From the Agbekoya Revolt to Decolonization Strategies: Towards a Biography of Scholar and Writer Toyin Falola

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

From the Agbekoya Revolt to Decolonization Strategies

Towards a Biography of Scholar and Writer Toyin Falola 

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                      Toyin Falola

           A contemporary photograph

 

Ibadan. 1953. The first day of the year.

In the land of warriors a child was born.

Ibadan had been renowned as a place where people made their name by force of arms.

It later became a centre of intellect through its pioneering university, the University of Ibadan. 

Falola was born in the traditional contexts of Ibadan,  not its newer elite socialisations represented by the university and the newly emerging Westernized  professional class.

This situation of birth enabled him experience the cultural life of Ibadan and of the Yoruba in general to which Ibadan belongs in a particularly riveting manner that would become central to his autobiographical writing and scholarship.

Le us follow this irrepressible  child across his childhood adventures,  his teenage involvement in the Agbekoya( peasants revolt) to his academic explorations and his eventual arrival as a Professor of the Humanities at the University of Texas in the highly competitive US academic landscape, as the river of his publications continue to unfold.

Falola's professional life can be situated within two matrices-his involvement in the Agbekoya Revolt against taxation in colonial Nigeria and his later struggles in contributing to developing African intellectual life through his scholarship, an effort located within a struggle against the negative effects of colonialism while taking advantage of its fruits.

Falola as a young academic at the then University of Ife

Within this broad span can be located his network of relationships across various times and places. 

Particularly strategic in these relationships is that with his childhood mentor Iya Lekuleja, a woman dealing in assorted materials for Yoruba herbal and ritual activities,  his earliest introduction to the wealth of classical Yoruba knowledge systems, an inspirational force the implications of which resonates across his work of more than fifty years,  bearing fruit in studies of African and particularly Yoruba knowledge systems, old and new,  and of representative figures of these systems.

Stay tuned.