A Journey with a Great Man: Rowland Abiodun and Oriki Theory: Eight Decades of Illumination

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

A Journey with a Great Man: Rowland Abiodun and Oriki Theory: Eight Decades of Illumination

     Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

How may one describe the journey of being and becoming, of birth and growth, of life and intersections, of entry, exit and transformation, invoking the essential qualities that constitute a human life?

In Western thought, that expressive genre is known as biography or authobiography.

In Yoruba discourse, it is called oriki. A salutation to the head. An invocation of the essence and dynamism of the self in it's myriad expressions.

Like a gun loaded and cocked to shoot, oriki are shaped to activate the potency of that  which they depict, human or non-human, as described of oriki by Rowland Abiodun.

My journey with Rowland Abiodun, fellow seeker in the quest for ultimate values through the Yoruba cosmos in it's intersection with other universes, is like the invocatory power of oriki, a conflagration of two stars in orbit around each other, their combined light illuminating the space between and beyond  them.

He is for me a person one thanks God one has met, an encounter crystallising that which is hoped for without knowing if it will ever be, a light in darkness lit only by the fire of aspiration, until, in that dim zone, a voice says, "why don't we go that way?" a fellow traveller emerging, one's life never being the same again, as oneself and others drink from the radiance flowing from that encounter.

Brother, as you searched through the corners and highways of Yorubaland in search of our ancestors' wisdom on the meaning of life as expressed in words carvings and dress, I was questing for the same in Benin, amidst sacred forests and books from various parts of the world.

It was the 70s and 80s. Abiodun had returned to Nigeria from his MA in art at the University of  Toronto and had taken up a research position at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University.

I was in transition between secondary school and university, a rebel struggling to escape the pull towards academic education expected of a middle class Nigerian youth.

What is the business of a traveller who has lost his way, no idea of how he got to where he is, of where he is coming from and where he is going to, with an educational system through which his fellow lost travellers delude themselves that they are gainfully occupied even as they ignore the fact that they are on a journey whose logic they have no idea about?

That was how I saw the educational system after my encounter with Buddhism, the Grail Message of Abdrushin and the thought of Sidney Bremer and meditations that introduced me to a devouring fire within me that meant I would never have peace ignoring the fact that I was lost, as most humans are lost, travellers from the unknown to the unknown, the origins and logic of their journey unknown.

In the years at Ife, Abiodun produced some of his greatest work.

"Verbal and Visual Metaphors in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori" is one of these, on the nature of human reflective and expressive powers, their origins and capacity, dramatizations of the self as grounded in an ultimate reality pervasive across the world, restlessly roaming everywhere but dangerous to gaze at in it's naked form, and therefore best approached through owe, metaphoric expression as understood in Yoruba thought.

I marvel at the ingenuity represented by this paper, in essence a collaboration between Abiodun and the verbal and visual wizards of Yoruba oral literature, art, philosophy and spirituality, particularly it's Ifa variant, masters whose names are often unknown, whose voices Abiodun constellates and interprets, projecting them across space and time. 

My exposure through a degree in English and Literature at the University of Benin, having succumbed eventually to participating in the learning systems available, and being guided by memorable teachers,  sensitised me to the groundbreaking significance of this paper.

Having been grounded in the prevalent  Western literary theory through the teaching of the inspiring Odun Balogun, elevated teacher and exemplary scholar,  I was hungry to know what my African ancestors thought about literature, the shaping of reality through words, the primary human means of communication.

That essay is wonderful on this. It is a theoritical nexus of all Abiodun's work at the intersection of Yoruba visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality, the Yoruba contribution to making sense of existence and shaping it through human creativity.

In leaving for England in 2003 on what was to become a decade long educational pilgrimage, I took with me Abiodun's passionately argued paper, the only work of his I knew at the time, "African Arts Studies: The State of the Discipline" (1990).

Reading and rereading that essay, I immersed myself in ori and oro, owe and iwa, constellations in the galaxy of Yoruba concepts that Abiodun assembles in that paper as exemplifying the need to understand how Africans think about their own classical art, rooted in foundational civilisations. 

The essay is proud and anguished, the cry of a man whose education in Nigeria and Canada included everything on Western art history, on Rembrandt and Michelangelo, chiaruscoro to quatraponto, luminaries of Western art and it's concepts, but nothing on such great masters as Olowe of Ise, on ase and asa, on oriki and ako, on Ifa and Ogboni, masters, ideas and institutions  in the Yoruba creation and interpretation of art, and their counterparts in the larger field of African art and aesthetics, a field that those shortly before him, such as the pioneeringly insightful Englishman William Fagg, the Austrian Ulli Beier, the Yoruba scholar Wande Abimbola, all inspirational figures for Abiodun, and his own collaborators, the US scholars Henry Drewal and John Pemberton III, among others, have eventually created in it's academic form. 

It was reading my repeated quoting of this essay in my own writing that led Abiodun to contact me informing me about his book that takes those ideas further, his 2014 Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, from which point we have slowly begun to increasingly share the same illumination from the headwaters of Yoruba wisdoms.

Abiodun had left or was leaving  Ife by the time that paper was published, taking with him his magnificent immersion in Yoruba oral,verbal, visual and performative cultures, rethinking them, reworking them in his new home, illuminating his journey from his native Owo to Ife through the enablements of a place whose systems were more conducive for him in pursuing that goal than the challenges eventually experienced by Nigerian society and academia through internally and externally motivated shocks that inspired the exodus of African scholars to the West in the late 80s and 90s.

Wherever you are, however, you take yourself with you. Abiodun's English is beautiful, lyrical, without any accent even though he spent decades of his formative years in Yorubaland. His Yoruba is almost magical, transforming the seemingly commonplace into the poetic, as evident in his audio recording of sections of his 2014  book on his website.

Having fully assimilated the Western centred educational systems he is compelled to operate within even as he seeks the wisdoms of his African ancestors, he remains the youth from Owo, listening to tales at moonlight in the assemblies at the family courtyard, following his grandfather on hunting trips into forests as he told the youth stories and accounts of the natural spaces and villages they passed through, resonances of memory that Rowland  Abiodun carries with him from a world that is long gone, distilling it's essence for a present world in need of it's inspiration.

Oriki master, he unsatsified with decades of achievement shaping African art history but must rework those insights  through the creation of a theory of being and becoming, the Oriki theory of Yoruba Art and Language, on behalf of all those whose lives you have shaped and are shaping, I salute you, scholars, artists and more, Okediji to Ekpuk to Audu and myself, as you enter your eighth decade and  beyond, preparatory to entering into many more gates of time in  great health, may the waters of your being never run dry, may the well of inspiration always open for you, may your influence never abate as existence persists.