What would people think if a child smiled instead of crying on being born? Why is it believed that crying must be the first reaction of every child, crying because of removal from the womb universe in which it has existed for months? What if the child becomes sensitive instead to its entry into broader possibilities, into a more expansive flow of air, more expansive spaces, and starts smiling?
I became like one such child on encountering the OAU campus. My experience suggests what Jaideva Singh describes as the Yoga of Amazement, the title of his translation of the idiosyncratic classic of Hindu Tantra, the Vijnana Bhairava, in which a person is enjoined to practice approaches of sensitizing oneself to oneself and the relationship between oneself and one's environment, taking time to be alert to the most minute of perceptions, so that the glory of being alive may be awakened and entry into the splendour underlying existence may be touched.
On coming out of where I'm staying on the campus, I understand myself to be at work by the very act of stepping out into the open air. The landscape calls to me to recognise its glory, evident in moving through every inch of space.
On waking, I've also begun work, as is my style even before this sojourn at OAU. At work because contemplation begins from waking, inspiring sensitivity to the emergence into the moment of awakening as entry into ''morning yet on creation day,'' as Chinua Achebe references an image from Igbo folklore in his essay collection of that title.
Lungs vitalizing, mind alert, limbs dynamizing, indicating that the miraculous creature on terra firma, rising from absence to the wonder of existence, is once again awake, mind roving, hungry to exercise its powers, a journeyer across creativities in which, he, a representative of his species, is called upon every second to justify his existence by transforming that existence into something beyond what is given by nature, beginning from alertness to its own being and the cosmos enabling that being, represented by air and earth, enabling breathing and moving within space.
This essay is about the intensification of this experience of wonder through a surprise encounter with a unique concentration of this environmental force, a micro space inspiring the idea of an ecosystemic microverse.
Photo by myself
Camera: iPhone 6s
Image edited on Photos app of an HP laptop
A place so uniquely exquisite, so atmospherically potent, so delightful in it's spatial and arboreal varieties, a zone secluded and pristine, evoking for me the beginning of time, it would require a master nature photographer, with the best kind of cameras, to adequately evoke the atmospheric force of this space.
Something similar applies to the atmospherics of various micro-spaces, as sections of the OAU landscape may be called. This is exemplified by the ambience generated by particular stretches of heavily wooded space, spatial relationships between trees generating unique atmospheres.
These are all the more striking in evoking forest space as they overlook the technological identity represented by the often smoothly tarred central highway of the campus and the vehicles speeding on it, conveying people between the main gate and the university's academic, residential and commercial centres, homo sapiens in its fervent motion in space and time, watched by their older brethren, the trees, whose lives are measured in larger cycles of time within smaller spans of space.
In my encounter with the primeval space I discovered near Oduduwa Hall on the OAU campus, I marvelled at the good fortune of those who might be using the building overlooking this wonder, but the building looked derelict, infrastructural maintenance being a challenge on the campus, its condition making me wonder if the building was in use.
In my exposure so far to nature photography, I have encountered only one book in which the photography is able to adequately dramatize these subtle potencies in nature, Janet and Colin Bord's Mysterious Britain, it's matchless black and white photography projecting an atmospheric resonance that I have not seen colour photography, in all it's lushness, as able to capture.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Kudos! You did it once again. Congratulations!
Not kid kidding!
In this instance, more in line with Wordsworthian Pantheism and less like the mystical rascal William Blake in wonderment, you transported some of us, all the way to Ile- Ife - as a result of which I was sure I would remain as a kind of permanent home-coming and now it’s a romantic and sentimental nostalgia, a somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience,
Up till today, in this people’s world, since the university is the place where among other things you learn to socialise, my only regret is that, unlike Herr Dan Strehl, I did not go to Ife at about the same time, where he was taught by W. Soyinka among others, but took off with Better Half, to Legon instead.
However, I really don’t complain because of a host of mostly Ghanaian, American and Canadian friends, Mustapha Tettey Addy, Thomas Annan, Frafra brothers Dollar & Attah and the crew at Nima, exiled Sierra Leonean Major Sandy Jumu ( who else would lend me his car?) fellow Saro man Samuel Oju King and his band the Echoes based in Kumasi, and fellow students such as John Collins (now Prof John Collins) , Terry & Ann Smutylo, Rudy & Thelma Silas, Kwatei Jones Quartey, Cyprian Lamar Rowe, Roberta Turner, lecturers such as Albert van Dantzig, Jeff Holden, Francis Abiola Irele, Joe & Adrianne Seaward, Jean Love, were really interesting, as was Victor Le Vine, Gerald Moore, Jawa Apronti, Jack Goody, and for beauty, there was Kumasi, Koforidua and the Aburi Gardens. All the preceding personal is more of my scattered notes, recollections that pop up from time to time, part “ spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings “, part “emotions recollected in tranquillity” ( smile) a manus in process…
Opened wide
eyes of astonishment -
the one-timeness of this photo
and yr description not captured
and frozen in time by a still photograph
of an object of desire, a micro-universe
a living, live, undulating mound of beauty-
full big body booty on the roll, in motion on yon
Arunachala hill which Sri Ramana Maharshi
made his permanent abode.
How far is Ile-Ife from Ibadan
“Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.” ?
Light upon light - just as you heard Jesus say
“ You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven”
So, here and now, wherever you may be, I ask you
How far Is Ibadan from ancestral Abeokuta,
the fabled city under a stone?
And how far is Mons Capitolinus, the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome,
from the Campus of the Obafemi Awolowo University?
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On this people’s planet, I daresay comparisons are as inevitable as breathing, a rewording of the TS‘s “Criticism is as inevitable as breathing”.
Comparative campus beauty was not Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju’s intention but one can’t help thinking of the magnificent entry portal to the University of Ghana, Legon, the awe with which it first struck me on my second trip to Ghana in January 1970, as a very impressionable much younger and less experienced person, the general leafy spread of the campus, from the entry, the director Kwabena Nketia ( smiled and tsroked his intrument fondly as he lectured) and secretary Richard Greenfield’ and ( as a neophyte to anthropology, my most difficult & radical tutor, the late Kwame Arhin ( he liked sounding off about “ The Ashanti Confederacy” - I sensed that he was a little suspicious about me since I was married to an obroni/ oyibo) and Eric O Ayisi’s and my Institute of African Studies to the left, a few about a hundred metres away the great Mensah sarbah Hall where a month later some scenes of Brecht’s “ The Caucasian Chalk Circle” was performed, directed by James Gibbs) — and a hundred metres to its East, the Balme Library , and a hundred metres to its North , VOLTA, the female students quarters, and further up North, Commonwealth Hall and the soemwhat exclusive Chalets at South Legon , about a mile from the main campus, where we the poor married postgradute students lived…and for soem of us, teh workers canteen where we often had lunch,,,
I wonder what the campus looks like today, after the structural adjustment programs to which Jerry Rawlings had to submit.
What else to add: friends George Crowell, Tony Asrilen, Lacey Vasek, and but looking back I sense a difference between the coastal cities in Africa, that I’m familiar with - Freetown, Monrovia, Accra, Takoradi, Tema, Port Harcourt, the Riverine Delta areas in Nigeria, Alexandria ( in Egypt) in contrast with the sometimes more real African cities of the interior: Makeni, Kumasi, Owerri, Umuahia, Aba, Cairo….
A homily: On love for enemies--
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Stockholm
Sweden.
20th October 2022
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Many thanks for your heartbreaking response.
Paradoxically, it is simultaneously so inspiring to know that someone like you is not alone in saying what you say and feeling what you feel about this abject situation from which only God and a national/nationwide mass movement, a massive, concerted, consciousness-raising rally and cry to our Politicians and wannabe great Leaders of Nigeria should be able to remedy.
What are Messrs Tinubu and Atiku doing about it?
You must have seen Peter Obi being interviewed on BBC‘s Focus on Africa, gesticulating wildly like a Francophone African graduate from the École de Paris, but not a word from him, about education. I was not impressed. Always, it has to be education first - that’s why Tai Solarin was worthy of the Right Livelihood Award.
In Sierra Leone, Maada Bio got a lot of wind in his sails when he announced - in his SLPP Manifesto back then, the importance that he was going to give to education, with an emphasis on that old SLPP dream: “ the education of the girl child !”
How far they have come since announcing those intentions is another matter altogether; as the poet put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley”
As we watch in wonder at the success of China, Singapore, Malaysia, the rest of Asia and the Indian subcontinent (India and Pakistan) what’s most puzzling now, as we observe the chaos and total disarray as evidenced by the perennial teachers' strikes in our Nigeria - and the dilapidated state of the University campus of a great university in need of renovation, refurbishment and maintenance - what is equally painful to acknowledge is is that it’s not as if there are no successful antecedents and precedents to follow. So, why don’t they? Is it that the will to do so, to get the nation on the rails to success has taken a leave of absence?
And what success there is, is relentlessly being exported as finished and partly finished sometimes as polished products otherwise being mourned as the brain- drain, at which movers and shakes throw up their hands and their heads in despair and tell us that the drain is irreversible, unless, to begin with, the opportunity is made a democratic right and entitlement for everybody in the country - and that is the democratic ideal that wannabe presidents of Nigeria should be adumbrating, when given the freedom and the opportunity to do so, even as guests in a BBC studio or at home in Onitsha
Sixty-two years after declaring the sovereign Independence of the potentially great nation of Nigeria, up to this point, after the beams of light from e.g. the late great Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s implementation of a successful education policy during his brief period as Premier of the Western Region, and some other stellar efforts in the oil boom years by e.g. Ambrose Alli who as governor of the then Bendel State devoted 50% of the state budget to education - and these policies are still reaping dividends.
Since then, the dreadful, deliberate neglect of education - as the engine, the sine qua non of any future national development - is a crying shame. But let not the disheartened surrender to despair - we could start at ground zero grassroots level with the pedagogy of the oppressed. ( I set off to Nigeria in 1981, armed by Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau
With good leadership ( at the top) the education revolution will kick start at kindergarten…
With regard to donations for your projects, you are aware that apart from some generous, do-good philanthropists, there are also various bodies that you could turn to for institutional help - far above the mighty widow's mite
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