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 4
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 4
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
Cambridge and the Global Geography of Knowledge
How Prestige and Accessibility to Knowledge Too Often Diverge
The Paradoxical Imprimatur of Cambridge
Image and Text: Visionary Creativity
Books Transmitting the Fire of Knowledge Across Space and Time
Image and Text: Journeys in Outer and Inner Space
Africa and Africans in the Global Knowledge Network
Image and Text: The Return from Shomolu and the Corn Roaster and her Community
Cambridge and the Global Geography of Knowledge
How Prestige and Accessibility to Knowledge Too Often Diverge
Why would Abiodun grow up in Yoruba culture in Nigeria, attend schools descended from European cultures in Nigeria and Canada, return to the then University of Ife, in Yorubaland, to build an academic career, later continue his professional life in the US and publish the text culminating his lifetime's journey of learning of more than 80 years in a book his fellow Yoruba people whom the book is about would hardly have access to?
Abiodun
had been caught in a web, a web from which, through our partnership, he is now trying to
free himself.
The Paradoxical Imprimatur of Cambridge
Abiodun, a scholar from Nigeria, in what is currently understood as a periphery of the global knowledge system, had gained his book a powerful endorsement by publishing with the oldest publishing house in the world, as Cambridge University Press describes herself, certainly one of the best on Earth, an arm of the University of Cambridge, one of the oldest, most highly achieved and most prestigious institutions in history, at the heart of the European civilizational nexus that currently dominates the planet.
Image and Text: Visionary Creativity
With Sholola Tobiloba Owolabi, left, the owner of QuickPrint, in his Shomolu office
Among many other great alumni, Cambridge is the university of Isaac Newton ( 1642-1727 ), without whose achievements much of the modern world would not exist.
He developed the theory of gravity, which explains why planets, as in the Earth's Milky Way solar system, orbit suns, strategic for life on Earth, and why human beings don't fall off the face of the Earth into space.
He also developed the laws of motion which helps explain why objects move.
Putting these two understandings together, the human being is able to calculate the amount of force to exert on the Earth to enable an object, such as a spacecraft, move with such velocity it escapes Earth's gravity that keeps objects on its surface, propelling the object to enter into outer space, where there is no gravity.
All
developments related to space travel, from satellite infrastructure critical to
communication on Earth to knowledge of the nature of the moon, are enabled by
Newton's insights, facilitating technological advancements undreamt of when he
developed them.
Books Transmitting the Fire of Knowledge Across Space and Time
As I wrote those lines, the image of a rocket on the page of the book where I first learnt about gravity as a child in Nigeria comes to my mind, the Ladybird book Exploring Space, one of a series of mouthwateringly coloured and lucid children's books, published in England.
Image and Text: Journeys in Outer and Inner Space
A collage of illustrations from the Ladybird books How it Works: The Rocket by
David Carey, 1967, illustrated by Bernard Robinson and Exploring Space, 1964, by Roy Worvill, illustrated by B. Knight and Bernard Robinson.
Journeys within the mind and across space and time, from the past to the present and future, are evoked by this collage. The visuals suggest the warmth of family companionship in relation to the futuristic depiction of space tourism and the exploration of gravity, against the background of rockets thrusting into space, racing from the Earth to the moon and other celestial bodies.
The warmth of the
colours, their exhilarating diversity, and their capacity to awaken wonder,
working in harmony with the clarity of the human and machine forms, can help
kindle in the receptive mind of the child a nascent version of the cognitive
sensitivity that has inspired humanity across the centuries.
It is the same
sense of awe that has drawn human beings to contemplate the stars, planets, and
galaxies, and to reflect on the immeasurable expanse of space through which the
celestial bodies journey.
In this way, the artwork becomes not merely an image
to be seen but an invitation to curiosity, imagination, and the lifelong
exploration of the cosmos.
''Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever deeper admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily one reflects on them-the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me''-Immanuel Kant, 18th century German philosopher in his Critique of Practical Reason.
Africa and Africans in the Global Knowledge Network
My having read such a book as a child in Nigeria is expressive of the web Abiodun found himself in and which we both committed ourselves to freeing him from.
What is the range of books published in Nigeria?
After books from Europe and North America had long travelled to Africa, shaping modern African cultures, African scholars, including Abiodun, began relocating in the 80s to Europe and North America in search of better living and working conditions, eventually creating some of the greatest scholarship by Africans and about Africa in that diaspora, even as the homeland soldiered on, its epistemic authority ruptured, divided between the diaspora and the continent.
How do we contribute, through Abiodun's book, to making Africa, once again, a global centre of knowledge?
How
relevant are books to such an endeavour at this time?
Image and Text: The Return from Shomolu and the Corn Roaster and her Community
A woman roasting and selling corn by the roadside
with a child by her and a customer assessing the corn
as seen from the interior of the commercial bus in which I returned home from Shomolu.
Selfie of myself in the bus as the conductor rides by hanging at the open door, thereby saving for a passenger the seat he would have sat on and enabling him to scout for more passengers from his vantage point facing the street as the bus moves to its destination.
This video shows part of the trip, highlighting sights and sounds of public transport in Lagos.