The Nexus of Verbalization, Spirituality and Society:A Brief Critical Survey of Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Nexus of Verbalization, Spirituality and Society
A Brief Critical Survey of Toyin Falola's
African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
Abstract
An examination of Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms focusing on its scope, lucidity and coherence.
Toyin Falola's African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms (Bloomsbury, April 2022) examines the confluence of verbalization, spirituality and society in contemporary African cultures, doing this across such explicitly actualized systems as divination, Islam, particularly Sufism, and Christianity, and what may be described as definitive spiritual practices, such as shamanism and magic, and controversial beliefs in spiritual practices, represented by witchcraft.
Part 1 covers indigenous systems. Part 2, Islam. Part 3, Christianity. The sections on Islam and Christianity are amplified through the devotion of more than one chapter to them in order to expound upon particular strains within these spiritual systems, strains represented by particularly influential Muslims and the movements they founded and by varieties of Christianity. Elements which could have been added in order to bring non-mainstream movements into the conversation are Asian spiritualities, such as Hare Krishna and Western esoteric schools, such as AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross.
The book provides a general mapping of the significance of verbalization, in general, and in African religions in particular, providing a broad yet specific exploration of the varieties of African religion. The presentation of the significance of verbalization in relation to African religions, however, is more introductory than exploratory, more of an appetizer than a full course, awaiting a later expansion of what is clearly a very fruitful theme, one in need of integration of the scope of extant literature and of reflection on the possibilities demonstrated by such a synthesis.
The subtitle of the book, Sacred Words and Holy Realms, and its powerful preface, rich introduction and compelling acknowledgements outlining the book’s mission as an investigation on the role of words in African spiritualities, promise something more than an introduction to this aspect of the spiritualities.
The author concentrates his discussion of this sub-theme, represented by the subtitle, in these sections of the book, limiting himself to discussing them in those sections without elaborating on them in the central chapters. This approach creates a dichotomous structure represented by the fact that the preface positions this theme of verbalization in spirituality as the central thrust of the book only for the author to declare as he rounds off the preface that he will use the preface, the introduction and conclusion as his major vehicles for exploring this theme, while the main part of the book would demonstrate the dynamism of words in religion. This approach leads, however, to only occasionally directly addressing the subject of sacred words in the main text, a strategy I wonder if it does not break the book into two parts, with little convergence between them, except that they deal with the same broad subject, religion in Africa.
For general breadth of description and lucidity of presentation of the spiritual conceptions, practices and schools of thought it discusses, the book is impressive, the sections on Islam and Christianity being particularly accomplished. The gap in expectation emerges in terms of the book’s focus on the main title, while downplaying the subtitle. The focus on the main title makes the book into a general textbook on the subject of that main title. The greater discussion of the main title in relation to the subtitle could have taken the book beyond being a general introduction to its subject into becoming a strategic contribution to that subject, even if that contribution consisted in integrating what now exists largely as disparate material unsynthesized in a manner the subtitle and the preface may lead one to expect.
The book therefore succeeds as an introductory text on African religious orientations, on account of the lucidity and scope of it's discussion of those orientations, but does not fulfill it's promise of going beyond that level to generate at least a summation, possibly a critical summation, perhaps even a reflection rethinking the subject in the context of such a summation, on the metaphysics, epistemology and sociology of verbalization in African religious orientations.
The book would have benefitted from closer line by line editing to sharpen its expressive force and clarify its arguments, removing the colloquialisms that at times show through and removing ideational disalignments. The latter includes the blunting of the judicious reference to English author J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter magical novels series. This iconic work in the imaginative zone of the Western magical tradition is discussed purely in terms of faith in the speech of authority figures and classed with secular texts such as political speeches and the faith they inspire, thereby losing a chance to explore the significance of magical speech as it is powerfully used in the Harry Potter novels, a perfect corollary with the African spiritual contexts Falola discusses.
Questions of ontological positioning also emerge as the author makes declarative statements about controversial conceptions of reality, as in references to the inspiration of spirit, without justifying those assertions, such justifications being vital in scholarship.
The book represents the fully actualized promise of one book-an introduction to African religious orientations, rich in scope, inspiringly informative in it's detail as demonstrated by its expansions within particular religions, and the tantalizing, creatively provocative but yet unfulfilled promise of another book, one on the role of verbal expression in African religions and spiritual orientations.
African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems : Sacred Words and Holy Realms is Falola’s latest effort in exploring the dynamics of verbal expression, its philosophical, social and historical significance, a theme aspects of which he explores in various books, and its intersection with the varieties of religions in Africa, African religions being also a subject he examines in diverse books.
In sum, this a very good mid-level text on African religions, though it's discussion of the more sophisticated and narrower topic of words in the religions in the brief form it does in the preface, the introduction and parts of the main text suggest a still developing philosophical agenda which the author might be groping towards.
An inspirational kernel in bringing this yet inchoate vision into focus could be the author's own particularly remarkable essay "Ritual Archives," in The Toyin Falola Reader (2018), where he makes bold and intriguing descriptions and analyses of the concept of a ritual archive, at the intersection of embodiment and disembodiment, human and non- human, facilitating robust examination of the philosophy, sociology and history of religious texts understood as archival forms.
Falola's Decolonizing African Knowledge:Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, due out in mid 2022, takes forward his exploration of varieties of
expressive forms, in relation to their intersection with his own self, implying the idea of embodiment
and abstraction incidentally evoked by ‘’Ritual Archives.’’ Later in the year, his
Nigerian Literary Imagination and the Nationhood Project will be published, extending his explorations of relationships between forms of
expression and society in the context of
African cultures and arts.
Explicit and inexplicit orientations in Fayola’s relatively recent work suggest that he is developing an identity, in which, at its best, critical scholarship operates in terms of a profound sensitivity to depths within African spiritualities and philosophies. These orientations are represented by the passionately described but unelaborated promise of detailed exploration of the role of sacred speech in African religions in African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems; by efforts highlighting the significance of controversial practices such as divination; by the examination of the value of the contentious beliefs represented by faith in the existence of witchcraft; through the study of the significance of magic; in identification with belief in spiritual inspiration, though without justifying that belief, all in the same text.
These orientations also include his rich descriptions and analyses of ritual archives in his essay of that title, amplified by the original and imaginatively powerful meditation on the Yoruba deity Èṣù in the essay. This meditation is correlative with his extensive essay on Èṣù in his edited Èṣù: Yoruba God, Power and the Imaginative Frontiers (2013). The Èṣù meditation in "Ritual Archives’’ adds a practical dimension, complementing the theoretical form of the essay in Èṣù:Yoruba God.
These are identifications with possibilities he is developing at various levels of coherence and insight, as he operates between the critical scholarly culture of his central professional identity and the other identifications he is entrenching himself in.
The full flowering of such a progression could bring Falola’s work into the constellation of thinkers in religion and philosophy whose work demonstrates insights into particular systems of thought while being sufficiently ideationally expansive to speak beyond doctrinal specificities. Among such figures are Ahmadou Hampate Ba on Islam and classical Africa spiritualities, Titus Burckhardt and the Traditionalist school on Western and Asian thought and arts, Rudolf Otto on Western and Asian religions and Carl Jung on Western esotericism in relation to psychology.
As Falola proceeds on his journey of self-creation as multi-disciplinary explorer of African humanities, spiritualities and philosophies, at the boundary of critical engagement and identification with his understanding of the truth potential of these forms of knowledge, its possible to build upon the paths he opens up, taking them forward in one’s own away. I will explore such possibilities in the second part of my response to African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Many thanks for the review of Ojogbon Falola’s African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms.
Chapter Five, “Political and Intellectual thoughts of Usman Dan Fodio” - of such topical importance and still reverberating in Sokoto , the seat of the Caliphate, ought to be an essential part of everyone’s education when studying the history of Nigeria….