Return to Shomolu in Search of Perfection: The Further Journeys of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art Part 2

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                          

                                                                                       

                                                                       Return to Shomolu in Search of Perfection

                              The Further Journeys of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art

                                                                                                   Part 2

                                                                                                   Abstract

On 24 June 2026, a meeting in a modest printing office in Shomolu, Lagos, Nigeria became the culmination of an intellectual journey spanning more than eighty years, three continents, and several generations. Gathered around a proof copy of the second edition of Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, I joined the book's printers in discussing how to perfect a work whose origins lay in Rowland Abiodun's childhood immersion in Yoruba culture, his scholarly formation in Nigeria, Canada, and the United States, and its first publication by Cambridge University Press.

This essay argues that the production of the book's second edition in Nigeria represents far more than a publishing project. It symbolizes the return of African knowledge to the cultural landscape that first gave it life, in a journey that mirrors larger patterns in the global circulation of knowledge from the African diaspora. Once compelled to seek validation through prestigious Western institutions, this  project points to the possibility of that knowledge now increasingly entering a symbolic and practical homecoming through initiatives in Africa, such as local African publishing.

Interweaving autobiography, intellectual history, reflections on publishing, and meditations on books in the digital age, the essay follows the intertwined journeys of author, editor, printers, and text as they converge in the effort to make one of the most significant works on Yoruba art and philosophy accessible to the people whose civilisation it interprets, as well as readily available to the world at large.

The essay also explores broader questions concerning the global networking  of knowledge, the continuing authority of books in an increasingly digital world, and the possibility of relocating Africa from the margins to the centre of intellectual production. Ultimately, it presents the making of the book not simply as an act of printing but as an event of cultural restoration, historical justice, and civilisational renewal.

At the centre of this narrative lies the Yoruba concept of oriki, understood not merely as praise poetry but as a dynamic mapping of identity across time and space. The migration of the book thus becomes an oriki of African intellectual life itself—a narrative of departure, transformation, return, and renewed global circulation in an age increasingly shaped by digital technologies.

                                                                                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                            Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

Contents

Abstract

Oriki Migrations 

Image and Text: The Ring of Deliberation         

Image and Text: The Book from Shomolu

Oriki Migrations 

Rowland Abiodun spent fifty years contributing to making clear to the world the views about art and its relationship to existence in general  developed in indigenous Yoruba civilization. His work has been strategic to educating people about African art as forms powerful in their effect on the viewer and listener and in the ideas that inform them. He eventually unified what he had  written across various essays into one book, a book unified by one idea-oriki, a Yoruba expressive form that maps the unfolding of the identity of its referent across time and space.

''Oriki is primarily oral but can't Yoruba art-oral, physical and dynamic-not also be seen as oriki?'' Abiodun may be imagined as asking, inspired perhaps by Olabiyi Yai's affirmation along those lines in “In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘Tradition’ and ‘Creativity’ in the Transmission of. Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space’’.

Why?

What is art, within Yoruba thought, if not the dramatization of  possibilities at the meeting of mind and matter, consciousness and form, in a universe where everything is believed to embody consciousness,empowered  by ase, the life force enabling being and becoming?

A force energizing  consciousness represented by ori, the essence of self, the embodiment of the self's ultimate potential, an unfolding potential saluted-''ki''- by ''ori-ki'', the art of saluting ori?

I am still trying to better understand Abiodun's effort in the ideational unification of his essays of 50 years in producing Yoruba Art and Language, first published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. 

The effort is subtle and complex, correlating Yoruba oral literatures,  Yoruba arts, philosophies and spiritualities, at times lyrically delightful and at other times, conceptually knotted. 

But in what Abdul Karim Bangura aptly calls Abiodun's oriki theory, I see something as understanding expands. I see the journey of my life, Abiodun's life journey, the journey of his book and how these trajectories are interrelated  in the efforts of oriki to map the unfolding of experience and its intersection with meaning.

This essay is my latest effort in tracing these unified journeys  as the editor and publisher of the second edition of Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

A Meeting in Shomolu

On the 24th of June 2026 I sat at a table with Sholola Tobiloba Owolabi, the owner of Quickprint Ltd, and Bidoye Ebiseni, who works with him. The photographs were taken by their colleague Michael Olaniyan.

 Image and Text: The Ring of Deliberation         

                                                                                                   

                               

                                                            From left-Bidoye Ebiseni,  Sholola Tobiloba Owolabi and Myself 

Between us was a proof copy of the second edition of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language which they delivered to me from their office in the printing hub that is Shomolu, Lagos, where we were now seated to discuss how to improve the job.

Image and Text: The Book from Shomolu

                                                                               

                                                                                                                              The Book
                                                           on an elevation used as a recreation spot near my house in Ikeja, Lagos


We concluded the manuscript's formatting was faulty and needed to be redone. We discussed how to improve image quality and how to make better the already impressive binding.

The goal: perfection.

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]