Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative Part 1 : Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History: Yorùbá History as a Quest for Meaning
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative
Part 1
Akinwumi
Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History
Yorùbá
History as a Quest for Meaning
Majestic art by Lamidi Fakeye at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum,
Lagos, depicting a cross-section of figures-hunters, priests, mothers and
others- from classical
Yorùbá
culture.
The artist interprets reality in terms of physical images. The archaeologist
does the same through the excavation and study of material forms from the past.
The historian explores the progression of experience in terms of the
convergence of a range of sources.
All these disciplines are either deployed, as with archeology
and history, or evoked, as with art, by
Akinwumi Ogundiran's The
Yorùbá : A New History, 2020.
Picture by myself.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A statement on what I find inspiring and challenging in Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá : A New History.
Inspiration and Challenge
I find Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá : A New History, 2020, inspiring and challenging.
Inspiration
Action and Reflection Driving Yoruba History
I am inspired by its narrative sweep and expressive drive, the sense of participating in the unfolding of great events that Ogundiran seamlessly generates in beautiful prose.
I am moved by the scope of ambition the book demonstrates in plotting Yorùbá history in terms of the responses of a group of people to diverse material and human environments as they migrate and settle across varied landscapes.
I am galvanized by the book’s highlighting of the process of reflection in relation to action that characterizes the human being as homo sapiens, a self consciously reflective creature whose unique combination of biological enablement and mental empowerment has enabled it dominate the Earth.
Knowledge Capital and Community of Practice
In pursuit of this goal, Ogundiran mobilizes two primary ideational structures
that I find deeply inspiring.
These are the ideas of “knowledge capital” and “community of practice.”
Ogundiran presents the idea of community of practice in a manner that seems to integrate that of knowledge capital. In terms of my current understanding of the book, however, I find it useful to interpret the concept of knowledge capital as integrating that of community of practice because the idea of knowledge capital suggests the emphasis on ideational structures and values that define and bind a community, which is how Ogundiran defines the idea of community of practice.
The focus in both contexts is on ideas, on ways of interpreting reality and organizing
society accordingly, therefore I prefer to describe the concept of knowledge capital
as the overarching idea.
I am excited by this because the subject of how Africans think, how they construed
their worlds across the centuries has been deeply contentious, in the absence of
widespread written records.
I am inspired, therefore, by Ogundiran’s effort to tell Yorùbá history as a history of thought in relation to action, exploring the interrelationships of thought and action, their mutual justifications and reinforcements.
Challenge
In additions to those qualities in Ogundiran’s work which inspire me, I am challenged by those aspects of his narrative which, even though compelling, strike me as lacking strategic components, provoking me to ask how Ogundiran came to his conclusions at the intersection of sources and interpretations of sources, particularly in relation to a history whose primary sources are largely oral traditions and material culture, even though he has taken advantage of what generations of scholars have been built on these foundations.
Issues in the Development of Yorùbá Spirituality and Philosophy
I am provoked to ask if other, richer imaginings of the same history, operating in terms of a more diverse assemblage of probabilities, cannot be constructed, even if not at the monumental scope of Ogundiran’s narration, given the multidisciplinary scope of knowledge he brings to bear, what is likely to be- a qualification on account of the limitations of my exposure to accounts of Yorùbá history, this book being the first to inspire my study of the subject- a unique convergence of the material, aesthetic and analytical sensitivities of an archeologist and the narrative and interpretive powers of a historian, his strongest points, allied to his efforts at integrating a perspective on the development of Yorùbá religious and philosophical thought and practice, the latter providing valuable insights while inadvertently suggesting how that third part of the project could be further developed, such possibilities of development being what I am exploring in this and other essays on this aspect of Ogundiran’s book.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Fact and Speculation in Historical Narrative
Part 2
Akinwumi
Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History
Yorùbá
History as a Quest for Meaning
Atmospheric presence of an example of Yoruba sculpture at the entrance to the Yemisi Shyllon Museum, Lagos.
Picture by myself.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A presentation of my understanding of the evocative force and inspirational power of Akinwumi Ogundiran's account on Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology in his The Yorùbá : A New History.
My Method in Studying The Yorùbá : A New History
My interest in Ogundiran’s work, in order of what motivates me most are 1) Religion/spirituality 2) Philosophy 3) Narrative quality 4) Material culture 5) Politics and social development, all of which Ogundiran weaves in terms of his account of Yorùbá history.
These interests have led to my style of reading the book, which began with the preface and introduction, where Ogundiran presents his goals and methods and justifies them.
I then moved to the section on the manner in which Ilé-Ifè developed itself
into the centre of the Yorùbá community of practice. From there, I looked into
his accounts of the various orisa or deities.
I shall go back to the preface and read the book in a sequential manner, taking care to reexamine the impressions gained from my earlier reading.
I find myself challenged by Ogundiran’s accounts of Yorùbá spirituality and philosophy in spite of his inspiring declaration of his intention to foreground these cognitive and practice based systems on a critical engagement with the lived reality of these cognitive communities as he reconstructs their histories.
I am of the view that his accounts of Yorùbá spirituality/religion/philosophy
are striking and insightful but reductionist in strategic ways. The resulting
contraction of value implies that Ogundiran opens up significant interpretive
possibilities while utilizing a fraction of those possibilities at various
levels of scope. Even then, the quality of his interpretations, empowered by
narrative lucidity and imaginative evocation, is such that he inadvertently
suggests how the journey on which he has thereby embarked may be taken farther.
Ogundiran on Orisa as Mirrors of Infinity
A particularly inspiring and yet challenging example of this is from his iconic
subsection “Òrìsà: Theogonic and Intellectual Basis of the Yorùbá Community of
Practice” from chapter 3, “Knowledge Capital and Referentiality” where he tells
a mesmerizing story of how Ilé-Ifè attained its centralizing role in the
shaping of Yorùbá civilization. Central to this achievement was its
reconstitution of what is now generally known as Yorùbá Orisa cosmology, as
Ogundiran states. Ogundiran’s summation of this cosmology as reconstructed by Ifè
thinkers is both striking and original:
Ilé-Ifè… attained referential status through a grand program of theogonic invention and revision. This involved the integration of deities from different backgrounds and ritual fields across the region into a standardized and universalized pantheon, and the cultivation of learning and intellectual pursuit that was associated with the several schools (cults) of these deities.
….
…several of those deities (òrìsà)… were conceptual in nature, rather than ancestral, had regional appeal because they addressed broad human conditions and derived from common origins and deep-time experiences. …Building on the legacy of this deep-time cosmological and theogonic thought, Ilé-Ifè led the charge… to reconceptualize the community of òrìsà …
It included translating those deities that had regional appeal into a system of filial relationships…and using them as parallel mirrors for viewing and reflecting on … everyday social lives. The light bouncing from these everyday lives, to borrow the lingo of optical physics, created the infinity effect on these parallel mirrors—the òrìsà pantheon.
The òrìsà offered … multiple angles to view everyday lives in a series of reflections that receded into an infinite distance. It would take deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections.
And, inasmuch as…everyday life is not static, the pantheon could not be static. New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences (128-9).
This account is magnificent in its combination of clarity of expression and evocative scope. It is both imaginatively rich and intellectually lucid, complex and beautiful. It is enriched by correlations between mythology and science suggesting a convergence, though not identification, between varied but ultimately correlative ways of knowing, indicating the existence of an epistemic field that defines humanity.
This interpretation of Orisa cosmology shares some similarity with Ulli Beier’s account in which the orisa are described as windows on the universe, diverse vantage points from which the universe may be perceived, with Olodumare being the totality of these partial perspectives ( The Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger ).
The image of the mirror moves the idea of orisa from its more conventional understanding in terms of realities existing over and above humanity, realities that constitute the fabric of the universe or that constitute its metaphysical structure, into constructs of the human mind, constructs based on social reality and abstracted in terms of deity images.
The
understanding of these mirrors of reality in terms of reflections multiplied
into infinity through the light reflected across the mirrors recalls for me the
image of infinity represented by Indra’s Net in the Buddhist Avatamsakara Sutra, in which the jewels at each node of a net of infinite length reflect
each other, thereby amplifying the visual force of each jewel into infinity.
Oxford Reference places this image in context in a way that amplifies its similarities with Ogundiran's depiction of Orisa cosmology, indirectly suggesting the distinctiveness of his own development of related images:
An image used by Fa-tsang to illustrate the Hua-yen [school of Chinese Buddhism] ‘teaching of totality’ according to which all phenomena in the universe are interrelated. He compared the universe to a cosmic net strung with jewels such that in each jewel can be seen the reflection of all the others. To illustrate this notion he placed a statue of the Buddha in the centre of eight mirrors located according to the major and minor cardinal points, with two additional ones above and below. When the statue was illuminated by a candle the mirrors reflected the image and each other in an infinite series. This demonstrated the Hua-yen tenet that the nature of the entire universe is contained in each particle.
Ogundiran’s invocation of the concept of infinity in relation to the orisa complex facilitates reflection on possible interpretations of infinity in this context, facilitated by its development within and beyond Yorùbá inspired thought.
Within the Yorùbá or Yorùbá inspired context these interpretations include infinity as a state of consciousness ( Susanne Weger on flying beyond time and suffering through entering the world of the orisa in Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hutter's Adunni: A Portrait of Susanne Wenger)
They include infinity as the transcendence of time and space while acting as the ground of spatio-temporal reality ( one way of interpreting Ifalola Sanchez on the circular symbolism of opon ifa in ‘’Opon Ifa Symbology’’ at his blog Ifa Yesterday,Ifa Today, Ifa Tomorrow).
They include infinity as the transcendence of death in immortality ( as suggested by the expression, ‘’aiku pari iwa’’ translated by Rowland Abiodun as ‘immortality is perfect existence’’ in "The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective" and Yorùbá Art and Language and translated by me as deathlessness consummates existence).
Contemplative Potential of Image of Orisa as Mirrors of Infinity
At the core of Ogundiran’s infinity image is that of the infinite expansion of human possibilities, not in a metaphysical or spiritual sense, but in a historical sense, in as much as the continuity of human experience is seen as unending, with no conclusion in sight.
Images of light and infinity, in relation to mirrors, all abstracting the unceasingly unfolding breadth of human experience, make this image a contemplative delight, facilitating the development of a perhaps infinite range of interpretive possibilities.
The rich imagistic frames constructed by Ogundiran stimulate the imagination and are potentially inspirational for mystical thought and contemplation. In such reflection and meditation, one may aspire to follow into infinity the experiential sequence thus abstracted in terms of deity images and experience this constellation of infinite possiblity within infinity as metaphysically and spiritually understood.
Correlations of Ogundiran's Account of Orisa Cosmology Construction with Other Descriptions of the Shaping of Orisa Theology
With this description, Ogundiran further develops the insights of such figures as Thomas Mákanjúọlá Ilésanmí in "The Traditional Theologians and the Practice of Òrìṣà Religion in Yorùbáland," Journal of Religion in Africa , Aug., 1991, Vol. 21, Fasc. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 216- 226, arguing for the constructed nature of such orisa cosmologies as privilege a centre to the system in the person of Olodumare, as demonstrated superbly, I would add, by Bolaji Idowu’s Olodumare: God in Yorùbá Belief, arguing that construct is an Ifa invention that does not tally with the orisa practice of many Yorùbá communities.
Ogundiran’s work also helps shed light on the process by which an Ife centric account such as that of Idowu was constructed, in which the deities descended onto earth at Ife, the centre of the world, from a chain extending to Earth from orun, which may be called the world of ultimate origins.
Ogundiran’s account also complements Karin Barber’s superb descriptions of orisa cosmology construction through the verbal art of oriki ( “How Man Makes God in West Africa” and “Women and the Proliferation and Merging of Orisa”) although her focus is neither Ife nor Ifa, the confluence of Ife and Ifa being Ogundiran’s focus.
Challenges with Ogundiran's Perspective on Shaping of Orisa Cosmology
I find Ogundiran’s description of orisa cosmology so meaningful and inspiring, why am I not finding it sufficiently fulfilling?