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
The central image is that of the house in the Ibadan neighbourhood of Ode Aje where Falola spent his particularly formative years between 1963 and 1975 as narrated in his memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story and Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My Encounters with Islam.
To the right is a picture of the passageway in the centre of the house. Seated in the middle is an old woman I met there who recognised him from his online pictures, referencing his visit to the neighbourhood in recent times and her memory of him as a child.
On the left is Iya Tosin, the current person in charge of the house, who also recognized Falola from his online pictures and 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.
Watch Iya Tosin speak about Falola here.
I was shown the room where Falola is described as having stayed, now occupied by a tenant who let me take pictures of it:
The room described as the room where Falola lived as a child, now rented by a tenant. ''The breathing of humans is what sustains a house'' stated Iya Tosin, Tosin's mother, 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 is the door. The other pictures are of the interior of the room and the window looking out of it.
Abstract
A visual and verbal account of my experiences and reflections in relation to searching for and finding the house where the great scholar and writer Toyin Falola spent his particularly formative childhood and teenage years.
As I navigated the rough side streets in search of the place the superlative scholar and writer Toyin Falola spent formative years of his life, my insides squealed with delight.
Not because I would not want the people who live in that place to have a better life, but because, under the impulse of the epistemic imperative, even the most concrete, the most immediate of human experiences, is valued for the knowledge it can help generate.
How delightful it would be to wonder, in writing, about how this bright flame had risen from these unlikely circumstances?
What was the matrix of educational aspiration, of sensitivity to learning in the Western sense in that environment, particularly in terms of going to the university,when he was there from 1963 to 1975, his 11th to his 23rd year?
I was in Ode Aje, an Ibadan neighbourhood, searching for the house where Falola lived his particularly formative childhood and teenage years.
He describes the impact of the neighbourhood on himself in this way:
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. Few know that I attended a madrasa. To write my third memoir, 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 to assist the Egungun. 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.
The topography of some of the nearby streets, off the tarred main road, as I observed it 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 memoirs.
What kind of place could this be? I wondered. Falola describes in this way his meeting with Iya Lekuleja, the female herbalist and spiritual adept who later became his mentor:
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 worshiped.
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 worshiped 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.
This collage shows, on the left, the back of the house, perhaps where Falola first saw Leku. The other picture is of children in the neighborhood with the woman who led me to the place.
I just had to go and see this Ode Aje. On the 6th of January 2026, after attending the exquisite conference organized by Leeds City University Ibadan, celebrating Toyin Falola's 73rd birthday, I went in search of the house of Baba Olopa, that being the guidance Falol had given me as to how to find the house where he spent his particularly formative years between 1963 and 1975.
On arriving at Ode Aje
and asking for Baba Olopa's house as directed by Falola, no enquiries led me to
the house I sought because a number of houses were so named. After all my
other efforts had failed to lead me to the house, I asked the woman in the pictures
directly above and below whom I met minding her trade, selling something which
I don't recollect. She insisted on carrying my heavy box on her head, loaded
with thick books I had bought at Ibadan. The pictures above show her carrying the box as she climbs a staircase to lead me to the person in charge of a house she expected could be the one I wanted.
When it turned out that was not the house, she climbed down the staircase with the box still on her head, crossed the road and led me to another house where we met a woman whom Falola gave directions to using my phone, upon which she led me to the house I was looking for, while the box was kept in her own house for me to collect on returning.
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 this environment, as represented, for example, by my picture of Falola working in his Lagos house, centre, his pictures of himself holidaying with his wife in Greece, top left, and bottom, and right, another picture from Falola showing him as a young father with his children:
The emergence of possibilities at the intersection of self and environment.