Paradoxical Positions: Western Thought in Toyin Falola’s Introduction to the Toyin Falola Reader and in Salimonu Kadiri’s Contributions in the USAAfrica Dialogues Listserve
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Paradoxical Positions
Western
Thought in Toyin Falola’s Introduction to the Toyin Falola Reader
and in
Salimonu
Kadiri’s Contributions in the USAAfrica
Dialogues Series Listserve
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
The Toyin Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies ( Austin/Ibadan: Pan-African University Press, 2018) is a very useful entry point into the thought of this voluminously published scholar in various disciplines, particularly since the Reader rounds off its broad exploration of continental and diaspora African history, society and culture with an epistemological and ontological conclusion containing two priceless essays "Pluriversalism" and "Ritual Archives", representing aspects of Falola's own contribution to the decades long struggle, now escalating in momentum, to also privilege non-Western thought as exploratory lenses in the face of the global dominance of the Eurocentric biases that define Western scholarship.
This essay is a preliminary response to his engagement with this subject, focusing on a few lines in his introduction to the Reader and contrasting those lines with the essays they introduce. This examination is carried out through comparison with the ideas of Salimonu Kadiri, another thinker who has expressed views correlative with those Falola expresses in that introduction.
Toyin Falola is a scholar of sweeping breadth and remarkable depth in the humanities and social sciences whose output is represented by the hundreds of books and articles and various scholarly institutions he has been central to building and scholars he has mentored. Salimonu Kadiri is a thinker on various subjects, particularly on the political economy of Nigeria and its relationship to external factors whose thought I have encountered through his contributions to debates on the USAAfrica Dialogues Series listserve created and run by Toyin Falola.
Salimonu derides the significance of Western education for Nigerians on account of the poor level of development of Nigeria in spite of the Western education of a good number of those who have run sections of its government and infrastructure.
In a post of Wednesday, 10th January 2018, on the listserve, titled “Revisiting Professor Chris Imafidon's Claim to Oxford Professorship”, he sates:
Almost forty-eight years after the inauguration of the Nigerian Council for Science And Technology… Our Agricultural system is still sustained by farmers primitively equipped with cutlasses and hoes. Crude oil we cannot refine; potable water we cannot pump; electricity we cannot generate and distribute; iron ore we cannot mine and work into steel; and our hospitals have been reduced to morgues while our leaders and officials run to the white man, from whom they claimed we have been liberated, to receive treatments.
All Ministries, Departments and Agencies created to produce goods and services are manned by Nigerians whose academic degrees have certified them as capable of producing what are required from their respective office.
Their failures in office can only mean that their academic degrees are fake and that is why Nigeria is poor and underdeveloped. While our Nigerian English Language Fundamentalists are blowing their grammars, the Dutch speaking Julius Berger is building Houses and Bridges and constructing roads for Nigeria, just as not so good English speaking Chinese are laying rail tracks for Nigeria. In fact there is [a] need to write a book titled: HOW EDUCATED NIGERIANS ARE UNDERDEVELOPING NIGERIA AND IMPOVERISHING HER CITIZENS.
In another post of January 17, 2018, under the same heading, he declares:
The purpose of giving Western Education to us, therefore, is to colonise us economically and mentally. In practice Western education converts us to trained dogs that always swerve [our] tail [s] in readiness to obey any command from our Western World masters no matter how dangerous the command is to our wellbeing.
In the previous post of Wednesday, 10th January 2018, this perspective is elaborated upon:
That was why Africa was colonised and the reason for colonialization of Africa remains the same although colonialization is self-administered nowadays by African indigenes as we have in Nigeria. The self-administered colonialism makes it possible for Nigeria to export crude oil to Italy, Germany and other countries in Europe where it is refined into various products for their citizens to consume, whereas Nigerians must sleep at fuel stations to buy petrol. The dysfunctional Nigeria's crude oil refineries are not manned by [Nigerians] but by qualified academic degree holders both from home and foreign Universities. If the academic degrees of managers of Nigeria's oil refineries are not fake, why are the crude oil refineries in permanent coma?
In the introduction to his latest book, The Toyin Falola Reader, Falola argues:
In terms of relevant methodologies, it must be clear that the epistemologies of conquerors hold no bearing on what African academic production is or should be. I recommend reverting back to the most basic forms of study and building from there, so as not to get entangled with European models and ingrained academic practices or assumptions.
…
[This] essay even includes…a series of sayings in a native language when making this point. In doing so, [it] reinforces [the] suppositions [of the work] and makes a part of [the ] work temporarily inaccessible and foreign to the white American or European reader.(64).
How helpful is this radical stance projected in different but correlative ways by both writers?
Falola’s position is actually much more nuanced and richer than the bare bones represented by what I have quoted of his passionate and possibly anguished summation of what he elaborates on at length in the essays he is introducing, “Pluriversalism” and “Ritual Archives”.
Those introductory lines, in contrast with the careful working out of ideas represented by the essays they introduce, suggests an oscillation between a deep sensitivity to the epistemological and institutional complexity of the subject and what I understand as a simplistic position represented by the lines I have quoted above. The patient wrestling with ideas of his essays does not demonstrate what may be seen as the escape into the freedom from the complexity of the problem represented by those basic introductory lines.
Kadiri on the other hand, conducts debate in terms that suggest significant grounding in Western education through the forms of logic he employs and his use of sources, because, even though ratiocinative logic has been developed by perhaps all cognitive cultures, perhaps the most prominent being the Western example and the Arab/Persian/Islamic and Asian achievements, on account of the influence of their systems of literacy, I wonder what the likelihood is that Kadiri has experienced depth of education in these systems as a 20th-21st century Nigerian, even as a Muslim, as his name suggests he is.
A wholesale denigration of the Western education of the managers of Nigeria’s public systems is also contradicted by the paradox that all aspects of contemporary existence cannot escape being mediated or enabled by the cognitive achievements of humanity as centred in Western scholarship and education, from the use of English as the world’s primary unifying language, to the global integration represented by the Internet and the transformation in information management and knowledge development and communication achieved through the computer to the vehicles-the bicycle, motorcycle, boat, car, aeroplane and rocket[ ( the rocket being first developed in China but perfected in Europe and the US]-through which human beings have escaped being limited to either walking or using elementary means of human created transportation, to the most up to date understanding of human biology-from the circulation of blood to the spectacles used in correcting defective eye sight- to the understanding of why people don’t fall off the earth into space as the earth rotates on its axis and revolves round the sun, understanding of scientific cosmology reached through dedicated work in Europe in defiance of repressive religious authorities, these cognitive achievements being intimately related to social developments that facilitated their emergence and which they helped to fuel, cognitive realizations created by European thinkers building upon the achievements of other civilizations through various levels of influence stretching across centuries.
How factual is the claim that European epistemologies have no bearing for Africans, as Falola states in the lines quoted above? Reverting to basic modes of study from African civilizations and building from there would be priceless but can such an effort be maximised in isolation from deploying, other, more complex cognitive systems, possibly from the West?
Does Falola’s position in those lines not suggest a withdrawal into an epistemic cul de sac of the kind Western thought imposed on itself in excluding non-Western thought from its own epistemic corpus? Western scholarship, as represented by academic and trade publications and numerous engagements in the broader public sphere, is increasingly moving towards dialogue with non-Western thought while such relationships have been a staple in Western culture since the 20th century, progress highlighting the fact that other civilizations cannot afford to retreat into emulating the limitations they are reacting to.
How realistic is it to argue for the non-relevance to African thought of the patient ratiocinations and cosmic ambition of an Aristotle who sought to penetrate the ultimate possibilities of existence using thought alone? The sensitivity to the creatively transformative possibilities of nature, its mystical potential demonstrated by Romanticism and Symbolism, specifically the poetry of William Wordsworth, the philosophy of Samuel Coleridge and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences”, are bodies of expression that become even more meaningful when placed in dialogue with Indian nature spirituality as expressed in the Hindu Brihadâranyaka Upanishad and when juxtaposed with Yoruba epistemology, particularly as summed up in Babatunde Lawal’s succinct but comprehensive summation in “Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art” and Igbo Afa epistemology as described by John Umeh in After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria ( 2 vols).
The human race is one race on account of similarities in its ways of perception. It is difficult to find an idea in one civilisation or form of knowledge that is not echoed in another perhaps centuries distant. Roger Penrose’ recent book postulates the idea of cyclic development of the universe but this idea has been elaborately developed in mythic and religious terms in Hindu cosmology.
Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux quote Aristotle’s De Anima, “thought is not possible without an image”, in “A Counter-Example to a Putative Classification of 1-Dimensional, N-extended Supermultiplets” one of the papers developing their mathematical system in cosmological physics, and explicitly acknowledge the similarity of method between their own mathematical forms and classical Adinkra created by the Gyaman and Akan of Ghana by naming their system Adinkras, later Adinkrammatics, as demonstrated by their first paper in this initiative, “Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory”
The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The Asante people of West Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known as Adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose. With a nod to this tradition, we christen our graphical symbols as “Adinkras.”
The Nsibidi system of Nigeria’s Cross River takes this awareness even further by building a system that integrates communication through body movements and poses, arrangements of objects, speech and diagrams, amplifying each form of expression though the others, thereby creating a mosaic of expressive forms communicating a unified body of knowledge using different but correlative methods. My “Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism : Research and Publication Project” aspires to a comprehensive exploration of extant research in this field.
My argument is that the epistemic liberation of non-Western peoples is best pursued by the creative adaptation of Western and non-Western thought, from within the cultural location of particular thinkers and beyond it. Each expression of human culture is better understood through dialogue with others.
While adapting Western education and scholarship, one would also do well to examine why Western social systems facilitate the maximisation of the educational systems developed in Europe in building the achievements of that civilisation and see how such insights can be adapted in other contexts.
At the institutional level, my own experience has been that I have got the best help so far in developing my interest in foregrounding classical African thought from the Western institutions in which I have undergone postgraduate studies, with this support coming from Western scholars. Right now, the decolonizing the curriculum movement, a drive to make the academic curriculum more representative of the global world of knowledge, of non-Western thought as lenses for thinking rather than simply as subjects to be perceived only through Western lenses, is gathering momentum at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, as represented by this press release from the SOAS BA World Philosophies programme and the Cambridge University seminar series “Decolonising the Curriculum in Theory and Practice” as well as the UK National Union of Students movement “Why is My Curriculum White?”, the YouTube film with the same title at which site one may see other films, particularly from the UK, on the same subject and Michael Peters’ contextualisation of the subject in relation to the history of Western higher education, particularly in philosophy.
The effort to achieve pluriversality of thought might be better appreciated as a global vision, requiring cooperation from all parties, enriching each unit of the human family by opening various perspectives to equal consideration.Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
"Those
introductory lines, in contrast with the careful working out of ideas represented
by the essays they introduce, suggests an oscillation between a deep
sensitivity to the epistemological and institutional complexity of the subject
demonstrated by the substantive essays and what I understand as a simplistic position represented by the introductory lines I have quoted above. The patient wrestling
with ideas of his essays does not demonstrate what may be seen as the escape
into the freedom from the complexity of the problem represented by those basic
introductory lines."
"Roger Penrose’ 2012 book "Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe"
postulates the idea of cyclic development of the
universe but this idea has been elaborately developed in mythic and religious
terms in Hindu cosmology".
I would have liked to include Kayode Fakinlede's contributions to this discussion on the " Revisiting Professor Chris Imafidon's Claim to Oxford Professorship" thread but I am yet to adequately understand his rich perspectives in order to take advantage of them..
toyin
I
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Olayinka Agbetuyi
"Those introductory lines, in contrast with the careful working out of ideas represented by the essays they introduce, suggests an oscillation between a deep sensitivity to the epistemological
and institutional complexity of the subject demonstrated by the substantive essays and what I understand as a simplistic position represented by
the introductory lines I have quoted above. The patient wrestling with ideas of his essays does not demonstrate what may be seen as the escape into the freedom from the complexity of the problem represented by those basic introductory lines."
"Roger Penrose’ 2012 book "Cycles
of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe"
postulates
the idea of cyclic development of the universe but this idea has been elaborately developed in mythic and religious terms in Hindu cosmology".
I would have liked to include Kayode Fakinlede's contributions to this discussion on the " Revisiting Professor Chris Imafidon's Claim to Oxford Professorship" thread but I am yet to adequately understand his rich perspectives in order to take advantage of them..
toyin
|
I
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@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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Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2018 10:33:40 PM
To: usaafricadialogue; tvol...@gmail.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Paradoxical Positions: Western Thought in Toyin Falola’s Introduction to the Toyin Falola Reader and in Salimonu Kadiri’s Contributions in the USAAfrica Dialogues Listserve
Olayinka Agbetuyi
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Moses Ebe Ochonu
"In terms of relevant methodologies, it must be clear that the epistemologies of conquerors hold no bearing on what African academic production is or should be. I recommend reverting back to the most basic forms of study and building from there, so as not to get entangled with European models and ingrained academic practices or assumptions."
Did Falola write this or is it the idea of someone trying to impersonate him or approximate what they think he believes? This raises so many questions. What does this "reverting back to the most basic forms of study" entail? In fact what is implied by "the most basic forms of study"? Even if such a thing exists, is it African? Could it not be both African and European? And how would a return to it improve our craft of telling African stories and analyzing/illuminating the African experience, past and present? Is that the new euphemism for so-called African or Africa-centered mythologies? Is this the same abracadabra of claiming that there is an autonomous African epistemological space and that there is such a thing as African mathematics, or African chemistry, etc, that must be done outside and in opposition to the rules of such fields that evolved from multiple currents and in multiple places as an aggregation of different methodologies and epistemological productions?
We've had this debate before, albeit in a narrower context dealing with a return to African languages and a departure from European ones. Ngugi tried that experiment, with little success. The old literary sage continues to espouse the philosophy of return to a pre-European linguistic and epistemological essence even as his own son, Mukoma, has inscribed himself firmly within the mainstream of world (read Western) literary practice.
Now Falola is telling us about the "epistemologies of conquerors." Would Falola revert back to folk history and the mechanics of African chronicling? Would he jettison the paradigms, protocols, and methods of professional academic history and embrace so-called authentic historical constructions that are unaffected by Euro-American ideas of historical knowledge production--assuming that a pure, authentic knowledge space or historical practice exists and will be valued or read even by Africans themselves?
These European models that are our favorite boondoggle, are they not precisely the methods that the Ibadan, Dakar, Dares e Salam, and Legon Schools deployed to decolonize African history, to effectively write back to Eurocentric scholars, and to (re)claim a space in professional history for Africa?
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
“Western-derived disciplines ( such as Religious Studies, History, and Philosophy as subjects of the Humanities) have carefully fragmented ritual archives, but it is time for all those disciplines to combine to provide an understanding of the centres of indigenous epistemologies, to unify their ontologies, and convert them to theories that will be treated as universal” (916).
“In each of the disciplines, Ifa [ a central Yoruba cognitive system] may become disconnected from the multi-layered and intricately connected indigenous epistemology that produces it in favour of the concerns of disciplines framed from other epistemologies external to the indigenous. In this regard, Ifa has been disembodied and fragmented” ( 918).
" Space does not permit the elaboration of the depth and breadth of the archives or the density of each genre with its own hydra-headed fragments and hundreds of individual constructions and presentations” ( 919).
How can such lofty goals be achieved?
He clarifies:
"...if Ifalogy (studies of Yoruba divination system) had been created as a discipline and department fifty years ago, it could have enabled hundreds of scholars to learn and work across disciplines, and they probably would have decoded its epistemology by now and used it to create other forms of knowledge. They would have uncovered hidden dimensions of the Yoruba endogenious, which has sustained and guided the people since their genesis"( 916).
What relationship between classical African thought and the dominant Western system would such a goal imply? How would such an initiative respond to Moses Ochnu's challenge :
Is this the same abracadabra of claiming that there is an autonomous African epistemological space and that there is such a thing as African mathematics, or African chemistry, etc, that must be done outside and in opposition to the rules of such fields that evolved from multiple currents and in multiple places as an aggregation of different methodologies and epistemological productions?
Falola's perspective is more robust than the essentialist limitations Ochonu points out:
"The goal here is to...revalidate ritual archives in Western derived-academies; to involve indigenous practitioners in research and knowledge dissemination; and to formulate evaluation mechanisms to authenticate indigenous knowledge and those who communicate them using data-driven and emic standards. At all levels of the educational system, indigenous ways of knowing, along with the knowledge and researchers of those accumulated knowledges, must be fully blended with the Western academy (916).
Why is it necessary to align classical African and Western cognitive systems? My own view is that both systems need to learn from each other. It is also practically impossible and certainly unrealistic to return to an unmodified classical African cognitive system. The Western influence is pervasive, and to a large extent, transformative. Falola projects the more realistic goal so described, "Rather than always taking theories from other knowledge systems, we should use ritual archives to generate theories for [ ourselves and] others to use".
Falola being first a historian like himself, Ochonu asks:
These European models that are our favorite boondoggle, are they not precisely the methods that the Ibadan, Dakar, Dares es Salam, and Legon Schools deployed to decolonize African history, to effectively write back to Eurocentric scholars, and to (re)claim a space in professional history for Africa?
In "African Glories: Nationalist Historiography" (637-679) Falola discusses those foundational schools in post-classical African history exploration, and in "Pluriversalism"( 889-911) he projects an understanding of "African history, derived from the organic methodology of African conception of history ( as in the Yoruba itan and aroba) [ that] will improve the methodology of western notion of history and generate a distinctive epistemology of its own , with an integrity that no one can question"( 892).
Intriguing. What characterizes these African conceptions of history, these perceptions of human progression in time and of how to interpret and project this progression?
Falola adds on classical African historiography: "To assume that a narrative infused with idioms and proverbs lacks acceptability because western historiography lacks such equivalences is to lend oneself to perpetual intellectual domination" (892).
Is that all? Is such a difference in expressive methods adequate to characterize distinctive approaches to the understanding and projection of history developed by classical African civilizations? Would the admission of idioms and proverbs into history writing add anything fundamental to historiography in the current dominant Western model?
In "Trends in Nigerian Historiography" ( Transafrican Journal of History, 1981) Falola begins with a summation of classical African historiography, its goals and methods, describing it as centred in the critical observation of all aspects of society in relation to its environment, for the purpose cultivating the well being of that society, historical study and preservation, carried out by specialists and transmitted to and engaged in by the populace at different levels of engagement, being a meta-cognitive institution, a superordinate discipline embracing all aspects of social being.
To what extent is African history really African? This is a very significant question that lies at the heart of Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines, an invaluable collection of essays. ....Implicit within it ...are notions and degrees of the relevancy and irrelevancy of non-African methods used in African historiography, which are modeled on Western modes of research, analysis, interpretation, and representation. The fact that knowledge itself is, in a sense, produced and processed through history and, as such, is a historical product casts a cynical light on the whole enterprise of "knowledge" and "knowledge production"that solely and unequivocally relies on Western methodologies.
Implicated in the production of such knowledge are a century of Western colonialism, the experience of slavery, and, more recently, the ceaseless technological, scientific, and cultural penetration of the West and the North into all aspects of life in Africa and the South, in general. As a result of this continuous intrusion and penetration, what is today known as "African historiography" is fundamentally influenced and transformed from what would otherwise be an autonomous African historiography. Not only has the history of such knowledge been presented through European concepts of history and hegemonic Western epistemologies, but, more importantly, in the majority of cases, even the very existence of such knowledge has been presented in colonial languages such as French and English.Hence, the necessity of posing afresh the now familiar question already asked by B.A. Ogot and E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo (39): "Is autonomy of African history possible?"
Africanizing Knowledge is a bold attempt to explore and interrogate the age-old dilemmas about authenticity, originality, locality, and indigeneity, as well as the autonomy of cultural, scientific, literary, and aesthetic creations. Generally, the main arguments in the book are centered around three important acknowledgements: first, Western methods of knowing and research are deeply imbedded in African historiography; second, such imbeddedness calls into question the authenticity and autonomy of African historiography; and third, articulations and explorations of African history through African-oriented ways and methods of research are indeed possible.
Having unequivocally admitted the problem of African historiography, the book proceeds to offer some innovative and creative ways of dealing with the issues and problems of historical research in Africa, with the hope of unearthing what may be called an objective African historiography and knowledge.
Esperanza Brizuela-García, in “The History of Africanization and the Africanization of History” (History in Africa, Vol. 33 ,2006,93) references Terence Ranger’s still resonant question from “Towards a Usable Past" (African Studies since 1945, ed. C. Fyfe, 18):
“can historians apply the epistemological values that have been used to write the history of the Western world to the study of African history? If they do, can they still produce a history that is meaningful and relevant to African communities?... Ranger's reflections on this matter are evidence of the re-emergence of the question of whether the discipline of history, as it is practiced throughout the world, offers the right concepts and methods for the study of African history.”
All historical interpretation and expression operates in terms of models of interpretation and expression, implicit or explicit, since the human mind needs to engage reality through ideational frames that make sense of phenomena. Along those lines, various historiographers have explicitly developed or implicitly dramatized conceptions on how history should be studied and presented, two famous figures among such explicit thinkers, from different cultures, being the German philosopher and historian Georg Friedrich Hegel ( 1770- 1831) and the Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun ( 1332-1406).
These models are explicitly grounded in or implicitly dramatise a conception of time, since history is about movement in time, and of the correlative roles of the various factors that influence that progression. What could the Yoruba concept of ase, for example, contribute to the exploration of history, even if is as a hypothetical model mapping human agency in its interaction with various factors? Ase is an understanding of the cosmos as shaped by the empowerment of all conscious forms of being by a creative cosmic force that enables being and becoming, existence and change, expressed in terms of distinctive ways of responding to experience, an idea that recurs, in various ways, in various African cosmologies, as exemplified by Placide Tempel's Bantu Philosophy and also similar to such ideas as the Indian concept of Shakti and the French philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of vital force.
Correlative with Falola's advocacy of the value of ritual archives in theory building is the significance of the spiral in the Nsibidi symbolism from Nigeria's Cross River, an image described as signifying the sun, journey and eternity, imagery and ideas suggesting the possibilities of human progression within time. What significance could this symbolism have for the interpretation of humanity's temporal progression, the goal of history?
Brizuela-García
presents the views of Caroline
Neale, "Writing Independent' History" in African Historiography, 1960-1980, and Bogumil Jewsiewicki from "African Historical Studies Academic Knowledge as 'Usable Past' and
Radical Scholarship" in African Studies
Review 32, who argue that :
"writing true African history requires more than just the use of African sources [pioneered by the Ibadan History School and Jacob Egharevba on Benin history as well as by Jan Vansina] or a focus on particular topics [ as in the nationalist or Marxist historiography of the Ibadan and Da es Salam schools]. They argue for a radical transformation of the way in which historians conceptualize historical change, time, and causation. They advocate an epistemological shift that privileges African ways of thinking over the concepts and methods traditionally used in Western historiography" ( 95).
Brizuela-García concludes that what is at stake is not simply writing history that foregrounds African conceptions for the benefit of Africans, but the creation of windows of perception derived from African thought in dialogue with other streams of knowledge, Western and non-Western, responding to their strengths and limitations in a symphonic complementarity that expands understanding of how history anywhere can be interpreted and expressed, thereby energizing interests from historians globally in learning about African historiography in order to enrich their own focus on histories of various places and contexts, a view similar to Falola's advocacy of the need to demonstrate the universal significance of classical African knowledge forms as part of a global multiplicity of potentially universal cognitive values.
"