as an intellectual and archival field. The history of the week therefore lies not in one person alone but in the interactions among all these centres of agency.
The Arch as Passage and Transformation
The sculptural arch stretches across a forest path. It is simultaneously an object to be contemplated and a structure through which one passes. Its two grounded supports rise from the earth, curve through space and approach each other above the traveller. The path continues beneath them into the forest.
The arch may therefore be read as a threshold between cognitive worlds. Before passing beneath it, one inhabits one configuration of perception; after crossing, the same forest may appear differently. The structure does not remove the traveller from the earth. It transforms the meaning of terrestrial movement.
The tortoise intensifies this symbolism. Ordinarily associated with the ground, deliberation, age and accumulated wisdom, it is here imagined in flight. Its carapace—already a portable enclosure, a miniature world carried upon the body—becomes an aerial universe. The earthbound creature rises without abandoning the wisdom of the earth. Elevation is achieved through transformation rather than repudiation of origins.
Falola’s intellectual trajectory may be approached through this paradox. He begins from particular grounds: Ibadan, Ọ̀de Àjẹ́, Yoruba history, Nigerian social experience and African historiography. Yet he repeatedly carries these grounds into wider disciplinary and global spaces. History expands into literature, performance, metaphysics, religious studies, political theory, ecology, memoir and public ethics. The local is neither abandoned nor confined; it becomes the foundation for intellectual flight.
The Alaafin Institute lecture exemplifies this movement. Falola carried Yoruba mythology through the arch separating supposedly traditional narrative from philosophy and public policy. Myth became a vehicle for examining ethics, ecology, political authority and education. Similarly, his study of Doyin Aguoru moved through the borders separating history from drama, literary criticism, feminist thought and cultural performance. His Falola Masterclasses cross the boundaries among formal scholarship, public education and digital communication.
The flying tortoise consequently becomes an emblem of an intellectual method: rootedness capable of motion, cultural specificity capable of transdisciplinary expansion, and accumulated knowledge transformed into a vehicle of imaginative elevation.
What Is History?
“What is history?” E. H. Carr asks in the book bearing that title. How should history be understood? Is it a record of events, an interpretation of surviving evidence, a reconstruction of interactions among diverse agencies, or an effort to discern patterns within apparently disconnected occurrences?
The Falola-related activities of a single week demonstrate the difficulty of separating event from interpretation. Falola’s keynote was an event. The reports that presented it respectively as a defence of African knowledge, an environmental intervention and a proposal concerning Ṣàngó and Ògún were interpretations. The University of Ibadan book presentation was an event; the performances, reviews and subsequent reports transformed it into a larger statement about mentorship and African feminist scholarship. TOFAC had already concluded, yet recollection, photography and testimony continued to extend its life into the week under review.
History thus appears as both occurrence and afterlife. An event enters time through action but continues through memory, narration, criticism, documentation and institutional consequence.
Ọ̀pọn Ifá as a Model of Historical Interpretation
The second image supplies a structure for navigating these relationships. The circular form of the ọ̀pọn Ifá encloses a central space across which lines radiate toward different points of the circumference. At the upper edge is the face conventionally associated with Èṣù, mediator of communication, guardian of interpretive crossings and agent of unpredictable transformations.
The image may be adapted as a model of historical hermeneutics.
The centre represents the present: in this instance, the week of 13–19 July 2026. It is the point from which inquiry begins.
The radiating lines connect the present to earlier actions and future consequences. Falola’s July activities emerge from decades of writing, teaching, conference organization and mentoring. At the same time, the Alaafin Institute, the Toyin Falola Disciples, the forthcoming publications and the proposed digital archive open toward futures not yet determined.
The segmented circumference represents the various domains through which Falola’s significance is constituted: scholarship, publishing, universities, cultural institutions, public policy, media, mentorship, artistic performance and intellectual reception.
The crossing lines represent interactions among those domains. A book becomes a performance; a lecture becomes a newspaper controversy; a conference becomes a professional network; an essay becomes an online discussion; a scholar becomes the subject of an archive; personal influence develops into an intellectual lineage.
The enclosing circle evokes the larger field of being and becoming within which these movements occur. No single line exhausts the whole. Each represents one possible direction from the centre, while the circumference holds the differentiated possibilities together.
Èṣù’s position is particularly significant. No communication passes unchanged between origin and destination. Lectures become headlines; books become reviews; mentorship becomes discipleship; biography becomes field formation. Interpretation is never neutral transmission. It is transformation at the crossroads.
Àṣẹ and the Multiplicity of Historical Agency
This ọ̀pọn Ifá hermeneutics may be deepened through the Yoruba conception of àṣẹ—the enabling power through which beings, words, actions and institutions bring possibilities into manifestation.
Within such a framework, history is not created by one sovereign agency. It emerges from the meeting, cooperation and contestation of multiple powers. Falola’s àṣẹ as writer and speaker interacts with the institutional àṣẹ of universities, the interpretive àṣẹ of reviewers, the distributive àṣẹ of media, the performative àṣẹ of artists and the associative àṣẹ of scholars who organize under his name.
The survey’s distinction between what Falola did and what others did in relation to him is therefore not merely documentary. It reveals how intellectual influence is socially produced. A scholar may write a book, but publishers make it materially available; reviewers interpret it; universities provide ceremonial and intellectual platforms; performers transpose it into another medium; readers contest its claims; archivists preserve it; and succeeding scholars adapt its methods.
Falola’s importance during the week lies at the intersection of these agencies.
The Week as an Ọ̀pọn Ifá of Intellectual Activity
Each principal development may be positioned within this interpretive circle.
- Falola’s book dedication and Adepoju’s republication occupy the line of reciprocity: recognition travels from one thinker to another and returns through commentary.
- TOFAC’s audiovisual and reflective afterlife occupies the line of collective memory: a concluded conference continues through images, recollections and new professional relationships.
- The Alaafin Institute lecture marks the passage from mythology to philosophy, ecology, political morality and public policy—the most dramatic passage beneath the arch.
- Damilare Bello’s review represents the line of criticism through which a book becomes an object of further interpretation rather than a closed achievement.
- The NOUN masterclass connects orature with digital culture, carrying inherited forms through technological transformation.
- The University of Ibadan presentation of the Aguoru book connects scholarship with mentorship, feminist recognition, music and theatrical performance.
- The Toyin Falola Disciples project influence into intellectual succession, although the language of discipleship must remain open to critical independence.
- The South African governance invitation extends Falola’s movement across national and disciplinary boundaries into public-policy debate.
- The institutionalization of Falola Studies and the proposed digital archive convert the circular field itself into an object of systematic mapping.
- “Second Wife—Double Wahala” returns analysis to the everyday ground of family, emotion, responsibility and popular moral reflection.
- Violence in the Postcolony enters histories of collective memory, religious conflict, displacement, performance and suffering, mapping contested passages through African experience.
- Media circulation demonstrates Èṣù’s transformative domain: one statement travels along several communicative paths and acquires different public meanings.
The week is therefore not a random collection of notices. It is a miniature intellectual cosmos in which texts, people, institutions and interpretations encounter one another.
Falola as Peregrinator
James Joyce’s Ulysses converts one day’s movement through Dublin into an epic journey by placing Leopold Bloom’s urban wanderings in dialogue with Odysseus’s return from the Trojan War. The ordinary city becomes a cosmos because the traveller’s movement is interpreted through multiple temporal, symbolic and literary dimensions.
A comparable method may be brought to Falola’s intellectual peregrinations. From his origins in Ibadan and Ọ̀de Àjẹ́, he moves through universities, archives, conferences, books, cultural systems and continents. His travels are physical, but they are also cognitive. He journeys from historical evidence into philosophical speculation, from Yoruba thought into global comparison, from scholarly prose into memoir and poetry, and from individual authorship into institutional organization.
The week of 13–19 July 2026 represents only a short temporal interval. Yet, like the single day of Joyce’s novel, it may disclose an epic structure when situated within the longer journey. The Alaafin Institute recalls Falola’s sustained investment in Yoruba knowledge. The Aguoru book presentation reveals his developing philosophy of mentorship. TOFAC represents decades of conference organization. The emerging Falola Studies archive anticipates the preservation and critical interpretation of that expanding trajectory.
The weekly survey thereby becomes a microhistory of a much larger movement.
From Earthly Ground to Intellectual Flight
Human beings walk upon the earth while projecting thought beyond immediate spatial and temporal limits. They remember worlds that have passed, imagine futures that do not yet exist and speculate upon realities exceeding ordinary perception. Falola’s work repeatedly inhabits this tension between terrestrial groundedness and cognitive flight.
The arch and the ọ̀pọn Ifá express complementary dimensions of that condition. The arch is a structure of motion: it invites the traveller to pass from one state of understanding into another. The tray is a structure of interpretation: it gathers multiple directions within a single encompassing field.
Together they provide the governing method of this survey. We follow Falola through the archways connecting disciplines, institutions and cultural worlds. We then map his activities upon the interpretive circle, distinguishing his actions from the responses of those around him while examining the relationships among them.
Under the flying tortoise, grounded wisdom discovers the possibility of elevation. Upon the ọ̀pọn Ifá, scattered occurrences become interconnected signs. The survey that follows therefore studies not merely what happened to or around Toyin Falola during one week, but how an intellectual ecosystem makes history through movement, interpretation, reciprocity and the continuing activation of possibility.
Transition to the Empirical Survey
The detailed survey may now proceed from this conceptual foundation. Each item should retain the analytical sequence already established:
1. What happened;
2. What Falola did;
3. What others did in relation to him;
4. How the development should be assessed;
5. Where it belongs within the larger Falola intellectual ecosystem.
This final element completes the integration. It ensures that the forest arch and the ọ̀pọn Ifá do not remain introductory ornaments. Each subsequent activity becomes a passage through the arch and a position within the tray’s interconnected field of time, agency and interpretation.
Empirical Survey
4. Reciprocal Intellectual Recognition: Adepoju’s Annotated Republication of Falola’s Book-Dedication Essay
The New Development
On 13 July 2026, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju republished, with commentary, Falola’s essay explaining his dedication of Ifá Priestcraft: Ifáyemí Elébuìbon and Yorùbá Ancestral Knowledge Systems to Adepoju. Falola’s original essay had appeared on 8 July, outside the strict temporal boundary of this survey; the annotated republication and the discussion it generated, however, belong within the week.
What Falola Did
Falola represented the dedication as more than an expression of friendship. He presented it as an acknowledgement of shared intellectual commitments and of Adepoju’s sustained engagement with African epistemologies, Yoruba cosmology and intercultural philosophy. He particularly emphasized Adepoju’s tendency to move beyond the surface of a text: questioning it, debating it, correlating it with other knowledge systems and attempting to unfold possibilities latent within it.
The dedication therefore constitutes an act of intellectual recognition. Falola used the paratextual space surrounding a book—normally limited to a brief personal statement—to articulate a philosophy of scholarly relationship. Falola’s original dedication essay
What Others Did
Adepoju republished the essay with an interpretive framework emphasizing its philosophical, methodological and personal implications. The republication extended the text beyond the Toyin Falola Network into LinkedIn, Facebook and the USA–Africa Dialogue Series. Discussion continued during the week, turning the dedication into a public conversation about recognition, naming, intellectual independence and the study of African knowledge systems.
Nimi Wariboko’s response to the original publication is also significant. He interpreted the essay not only as a celebration of Adepoju but as an intervention in the methodology of African Studies and indigenous epistemology.
Assessment
The newly circulated commentary is valuable primary material for Falola Studies. It reveals how Falola constructs intellectual relationships through writing, dedication, mentorship and public affirmation. It also illuminates the reciprocal character of intellectual influence: Falola recognizes Adepoju’s work, while Adepoju interprets and expands Falola’s recognition.
The limitation is that both figures are participants in the relationship under examination. Their statements should eventually be placed beside independent studies of their writings and collaborations. Reciprocal testimony establishes the relationship’s meaning to its participants; external scholarship must assess its wider intellectual significance.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
This development occupies the line of reciprocity on the imagined ọ̀pọn Ifá. Recognition travels outward from Falola through the dedication and returns through Adepoju’s commentary. The exchange resembles two movements passing through the same arch in opposite directions: the act of dedication becomes an act of interpretation, and interpretation preserves and enlarges recognition.
5. Documenting an Intellectual Community: The Audiovisual Afterlife of TOFAC 2026
The New Development
On 13 July, the Toyin Falola Interviews platform released an audiovisual recap of the fifteenth Toyin Falola Annual Conference, held at the University of Jos from 7 to 10 July 2026. Although the conference itself preceded the survey period, its digital representation became part of the following week’s Falola-related activity. TOFAC 2026 video recap
What Falola Did
Falola had supplied the conference with its name, intellectual inspiration and a substantial history of scholarly convening. His presence connected TOFAC 2026 to an established sequence of annual conferences through which different African universities have hosted discussions addressing continental and diasporic questions.
What Others Did
The audiovisual producers selected and organized images of the conference, converting a concluded physical event into a digital object capable of continued circulation. Participants, university officials, speakers and conference organizers thereby entered an expanding visual archive of the TOFAC tradition.
Assessment
The recap adds limited new intellectual information, but its documentary function is important. Conferences disappear rapidly if their papers, images, programmes and discussions are not preserved. Audiovisual documentation communicates scale, atmosphere and collective participation in ways that written reports cannot.
Nevertheless, visual celebration should not substitute for intellectual preservation. A strong TOFAC archive should eventually connect photographs and videos with programmes, abstracts, complete papers, keynote lectures, participant lists and post-conference publications.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The recap occupies the line of memory. TOFAC has ended, but the digital image carries it back into the present. Like a path remaining visible through the forest after travellers have passed, the recording marks the conference’s movement through time.
6. Yoruba Knowledge as Philosophy and Public Policy: Falola at the Alaafin Institute
The inauguration of the Alaafin Institute of Yoruba Studies at Emmanuel Alayande University of Education, Oyo, on 14 July was the week’s most substantial completed public event. Falola delivered the keynote, “Yorùbá Mythologies and Their Relevance Today,” while the university and the Alaafin of Oyo formally launched an institution dedicated to Yoruba knowledge.
Yoruba Mythology as an Intellectual System
Falola argued that Yoruba mythology should not be approached as an accumulation of entertaining or superstitious narratives. It is, in his account, a layered intellectual system communicating philosophical, theological, ethical, ecological and political ideas through stories, poetry, ritual and symbols.
He challenged the hierarchy inherited from colonial education in which Greek traditions are classified as philosophy and classical learning, while structurally comparable African traditions are reduced to folklore. Yoruba myths, he argued, ask fundamental questions about reality, personhood, responsibility, suffering, power and the relations between humanity, nature and invisible being.
The intervention does not require every mythic claim to be accepted literally. Rather, it demands that the intellectual labour embodied in Yoruba symbolic systems be investigated with the seriousness applied to other civilizational traditions.
Indigenous Knowledge and Curricular Equality
Falola called for Ifá and related systems to be taught beside Aristotle, Plato, Descartes and other conventionally privileged figures. His argument concerned not simply the addition of African material to an unchanged curriculum but the reorganization of intellectual categories.
Curricular equality requires more than ceremonial inclusion. It entails Yoruba-language competence, textual and oral documentation, philosophical interpretation, historical criticism and sustained research funding. It must also enable disagreement within Yoruba traditions rather than present them as internally uniform.
Falola’s strongest point is therefore institutional: knowledge systems survive when universities train scholars, support archives, publish research and transmit intellectual languages to new generations. Guardian report on Falola’s defence of African knowledge systems
Yoruba Ecological Philosophy
Another strand of the keynote addressed the environmental implications of Yoruba sacred geography. Rivers, forests, mountains, plants and animals may be understood not merely as resources but as participants in a morally significant universe.
This aspect of the lecture resonates strongly with the first governing image of this essay. The Ọ̀ṣun forest is simultaneously an ecosystem, a sacred geography, a sculptural environment and an archive of Yoruba cosmology. Wenger’s art does not merely place objects inside a forest; it attempts to disclose the forest itself as a community of presences.
Falola urged policymakers to draw upon such indigenous ecological philosophies in confronting deforestation, pollution and environmental degradation. TheCable’s account of Falola’s ecological argument
The proposal is promising, but sacred valuation must be translated into practical structures: community land rights, conservation law, ecological research, enforceable protection and measurable outcomes. Indigenous knowledge can complement environmental science while also challenging the assumption that nature exists solely for human extraction.
Moral Authority and Political Accountability
Falola connected Yoruba mythology with political philosophy. Authority, he argued, should be understood as àṣẹ grounded in moral responsibility. When power loses its ethical foundation, it becomes coercion rather than legitimate authority.
This interpretation proposes that communities do not owe unlimited reverence to officeholders. Respect must be sustained by responsible conduct, reciprocity and service. Indigenous political philosophy, in this account, does not require a literal restoration of precolonial governance; it offers concepts through which contemporary institutions may be criticized and reconstructed.
The Ṣàngó–Ògún Oath Proposal
The most widely publicized and controversial element of the lecture was Falola’s proposal that the National Assembly consider incorporating Ṣàngó and Ògún into public-office oaths. The proposal rests on the belief that culturally meaningful sanctions may exert greater moral force than formulas treated by political actors as empty ceremony. Punch report on the oath proposal
The underlying diagnosis is significant: legal systems are weakened when public officials do not experience their commitments as morally binding. Falola’s proposal dramatizes the gap between formal oath-taking and actual accountability.
Its literal implementation, however, would raise major questions in a religiously plural society. Compelling people of different faiths to invoke Yoruba divinities could reproduce the very cultural domination that decolonial thought seeks to overcome. The proposal is most productive when understood as an intellectual provocation: What moral languages genuinely bind public officials, and how can indigenous concepts of consequence strengthen constitutional accountability without violating religious freedom?
Institutional and Media Responses
Emmanuel Alayande University established the Institute; Vice-Chancellor Olanrewaju Olaniyan emphasized the vulnerability of archives, oral traditions, museum collections and private records; and Alaafin Oba Akeem Abimbola Owoade commissioned the Institute’s office and advocated investment in indigenous languages and cultural research.
Ademola Dasylva, Sola Olorunyomi and Arinpe Adejumo participated in the discussion of Falola’s lecture. The Institute also honoured Falola for his contributions to Yoruba language, history and culture. Guardian report on the Institute’s inauguration
The event’s long-term importance will depend less on the inauguration ceremony than on what follows: staffing, funding, archives, publications, language programmes, research projects and collaborations with community knowledge holders.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The Alaafin Institute event is the survey’s clearest passage beneath the Arch of the Flying Tortoise. Yoruba mythology, conventionally confined to the ground of “tradition,” is carried into philosophy, curriculum, environmental policy and political theory.
On the ọ̀pọn Ifá, it occupies several intersecting lines: mythology, education, ecology, authority, religion, media and institution-building. The event demonstrates how one lecture can become a crossroads from which different interpretive paths emerge.
7. The Critical Reception of Falola’s Study of Doyin Aguoru
The New Development
On 14 July, Damilare Bello of Duke University published a substantial review of Falola’s Feminism, Africanism, and Globalism: Doyin Aguoru’s Voices through Drama. The review examines the book’s organization, themes and interdisciplinary method. Damilare Bello’s review
What Falola Did
Falola’s book studies Aguoru’s dramatic, literary and intellectual work through the intersecting categories of feminism, Africanism and globalism. He moves among history, literary criticism, dramaturgy, political analysis and cultural interpretation.
Rather than separating Aguoru’s creative and scholarly writings, Falola approaches them as complementary expressions of a developing intellectual vision. His chapters address identity, governance, gendered power, refugees, neoliberal capitalism, scientific knowledge, local traditions and comparative drama.
What Bello Did
Bello supplied readers with a chapter-by-chapter map of the book. He praised its synthetic and interdisciplinary range, particularly Falola’s capacity to connect individual works to larger political and philosophical questions.
He also identified a structural weakness: the comparison between Aguoru and Athol Fugard arrives relatively late and would have benefited from stronger preparation and more sustained development. This criticism gives the review analytical value beyond celebration.
Assessment
Bello’s essay is an important reception document because it demonstrates that Falola’s book is beginning to generate a secondary literature. The review confirms Falola’s movement beyond disciplinary history into literary and performance studies.
Its overall orientation remains sympathetic. Future criticism should test Falola’s selection of Aguoru’s works, his comparative categories and the balance between historical contextualization and close textual analysis.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The review occupies the line of critical return. Falola interprets Aguoru; Bello interprets Falola’s interpretation. Meaning moves through successive circles rather than terminating in the original book. The critical pathway prevents intellectual flight from becoming unexamined elevation.
8. From Orature to Digital Culture: The NOUN–Falola Masterclass
The New Development
On 14 July, the English Department of the National Open University of Nigeria announced a free virtual masterclass scheduled for 28 July: “From Orature to Digital Culture: The Evolution of African Literature.”
Falola was identified as a collaborator in the programme. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah was announced as lead lecturer, Mobolanle Sotunsa as moderator, and acting head of department Felicia Oamen as the issuing institutional officer. NOUN’s official announcement
Intellectual Significance
The announced subject joins forms sometimes treated as historical opposites. Orature suggests inherited performance, communal participation, memory, voice, gesture and live transmission. Digital culture suggests electronic mediation, recording, circulation, recombination and global access.
The title implies that African literature has not simply moved from an oral past into a digital present. Orality persists within contemporary media through spoken-word performance, video, podcasting, participatory storytelling and other forms of technologically mediated communality.
Assessment
This initiative extends the Falola Masterclass model into literature and digital culture. It also demonstrates Falola’s capacity to convene scholars without making himself the principal speaker.
As of 19 July, however, the programme remained forthcoming. It should therefore be recorded as a confirmed institutional initiative, not assessed as an accomplished intellectual event. Its eventual significance will depend upon the lecture’s quality, audience participation, documentation and continued accessibility.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The masterclass is another passage through the arch: voice becomes inscription, performance becomes recording, and orature enters the digital environment without necessarily surrendering its communal character. On the tray, it connects memory, technology, literature and pedagogy.
9. Mentorship as Intellectual Recognition: The University of Ibadan Book Presentation
On 15 July, Falola publicly presented Feminism, Africanism, and Globalism at the Senator Abiola Ajimobi Resource Centre, Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ibadan.
Falola’s Philosophy of Scholarly Succession
Falola described the book as both an intellectual and an ethical undertaking. Aguoru’s oeuvre, he argued, deserved sustained investigation. His broader claim was that senior scholars should not wait until younger colleagues have retired or died before recognizing their achievements.
Mentorship, from this perspective, involves more than recommendations, encouragement or access to appointments. It also means reading another scholar seriously, responding to the person’s ideas, publishing about the work and helping to create a durable intellectual presence.
The principle may be summarized as succession through visibility: intellectual success remains incomplete if it does not enable others to emerge.
Aguoru’s Response
Aguoru received the book as an act of intergenerational dialogue. Her response expressed gratitude but also redirected attention toward younger African scholars and women whose intellectual work often remains insufficiently recognized.
This response is important because it prevents the event from being interpreted only as Falola bestowing recognition. Aguoru speaks within the event as an intellectual agent, locating the book within her own continuing commitments.
Criticism, Music and Dramatic Performance
University of Ibadan Vice-Chancellor Kayode Adebowale hosted the occasion. Samson Ijaola served as master of ceremonies. The UI Department of Music performed, while Oreofe Williams and City of Talents staged Aguoru’s Stolen Seeds. Reviewers examined Falola’s book as a contribution to African literary criticism.
These activities transformed the presentation into an interdisciplinary event. Aguoru’s drama moved from text to Falola’s criticism, from criticism to review and from written drama back into embodied performance. Guardian report on the presentation, The Sun’s account of Falola’s succession argument
Social-media reports also stated that Williams, his family and City of Talents contributed ₦2 million. Because this detail rests principally on social reporting, it should be presented with that qualification.
Significance for African Feminist Scholarship
The presentation enacted rather than merely described a politics of recognition. Falola used his scholarly authority to direct attention toward a living African woman scholar and writer. The book’s scale indicates a commitment beyond ceremonial praise.
Yet a productive tension remains. Falola’s international prominence amplifies Aguoru, but his interpretive framework should not become the only route through which she is read. The healthiest reception will use Falola’s study as one entrance into Aguoru’s corpus while continuing to foreground her own language, concepts and creative authority.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
This event occupies the line of succession. Knowledge does not merely return to the past; it moves toward another person and another generation. Beneath the arch, individual achievement becomes a passage through which others may advance.
10. The Afterlife of TOFAC 2026: Jatau David Polang’s Reflection
The New Development
On 15 July, Jatau David Polang published a participant’s reflection on TOFAC 2026. His essay described the conference’s organization, intellectual content, hospitality and professional consequences. Polang’s TOFAC reflection
What Falola Did
According to Polang, Falola circulated updates and observations about forthcoming papers before the conference, attended the gala, interacted with younger scholars and gave Polang a copy of African Identities: Absence, Loss and the Quest for Self-Definition.
These actions reveal the small-scale interpersonal practices through which a large conference becomes meaningful: anticipation, conversation, book exchange and recognition.
What Others Did
The University of Jos hosted hundreds of participants and more than 130 papers on “Identities in Nigeria.” Sati U. Fwatshak and the local organizing committee coordinated communication, accommodation, transportation and hospitality.
Former INEC chairman Attahiru Jega delivered the keynote on identity, politics and governance. University officials and senior scholars participated, while the University’s Elizabeth Isichei honorary professorial recognition of Falola—conferred during the preceding week—remained prominent in the retrospective.
Polang also reported receiving collaboration inquiries after the conference, suggesting a measurable professional consequence of participation.
Assessment
The essay shows TOFAC functioning as intellectual and social infrastructure. Falola’s influence operates through a network that brings people into contact, generates visibility and enables possible collaborations.
The source remains celebratory and is published within Falola’s network. It should therefore be read as participant testimony rather than an independent evaluation of the conference’s inclusiveness, paper quality or long-term scholarly outcomes.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
Polang’s recollection is a return journey. The conference lies in the immediate past, but memory brings it back to the tray’s centre. The retrospective demonstrates that an event’s historical life includes what participants later understand it to have made possible.
11. From Influence to Intellectual Lineage: The Toyin Falola Disciples
The New Development
On 16 July, a report described the activities of emerging scholars—largely History staff at Kaduna State College of Education, Gidan Waya—who identify themselves as the Toyin Falola Disciples.
They traced their association with Falola’s intellectual network to TOFAC 2019, subsequent lectures and their stronger participation in TOFAC 2026. They committed themselves to African historiography, history from below, African-centred knowledge and the mentorship of emerging historians. Account of the Toyin Falola Disciples
What Falola Did
Falola’s contribution was principally generative rather than administrative. His writings, conferences, lectures and mentoring practices supplied an intellectual reference point around which the scholars organized themselves.
What Others Did
The Kaduna scholars transformed influence into association. They did not merely describe themselves as readers of Falola; they adopted a collective identity and articulated a programme of historical research and mentorship.
This is a significant transition. Intellectual influence becomes institutional when readers begin forming groups, defining purposes and transmitting methods to others.
Assessment
The development demonstrates the decentralization of Falola’s influence. Work conducted in his name is no longer dependent upon his direct physical presence.
The word “disciples,” however, deserves critical attention. It can communicate gratitude, continuity and commitment, but it can also encourage excessive loyalty. A scholarly lineage achieves maturity when successors extend, revise and sometimes reject elements of their predecessor’s work.
The group’s ultimate importance will therefore depend upon its publications, research projects, archives, teaching, mentoring and capacity for intellectual independence.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The Toyin Falola Disciples occupy the line directed toward the future. They suggest that the traveller’s path may be continued by others. The decisive question is whether they will simply follow existing footprints or create new paths through the forest.
12. Falola and African Public Policy: The South African Governance Invitation
The New Development
Between 13 and 18 July, the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs at the University of South Africa promoted a seminar scheduled for 22 July: “Leadership and Governance for Africa’s Renewal: Reclaiming Agency, Ethical Leadership, and Transformative Governance in the Twenty-First Century.”
Falola was announced as guest speaker. The programme proposed to address institutional weakness, corruption, democratic deficits, insecurity, African agency, ethical leadership, development and human welfare. TM-School seminar announcement
The Circulated Falola Proposition
The TM-School also circulated Falola’s argument that the crucial test of leadership is whether rulers are prepared to construct institutions capable of restraining them. Independent courts, effective anti-corruption agencies and genuine electoral removal represent structures through which personal power is subordinated to public accountability. TM-School’s Falola quotation
What Others Did
The South African institution framed and promoted the seminar, while ASG Africa amplified the invitation. Their actions positioned Falola within a continental public-policy conversation extending beyond his better-known roles in history and the humanities.
Assessment
The invitation demonstrates Falola’s transnational intellectual reach. It also reveals a productive conjunction between his Alaafin Institute reflections on morally grounded authority and his emphasis in South Africa on institutions that restrain leaders.
The two arguments should be read together. Moral culture without enforceable institutions may become rhetoric; institutions without ethical legitimacy may be manipulated or ignored. Falola’s emerging position appears to seek a conjunction of both.
As of 19 July, however, the lecture had not yet been delivered. The item documents an invitation and an announced subject rather than a completed intervention.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
This invitation represents an outward radiating line connecting Oyo, Ibadan and Lagos-oriented intellectual activity with Pretoria. Falola moves through another arch: from historian and cultural theorist into a continental discourse on governance.
13. Constructing Falola Studies
The most consequential developments initiated by someone other than Falola were Adepoju’s public efforts to define and institutionalize Falola Studies.
Institutionalizing Falola Studies
On 16 July, Adepoju published “Institutionalising Falola Studies: A Conversation with ChatGPT Plus.” The discussion examined how the study of Falola might develop beyond scattered reviews, tributes and biographical notices into an organized, transdisciplinary field.
The conversation also generated debate concerning decolonization and globalism. Such disagreement is important: Falola Studies should not become a space in which Falola’s conceptual vocabulary is repeated without scrutiny.
AI-Assisted Research Conversations
The use of AI in this project is not incidental. Falola’s corpus is exceptionally large and distributed across books, articles, lectures, interviews, conferences, social-media posts, institutional appointments and writings by other scholars.
AI can assist in discovering patterns, constructing preliminary classifications, correlating themes and designing searchable structures. It can also produce errors, false connections, incomplete bibliographies and misleading summaries. Its proper role is therefore that of an instrument within a humanly directed research process, not an autonomous authority.
The Proposed Dynamic Transdisciplinary Archive
On 18 July, Adepoju published “Composing a Dynamic Transdisciplinary Archive: ChatGPT’s Composition of a Website Mapping Falola Studies,” describing the project as a work in progress.
The proposed archive moves beyond a conventional bibliography. It aims to map relationships among:
- Falola’s publications;
- biographical periods and locations;
- research themes;
- institutions and conferences;
- collaborators and respondents;
- reviews and critical debates;
- interviews and audiovisual records;
- public-intellectual interventions;
- developing interpretations within Falola Studies.
Institutionalising Falola Studies discussion, Dynamic archive project
Opportunities, Requirements and Risks
A dynamic archive could make a vast and dispersed corpus discoverable. It could demonstrate connections across history, metaphysics, Yoruba studies, memoir, literary criticism, public policy and institution-building.
For the archive to become scholarly infrastructure, however, it will require:
- precise bibliographical metadata;
- source provenance;
- stable categories and identifiers;
- distinction between original and republished material;
- clear dating of events and reports;
- correction and version histories;
- human verification of AI-generated summaries;
- inclusion of critical and dissenting interpretations;
- preservation planning independent of changing commercial platforms.
Assessment
This initiative marks a transition from Falola scholarship—individual works about Falola—to Falola Studies as a potentially organized intellectual domain. Its significance lies in treating Falola not only as a prolific author but as the centre of interrelated textual, institutional, social and philosophical formations.
The project must guard against hagiography. Its credibility will depend upon whether it can document criticism as rigorously as celebration and distinguish intellectual influence from institutional publicity.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The proposed archive is the most direct attempt to transform the metaphorical ọ̀pọn Ifá into research infrastructure. The corpus occupies the circumference; themes and relationships become radiating lines; individual events are positioned in time; and the researcher works at the centre, continually revising the map as new evidence appears.
14. Falola as Popular Moral and Creative Writer: “Second Wife—Double Wahala”
The New Development
On 17 July, Falola published the sixth instalment of his Life Challenges series, “Second Wife: Double Wahala.” The work combines a poetic preamble with popular social commentary on plural marriage and second-wife households. Falola’s essay
What Falola Did
Falola examined emotional, financial and intergenerational pressures from the perspectives of husbands, wives and children. He clarified that his argument arose from observation rather than personal experience of plural marriage.
He considered rivalry, mistrust, economic obligations, secrecy, divided households and the burdens placed upon children. His practical recommendations included careful consideration before entering plural marriage, responsible provision, support for women’s economic independence and attention to children’s welfare.
What Others Did
Adebayo Ajadi circulated the essay through the USA–Africa Dialogue Series. No substantial critical response published before the close of 19 July was identified.
Assessment
The essay reveals Falola as a creative and popular moral writer. It brings together poetic expression, Yoruba-inflected thought, colloquial language and social observation.
Its accessibility is a strength, but its evidential basis differs from formal scholarship. Several conclusions depend upon generalized observation, while some descriptions risk treating the behaviour of men or women as more uniform than it is. The essay is therefore most valuable as moral-social reflection rather than as a comprehensive sociological analysis of polygamy.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
This essay returns the traveller to the earth. After philosophy, conferences and international policy, Falola addresses the everyday household. The flying tortoise may rise, but it carries its terrestrial carapace with it. Intellectual range remains grounded in ordinary human difficulties.
15. A Forthcoming Scholarly Intervention: Violence in the Postcolony
The New Development
On 17–18 July, information circulated about Violence in the Postcolony: Entangled Histories of Africa, a forthcoming Indiana University Press collection co-edited by Abikal Borah and Toyin Falola.
The approximately 460-page volume was scheduled for publication in August 2026 and made available for preorder. Indiana University Press record
Falola and Borah as Co-editors
The editors challenge approaches that explain African violence principally through the state, political instability or spectacular crisis. The volume instead turns toward social histories, lived experience, cultural expression, memory, displacement, sacredness and everyday space.
Falola’s Contributions
Falola co-authored the introduction with Borah and contributed chapters addressing religious violence in Nigeria, violence in postcolonial African performance and the future of the postcolony.
These contributions connect several areas of his scholarship: colonial history, religion, performance, political thought and speculative reflection on Africa’s future.
Authors, Regions and Themes
Contributors include Jill E. Kelly, Amir Idris, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Busani Mpofu, Benjamin Claude Brower, Daniel J. Hoffman, Barira Mohammed, Nimi Wariboko, Christopher P. Davey, Sepetla Molapo, Ogenga Otunnu and Meghan Gorman-DaRif.
Their chapters address North, West and Southern Africa and the Great Lakes region through subjects including:
- collective memory and historical denial;
- political violence;
- colonial naming and symbolic violence;
- sacred and secular sources of violence;
- marketplaces and urban space;
- displacement and refugee experience;
- xenophobia;
- literature and performance.
What Others Did
Indiana University Press provided the formal bibliographical and commercial record. Adebayo Ajadi and the Toyin Falola Interviews platform circulated the announcement, while readers responded with congratulations. Public circulation of the book announcement
Preliminary Assessment
The collection appears to be the week’s most important new bibliographical information. Its promise lies in approaching violence as an entangled phenomenon produced through memory, belonging, religion, space, culture and state power.
Nevertheless, this was a publication announcement, not the book’s release. Final assessment must await examination of the individual chapters, their evidential foundations and the coherence of the volume’s multidisciplinary structure.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
The book maps damaged, obstructed and contested paths through African history. On the ọ̀pọn Ifá, its chapters radiate across regions and forms of experience while returning to the question of how inherited violence structures the postcolonial present.
16. Media Circulation, Republication and Public Reception
Media organizations played an active role in constructing the week’s public image of Falola. The same Alaafin Institute lecture appeared under several emphases:
- African knowledge systems are not inferior;
- Ifá should be treated with the seriousness accorded classical philosophy;
- indigenous ecological ideas should inform environmental management;
- Ṣàngó and Ògún should enter public-office accountability;
- political authority must recover a moral foundation.
These reports were not wholly separate developments. They were selective presentations of one complex lecture. Their variety demonstrates how media titles can divide a multidimensional argument into apparently independent propositions.
Other forms of circulation included:
- Adebayo Ajadi’s photographs of the Alaafin Institute inauguration;
- circulation of Falola’s Life Challenges essay;
- the TOFAC video recap;
- Adepoju’s republication of the dedication essay;
- promotion of Violence in the Postcolony;
- institutional promotion of the NOUN and South African programmes.
Assessment
Media circulation expands access and can preserve otherwise temporary events. It may also distort proportions. Falola’s Ṣàngó–Ògún proposal received greater headline attention than his more extensively developed arguments about epistemology, education and ecology.
A Falola Studies archive should therefore distinguish among:
1. the original lecture or text;
2. institutional summaries;
3. journalistic reports;
4. social-media recirculation;
5. public responses;
6. subsequent scholarly interpretation.
Position within the Visual Hermeneutics
Media occupy the crossroads governed by Èṣù. Messages move, change form and acquire new emphases. The transformation is not necessarily false, but it must be examined. Every headline represents one path across the tray, not the whole interpretive field.
17. Summative Assessment: Falola as a Distributed Intellectual Institution
The week presents Falola in several interconnected roles.
Falola as Scholar and Author
The Aguoru book and the forthcoming volume on violence demonstrate two different forms of scholarship. The first is a concentrated examination of one living scholar’s oeuvre; the second is a collaborative, transregional collection involving numerous contributors and disciplinary approaches.
Falola as Interpreter of Yoruba Knowledge
The Alaafin Institute lecture positions Yoruba mythology as philosophy, ecology, political thought and educational resource. It exemplifies his effort to move African knowledge systems from marginal cultural classification into comparative intellectual debate.
Falola as Popular and Creative Writer
“Second Wife—Double Wahala” shows Falola working outside the conventional boundaries of academic prose. Poetry, popular idiom and moral commentary allow him to reach different audiences, although the resulting generalizations require critical qualification.
Falola as Mentor
The Aguoru presentation and Polang’s TOFAC reflection reveal mentorship through several scales: a full-length book, public recognition, interpersonal exchange and the gifting of publications.
Falola as Convenor
TOFAC, the NOUN programme and the South African invitation demonstrate the importance of platforms. Falola’s role is not always to deliver the central content. He also brings people, institutions and themes into relation.
Falola as Generator of Intellectual Lineage
The Toyin Falola Disciples indicate that his influence has become self-organizing. This is evidence of intellectual continuity, but it also makes critical independence increasingly necessary.
Falola as Subject of an Emerging Field
Adepoju’s Falola Studies initiative moves beyond recording individual achievements. It seeks to investigate the relationships among Falola’s biography, texts, methods, institutions, collaborators, critics and public influence.
The Distributed Intellectual Institution
Taken together, these roles suggest that Falola increasingly functions as more than an individual scholar. Around him has developed a distributed intellectual institution composed of:
- books and articles;
- conferences and masterclasses;
- universities and research centres;
- publishers and media platforms;
- collaborators and reviewers;
- students and intellectual descendants;
- archivists and interpreters;
- public controversies and policy interventions.
This institution is “distributed” because it has no single physical headquarters. Its components are located in different universities, countries, media environments and intellectual communities. Falola’s name provides a point of convergence, but the ecosystem is activated by numerous people.
The strength of this structure is its range and generative power. Its danger is excessive personalization. If every initiative depends on Falola’s continuing presence or unquestioned authority, the ecosystem remains fragile. If it produces archives, autonomous scholars, durable programmes and independent criticism, it may outlive the immediate circumstances of its formation.
18. Conclusion: Falola Studies beneath the Arch of Possibility
The week of 13–19 July 2026 began, in this essay’s interpretive structure, at the centre of an ọ̀pọn Ifá. From that temporal centre, lines extended backward toward Falola’s earlier writings and institutions, outward toward collaborators and media, and forward toward forthcoming books, masterclasses, scholarly lineages and archives.
The Arch of the Flying Tortoise supplies the complementary image of movement. Beneath it, the traveller passes between domains without abandoning the ground from which the journey began. The earthbound tortoise rises; its carapace becomes a universe in motion.
Falola’s activities during the week enact comparable transformations:
- Yoruba mythology passes into philosophy and public policy;
- literary scholarship becomes mentorship and theatrical performance;
- a conference becomes memory, archive and professional network;
- intellectual influence becomes collective identity;
- an individual corpus begins to become a field;
- orature moves toward digital culture;
- Nigerian scholarship enters continental governance debate;
- historical research expands into the everyday, the metaphysical and the prospective.
The decisive achievement is not simply productivity. It is the ability to generate relationships among forms of knowledge, people and institutions. Yet these relationships must be studied critically. Celebration establishes value, but criticism establishes durability. Documentation preserves achievement, but classification makes it usable. Mentorship produces successors, but intellectual freedom enables them to exceed their predecessor.
Falola Studies should therefore become neither a shrine nor a catalogue of honours. It should be an open, transdisciplinary investigation of a remarkable conjunction of scholarship, creativity, institution-building, public engagement and human relationships.
The forest arch does not tell the traveller where the path will end. It marks a threshold and invites passage. The ọ̀pọn Ifá does not reduce possibility to one predetermined line. It presents a field in which multiple paths may be interpreted.
Between them stands the traveller from Ọ̀de Àjẹ́—moving through history, literature, metaphysics, institutions and continents. Around him move collaborators, interpreters, critics and successors. Their intersecting journeys constitute the still-unfolding subject of Falola Studies.