The Strategy of the Chameleon 2: Humility and Elevation: Correlating Knowledge Systems between the Forest and the University: TOFAC 2025 and the Return to Osogbo

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

The Strategy of the Chameleon 2

            Humility and Elevation

       Correlating Knowledge Systems

 between the Forest and the University

 TOFAC 2025 and the Return to Osogbo

         Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                            Abstract

An account of a paradoxical encounter with the Osun forest in Osogbo, Nigeria, in relation to my unfolding theory of spatial and general cognitive navigation, The Strategy of the Chameleon.

All pictures are by myself.

                        

On the 30th of June 2025, I arrived in Osogbo for the 14th Toyin Falola Annual Conference holding between the 1st and third of July and took the opportunity to visit the Osun forest again for the first time in more than twenty years.

The forest has long been for me a great demonstration of the inspirational powers of Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology on account of the sculptural and architectural network created inside it by Susanne Wenger and her collaborators, two of whom are Buraimoh Gbadamosi and Adebisi Akanji.

The visit left me humbled, purified and empowered, all at once.

                           

"The end of all our journeying" Anglo -US poet T.S. Eliot states, "is to return to where we started and see the place for the first time".

How many a person see for the first time what they have perceived before?

It seemed I had never seen the forest earlier.

I experienced the landscape afresh, in terms of a rejuvenated sensitivity, the artistic forms igniting new awakenings to their unique power.

I better appreciate the relationship between landscape and art in that vegetative expanse, the art complementing  the natural space, projecting the sense of encounter with something glorious manifested by the space, something beyond adequate articulation but which the art signifies, like a finger pointing to the moon, in Buddhist terms.

I shall be staying behind after the conference, making daily visits to the forest, meditating and prsying in particularly enticing spots, wandering the entire space, opening myself to its silent grandeur.

No two people can tell the same story about navigating that forest. Each experience would be unique.

I have written much and read much about the Osun forest but I now appreciate all I've written as akin to the difference between the experience of love and reading about it 

No book, no writing, even the great work of Susanne Wenger and Ulli Beier, the best expositors of the forest/ art network, can adequately encapsulate the experience. 

Perhaps the best anyone can do is do their best and allow the echoes of the experience to resonate in ways beyond their own contrivance.

The richest encounter in the place was with silence, the silence occupied by awesome trees, amplified by the murmuring of the river and the eloquent undulations of landscape and the evocative force of spatial configurations, in tandem with awesome human creations.

I understand the forest and its artistic network as perhaps best appreciated in solitude although the uncanny force of the place could inspire a sense of unbelonging within something inhuman, something unseen but which presses upon the space surrounding one, making one feel an intruder into a territory well established before the emergence of human presence and which mankind's entry into might not be and can never be fully integrated.

The Strategy of the Chameleon, an idea earlier presented by me as an approach to navigating the forest and for transposing that orientation to moving through the world as a whole increasingly looks to me like something perhaps clever but perhaps closer to the speech of a child trying to make sense of something for which his interpretive skills are  inadequately equipped.

Yet, in the midst of thus humbling contextualization of an intellectual and imaginative effort that gave me significant satisfaction on its completion, I have become more sensitive to the value of who I am, to accepting my reality within the flow of time as I seek to construct new actualizations of possibility , reaching out for help to the presences symbolized by the forest sculptures.