Masters of Disciplinary Depth and Disciplinary Trascendence: Toyin Falola, Akinwumi Ogundiran and Nimi Wariboko

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Masters of Disciplinary Depth and Disciplinary Transcendence: Toyin Falola, Akinwumi Ogundiran and Nimi Wariboko

                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                    Compcros

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

I am fascinated by the work of three scholars and writers, Toyin Falola, Akinwumi Ogundiran and Nimi Wariboko, for their capacity to contribute to particular disciplines and yet transcend those disciplinary specificities.

Toyin Falola

Falola's work demonstrates imaginative, ideational and multi-disciplinary range.

This is evident through the vast scope of his writings as poet and scholar  and encapsulated by his commemorative  poetry  and essays, some of which are collected in his book  In Praise of Greatness.

My favourite  in that book is the majestic combination of poetry and essay celebrating the historian  Ade Ajayi.

Another favourite piece of his for me is his essay "Ritual Archives" from The  Toyin Falola Reader. The essay continues to ring in my mind on account of  it's rhapsodic and structural power as it explores diverse epistemic systems.

I also love  his introductory essay to his edited book on the Yoruba deity Eshu, Eshu and the Imaginative Frontiers,  for it's imaginative and analytical force.

These are a few of my encounters  with his vast multi-disciplinary mapping of knowledge about Africa and the African diaspora.

Akinwumi Ogundiran

Akinwunmi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History shows him as a superb history writer, magnificent in narrative flow and analysis, and deeply  stirring in his expressions of his ambitions of uniting the full range of Yoruba  history, mythology, philosophy and spirituality.

His work suggests the possibilities of  the full flowering of such a synthesis as one deeply assimilates the imaginative dynamics and spiritual and philosophical imperatives of Yoruba thought, the historical development of which Ogundiran is committed to mapping in his book.

A magnificent demonstration of this achievement is  his depiction of the roots of Yoruba cosmology in his chapter on the proto-Yoruba, roots in environmental dynamics inspiring a primal spirituality eventually integrated with more mentalistic symbolic forms, as nature spirituality is subsumed by mythic imagery and narrative.

His grand chapter on the Ife synthesis of Yoruba thought and polity also demonstrates potent sensitivities to this cosmology, as in his magnificent image of the cosmology in terms of mirrors reflecting each other as they stretch into infinity, a strikingly original imagistic construct  related to the Buddhist image of the Net of Indra, which also uses the picture of the cosmos in terms of reflections extending into infinity, but employs jewels, instead of mirrors.

The very power of this particularly strategic section on Ife, however, suggests a need to engage with a fuller range of the climatic synthesis of Yoruba thought represented by the Ife achievement.

This would involve a richer integration of  the economic and political  orientations Ogundiran focuses on and the  philosophical speculation and spiritual practice his account does not highlight.

This would more fully demonstrate the convergence of the materialistic and the spiritual,  the concrete and the abstract, thought, action and space,  through which the Ife landscape became a cosmographic image of Yoruba thought, resonating in the integration of Yoruba cosmology within the Ifa symbolism powerfully developed at Ife, a mythic  synthesis Ogundiran beautifully describes.

The task Ogundiran sets himself in this uniquely ambitious book,  recreating the historical development of  a system of thought that has not been historicised before, demonstrating it's interweaving with the development of Yoruba society in it's economic and political aspects,  a history of thought existing only  in vanished  oral continuities, might require more imaginative engagement, more readiness to speculate, than  he was ready to engage in, given  the disciplined relationship between evidence and analysis  represented by  his scholarly culture.

These tensions may have led to what may be seen as an often mono-dimensional- focused on one element in the nature  of a phenomenon, it's causes and character- materialistic- defined wholly or largely  by material interests- and episodic- needing continuity between various aspects,  interpretations of the development of Yoruba thought in the book.

Within what I understand as it's strengths and limitations, Ogundiran's book constantly calls to me to feed on it's powers, assimilating it's triumphs, tantalizing me with it's uncompleted magnificences, a window into possibilities calling from a horizon vast in possibilities but intimate in the demonstration of those possibilities by the ambitious scholar and compelling writer.

Nimi Wariboko

Wariboko is a mystic and social thinker, philosopher and theologian,  idealist in urban thought, and an economist, as well as a richly rhapsodic writer and conceptually muscular configurator of ideas, capable of taking one into intimate spaces of sensual enjoyment and reflection and thence  into cosmic vistas, integrating the daily motion of life across time into revolutions of eternity, in movement towards the inconceivable and absolute, as he puts it.

His acknowledgements pages are masterpieces of poetic prose. The books themselves bristle with ideas in conceptually muscular writing, ranging across Kalabari philosophy, Pentecostal thought and Continental Western philosophy, with specific foci in economics and urban philosophy in some of them.

His writings inspire me at break of day, as I seek to anchor my half confused daily journey of life in a picture of life's meaning that is both sublime and realistic.

The Pentecostal Principle, The Depth and Destiny of Work, Principles of Excellence, these and more books from his ceaselessly fecundative creativity are challengingly intellectual yet imaginatively dynamic, rewarding careful reading, enabling one grasp an ideational sweep, variegated but unified,  across various texts as well as distill brilliant ideational constellations, inspiring treasures held in one's mind, illuminate life's walk and lightening it's challenges.

Synthesis

Falola, Ogundiran and Wariboko converge in a determined exploration of classical African knowledge systems, with Wariboko's discussions of Kalabari epistemology and metaphysics a superb complement to the Yoruba thought privileged in some works of Ogundiran and Falola.