Re: PROF OLUKOTUN'S COLUMN

[Michael Afolayan]

Prof. Olukotun: Wow, what a great tribute to a worthy citizen! As we mourn the death of the great Nigerian Chinua Achebe, it is worthwhile to also honor the living legends. Thanks for putting a round peg in a round hole. You gave honor to the one for whom honor is due. You captured, let me say, “almost captured,” the secret of a great man’s success in your quite impressive analysis of Professor Falola. In my book, liking someone and respecting them are mutually exclusive but Falola happens to be one of handful individuals that have broken that rule for me – he is a person I like as mush as I respect. My reasons for this stance are few, and highlight them below:

This man called Toyin Falola is levelheaded. Period! He is a public intellectual with private demeanor. His dog does not bark at other dogs; he would only bark at rogues crashing the fence, and breaking into the house. In fact, his dog would nurture a rabid dog back to health, not kill, dismiss, or further injure them. He does not beat the drum of his gallantries; he lets his fingers do the working. He does not have the time to blow the trumpet of his accomplishments even though they are many. He does not need to lobby any government, at any level, in order to become relevant. Go to any good library and you would find 120 books and hundreds of articles to his credit – those are the things that speak for him. Forget about Africa; forget the Diaspora, let us look at the whole world and ask the question, how many people anywhere today can boast of such intellectual accomplishment – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, or South America. This is a man of unique disposition and talent. Were there a Nobel Prize for scholarship in the Humanities, there is no second candidate anywhere I know who would beat Falola to it. Indeed, his recent decoration by the University of Texas, into a multi-million dollar chair underscores that fact par excellence. The man is dedicated to a life of scholarship. Most of us in the academia would peak our productivity when we eye our tenure and as soon as the tenure is granted, we sit still and mark time towards retirement, lame-ducking and bench-couching. Not so with Falola who is more productive each year than he was the previous one. His legendary “calabash carver” as the Yoruba people would say, could have stopped carving two decades ago, and the beauty of his craft would not have been destroyed in the marketplace of excellence. Yet, he continues carving as if his life depends on it – and indeed, his life may depend on it, his career definitely does not. He has made a career that will pass the test of time!  

 

Professor Olukotun, thanks for linking Falola to the Great Ife tradition. I recall with nostalgia the high assemblage of scholars in the humanities at Ife in those days of the 70s. Every Monday at the African Studies Center, there would be an intellectual exchange through seminars. Who would forget the meeting point for great minds like Pierre Verger, J.F. Odunjo, Kole Omotosho, Akin Euba, Bayo Faleti, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, O.B. Yai, Roland Abiodun, Karin Barber, Adebisi Afolayan, Barry Hallen, Howard Jordan, Tunji Vidal, Oyin Ogunba, Biodun Jeifo, Akinwumi Isola, Sope Oyelaran, T. Yayi, Omotoso Eluyemi, Bade Ajuwon, Babatunde Lawal, Isola Olomola, Afolabi Olabode, Olatunde Olatunji, S. A. Ekundayo, G.G. Darah, and many more. People would travel from universities across the country, and from Cameroon and Republic of Benin, just for the two-hour seminar, attack each others in intellectual scrutiny, and minutes after, they were hands-in-hands at the Staff Club, laughing, playing tennis, eating chicken legs, and having drinks! It was a time of intellectual revival and the likes of Falola were beneficiaries of such unrivaled renaissance.  Many who later traveled to the West after that experience thought scholarship in the West was so mediocre when compared to the Ife experience!

 

However, the real secret behind Falola’s extraordinariness could not have been Ife, and certainly not UT – far from it! If Ife watered Falola’s intellectual vine, the farmer that cultivated the land, planted and germinated the seed was the “native” ingenuity, the intuitive whiz of his upbringing. Ife and UT provided him the environment to stretch his wing and fly ad infinitum, but it was his village life and the tutelage at the feet of elders and sages like Pasito, the grandfather and Iya Leku - the dura mater, that laid the mysterious egg called Toyin Falola. Any small reading of A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt would vindicate my hypothesis. Unfortunately, today, we have destroyed that innate mind of “Hausaness,” “Yorubaness,” “Igboness,” “Asanteness,” “Akanness” and everything that invokes the depth of indigenous metaphysics and epistemology, the two areas that Falola has successfully tapped into and which have made the sky the limit for his productivity and super-human endeavors. Contemporary Yoruba children born in Nigeria, for example, can no longer speak Yoruba. Even sadder, when you pay attention to their English, it is woeful! They have become members of two worlds and citizen of neither. It is sad. It is scary. It is lamenting! It does not say much about us, and does not proffer any hope for tomorrow’s generation. Except we go back to the drawing board and do so with alacrity, by doing what you suggested, that is, “restructure our national values,” the airplane of our nation is about to run out of gas in the boundless sky, and no landing pad would give it a soft perching! In fact, Falola may be, in the words of Shakespeare, “the last of all Romans . . .” and we may as well say, “Fare thee well!”

 

 

 

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From: "ayo_ol...@yahoo.com" <ayo_ol...@yahoo.com>
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Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 2:56 AM
Subject: Fw: PROF OLUKOTUN'S COLUMN

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From: maggie anaeto <maga...@yahoo.co.uk>

Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:27:40 +0000 (GMT)

To: <ayo_ol...@yahoo.com>

Subject: PROF OLUKOTUN'S COLUMN

FALOLA AND A BLIGHTED NATION’S LITTLE MERCIES   Ayo Olukotun          Our politicians who ideally should inspire and bring out the best in us, continue to drag the nation down in taste, values and role–modelling. As the ongoing controversy over the ill-judged presidential pardon for former Bayelsa state governor, Depreye Alamieyeseigha demonstrate, short term and self interested political calculations continue to trump enforcement of standards and the need to mind our international image.       The moral downturn and suffocating mediocrity have caused several citizens, having held out hope for long without sniffing any prospects for change to give up or cave under.  Kunle Agboluaje, a writer and historian in a terse, despairing response to my inquiry as to why he stopped writing for a national newspaper lamented: “I am beginning to feel that the Nigerian demon cannot be tamed in my generation. I have therefore resorted to writing books that will impact the next generation.”  Touching words that will find an echo across the length and breadth of this much abused country.      A decidedly different picture of what Nigeria could become emerges, however when you consider narratives of excellence around the outstanding achievements of Nigerians in the Diaspora; an issue recently touched on by former United States President, Bill Clinton. Take for example, Toyin Falola, who currently occupies the Jacob and Frances Mossiker chair in Humanities in the state of Texas, and is today being honoured with a honourary Doctor of Letters at Ondo state university. Considered the most productive and versatile historian that Africa has produced having published either singly or with others over 100 books, the professor exemplifies the yet unharnessed Nigerian spirit of overwhelming industry, flashes of which were displayed recently on the world stage by Nigeria’s Super Eagles when they defied the odds to strike gold at the Africa Cup of Nations.    It is part of the corruption and degradation of our polity and society that honour is often bestowed on full time crooks doubling as politicians; and awards of so-called excellence can be exchanged for cash in open market transactions.  Even our national honours count for little because of its successive devaluation to include several citizens who, in a different clime would be behind bars.      Part of the journey to national recovery is to look closely at international best practices as well as retell stories of outstanding contribution by our countrymen; who have made landmark contributions in specific areas of human endeavour.  In this respect, Falola has set the bar high indeed by breaking all known records in scholarly publishing across a diverse terrain of disciplines in the humanities, putting Nigeria on the global cultural map.    How was this possible? Let us tease out an answer from Malcom Caldwell’s international bestseller on high flyers. Leafing through the rise to stardom of prodigies such as Bill Gates, Wolfgang Mozart as well as chess grandmasters, Caldwell developed a thesis of the 10, 000 hours rule which he called the ‘magic number of greatness’.  He argues that eminence is forged in the crucible of opportunities undergirded by outstanding industry.  To quote him: “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a crucial minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise.  In fact researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”   Connecting this back with Falola’s scholarly front runner position, it is pertinent that he took all his academic degrees from the University of Ife (renamed Obafemi Awolowo University) at a time when that institution ranked among the best in the world, and was a cosmopolitan venue for cross fertilising ideas on African studies.  Specifically, his contributions to the political economy of Africa’s colonial history were developed at Ife where a radical, Marxist and non-Marxist school of history and the social sciences thrived. Professor Adebayo Oyebade, one of Falola’s former students, who edited a two volume festschriften on him informs that one of his enduring contribution to colonial economic history is his creative application of political economy to the study of colonial history as well as his penchant for pioneering fresh research paths. This underlies the point that Ife and the critical humanities and social science tradition that it nurtured were critical to Falola’s scholarship and his later ascendancy to global stature at the University of Texas.  In other words, Ife provided the intellectual climate for sowing the seeds of distinction which were to fully germinate when in the early 1990’s he moved over after a stint at the University of Cambridge to the University of Texas, Austin which is assessed by the most recent World University ranking published by the Times Higher Educational Supplement as number 25 on the global organogram.     On both campuses, Ife and Texas, he became a veritable illustration of Caldwell’s 10,000 hour-rule by applying himself by his own published admission roughly 18 hours a day to researching, teaching, co-editing, hosting conferences, and turning out new books at an incredible momentum. True, quantity of publications is not the same as quality; while profusion is not necessarily profundity as profusion may merely express access to publishing opportunities rather than originality or depth.  It is also the case, however that over time and as the scholar has matured, he has  accumulated to his credit ground breaking research and new lines of inquiry, thereby acquiring the status of an elder in the profession.  Professor Bessie House Soremekun of Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis in explaining Falola’s choice as winner of the Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2009 asserts that Falola’s work has had “transformative effects on the global epistemological debates which has preoccupied scholars in his disciplinary area of focus.”      Although Falola’s story is mainly one of personal excellence, it offers lessons for Nigeria as it searches for a roadmap out of the current wilderness of lost opportunities. The first lesson is the need to pay attention to institution building for as we have seen Obafemi Awolowo university of the Falola years as well as the University of Texas, Austin were critical to his rise to academic eminence and the string of laurels that have kept coming his way.  It is sad to reflect that Ife despite ongoing efforts to bring back its lost glory like other Nigerian universities no longer features in an advantageous position on the global intellectual map; and this brings to mind the question whether it or any other Nigerian university given their current state can produce another Falola. If Nigeria is serious about joining the global knowledge society then it will have to pay attention to rebuilding institutions that make greatness possible.     The final lesson to be drawn from the happy personal trajectory of the scholar is the need to restructure national values by promoting a culture of productivity and achievement driven norms.  This presupposes that Nigeria should build icons who have achieved distinction through honest labour and alternatively criminalise crooks and apostles of ill-gotten wealth currently parading themselves as heroes.          Prof Olukotun is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Entrepreneurial Studies at Lead City University, Ibadan. ayo_ol...@yahoo.com 07055841236

[Kolawole Onifade]

I am fortunate to have been under Professor Falola's tutelage. He taught me for two consecutive sessions in the early 80s. And, I must confess, Professor Falola is sound. His soundness and intellectual depth was forged as rightly noted by Professor Olukotun, in hours of committed research and studies. He is a natural scholar.

Professor Falola was always seen wearing his adire, thick glasses and paid no attention to vain things. He was warm and accessible. He did not place too much importance on himself; unlike some of his colleagues who carried themselves as if they were Demi gods.

I was therefore amused when one cantankerous fellow on this listserve said a while back that Professor Falola is a fluke.

A man's work speaks for him. Here we celebrate a true scholar. A dye-in-the-wool researcher. An intellectual prodigy. A prolific writer.


Kola/
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