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

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

     The Strategy of the Chameleon 

     Correlating Knowledge Systems 

between the Forest and the University

 TOFAC 2025 and the Return to Osogbo

          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                         Compcros

                          Abstract 

A description of an approach to knowledge integrating diverse cognitive possibilities, a stance imaged by the chameleon, a conceptual synthesis inspired by the   the contexts of the 2O25 Toyin Falola Conference ( TOFAC).

The Strategy of the Chameleon  

     Character 

The Strategy of the Chameleon is an approach to developing knowledge,  unifying diverse ways of knowing in a quest for synoptic vision integrating the particular and the universal.

The Strategy of the Chameleon involves navigating the universe as a cognitive space, deploying  the full range of human cognitive powers in exploring this forest of possibility, from sensory perception to interpretation of sensory phenomena, from memory to  imagination, from imagination to intellectual analysis and synthesis,  from sensate awareness  to extra-sensory  perception and beyond to  a quest for the essence of being,  engaging and integrating the particulars of human knowledge and experience while seeking to comprehend them in terms of  an exalted level of evaluation, ultimately situating them within an understanding of the essence, structure and dynamism of the cosmos.

Inspirational Sources

The naturalistic metaphor at the heart of this idea emerges from  roles of the chameleon in classical African thought, as epistemic paradigm and cosmogonic agent, projecting cosmic beginnings and cognitive range of the possibilities unfolded by cosmos, the first creature on Earth on the morning of creation, as its head and tail hold up the moon and sun, moving through the forest in simultaneous identification with its environment while maintaining its own identity, blending smoothly with its vegetative home  as it seems to change its colour to match its surroundings, its colour dynamism dramatizing positive and negative qualities of existence, its capacity to swivel its eyes to perceive its environment in a three hundred and sixty degree vision suggesting comprehensive perception, a synoptic understanding of reality, these being depictions of the chameleon in Igbo and Yoruba mythology, as developed by Chinua Achebe and Susanne Wenger, in Fulani thought as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba, as well as in Mazisi Kunene's account of  Zulu epistemology.

The forest the chameleon navigates, adapting Ayi Kwei Armah's and Abiola Irele's  distillation from Akan and Yoruba thought , respectively, is both the forest understood as  a communicative space and its ecological complexity perceived as evocative of the ontological density of of the cosmos.

These inspirations are amplified  in dialogue with the Hindu image of the five arrows of flowers and the sugarcane bow of the mind held by the Goddess Tripurasundari, representing sensitivity to the universe as a sensory delight and deeply pleasurable experience through which one may penetrate  to the source of reality represented by the Goddess Tripurasundari, "the most beautiful embodiment of the cosmos", as described by the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram.

These naturalistic images  are further developed through a multi -cultural ideational network in which the chameleon, as terrestrial navigator, draws upon a synthesis of  "oju lasan" and "oju inu", between outward and inward vision as understood in Yoruba thought, in a  continuum from sensory perception to memory, memory to  imagination, imagination to intellectual analysis and synthesis, sensory awareness to extra-sensory  perception, as described by Babatunde Lawal, complemented by Anenechukwu Umeh on Igbo epistemology extending similar cognitive possibilities into a cosmic scope of awareness.

These  conjunctions are correlated with  other cognitive frameworks across the world in constructing a multi-cognitive, ontologically expansive knowledge system,   from Susan Greenwood 's  exploration of dialogue between intellectual and magical consciousness, shaped into a shamanism course at the University of Sussex to  US philosopher David Abrams' Spell of the Sensous and his Becoming Animal, on nature navigation within an expansive cognitive framework,  US philosopher  Fritjof Capra's idea of networked cosmos, placed in dialogue with Negritudist, Hindu, Chinese, Yoruba, Igbo, Bantu, scientific and other conceptions of variously understood forms of energy  as a unifying feature of cosmos, in tandem with ideas on reality as defined by structures of information,

resonating with Toyin Falola's"Ritual Archives" and an interdisciplinary network of thinkers.

Within the Strategy of the Chameleon, natural and humanly constructed space  becomes an immersive laboratory akin to a forest which people navigate in terms of various levels of direction and serendipity within the network of trees and rivers, of groves and the larger network of trees, privileging nature as teacher,  forest as cosmic microcosm, in which human individuality and cosmic complexity are correlated, as a person may open themselves to inspiration within the elevated atmosphere of the  forest space.

TOFAC 2025

    TOFAC Matrices and Autobiographical 

     Conjunctions

This philosophical and practical vision is catalyzed for me by the constellations between my cognitive journey  and  the 2025 Toyin Falola Conference  (TOFAC), in honour of the scholar and writer Toyin Falola, taking place between the 1st and the 3rd of July 2025 at the Osun State University, Osogbo, the theme of the conference being "African Cultural Creativity and Innovations".

The conference location, conference theme and conference inspiration constellate for me primary axes of my life's journey, pivots around which my terrestrial progression across time and space revolve, resonating into the context of eternity within which my life is ultimately lived as a seeker of the Ultimate.

     

      The Osun Forest and Natural Space 

       as Cognitive Accelerator

Osogbo is the site of the Osun forest, emblematic for me of my transformative encounter with the recreative power of  natural space in expanding human cognitive faculties beyond the conventionally understood character of the senses, doing this  in ways that bring one into contact with forms of being beyond the everyday understanding of nature within the global dominance of Western modernity, an expansion demonstrating the human person as sharing the Earth with identities that are neither totally human nor fully animal, neither purely inanimate or elemental forces of nature as generally understood, integrating material nature but going beyond it, suggesting sentience but in a way different from humans or animals, the only forms of sentience readily accessible to humanity.

     The University as Intellectual Zone 

      

The idea of a university, represented by Osun State University, where the conference will take place, represents for me the cognitive skills of reading and writing through which I began the explorations that brought me into the knowledge adventures represented by the Osun forest.

The university also embodies the cognitive networks through which I have tried to make sense of, apply and share the knowledge gained from those adventures, ultimately concluding in my inability to fit into the scholarly community represented by the universities I have been affiliated with, thriving better as an Independent Scholar, more at home in the "wild" of unscripted knowledge  than in the domestication of academic spaces, adapting Olabiyi Yai's distillation of a Yoruba conception of relationships between social and wild spaces as lifestyle metaphors ( " Tradition and the Yoruba Writer").

     Toyin Falola and Transdisciplinary

     Mapping 

Toyin Falola, whom the conference honours,  is a polymathic scholar and writer who evokes for me my aspiration to as broad a range of knowledge as possible, in relation to engaging the source of existence enabling all possibilities, an aspiration pursued through a multi-cultural philosophical and spiritual enquiry, akin to Falola's range of exploration of systems of thought centred in Africa, African thought being also for me a centre of navigation of the world's cognitive possibilities, a pivot around which diversely ranging cognitive journeys cohere.

    Re-Encountering the Osun Forest 

Arriving in Osogbo for the conference, I will prioritize  visiting the Osun forest, the conglomeration of trees and river that Susanne Wenger and the Osun Forest Collective, as she and her artistic collaborators may be called, transformed into a sculptural and architectural evocation of classical Yoruba cosmology, its picture of the universe as a network of relationships between forms of consciousness expressed in human life and nature,  the orisa, foundations of existence,  yet transcending the material world  within the overarching matrix of an ultimate generative power, Olodumare, the creator of the universe.

I anticipate dropping my bag in my hotel room and heading for the forest  before doing anything else, observing how much Osogbo might have changed since the more than twenty years I was last there.

I would move from my recalling the experience through memory to physical encounter.

I would confront the forest against the echoes of memories of mental images of the vegetative space which enabled me write "Cosmogeographic Explorations:Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury" ( 1) my 2004 MA dissertation about 

the forest and its art at England's University of Kent, and subsequently seeking to expand that dissertation in a PhD jointly run by  the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and University College, London, a project uncompleted partly beceause of my inability to integrate the scope of ideas and aspirations I was developing and sheer creative restlessness inspired by being let loose for the first time in an environment where I could do almost anything I wanted in the quest for knowledge.

With time I have come to better understand how that effort to study the forest and its art in relation to a similar though quite different initiative by Katherine Maltwood on the Glastonbury landscape in England in terms of Western astrological cosmology may be consummated, a sensitivity shaping my renewed encounter with the Osun forest.

I shall be returning to the forest and its artistic network with a renewed sensitivity to navigating that natural  environment in terms of a psychological, physical, visual, and total aesthetic experience, within the completeness of my embodiment as a sensate and thinking creature, moving through a space that reminds me of the trees and forest in Benin City I used to contemplate, seeking, by the power of my admiration of their beauty, to pierce through perception of their physical forms to perceiving the ultimate source of existence in which all forms of being are grounded, as a tree is rooted in soil.

    Animistic Mysticism and the 

    Inspiration of Susanne Wenger 

"All the gods of the world were trees and animals, long, long before they entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure" declares Susanne Wenger in Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hotter 's 

Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne  Wenger.

"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 would not 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, because they are real in many ways, present ever new features.

I feel sheltered by them-in them-because 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 entrusted their sacrosanct magnificence to a human figure", the full statement from Wenger, is akin to the goal I pursued in those years of nature mysticism in Benin City, leading to an expanding awareness of concentrations of what may be called energy in particular trees, groves and the Ogba forest, the forest and the river running through it manifesting " an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination, constituting the non-rational essence of vital religion" as Webster's Third New International Dictionary describes Rudolph Otto's concept of the numinous, an experience moving from seeking the source of existence to encountering the animistic cosmos, nature understood as " a temple of living pillars through which man walks as strange, familiar eyes gaze upon him from the leaves above" as French poet Charles Baudelaire's"Correspondences" depicts a similar experience.

     Interpersonal and Naturalistic                     Networks Enabling Understanding of         the Particular and the Universal

I look forward to listening to people at the conference, harvesting knowledge to further advance my cognitive aspirations and perhaps even developing new orientations.

I anticipate embodied encounters akin to my textual relationship with Western esoteric insights  exemplified by Dion Fortune on discerning consciousness in inanimate nature through  appreciating nature's beauty.

I look forward to discussions recalling my reading about the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth's account of entering into the source of existence through  sensitivity to the beauty of nature, his description of a " power whose home is in the setting sun and the mind of man" leading me to seeking the animistic visions  exemplified by Fortune and the cosmic awareness represented by  Wordsworth through the trees, groves and forests of Benin, a pursuit eventually drawing  me to Susanne Wenger as a veteran of such explorations in her inspiration by the Osun forest.

   Oscillating between Forest and 

   University, between Expansive 

   Cognitive Encounters and Intellectual    

   Structuring

"Oju inu", the inward eye or vision, I was later to learn, is the Yoruba term for such penetrative awareness, as demonstrated by such scholars as Babatunde Lawal who, studying with Yoruba culture bearers at a time when a good number of them might not have been literate, distilled this knowledge in texts operating within the academic contexts of a Lawal, whose majestic "Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art", written while at the then University of Ife, has been my richest encounter with that concept, though covered by him in only one brief but trenchant paragraph, although elaborated in terms of artistic practice by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

How can the forest and the university be brought together, the exploration of a spectrum cognitive possibilities enabled by such an epistemic laboratory as the Osun forest, and a community committed to intellectual and imaginative pursuits as  Osun State University, be integrated in a synergy sensitive to the distinctive strengths of each of such diverse  cognitive domains?

US philosopher David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensous is one approach to that question in its mediation between Western philosophy, animistic thought and personal practice.

Another is Susan Greenwood's personal and scholarly exploration of  diverse modes of consciousness, human and non-human, animate and non-animate, biological and non-biological, organizing these into a shamanism program at the University of Sussex.

Toyin Falola's "Ritual Archives" champions a rethinking of academic work to integrate sensitivity to such sacred spaces of classical African spiritualities as natural and human made shrines, trees and sculptures, as  unique archives of knowledge, to be engaged with in terms of their distinctive identities.

The realities they embody and enable, he urges, should be appreciated in terms that honour their individuality of being.

This individuality, he argues, should be  communicated beyond the specificities of these identities to other cognitive domains, engagements navigated at the intersection of sensory sensitivity, imagination and intellect.

Could the inspirational force of the Osun forest's natural spaces as well as of its sculptural and architectural constructs mapping Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology demonstrate how this cosmographic art may be related with as symbolic of ideas about the nature of reality which may or may not be understood in a religious sense?

Could  the Strategy of the Chameleon be developed as a learning method, even within an academic context, inspirational natural spaces such as the  Osun forest in Osogbo related with as  immersive laboratories in which people are encouraged  to wander, allowing themselves  get lost in the network of trees and river, of groves and the larger network of trees, a person opening themselves to inspiration within the elevated atmosphere of the  forest space, experiencing nature as teacher,  forest as cosmic microcosm,  human individuality and cosmic complexity  correlated?

"Fun iwa ni oniwa", the Yoruba expression goes, rendered by Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language as "grant to each existent its unique identity" or " recognize the unique identity of each existent", sensitivities developed by that thinker during research as a scholar at the then University of Ife, when collaboration with traditional Yoruba culture bearers and scholars trained in the Western academy, at times in the West itself, as with Abiodun and Lawal, created an efflorescence of knowledge foundational for Yoruba Studies and its impact on African Studies.

The 2025 TOFAC conference at Osun State University, Osogbo, represents for me an opportunity to revisit questions of such possibilities in the African university's domestication of Western academic culture, drawing inspiration from Africa's soil while absorbing and sharing potencies from and with  the wider world.

Notes

(1) "Cosmogeographic Explorations:Metaphysical Mapping of the Osun Forest and Glastonbury"

https://www.scribd.com/document/25301356/COSMOGEOGRAPHIC-EXPLORATIONS-METAPHYSICAL-MAPPING-OF-THE-OSUN-FOREST-AND-GLASTONBURY

2. This paper integrates the insights of two essays of mine- "Sense Perception and Metaphysical Integration" and "The Vagina of the Chameleon: The Chameleon Gate at the Osun Forest", in relation to other explorations, written and unwritten,  marking the first time I have achieved this synthesis I have aspired to for decades.

 Great thanks to the  TOFAC organizers and Toyin Falola for their catalyctic inspiration.

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