Of Knowledge Systems and Interpersonal Relationships: Survey and Assessment of Events in Toyin Falola Studies for 13th-19 July 2026 by ChatGPT and Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju: Toyin Falola Studies Review No.1, Part 1, Version 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Of Knowledge Systems and Interpersonal Relationships
Survey and Assessment of Events in Toyin Falola Studies for 13th-19th July 2026 by ChatGPT
and Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Toyin Falola Studies Review No.1. Part 1
20th July 2026
''Pencil drawing of Toyin Falola by Adeoye Hassan, from a reference photo by Michael Efionayi.
Courtesy of Toyin Falola.''
From ''Toyin Falola featured in Life & Letters interview: 'May My Child Become like Toyin!' ''
by Vik Bahl
University of Texas, Department of History
by ChatGPT
With Commentary by
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Directive to ChatGPT:
Provide a survey, a summary and assessment of each item, of every new piece of information on Toyin Falola in the past one week up till today, the 19th of July, 2026, indicating what he did and what others did in relation to him. Provide a title, an abstract and list of contents.Suggest images for each subsection and provide the images if possible.
Responses of ChatGPT:
A.
Toyin Falola in Scholarship, Institution-Building and Public Culture: A Critical Survey of Falola-Related Activities, 13–19 July 2026
Abstract
This survey critically examines publicly discoverable activities involving or relating to Toyin Falola between 13 and 19 July 2026. It distinguishes Falola’s direct actions from the actions of scholars, universities, cultural institutions, publishers, 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 completed developments were Falola’s keynote at the inauguration of the Alaafin Institute of Yoruba Studies, the University of Ibadan presentation of his book on Doyin Aguoru, and the publication of his popular-social reflection on plural marriage. His Alaafin Institute lecture advanced indigenous Yoruba mythology as a philosophical, ethical, political and ecological knowledge system, while also generating controversy through his proposal to incorporate Ṣàngó and Ògún into public-office oaths. The Aguoru book presentation enacted Falola’s philosophy of mentorship by directing sustained critical attention toward the work of a living African woman scholar.
Other people and institutions expanded Falola’s presence through scholarly review, conference documentation, institutional invitations, artistic performance, publishing initiatives and intellectual organization. These included Damilare Bello’s review of Falola’s Aguoru study; reflections on TOFAC 2026; the emergence of the self-designated Toyin Falola Disciples; announcements by the National Open University of Nigeria and the Thabo Mbeki African School; and promotion of Violence in the Postcolony, co-edited by Falola and Abikal Borah. Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju’s discussions of institutionalizing Falola Studies and constructing a digital, transdisciplinary archive represented an important movement from studying Falola as an individual toward defining a field and building its research infrastructure.
Taken together, the week presents Falola simultaneously as scholar, author, editor, public intellectual, mentor, convenor and subject of an emerging intellectual field. It also demonstrates that his significance increasingly resides in a distributed ecosystem of institutions, publications, collaborators, interpreters and successors. The survey concludes that the durability of this ecosystem will depend on independent criticism, reliable documentation, inclusive institution-building and the transformation of celebratory recognition into verifiable scholarly production.
Contents
1. Introduction: Scope, Period and Method of the Survey
2. Reciprocal Intellectual Recognition: Adepoju’s Annotated Republication of Falola’s Book-Dedication Essay
3. Documenting an Intellectual Community: The Audiovisual Afterlife of TOFAC 2026
4. Yoruba Knowledge as Philosophy and Public Policy: Falola at the Inauguration of the Alaafin Institute of Yoruba Studies
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
5. The Critical Reception of Falola’s Study of Doyin Aguoru: Damilare Bello’s Review
6. From Orature to Digital Culture: The NOUN–Falola African Literature Masterclass
7. Mentorship as Intellectual Recognition: The University of Ibadan Presentation of Falola’s Book on Doyin Aguoru
o Falola’s philosophy of scholarly succession
o Aguoru’s response
o Critical reviews, music and dramatic performance
o The event’s significance for African feminist scholarship
8. The Afterlife of TOFAC 2026: Jatau David Polang’s Participant Reflection
9. From Influence to Intellectual Lineage: The Emergence of the Toyin Falola Disciples
10. Falola and African Public Policy: The South African Leadership and Governance Invitation
11. Constructing Falola Studies
- Institutionalising Falola Studies
- AI-assisted research conversations
- The proposed dynamic transdisciplinary archive
- Opportunities, methodological requirements and risks
12. Falola as Popular Moral and Creative Writer: “Second Wife—Double Wahala”
13. A Forthcoming Scholarly Intervention: Violence in the Postcolony
- Falola and Abikal Borah as co-editors
- Falola’s individual contributions
- The volume’s authors, regions and themes
- Preliminary critical assessment
14. Patterns of Media Circulation, Republication and Public Reception
15. Summative Assessment: Falola as Scholar, Mentor, Convenor and Distributed Intellectual Institution
16. Conclusion: From Falola’s Activities to the Emerging Field of Falola Studies
Scope
This survey covers 13–19 July 2026 inclusive, using Lagos time. I searched institutional announcements, Falola-related platforms, publisher records, Nigerian media, professional/social-media posts and public discussion forums.
“Every item” here means every publicly discoverable, date-verifiable development I found. Private communications and unindexed posts cannot be guaranteed. I have consolidated duplicate headlines and distinguished:
- an event that happened during the week;
- a new report about an earlier event;
- a forthcoming event or publication;
- republication, discussion or archival activity.
First Draft of Image Commentary, by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The arch of the flying tortoise evoking elevation above the limitations of existence, by Susanne Wenger
and the New Sacred Art Collective, in the Osun forest in Osogbo, Nigeria
in their sculptural and architectural transformation of the forest into a microcosm of indigenous Yoruba cosmology
as described by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger
and ''Cosmogeographic
Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury'', Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
''Here I am,one with the water;I think and feel like the river,my blood flows like the river,to the rhythm of its waves,otherwise the trees
and the animals wouldn't be such allies.
I am here in the trees,in the river,in my creative phase not only when I am here physically,but forever,even when I happen to be travelling-hidden beyond time and suffering,in the Spiritual Entities which, beceause they are Real in many ways,present ever new features.I feel sheltered with them -in them- beceause I am so very fond of trees and running water - and all the gods of the world are trees and animals long,long before they entrust their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure.''
Susanne Wenger from Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger by Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter.Machart:Hamburg,1994.Back cover.
''What is history?'' E.H. Carr asks in his book of that title.
How best may we understand history?
As the outcomes of interactions between diverse possibilities of individuals, societies and nature?
As the spatio-temporal dynamics of ecosystems-individual, social and natural?
Does history demonstrate an ultimate purpose or direction?
How best may human beings navigate these complex intersections eventuating in motion across time-past, present, future?
May these temporal motions be transected?
Could alternate possibilities be explored, through reason, imagination, or non-conventional means of perception?
Those questions are derived from what be described as Yoruba àṣẹ theory, which describes all forms of existence as animated by àṣẹ, a creative force that imbues all possibilities of existence with unique creative agency, and Yoruba opon ifa hermeneutics.
Those questions transpose the orientations of those ideas in intellectual terms.
From history to metaphysics, from individual and group formations in space and time, to explorations of the ultimate significance of these human agglomerations, particularly as developed in African thought, most specifically in the Yoruba cognitive journey, Falola's work ranges, from the writer's location in the present into the past and further into extrapolations of and speculative projection into the future.
These are temporally grounded explorations transected by efforts to understand meanings that include and transcend those temporalities and their spatial manifestations.
An opon ifa hermeneutics thereby emerges, tracing the vertical lines from centre, the present, to the past and the future, transecting those linear temporalities to investigate the varieties of options they represent, within sensitivities to the enveloping circle of being and becoming, the walk of homo terrestrialis under the light of the sun, evoking questions of the ultimate destination of the journey, into infinity of individual being or infinity of collective memory, inscribed in human achievement and recording?
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Opon Ifa by Moyo Okediji
Facebook post of March 12, 2017
Let us follow the traveller in space, time and knowledge from his Ibadan, Ode Aje origins to his criss-crossings across the world, both physical and cognitive and beyond Earth, into explorations of the ultimately unknown ground that enables the terrestrial groundendess of that creature made of earth, as the Bible says, but animated by divine fire, the creature whose body dissolves into earth at the conclusion of its terrestrial walk while that intelligence and life that once animated the body perhaps moves elsewhere.
James Joyce's novel Ulysses explores its central character's journeys around the Irish city of Dublin in a single day, transmuting that motion in terms of Odysseus ten year journey back home to Ithaca after the ten year Trojan War in Homer's Iliad, Ullyses' epic journey emerging from one day's motion within a city.
In following the ceaseless peregrinator from Ibadan's Ode Aje across physical, social and cognitive worlds, may an epic unfolding emerge, perhaps taking us into the elevated conjunctions of knowledge suggested by the tortoise in flight, its carapace universe transformed into an arabesque of delight, riding high above the world, as all possibilities of being and becoming fuse as one?
ChatGPT Revision and Expansion of the Essay Above
Beneath the Arch of the Flying Tortoise: Toyin Falola’s Journeys Through History, Metaphysics and Possible Futures
Abstract
This essay interprets the Arch of the Flying Tortoise, created by Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Collective in the Osun Sacred Forest of Osogbo, as a governing metaphor for the intellectual journeys of Toyin Falola.
The arch transforms a forest pathway into a cosmological threshold, uniting animal, vegetal, architectural and spiritual forms. Drawing upon Wenger’s ecological spirituality, E. H. Carr’s interrogation of history, Yoruba conceptions of àṣẹ, and an interpretive model inspired by the ọ̀pọ́n Ifá, the essay presents Falola as a traveller across geographical, historical, disciplinary and metaphysical worlds.
Like James Joyce’s transformation of an ordinary day into an epic journey, Falola’s movement from Ibadan and Ode Aje into global intellectual space becomes an expansive exploration of being and becoming. The flying tortoise ultimately embodies the conjunction of rootedness and elevation: the capacity to remain grounded in history while rising into imaginative, philosophical and spiritual possibility.
“Here I am, one with
the water; I think and feel like the river.”
—Susanne Wenger, quoted in Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger
The Arch of the Flying Tortoise, created by Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Collective in the Osun Sacred Forest, Osogbo, Nigeria. The work is discussed by Ulli Beier in The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger and by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in “Cosmogeographic Explorations: Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury.”
The Forest as a Cosmological Threshold
The Arch of the Flying Tortoise rises above a path in the Osun forest like a creature emerging from the earth while simultaneously taking flight. Its sweeping form suggests wings, branches, bones, roots and flowing water. The sculpture seems neither entirely constructed nor simply grown. Architecture becomes animal; animal becomes vegetation; vegetation becomes a portal through which the traveller passes into the forest’s depths.
The reddish-brown surface of the arch echoes the earth beneath it, while its irregular curves answer the surrounding trees. Openings within the sculpture admit the forest’s greenery and filtered light, preventing the structure from separating itself from its environment. It does not merely stand within the forest: it participates in the forest’s visual and spiritual rhythms.
The pathway remains visible beneath the arch, extending beyond it into an uncertain distance. The sculpture therefore frames not a destination but a passage. It invites movement from one condition of awareness into another—from the ordinary to the sacred, from physical space into cosmological imagination.
Through this and related works, Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Collective transformed the Osun forest into a microcosm of indigenous Yoruba cosmology: a landscape in which earth, water, vegetation, animals, human beings and divine presences inhabit overlapping dimensions of existence.
Susanne Wenger and the Spiritual Ecology of the Forest
Wenger’s account of her relationship with the Osun forest expresses an understanding of existence grounded in participation rather than observation. She describes herself as united with the river, the trees and the animals, sensing their rhythms as dimensions of her own being. Even when physically absent, she imagines herself as continuing to exist within the forest’s spiritual presences.
This vision dissolves rigid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the material and the spiritual, the artist and the environment. The gods do not simply descend into the natural world from a remote supernatural domain. They become perceptible through trees, animals, water, earth and the continually changing forms of life.
The arch gives sculptural expression to this philosophy. Its forms do not impose a geometrical order upon the forest. Instead, they translate the forest’s organic energies into architecture. The work suggests that sacred art does not merely represent spiritual reality; it participates in that reality. The sculpture becomes a meeting point at which nature, imagination and metaphysical presence converge.
The Paradox of the Flying Tortoise
The flying tortoise is a magnificent paradox. The tortoise is ordinarily associated with the ground: with weight, deliberation, endurance and the protective enclosure of the shell. Flight, by contrast, signifies elevation, freedom, speed and release from terrestrial limitation. To imagine a tortoise flying is therefore to imagine the transformation of the apparently impossible into a new condition of being.
Within the arch, heaviness becomes lightness. The tortoise’s carapace appears transfigured into a soaring arabesque, its solid body extended across empty space. Yet the creature does not wholly abandon the earth. The arch remains rooted on both sides of the pathway. Its elevation depends upon its grounding.
The sculpture consequently embodies a profound conjunction: rootedness and flight, inheritance and innovation, limitation and transcendence. It suggests that elevation need not require the rejection of the earth. One may rise precisely because one is rooted.
The arch may therefore be understood as an emblem of intellectual and spiritual possibility. To pass beneath it is to enter a space in which apparently incompatible realities—earth and sky, body and spirit, history and imagination—may be brought into creative relationship.
What Is History?
“What is history?” E. H. Carr asks in the book bearing that title. How might history best be understood? Is it a record of completed events, or the outcome of interactions among individuals, societies, environments and unrealised possibilities? Is historical change governed by necessity, accident, human agency or forces beyond human control? Does history reveal an ultimate direction, or does it unfold through shifting configurations whose meanings are continually revised?
How, then, should human beings navigate the intersections of past, present and future? Can the apparent linearity of time be crossed by memory, imagination and interpretation? Might unrealised possibilities be recovered through reason, speculative thought or unconventional forms of perception?
These questions lead from history into metaphysics. Historical inquiry investigates what occurred; metaphysical reflection asks what makes occurrence, agency and transformation possible. The first examines movements through time. The second seeks the conditions of existence within which time, change and human action acquire meaning.
The forest pathway beneath the flying tortoise offers a visual expression of this relationship. The traveller moves forward, yet the arch gathers earth, vegetation, animality and spiritual imagination around that motion. The journey is linear, but the field of meanings enveloping it is multidimensional.
Àṣẹ and the Creative Possibilities of History
These questions may be approached through the Yoruba concept of àṣẹ: the dynamic power through which beings act, create effects and bring possibilities into manifestation. Àṣẹ presents existence not as passive substance but as a field of creative capacities. Human beings, natural forms, spiritual presences, words, actions and communities participate in different expressions of this enabling power.
Understood through àṣẹ, history becomes more than a succession of dates and events. It becomes the record of interacting agencies: some dominant, others suppressed; some actualised, others remaining only as possibilities. Every historical moment is a provisional configuration emerging from the convergence and conflict of multiple forces.
The study of history may therefore involve more than reconstructing what happened. It may also investigate what could have happened, what was prevented from happening, and what possibilities remain latent within the consequences of the past. Historical understanding becomes an exploration of realised and unrealised àṣẹ.
Towards an Ọ̀pọ́n Ifá Hermeneutics
The ọ̀pọ́n Ifá, the Yoruba divination tray, may be imaginatively adapted as a model for this interpretive process. This is not to reduce Ifá divination to historical analysis, but to derive from the tray’s spatial structure a method of thinking about time, possibility and meaning.
At the centre of this interpretive tray stands the present: the moment from which questions are asked. From that centre, lines may be projected towards the past and the future. The past contains antecedents, memories, inherited structures and unresolved consequences. The future contains projections, fears, hopes and unrealised possibilities.
These temporal movements are surrounded by the encompassing circle of being and becoming. The circle transects linear time, suggesting that the meaning of an event cannot be confined to its chronological position. An occurrence in the past may remain active in the present; an imagined future may reshape present action; spiritual, ecological and collective forces may complicate the apparent separation between different moments.
An ọ̀pọ́n Ifá hermeneutics would therefore interpret history as a field of relationships. It would ask not only what happened, but what forces converged to make it happen, what alternatives were displaced, and what new possibilities arose from the event.
Toyin Falola as Traveller Through Worlds
From history to metaphysics, from social formations to individual creativity, and from African intellectual traditions to global systems of knowledge, Toyin Falola’s work moves across multiple worlds. His writing travels from the present into the past and from historical reconstruction towards speculative engagement with the future.
His journey begins within the cultural and historical worlds of Ibadan and Ode Aje but continually expands beyond them. He travels physically across continents and intellectually across disciplines, archives, memories, philosophies and spiritual traditions. Yet these movements do not represent an abandonment of origins. Like the flying tortoise, Falola’s elevation remains dependent upon his grounding.
The local becomes the platform from which the global is interpreted. Ibadan is not merely one location among many; it is an epistemic ground—a place from which history, modernity, colonialism, decolonisation, spirituality and the future of knowledge may be examined. Ode Aje becomes both geographical origin and symbolic centre.
Falola may thus be understood as a ceaseless peregrinator across physical, social, historical and cognitive worlds. His work continually asks how African experience may be interpreted from within its own conceptual resources while remaining open to conversations extending across cultures and disciplines.
From Terrestrial Life to Metaphysical Possibility
These journeys also raise questions exceeding conventional historical inquiry. What is the ultimate ground of the human creature whose body is formed from the earth but whose intelligence travels beyond every immediate environment? What becomes of a life after its terrestrial journey has concluded? Does the individual continue through spiritual existence, through the memories of others, or through achievements inscribed in collective consciousness?
Falola’s work may be read as moving towards these borders between historical knowledge and metaphysical uncertainty. The historian reconstructs human activity within time, while the metaphysical thinker asks what time, personhood and continuity ultimately mean.
The figure that emerges is homo terrestrialis: the earthbound traveller whose feet remain upon the ground while memory, imagination and intelligence cross immense distances. The flying tortoise becomes an appropriate emblem for this condition. Its body belongs to the earth, but its arc describes a movement towards the sky.
From Dublin to Ode Aje: Transforming Journey into Epic
James Joyce’s Ulysses transforms the movements of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during a single day into an imaginative counterpart to the prolonged homeward journey of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce demonstrates that an epic need not depend upon distant seas, supernatural monsters or heroic warfare. One ordinary day within one city can become a universe when perceived through sufficiently expansive forms of attention.
In following Falola from Ibadan and Ode Aje across physical, social and cognitive worlds, a comparable epic may emerge. Its magnitude would not depend solely upon geographical distance but upon the range of relationships disclosed by the journey. A street, household, conversation, archive, ancestral town or remembered event may open into an immense network of historical and philosophical meanings.
As Dublin becomes a world in Joyce, Ode Aje may become a centre from which multiple worlds unfold. The local journey becomes global; the biographical becomes civilisational; the historical becomes metaphysical.
Beneath the Arch: Groundedness and Flight
The path beneath the Arch of the Flying Tortoise continues beyond the limits of the photograph. The sculpture frames the journey without revealing its destination. Its rooted supports emerge from the earth, while its upper forms leap across space as though gravity has been converted into movement.
The image may therefore serve as a visual summation of Falola’s intellectual itinerary. The earth represents historical and cultural grounding. The path signifies biography, movement and inquiry. The forest evokes the plurality of visible and invisible agencies within which every life unfolds. The arch marks a threshold between established knowledge and speculative possibility. The flying tortoise unites them all: earth and sky, slowness and movement, enclosure and openness, inheritance and invention.
Following the traveller from Ode Aje across the world, and from documented history into questions of ultimate meaning, we may encounter the elevated conjunctions of knowledge suggested by the tortoise in flight—its carapace universe transformed into an arabesque of delight, soaring above the pathway while remaining rooted in the earth.
Within that magnificent paradox, the possibilities of being and becoming converge. History becomes journey, journey becomes interpretation, and interpretation rises towards the still-unknown horizons of existence.