The Achievement of Rowland Abiodun as Philosopher of Yoruba Hermeneutics and the Dialogue between General and Specialized Knowledge in Yoruba Thought :Very, Very Short Essays on Perspectives on ''Oro'' ''Discourse.''

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                    The Achievement of Rowland Abiodun as Philosopher of Yoruba Hermeneutics

                                                                                  and the 

                                      Dialogue between General and Specialized Knowledge in Yoruba Thought 

                                               Very, Very Short Essay on Perspectives on ''Oro,'' ''Discourse'' 

                                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                       Compcros

I have been haunted for some time by the fact that I did not take advantage of an opportunity to further demonstrate the power of something I find inspiring on account of a direction taken in the debate where the subject in question was being examined.

In discussing ideas emerging from an oral culture and endeavouring to delineate perspectives on various subjects from within this culture, to what degree is one presenting one's own perspectives, the perspectives of one's own interlocutors within the culture or both and to what degree is one demonstrating an orientation pervasive across the culture?

These are questions arising from Olayinka Agbeuyi's insistence, in a debate on this group, that Yoruba people, of whom he describes himself as informed as a native Yoruba speaker who knows enough about Yoruba thought, that the image of ''oro,''  ''subject of discussion, ''discourse,''  ''verbal capacity and expression,'' as a naked, restlessly mobile entity, whom it is forbidden to gaze upon with naked eyes, hence must be approached through the indirection of ''owe,'' metaphorical expressions, as presented in  in sound or visual signification, presented in Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language : Seeking the African in Afrtican Art, is foreign to Yoruba thought.

''Oro'' is simply the outcome of human expression, no more, the instantiation of human action in the form of speech, he argued, and not an entity, an animate identity roaming the world.

I needed to further emphasize the point I had made earlier  that the image of oro as a mobile entity is a metaphorical and not a literal image. It represents an effort to personify the ubiquity and dynamism of human expressive capacity and action.

People everywhere are engaged in expression, in that sense ''oro'' is everywhere. Elaborating on the image of pervasive presence, oro in that image is depicted as mobile. Mobility suggests dynamism, change, transformation, varied angles of perception of the moving form, suggesting the variety and dynamism, the multifaceted character of human expression, as befits the complexity of human reflective capacity and its permutations. 

This image is not likely to be known to many Yoruba people because it has not penetrated the corpus of the group's knowledge sufficiently to be thus known.

It also might not be known to various specialists in various knowledge systems in classical Yoruba disciplines for the same reason.

Yet, it is built on the conventional understanding of oro as outlined by Agbetuyi.

The study of the thought emerging from classical African cultures is often perceived as efforts to speak for the group from which these ideas emerge. 

Thus, such a book as Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language  from which this image comes, in a reworking of Abiodun's essay ''Verbal and Visual Metaphors : Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori,'' may be seen by one view, a view perhaps partly encouraged by the book, to be presenting a world view, a set of ideational positions that characterize Yoruba thought in general, when in fact the picture is more subtle, as in the example above.