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 3

[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 3

                                                                                                   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

The Long Journey of a Book

Abiodun's Life and the Emergence of Yoruba Art  and Language

My Own Journey Toward Yoruba Thought

A Search for Meaning through Books and Spiritual Practice

Image and Text: Arrival in the Shomolu Industrial Nexus

Why the Book Had to Return

The Paradox of an African Classic Being Largely Inaccessible in Africa

Image and Text: Soaring Ambitions in Humble Space

The Long Journey of a Book

                 Abiodun's Life and the Emergence of Yoruba Art and Language

The book and I have collectively travelled a long geographical and epistemic  journey, from Nigeria to the US to Cambridge, England, and back to Nigeria, specifically, to Nigeria's Yoruba centred southwest, central to the construction of my identity and that of the author as Africans. 

Journeys travelled separately but unexpectedly conjoining in ways represented by that meeting in Shomolu  between people-myself and the printers- all of whose parents might not have been born when the journey that became the book began.

When Abiodun entered, in the 1940s,  into his childhood immersion in Yoruba culture and his further growth in it filtered in that book, my mother had not yet arrived on Earth.

When he began writing the essays that inform the book at the southwestern University of Ife in the 70s, I was also in Nigeria, in the midwest, in Benin, and later, Lagos, in the southwest, exiting secondary school and entering into in a tough  quest for identity within a deep hunger for ultimate meaning that would take me through various spiritualities, philosophies and their associated arts, those of Yorubaland and other African peoples being central to this struggle.

My Own Journey Toward Yoruba Thought

       A Search for Meaning through Books and Spiritual Practice

Books about Yoruba spirituality and philosophy opened my eyes  to the quality of thought my African ancestors and their contemporary disciples had developed.  My entry was through books since I was not Yoruba and did not live in Yorubaland at the time I awakened to the hunger for ultimate meaning-the question of the essence of the human being as a cosmic citizen on a journey from the unknown to the unknown. That of Abiodun was through experience as a Yoruba person in Yorubaland.

 Image and Text: Arrival in the Shomolu Industrial Nexus

                                                                           

                                                               Arrival in Shomolu for Discussion of Printing Outcomes with QuickPrint

                                                                               This video shows my excitement at the experience

Why the Book Had to Return

The Paradox of an African Classic Being Largely Inaccessible in Africa

Here I was now, in 2026, discussing with men perhaps young enough to be my children, about that book by Abiodun, an author old enough to be my father, and a grandfather to the assembled printers, about how to give birth, in Nigeria, to a book about a Nigerian culture.

A book penetrating into the depths of that culture and the emergence of the author's formative years within those creative forces, a book that had not yet reached even those whose culture the book is about, even academics at the former University of Ife where the book's central insights were birthed when Abiodun lectured there having been compelled to rely on photocopies.

The first edition's publisher, Cambridge University Press, does not distribute to Nigeria, and even if they did, the print copy's price would have  been prohibitive, as it was for the average person in even the much stronger currencies of North America and Europe.

Image and Text: Soaring Ambitions in Humble Space

                                                           

                                                            No. 3. Rufai Street, Shomolu. PrintQuick's office is on the top floor.

       This video is a view from the top floor balcony, showing the human density and human and vehicular dynamism of the environment