Toyin Falola and the Tree of Knowledge: Visual Configurations and Projections of Self between the Mythic and the Everyday Part 1

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                         

                                                       

                                               Toyin Falola and the Tree of Knowledge

           Visual Configurations and Projections of Self between the Mythic and the Everyday

                                                                             Part 1

                                                           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                               Compcros

                                               Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                    "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                               

 

A collage of Falola book and memorabilia images chosen to emphasize an understanding of some of the most salient qualities projected by  Falola iconography. 

The image selection  and organization are inspired by Buddhist mandala technique and possible theoretical interpretations in which diverse images of human forms inspired by the same historical figure are used in evoking abstract concepts in a variety of symbolic visual settings, facilitating contemplative  identification with the values the images crystallize.

                                                   Abstract

This essay examines the immediate and more distant yet strikingly illuminating implications of the use, in his books and memorabilia of him,  of artistic images of polymathic scholar, writer and institutional organizer Toyin Falola, exploring these images within an intercultural context, generating  a global nexus in relation to their  proximate African frameworks.

The essay initiates  what is likely to be a new field of study, Falola iconography, the study of values relating to images of Toyin Falola, part of Falola Studies, the investigation of the life and  work of the scholar, writer and academic entrepreneur.

I have identified the artists responsible for the images when I could get their names from the books.

 

Creating an Imagistic Universe

Toyin Falola, with the aid of photographers and artists, has been making a point of placing his artistically rendered image on the covers of a significant number of his books, and pictures and art of himself, alone or with others, in the interiors of those books. Others have complemented his efforts by doing the same thing in books about him and memorabilia associated with him. 

                                              

                                               

                                     A realistic artistic depiction of Toyin Falola

Some of these are realistic images, doing nothing more than projecting an artistic likeness.  Others do more, suggesting symbolic values by depicting Falola in contexts that tell a story which may be interpreted as visual complements to the scholarly explorations in the books.

We see him on the cover of his Daily Life in Colonial Africa, 2024, elegantly dressed in a Yoruba shirt, face shaped by a stylish white beard, seated as a trader in front of  his wares in an African market.

                                                            

He is also depicted, in his Milestones in African Literature, 2024, in art by Getty Ekele and Michael Effionayi, responsible for the various images in that book. He is again sporting that white beard and those Yoruba clothes, seated under a tree, talking with children seated in a circle around him, as the tree's shade covers speaker and listeners.

                           

                       
                            

A large tree grows from his head in another visualization in  Milestones, his face marked by that carefully trimmed white beard, his countenance configured in terms of shapes defined by reflection across decades. Around his brow is a circlet projecting elegance and quiet majesty in the style of the classical beauty of iconic Ife sculptural heads, as a massive tree grows from the top of his head, the branches of the tree named after bodies of knowledge Falola has addressed in his decades long career-the Ifa knowledge system, the African Ajami script, rituals, history, poetry,  prose, drama, nation, the Swahili language.

                                                                                       

                                                              
                                                              

In yet another visualization, in a painting by Moses Ogunleye, from Falola's In Praise of Greatness: A Poetics of African Adulation, 2019, we see his clearly identifiable face ensconced under a mask within the multifariously coloured robes of an Egungun, a messenger from the world of the finally departed, someone who has returned to Earth from orun, the world of ultimate origins and of final destinations, from where creation began, from where each person issues at the beginning of a lifetime and to which they return at the end of each lifetime, as understood in Yoruba masquerade traditions and their grounding in Yoruba thought.

                                                                     

                                                     
                                    

In another image the slenderly built Falola, his white bearded face unmistakable, is shown laboriously but successfully holding aloft the structure of Nigeria in the form of a map of the nation, as the title of the book on which this image appears, Understanding Modern Nigeria: Ethnicity, Democracy and Development,  highlights the enormity of the cognitive task the book performs and which the image projects by association, evoking cognitive activity by depicting physical effort.

                                                                                   

                                                       

In still another visualization, in front of the bag given to conference attendees at the conference to mark his sixty-fifth birthday in 2018, Falola's face is seen  wearing a Yoruba cap, poised in contemplative abstraction, part of a semi-circle of visual icons of African cultural history as that history focuses the continent's economic, artistic, technological and philosophical development-the inimitable vertical projections of the pyramids, the Sankofa bird of Akan Adinkra symbolism, its backward looking stance evoking learning from the past, the outline of a camel suggesting the trade routes and cultural transmissions enabled by the unique capacities of the camel in movement across the Sahara, an Ife sculptural head completing the lower end of the semi-circle of images, its sense of lofty humanity projected in minimalist yet unmistakably eloquent lines.

                                                                              

                                                  

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]