African Epistemic Metaphors : From the Mask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge 1
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
Introduction
Classical African images of knowledge are amongst the most imaginatively exciting one can find. They are not widely known, perhaps even among Africans, for various reasons. Even when they are known, their scope of significance is inadequately appreciated.
Toyin Falola’s work is fascinating for its insights and multi-disciplinary range across a vast network of publications. It is also striking for its multi-expressive variety, across the expository and argumentative culture central to scholarship, the imaginative lyricism of poetry and the vividness of storytelling, storytelling being an expressive form unifying his autobiographical and historical writings. Also central to Falola’s work is his exploration of the contemporary significance of classical African knowledge systems.
This essay is part of my own effort to better understand this dynamic, ceaselessly growing configuration of knowledge that is the Falola Network, sharing this appreciation with others in a way that goes beyond the academic circles, particularly in African Studies, where Falola’s work is securely established.
The themes of African epistemic images, images of learning processes, and
Falola scholarship, are unified in this essay through my fascination with
mysticism, the human quest for union with or transformative insight to ultimate reality, the summation of all
possibilities, as it may be described, a summation known by the varied names of
“God,” “Allah,” “Braman,” “Nyame,” “cosmic mind,” among other designations for
the varied conceptions of an ultimate reality.
This piece is a development from an earlier essay “Toyin Falola : A Dancing Mask and his Footprints,” published in Nigerian news media. It expands the implications of the Igbo proverb of watching a dancing mask made famous by the quintessential literary explorer of classical Igbo thought and society, Chinua Achebe.
Entry into African Epistemic Images
The appreciation of the range and significance of African images of knowledge and the mutual illumination they generate between each other is enabled by multi-disciplinary exposure, across the visual and verbal arts, spirituality, philosophy, anthropology and other disciplines.
The better known strands of modern African philosophy, in keeping with their central inspiration by the linear logic that characterizes much Western philosophy, might not be adequately sensitive to this imagistic centre of classical African thought.
With such exceptions as Abiola Irele, Wole Soyinka, Mazisi Kunene and Ayi Kwei Armah, the literary scholars whose work is often closer to these images and who are central to making them known through their writings, may have other interests in them besides depth of engagement with their ideational significance as strategies of knowing relevant beyond the texts and other cultural forms where they occur.
Studies in African art history and theory, however, as in the work of Rowland Abiodun and Mary Nooter Roberts, are very sensitive to the visual evocation of ideas represented by these epistemic images.
Anthropologists have played a very significant role in these investigations. The magnificent work of anthropologist Marcele Griaule, enhanced by its qualification through subsequent research, his co-traveller Germaine Dieterlen and her collaborator, writer and scholar Ahamdou Hampate Ba, must be acknowledged as among my fundamental inspirations in this quest.
This essay is an effort to effort to organize what has been the outcome of random encounters rather than systematic research. This could lead to more focused textual and possibly interpersonal and material investigations.
The Dancing Mask
“You cannot stand in one spot to watch a dancing mask,” states an Igbo proverb quoted by the novelist Chinua Achebe. You need to see the mask from various vantage points in order to better appreciate its dynamism, its combination of visual power and dazzling motion.
As with the mask, so with life. Its scope cannot be adequately appreciated from one perspective, from any one body of ideas and insights. The ever-unfolding totality of approaches to understanding reality represent human efforts to grasp the ultimately ungraspable.
The Falola Dynamic
Even then, the quest is central to what makes us human. The hunger to know as much as possible about this universe we find ourselves in, a pursuit taking the seeker into various disciplines, diverse bodies of knowledge. One such seeker I deeply admire is Toyin Falola, the “dancing mask” of many sides, whose multifaceted genius needs multiple perspectives to appreciate.
Through a consistently unfolding series of books and essays he writes, co-writes, edits or co-edits and through various book series he has instituted with different publishers, through interviews with figures from different aspects of life, there steadily unfolds a kaleidoscopic window of the African continental and African Diasporic experience, as seen by various eyes, spoken by varied voices.
Falola's academic education is in history. From the grand narrative about the scope of the human journey that is history, he enters into various tributaries of the mighty ocean, seeking, in the rivers, creeks and other waterways that feed into the tumultuous sea, the varied motivations and engagements with reality that define human existence. He is particularly interested in those who still people the continent from which humanity branched out across the world, Africa, as well as in the journeys of Africans across the ocean into the Americas.
Patterns of Knowing
Can studying Falola’s work assist me in my fascination with patterns, patterns in terrestrial nature, patterns shaping the cosmos and patterns of interpretation of the significance of those material realities and of the human mind exploring those concrete forms?
The Calabash of Time and Infinity
I am haunted by the hunger for keys to the meaning of existence as dramatized in its unfolding possibilities. “Olo-du-mare,” “the owner-olo- of-odu,” odu, the calabash of existence from which each moment is born, is Shloma Rosenberg’s interpretation, at his site Mystic Curio, of the meaning of the name “Olodumare,” the identification of the supreme creator as understood in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology.
I am
intrigued by that calabash, its sphericality suggesting infinity, its concavity
the depth of existence, as the complex of related calabash images in classical
African thought, from Igbo to Zulu philosophy, may be described, resonating
with Indian Tantric thought.[1]
Falola is an explorer of this calabash, an investigator of the sea of time and the multiple rivers emerging from and feeding into it.
The Dancer of the Mask
Dancer of the mask, what story are you telling us? Are you unfolding a vision of the African journey, in particular, and the human journey, in general, a perspective on its significance? Or are you simply a seeker yourself, a traveller seeking answers, sharing his travels across landscapes of possibility?
I am not developing a
central idea, he says of the essays in his The Humanities in Africa,[2]
but “an elaborate and systematic network of ideas on a given subject,” he
concludes in his introduction to that volume.
What may one learn from Abdul Karim Bangura’s Falolaism: The Epistemologies and Methodologies of Africana Knowledge, 2019, and its predecessor, his Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies, 2015, Bangura’s investigations of questions similar to those I am asking?
Diverse Ways of Knowing
History is a story told by different people, in different ways, seeing and describing the same thing, the same objectively verifiable happenings, from their own perspectives. What kind of story or stories are told by the collection of works emerging from the publishing network generated by Toyin Falola or by others, such as Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Adeshina Afolayan and Samuel Oloruntoba, whose originating platforms as knowledge curators, organizers of knowledge as book editors and writers, beginning as co-writers and co-editors with Falola and expanding into organizing their own edited book series, complementing their sole authored texts exploring various aspects of the African experience?
May these questions take us into seeking knowledge from all possibilities, as promoted by Falola in his ideas on pluriversalism and as exemplified by his own practice?[3]
Mirrors of Infinity: The Yoruba Orisa
Would this be akin to Akinwumi
Ogundiran’s description of the
constellation of deities constituting Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology as mirrors
reflecting everyday social lives from multiple angles, reflections expanding
with the dynamism of everyday life as they recede into infinity,
taking “ deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and
interpret these reflections,” light reflected from mirrors into other mirrors,
integrating impressions as they reach the eyes, carrying messages to the mind
learning to interpret them, this process of learning constituting ways of
knowing and organising knowledge?[4]
The Orisa represent windows for viewing the universe from different angles while Olodumare is the totality of these perspectives, states Ulli Beier,[5] viewpoints integrated and transcended, one could state, in that which is Axiom Paradoxon, Origin and Consequence, The Unlimitable, The Incomprehensible, as Suzanne Wenger describes Olodumare.[6]
The Ungraspable Baobab
“Wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single person’s hand cannot embrace it” is an Akan proverb which Falola uses in highlighting the value of "seeking a [critical ] constellation of knowledges."[7]
The proverb suggests a sensitivity to the ultimate inadequacies of all cognitive processes and the incompleteness of all knowledge systems. This understanding motivates the integration of diverse epistemologies, different ways of knowing, as developed within and across various cultures, in order to maximise human cognitive potential.
Using this framework, I developed Baobab Epistemology and Mysticism,[8] a quest for ultimate knowledge through the critical integration of diverse cognitive strategies, inspired and challenged by the correlative allure and impossibility of ultimacy of knowing, aspirations evoked by the size and ecosystemic associations of the baobab as it harbors and nourishes various creatures even as it is beyond the physical grasp of those creatures.
Between the Small and the Large
I love such ideas because they imply that I, located at a particular spatio-temporal coordinate on a relatively small planet orbiting what is known as a dwarf star in relation to other, massive stars, though the Earth is but a dot beside it, am trying to reach beyond the circumscriptions of my material existence into the cosmos where I exist as a creature of negligible visibility amidst vast temporal and spatial coordinates ( A formulation inspired by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the conclusion of his A Critique of Practical Reason).
The African Imperative
Even sweeter, I am doing it using ideas developed by my fellow Africans, who need greater representation in the world of abstract thought, the universe of knowledge alive with people seeking to go beyond the needs of the moment and the demands of biology, questions stimulated by what Stephan Korner refers to as the “metaphysical moment,’’ periods of acute sensitivity in which what matters most to the person is the sense of existence as a whole, of existence in contrast to non-existence, fundamental sensitivities different from the details of life that often engross people in the challenges and enjoyment of living.[9]
[1] As evident in Obianuju Umeji, “Igbo Art Corpus: Women’s Contribution,” Nigerian Heritage, 2,1993, 87-98, 96; Mazisi Kunene, Anthem of the Decades, 1981, xxiii; Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest, 1997, 164-5.
[2] 2016, xi
[3] “Pluriversalism,” The Toyin Falola Reader.
[4] The Yoruba: A New History, ( 2021, 129).
[5] In The Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.
[6] In her response to Courlander’s Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes (Research in African Literatures, 1976, Vol. 7, No. 1, 74-76, 75).
[7] "Power is Knowledge: Discussions in Intellectual Liberation,” 2020, awaiting publication.
[9] In Kant (1977, 13).
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
Nommo Imploring Rain
Some of the most moving images of prayer for me are sculptures of Nommo from the art of the Dogon of Mali. They show a naked figure, hands outstretched, reaching towards the sky, the figure’s streamlined body giving the entire gesture a sense of poignant force arising from total dedication of self to the upward focus represented by the body’s thrust.
The last time I read the description of one of these figures at the site where I saw it, it stated, “Nommo, imploring rain.” Really? Only rain? But as I compose this, I recall what John Mbiti writes about rain in classical African cultures:
rain is seen as the eternal and mystical link between past, present and future generations. …one of the most concrete and endless rhythms of nature: as it came, it comes and it will come [a] vital rhythm of creation [that knows no end, linking humanity] with the divine…a manifestation of the eternal, in the here and now [symbolizing humanity’s ] contact with the blessings of time and eternity.[1]
What have these beautiful ideas got to do with Falola scholarship? Nommo implores rain, so one may call upon knowledge, in its varied manifestations, knowledge as a demonstration of human creativity, houses of knowledge whose corridors reverberate as rain, adapting Yoruba oriki chanter Sangowemi,[2] houses built by each person in explicit or implicit collaboration with others, configurations organized around varied ways of knowing, diverse subjects of enquiry.
Can these be unified, perhaps in infinity?
Forms of Infinity in Yoruba and Akan Thought
Infinity as an unending expansion of possibilities, as depicted by Ogundiran? Or infinity as deathlessness, as indicated by the Yoruba expression, “aiku pari iwa,”[3] “deathlessness consummates existence,” or as a state beyond time and suffering, as Orisa philosopher Susanne Wenger puts it in Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hötter’s Adunni : A Portrait of Susanne Wenger?
Or in terms of the Akan Adinkra visual symbol Gye Nyame, enigmatic and abstract, perhaps suggesting the distance of identity, the ontological remoteness, between the divine subject the abstractions evoke and the total field of existence, a transcendence of being and cognitive possibility correlative with the Akan understanding of an ultimate creator, the eternal witness of existence, who subsumes the transformations of being into themself?
Within this context the universe is conceived in terms of a transformative process perceived in its totality only from a central point of consciousness which constitutes its origin, as expressed in the Twi proverb “Abode santann yi firi tete;obi nte ase a onim ahyease, na obi ntena ae nkosi ne awie, Gye Nyame” “This great panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial; no one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see its end, except Nyame.”[4]
A tantalizing idea, which, with its elevated sweep and inspiring loftiness, may provoke aspirations to participate in such an intelligence, to the degree that the human mind is capable of that.
Epistemic Images
Philosophy enables us understand our time in thought, Falola thus references German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel,[5] incidentally evoking Hegel’s project of comprehending the development of history in terms of patterns of human thought ( The Philosophy of History) and understanding the development of human cognitive potential in terms of patterns unifying reflective thought and cosmic development ( The Phenomenology of Mind and The History of Philosophy). A speculative aspiration, though yielding rich insights and profound social consequences.
The multi-perspectival windows of Ogundiran on Orisa as constellations of human experience multiplying into infinity and of Ulli Beier on these cosmological figures as windows for viewing the unity of reality from particular perspectives, partial insights subsumed in an ultimate harmony, the ecosystemic complexity and ungraspable breadth of the baobab, the calabash of totality, Falola’s pluriversalistic modes of enquiry within multidisciplinary frameworks.
May these cognitive matrices be adaptable to another project that aspires to achieve what a commentator on the Greek philosopher Aristotle states the pioneering thinker had to concede after a lifetime laying foundations of thought in general, and in specific disciplines in particular, “the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being”?[6]
The Paradoxical Old Man: The Fulani Kaidara
A bent and dirty old man, clothes infested with lice, demands to see the king. The palace guards try to drive away the impudent figure but are stopped by the monarch, who invites the destitute person to his table. Amidst the convivial feast, the unlikely figure reveals to the king mysteries to which he had long sought answers in vain. The king tries to embrace him in joy, but the figure withdraws and departs, transformed into a creature of light who blasts off into space.
Kaidara, a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, the creator of the universe, assuming the form of a decrepit old man to test who is ready to learn what he has to offer, a knowledge that is reached only by discerning the real from the apparent, sensing the treasure hidden in the unlikely figure of the old man.
Kaidara, near yet distant, embodiment of the scope, the limits and the reach of human knowledge, terrestrial and cosmic, as Ahmadu Hampate Ba tells and explains this gripping story in Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.
I love the Kaidara image for its integration of the abstract and the concrete, the abstract idea of human cognitive possiblity and the concrete picture of a human being.
I am thrilled by its striking paradoxical conjunctions, between enfeebled old age and destitution, on one hand, and concealed divine majesty and power, on the other.
I find deeply memorable its fusing of human cognitive limitations, the circle of possible knowledge, ever expanding to an unknown scope even as it strains against circumscriptions at every stage of this advance, on one hand, and explosive, expansive opening to knowledge, on the other.
Even more compelling is the actualization of these ideas through a focus on human sensitivity and humility, within the dynamic image of a figure, moving from place to place, meeting different people in various circumstances, assessing them for
their readiness for the cognitive illumination of a lifetime which he embodies, an image evoking the wonder of every moment of human existence, the nondescript and the wonderful, the ordinary and the sublime.
The Nakedness of Òrò : A Yoruba Theory of Discourse
“Kólóḿbó ni Òròń rìn, ‘Òrò moves around naked,’, but it is forbidden to see it with… naked eyes,”[7] the Yoruba expression goes, another image of the opportunity for insight about the wonderful in the midst of the everyday that I find compelling.
Òrò, the unified complex of potential for awareness and expression emerging from the creator of the cosmos and accessible to humanity, roams the world naked, its luminous empowerment accessible to all, but, like the blaze of fire whose intense white heat is dangerous to eyes gazing directly at it, Òrò may not be safely engaged with directly but only through the indirection of òwe, imaginative expressions which mediate this luminosity, as majestically elaborated by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
Òrò is more broadly understood as an issue under discussion, a point of reference, or more learnedly, as discourse. It is depicted, however, in the cosmogonic myth from which the description above comes, as representing cognitive and expressive potential in general. This cognitive and expressive capacity of humanity is itself grounded in the cognitive and expressive powers of the creator of the cosmos who created existence through these potencies and hurled them to Earth, where they became empowerments for humanity, enabling human cognitive and communicative capacity, from the mundane to the sublime.
At its core, this perspective suggests, human capacities for understanding and expression, even at their most mundane or lofty, from gossip to elevated thought, embody, deeply hidden under layers of thought and conventional expression, the force through which the universe was created, a core too potent for unmediated human encounter.
The cosmogonic roots of this image are resonant with the global complex of ideas correlating language and divine creativity.[8] The picture of Òrò moving around in a nakedness it is forbidden to see with naked eyes may further evoke human reliance on symbols to mediate the world. It may suggest the use of symbols, represented by òwe, to negotiate relationships with reality. These engagements are encapsulated within a sensitivity to the universe in general and human cognitive and expressive capacity in particular as embodying possibilities beyond the conventionally accessible, possibilities related to the core from which existence derives as an expression of ultimate meaning and value.
[1] African Religions and Philosophy, 1976,181.
[2] In Karin Baber’s I Could Speak Until Tomorrow ( 1991, 17)
[3] Quoted by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language ( 2014, ),
[4] From my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos.
[5] “Nimi Wariboko in the World of Philosophy,” The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, 2021, 3-20, 3.
[6] “Aristotle,” Encyclopedia Britannica, edition unrecalled).
[7] Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, 31-2.
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
the concept of Òrò described in this context is superordinate to the conventional one.
That is the conventional understanding you reference in terms of Òrò as something being discussed, perceived as the spoken word in a more specific sense, as you put it.
Reflection and its projection in human expression imply consciousness.
The myth being referred to is a dramatisation of these ideas, tracing the source of human consciousness and its capacity for reflection and expression to the cognitive powers Ogbón(Wisdom), Ìmò(Knowledge), and Òye (Understanding), created by the ultimate creator Olódùmarè.
The myth depicts the human capacity for expression as rooted in those divine powers.
Those divine powers were hurled to Earth by Olódùmarè. In their combined form on Earth, they are Òrò.
This divine capacity is what is dramatised, at various levels of crudity, subtlety and power in human expression.
Its pristine character, its naked essence, however, is too potent for direct human expression. Hence, it is best approached through òwe , imaginative expressions. Òrò is depicted as moving about naked in order to suggest that paradoxical combination of accessibility and dangerous potency.
I sum it up this way-
The myth is a style of exploring and presenting ideas through fictional narrative.
The myth Abiodun presents and discusses is correlative with the global presence of ideas of language, humanity's primary expressive capacity, as patterned after divine expression.
The essay where it is first discussed by Abiodun is attached to my mail after this one. It is one of Abiodun's best works and an iconic piece in African aesthetics and hermeneutics. Magnificent Yoruba poetry. Superb translations. Powerful analyses yet expressively beautiful.
It was written and published while he was at the then University of Ife, at a time that university incubated much of what is known today as Yoruba Studies, significantly through its African Studies Centre.
Abiodun reworks and extends the essay's ideas in the first chapter of his Yoruba Art and Language in terms of his theory of oriki, the Yoruba art form of celebration of the essence and expression of an entity-as it may be described in its multi disciplinary form rather than limited to its better known verbal form-a theory developed from Olabiyi Yai, himself a mentor to Karin Barber, author of the landmark book on verbal oriki.
thanks
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982FB5359861AB73C39683DA6609%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (the concept of Òrò described in this context is superordinate to the conventional one.
That is the conventional understanding you reference in terms of Òrò as something being discussed, perceived as the spoken word in a more specific sense, as you put it.
Reflection and its projection in human expression imply consciousness.
The myth being referred to is a dramatisation of these ideas, tracing the source of human consciousness and its capacity for reflection and expression to the cognitive powers Ogbón(Wisdom), Ìmò(Knowledge), and Òye (Understanding), created by the ultimate creator Olódùmarè.
The myth depicts the human capacity for expression as rooted in those divine powers.
Those divine powers were hurled to Earth by Olódùmarè. In their combined form on Earth, they are Òrò.
This divine capacity is what is dramatised, at various levels of crudity, subtlety and power in human expression.
Its pristine character, its naked essence, however, is too potent for direct human expression. Hence, it is best approached through òwe , imaginative expressions. Òrò is depicted as moving about naked in order to suggest that paradoxical combination of accessibility and dangerous potency.
I sum it up this way-
The myth is a style of exploring and presenting ideas through fictional narrative.
The myth Abiodun presents and discusses is correlative with the global presence of ideas of language, humanity's primary expressive capacity, as patterned after divine expression.
The essay where it is first discussed by Abiodun is attached to my mail after this one. It is one of Abiodun's best works and an iconic piece in African aesthetics and hermeneutics. Magnificent Yoruba poetry. Superb translations. Powerful analyses yet expressively beautiful.
It was written and published while he was at the then University of Ife, at a time that university incubated much of what is known today as Yoruba Studies, significantly through its African Studies Centre.
Abiodun reworks and extends the essay's ideas in the first chapter of his Yoruba Art and Language in terms of his theory of oriki, the Yoruba art form of celebration of the essence and expression of an entity-as it may be described in its multi disciplinary form rather than limited to its better known verbal form-a theory developed from Olabiyi Yai, himself a mentor to Karin Barber, author of the landmark book on verbal oriki.
thanks
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982FB5359861AB73C39683DA6609%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
I'm not really interested in this style of debate you are demonstrating.
I dont see it as worthy of my time.
If I change my mind, i'll let you know.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982D1655C203E7E043A53CCA6609%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
OAA, you are contributing nothing to the discussion.
Knowledge of difference between metaphorical and literal expression missing.
Most of your response is spent in extolling your native knowledge of Yoruba rather than engaging in analysis of ideas.
Yet, with all this boasting, you have published nothing in the field of Yoruba thought.
You cant compare with Adepoju whose peer reviewed publications on the subject are very visible and whose publications on the subject on varied platforms constitute a library.
You are the same man whose scholarly publications in any platforms do not exceed 3 publications in 40 years, of whom there is no evidence of having published anything else anywhere, whose most visible scholarly activity as his efforts to debate with Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and who claims he has many unpublished works incubating in his house over decades and yet who boasts he was an academic in the US for several years, a puzzling anomaly for a person for whom there is no evidence that he has ever been a scholar.
Please leave me out of such time wasting exercises.
When you are ready for serious discussion of ideas, not ethnic grandstanding, you know what to do.
thankstoyin
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Knowledge of difference between metaphorical and literal expression missing.
Most of your response is spent in extolling your native knowledge of Yoruba rather than engaging in analysis of ideas.
Yet, with all this boasting, you have published nothing in the field of Yoruba thought.
You cant compare with Adepoju whose peer reviewed publications on the subject are very visible and whose publications on the subject on varied platforms constitute a library.
You are the same man whose scholarly publications in any platforms do not exceed 3 publications in 40 years, of whom there is no evidence of having published anything else anywhere, whose most visible scholarly activity as his efforts to debate with Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and who claims he has many unpublished works incubating in his house over decades and yet who boasts he was an academic in the US for several years, a puzzling anomaly for a person for whom there is no evidence that he has ever been a scholar.
Please leave me out of such time wasting exercises.
When you are ready for serious discussion of ideas, not ethnic grandstanding, you know what to do.
thanks
OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (Knowledge of difference between metaphorical and literal expression missing.
Most of your response is spent in extolling your native knowledge of Yoruba rather than engaging in analysis of ideas.
Yet, with all this boasting, you have published nothing in the field of Yoruba thought.
You cant compare with Adepoju whose peer reviewed publications on the subject are very visible and whose publications on the subject on varied platforms constitute a library.
You are the same man whose scholarly publications in any platforms do not exceed 3 publications in 40 years, of whom there is no evidence of having published anything else anywhere, whose most visible scholarly activity as his efforts to debate with Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and who claims he has many unpublished works incubating in his house over decades and yet who boasts he was an academic in the US for several years, a puzzling anomaly for a person for whom there is no evidence that he has ever been a scholar.
Please leave me out of such time wasting exercises.
When you are ready for serious discussion of ideas, not ethnic grandstanding, you know what to do.
thanks
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
even after you produce whatever you wish to produce next year as if there is anything wrong with this year, you will still be behind adepoju, who has been publishing for years on yoruba thought in both peer reviewed and self publishing platforms.
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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
Michael Afolayan
“Kólóḿbó ni Òròń rìn, ‘Òrò moves around naked,’, but it is forbidden to see it with… naked eyes,”[7] the Yoruba expression goes, another image of the opportunity for insight about the wonderful in the midst of the everyday that I find compelling.
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
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More info “Kólóḿbó ni Òròń rìn, ‘Òrò moves around naked,’, but it is forbidden to see it with… naked eyes,”[7] the Yoruba expression goes, another image of the opportunity for insight about the wonderful in the midst of the everyday that I find compelling.
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
someone diverts attention from analysing an intellectual production, instead focusing on ethnic authenticity.
when the discussion goes downhill from there you then speak up from a moral high ground.
i make a point of posting original intellectual productions on this group.
i have had, repeatedly, to urge him to separate genuine critique of ideas from negative personalisations.
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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI
This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (someone diverts attention from analysing an intellectual production, instead focusing on ethnic authenticity.
when the discussion goes downhill from there you then speak up from a moral high ground.
i make a point of posting original intellectual productions on this group.
i have had, repeatedly, to urge him to separate genuine critique of ideas from negative personalisations.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29820F82F136D8FF203C2778A67F9%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Is that too much to ask?
I question how a person who is not a scholar, who does not publish in any field, talk less Yoruba thought, the field in question, in other words, such a person as yourself, can determine who should be a scholar in any field, talk less in Yoruba thought?
Is that question not reasonable?
Thats why we are all here. To help each other. This is not your domestic space in which you do what you like with yourself and get others to homour you. Thats why even though you are not an academic as you used to claim to be, using that claim as a platform for ego inflation, even though there is no evidence you are a scholar, you are here hanging out with academics and scholars. You desire to belong.
But you must learn how to engage. Scholarship is not about boasting or ego inflation. It is about work, work, work. Creativity. Productivity.
Claiming to have this or that work unseen by the world in your house, boasting about your education, losing direction in debates by refusing to focus on issues, is not scholarship.
Learn from Adepoju's work ethic. If a reckoning is to be made today of contributors to Yoruba thought, would you be counted? No, because you have nothing to be counted.
Yet, Adepoju, whom you should be learning from, stands as a major contributor to the field even before his 2011 comprehensive essay on 'Ifa/Odu', his essay on 'Orisa' and his essay on 'Ori,' strategic aspects of Yoruba cognitive systems, spirituality and philosophy, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, doyens of African scholarship,.
Should we add his groundbreaking essay demonstrating the universal applicability of Ifa divination as a hermeneutic strategy even beyond Africana thought and culture in his explication of the art and letters of the Duch artist Vincent van Gogh in the peer reviewed journal Reconfigurations? And more, in terms of academic peer reviewed publications, covering art, philosophy and spirituality, even beyond Africana and which yet which is about 1% percent of his total publication output?
Is that not the kind of person you should be learning from?
You might feel negatively challenged or inadequate on account of your non-productivity while faced with the creativity of an Adepoju. I have suggested you could begin by writing a few things and sharing them here, even its just one sentence observations of your thoughts, so people like me as well as others can help you look at them. I started writing by being bold. That is good advice I have given you.
A Nigerian pidgin English saying goes ''If person senior you by one day, e senior you.'' Talk less a person who is your senior by more than ten years of daily work and steady publication while you claim you are postponing publication till eternity.
Anyone who wants to understand what I represent may start with my blog Ifa Student and Teacher, where I began to write about the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge in its visual, literary, philosophical and spiritual dimensions, containing original work, some of it of a kind unreplicated anywhere, such as the first posts, imaginative explorations of the origins of Ifa.
The person can then move to my more than 80 blogs on Blogger, to my Facebook, academia.edu, Scribd and YouTube accounts, which contain original work by myself on various aspects of African, Asian and Western thought. You may also see my contributions in the field of the philosophy of Ubiquitous Computing in its subfield of Metapolis and Urban Life.
Everybody, one life. What you do with it is your choice.
toyin
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