Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                             

                     

      

            Classics in Ogboni Studies 

                      Babatunde Lawal

                  Philosopher of Ogboni

                              

                                            

   

                      Babatunde Lawal surrounded by great works of Yoruba art, his field of study

                                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                          Compcros

                                                        Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

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

         

Abstract

An exploration of the insights of the work of art historian, art critic and art theorist Babatunde Lawal on the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in relation to developing a comprehensive grasp of its philosophy, as intrinsic to the order and in its integration within Yoruba thought.

Philosopher of Ogboni

Babatunde Lawal may be described as a philosopher of Ogboni on account of his dramatization of Ogboni vision, through poetry of expression, analytical depth, ideational range and artistic sensitivity, projecting a passion that lifts to the mind's eye the glory of his subject.

Representative examples of his scholarly work may also be seen as demonstrating an inter-relationality, a coherence of subjects and of perspectives on those subjects, suggesting an Ogboni vision, even though he is not known as an Ogboni initiate.

Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó" 's Compelling Exposition of the Unity of Ogboni Philosophy, Spirituality and Art

Lawal's “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni,” was published in African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100.

This essay is the most comprehensive on Ogboni known to me, surveying the fundamentals of Ogboni thought and its relationship with Ogboni art in the context of Ogboni history.

Lawal is magnificent on Ogboni philosophy, in terms of its conceptual exposition and the unraveling of the projection of these ideas through Ogboni art.

The poetry, imaginative range and lofty moral vision demonstrated by Ogboni in what might be described as its most mature form at the acme of Yoruba political, judicial, philosophical and spiritual synthesis is magnificently demonstrated by Lawal in an essay enriched with superb images of the art whose harmony of expressive power and ideational projection he explores.

He masterfully projects the character of Ogboni as a spirituality and philosophy centred in the feminine, as it foregrounds the masculine and feminine polarities that define human existence as a manifestation of the feminine principle represented by Earth as universally nurturing mother.

The Unity of Representative Examples of Babatunde Lawal's Scholarly Work as Suggesting an Ogboni Vision

"À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó" is correlative with Lawal's book on Yoruba female centred spirituality, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture, where he argues for the correlation of all female deities in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology as expressions of Earth.

These conjunctions further resonate with another remarkable essay of his, "Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture", where the centrality of the binary principle and its manifestation in a unifying triad is developed at length, with superb pictures.

This essay may be seen as microcosmic of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality as a whole, binary and triadic concepts being also central to Ogboni, that being one of the examples he gives in this essay, while demonstrating the ramification of these ideas in other centres of Yoruba thought, as in the Ifa system of knowledge.

"Orilonise : The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles Among the Yoruba" is another essay in which Lawal can be seen as exploring Yoruba philosophy and spirituality's grounding in the intersection between the material and spiritual universes, an intersection that defines Ogboni, although Ogboni does not feature explicitly in this essay, from what I recall.

Another priceless essay by Lawal, conjunctive with Ogboni thought, though Ogboni is not discussed in it, is "Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art," where he explores ideas of imaginative fashioning in Yoruba thought, with reference to the transformation of what is seen by the eyes and recreated by the artist into art, a creative form further reworked by the perception of the viewer.

He presents the scope of sensory and particularly visual perception in Yoruba thought, ranging from corporeal perception, immediate sensory apprehension, to the reworking of sense data through critical reflection and imagination, among other conventional cognitive processes, to unconventional modes of perception.

He thus depicts Yoruba epistemology as developing the idea of penetration beyond the conventionally perceptible to unconventional awareness, the unconventional ranging from extra sensory perception to trance and witchcraft, although he does not elaborate on these tantalizing epistemic categories, nor explain the controversial conception of witchcraft in Yoruba thought.

"Àwòrán" aligns superbly with the Earth centred, materially grounded but extra-material orientation of Ogboni thought in dramatizing the emphasis in Yoruba thought of a dynamic between the material world and possibilities of being beyond the material, between Earth and its biological enablements and possibilities beyond these.

These oscillations are emblematised by the recurrent motif in Yoruba Ifa literature of a journey between orun, the world of ultimate origins and the material universe represented by aye, Earth, a journey described by Ogboni elder Kolawole Ositola in Margaret Thompson Drewal's Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play Agency, as central to Ogboni lifestyle as an inter-generational quest for knowledge, truth and justice, a journey between orun and aye that may be perceived in metaphorical terms as an oscillation between the ultimate and the contingent, between the material and the spiritual.

In "Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics," Lawal explores the dialectic of divine and human creativity in Yoruba thought emblematised by myths of divine shaping of the human being in Yoruba cosmology in contrast to the belief co-existing in this cosmology, that deities are shaped by humans, represented in the expression "Bi eniyan ko si, orisa ko si", "No humanity, no orisa [deities]" thereby incidentally evoking the Ogboni expression, "Earth existed before the orisa and the Ogboni cult before kingship," as quoted by Peter Morton-Williams in "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo."

Lawal concludes, in keeping with Wole Soyinka's summation on the same expression in The Credo of Being and Nothingness, Soyinka's response being that "Orisa reveals destiny as-Self destination."

Lawal states that, in this context, the human creation of deity is an "act of self-reflexion [that] not only constitutes the orisa into a sort of superhuman Other, an extension of the metaphysical self, but also provides a basis for involving them in the ethics, aesthetics, poetics and politics of human existence".

This perspective may be fruitfully compared with the Ogboni projection of human creativity within a symbol matrix where human creativity is placed within a network of symbols including Olodumare, the ultimate creator and Ile, Earth, as described in Dennis Williams' "The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni".

Within this configuration, the human being is symbolized by charcoal from cooking fires, suggesting human discovery of fire in transforming food from a raw to an edible state, representing the adaptation and transformation of nature that defines human civilization, a recreative process that may be extended to humanity's relationship with ideas of spirit and deity.

In "Orí: The Significance of the Head in Yoruba Sculpture", Lawal explores the recreative activity of art as representative of the dialogue between the self, as a biologically and socially shaped entity, and the self as an entity that transcends biology, society and mortality, as understood in Yoruba thought.

He examines the scope of the idea of the human person as shaper of being at the nexus of contrastive but complementary aspects of the self, a perspective resonant with Morton-Williams' description of Ogboni thought as centred in the shaping capacity of humanity even within the cosmos of deities:

The senior grade of Ogboni will collectively know all that pertains to the orisa cults. They will also have been active participants in them and many will have gone deeply into their esoterica. The ritual of the orisa ceases to captivate the most thoughtful of them … through their experience, age, and closeness to death they have transcended the ordinary orisa 'truth '-the conceptions expressed through the cults-leaving only Earth as the absolute certainty in their future.

In discussions of Yoruba religion, contemplative Ogboni men will often introduce such phrases as ' I know that everything must have its cause ', meaning that whatever the orisa do for mankind is a consequence of human action; implicit is a denial of the ordinary man's conviction that there is an element of irresponsibility or of chance in events; implicit also is the awareness that Elegbara, the Trickster deity, cannot lead a man into misfortune unless he himself or an enemy provokes the event.

(Peter Morton-Williams, "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo, " Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 30, No. 4.1960. 362-374.373).

To what degree is such a perception an aspect of Ogboni ethos in general and in relation to changes in Ogboni since the decades when this article was published?

Whatever might be the response to this question, this style of thinking suggests an approach to the nexus of humanity, Earth and deity generated by Ogboni thought.

Links to Download Some of Lawal’s Works

"Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art,"

“À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”

“Orilonise : The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles Among the Yoruba”

"Orí: The Significance of the Head in Yoruba Sculpture"

"Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics"

“Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art”

Babatunde Lawal Page on Semantic Scholar Document Archive Site

An Invitation to Donate to this Project

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Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.

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[Chika Okeke-Agulu]

On current Ogboni research, you might want to check the ongoing work of David T. Doris at Michigan. His Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (2011) compellingly challenged Robert Farris Thompson's dominant "cool" aesthetic that for decades served as the primary code for understanding Yoruba Aesthetic; and I suspect that his research on Ogboni, based on years of understudying leading members of the Ogboni Society--from the little I have seen--will vigorously trouble current scholarly on the subject.

Chika

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

thanks Chika.

I know of the book but have not read it.

Will check it out.

Will also go to his essay that might have preceded the book.

I will also contact him.

Some very good work on Ogboni, such as Ogboni elder Kolawole Ositola's summation of Ogboni philosophy in Margaret Thompson Drewal's Yoruba Ritual: Performer's Play, Agency is not in books expressly on Ogboni.

Scholarship on Ogboni seems to have slacked off after Lawal's 1995 “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni.”

Congrats on your magisterial relatively recent books on modern African art, on artist, scholar and Nsukka school of art inspirational figure Obiora Udechukwu and the great exhibition on El Anatsui organised with Okwui Enwezor, a global art colossus from Nigeria who, unfortunately, relative to his commanding presence in global art as curator and scholar, is hardly known in his country of origin .

Losing him along with the wonderful curator Olabisi Silva along with dynamic arts and culture scholar and social activist Pius Adesanmi was one of the terrible things Nigerian and the world suffered in recent times. 

I have set up Facebook platforms for the study of the work of Enwezor and Silva, the Facebook page, Exploring Okwui Enwezor and the Facebook group, The World of Olabisi Silva, Great Curator and Scholar .

Thanks

toyin

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[Akin Ogundiran]

Hello Chika, Thank you for the reference. I reread David Doris's book not too long ago and I didn't see anything he said about the Ogboni that is troubling or that goes against Thompson's cool aesthetics. The latter is a metatheory that Thompson applied to both the African and African Diaspora art (not just the Yoruba). Toyin should indeed read Vigilant Things so that he can reach his own conclusion on this.

One problem with many of our studies is that when we approach African institutions from the narrow view of a discipline, we reduce them to the limitation of that discipline (whether it's art history or physics). "Ogboni aesthetics" is one example of this reductionist tendency. 

Toyin, I admire your efforts in seeking knowledge about the Ogboni but I encourage you to make efforts to visit the Ogboni members and their iledi. Doing so might show you that this is not as exotic as you are making it to be. But for you to gain that access, you must be ready to practice what a colleague of mine called "epistemic humility." I have had the opportunity and privilege of speaking with Ogboni members, and visiting Ogboni houses in the course of my research. I've also been to the US Congress for closed door meetings, and visited some of the most admirable but highly restricted institutions in the Western world. I don't see the difference between them and the Ogboni. Everyone in a community knows the members of the Ogboni. They know Apena, Olurin, Erelu, etc. It is lack of knowledge that would make anyone think that Ogboni is an exotic institution, the unknowable, the Other. This is what the British colonial institution taught us to believe. You know why? Because the Ogboni was an underground resistance to colonialism, the same way that the Ogboni resisted "foreign" domination in their communities for centuries. For example, the Egba resistance against the Oyo Empire in the late eighteenth century would not have been possible and successful without the Ogboni. It is sad that our colonizers (White Nationalists) succeeded in their war of mental dislocation which then leads to ignorance. And many of us are still perpetuating that ignorance.  There is nothing more secretive about the Ogboni than any other institution anywhere, committed to governance, indigenous rights, and self determination. If it is that secretive, how come Babatunde Lawal, Henry Drewal, Rowland Abiodun, and David Doris (all art historians-Caucasian and Black), among others, know so much (and share so much) about the Ogboni? 

Akin Ogundiran

UNC Charlotte

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Thank you Akin.

I have myself remarked on Toyin Adepoju's preoccupation with dialoguing with extant Yoruba institutions tangentially from afar through other people's encounter with them.  I dont see the ethnographic value of this scholarship attitude.

I have related my own encounter with an Ifa priest in situ for a curative and I still remember the first line of ese Ifa used in the curative till today.  These are not institutions foreclosed in the past and lack of close contact is betrayed in Toyin Adepoju's analysis.  For instance what does 'centrality of a binary principle in a unifying triad' mean?  Is Toyin Adepoju a European commenting on an African institution through the lenses of another African because he is alien ( and forbidden from making direct contact) to that culture?

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

dear akin, i love your answer. surprised, when you got to the limiits of the discipline, that you didn't cite mudimbe, the sage on this topic.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Akin Ogundiran <ogun...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2020 9:06 PM

To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

Which of Mudimbe’s books 

are you referring to, Ken?

GE

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 21, 2020, at 5:09 AM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB2456C697EF48A9DCB87356A1DA960%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

well, the key key key text, The Invention of Africa. changed the field, as far as i am concerned. then the sequel, The Idea of Africa.

k

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2020 11:53 AM
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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

Mudimbe’s texts are largely 

historiographical/methodological

and focus very peripherally on 

Yoruba culture, if at all, in my view,

but correct me if I am missing out 

something specific.

Symbols and the interpretation 

of the African past; 

Which idea of Africa;The power of the 

Greek paradigm; and Domestication 

and the Conflict of memories -

constitute the agenda for “The idea

Of Africa.”

 In “The Invention  of Africa”

he begins with: Discourse of Power

and Knowledge; Questions of Method;

The Power of Speech; Blyden’s 

legacy and questions; and the

 patience of philosophy.

His West African bibliographic 

references are scanty and so, too,

overall content- heavily inspired

by Central African realities.

GE

On Jun 21, 2020, at 11:59 AM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

correction

'inter-state/community wars  in Yorubaland'

On Sun, 21 Jun 2020 at 17:43, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:

Response to Akin Ogundiran

Akin, great thanks.

Chika did not state that Doris discussed Ogboni in Vigilant Things.

He first referenced Doris' book in contrast to Thompson's work and mentioned Doris ongoing work on Ogboni.

That work is briefly presented at the following links-

 University of Michigan page on David Doris-

'He is currently reconsidering the iconography of the ancient Yoruba Ogboni Society of honored elders, suggesting iconography diverts viewers from perceiving "secret" truths about Ogboni power. Those truths, plainly shown, can't be read, and go unseen.'  

David Doris on Yoruba Culture and Aesthetics the title of this talk as "When Two is Three: The Presence of Absence in Yoruba Ogboni Society." Audio accessible at site. 

 “The Absent Witness of Everything: Earth, Iron, and Dissemblance in Yoruba Edan Ogboni Staffs”

“Earth, Paradox, and Immortality in Yoruba Visual Culture": A Lecture by Dr. David Doris

  This is likely to discuss Ogboni on account of the society's veneration of Earth, echoing Hans Witte's book on Ogboni art, Earth and the Ancestors.    

On Ogboni History

Your comments on the role of Ogboni in anti-colonial struggles in intra-state/community wars in Yorubaland and agst Western colonialism  is intriguing and is a perspective on  Ogboni history that needs to be explored in depth.

I look forward to reading about it and other Ogboni research of yours  in its published, and if its okay,  unpublished form.

I am engaged in inquiry into Ogboni at various levels, textual and inter-personal, with the inter-personal beginning on social media  but steadily moving to face to face contact.

The field is extremely rich but little explored, relative to its wealth.

On Discursive Formulations 

I wonder, though,  how sustainable your theoretical positions on Ogboni are.

In terms of the categories I see as thrown up by your perspectives, I wonder-

 How valid are those views  in terms of interpreting Ogboni  within the construction of discourse, Yoruba, African or Western?

How accurate are they on Ogboni in relation to   disciplinary formulations wiyhin and beyond Yoruba thought?

How illuminating are they in terms of intersections between esoteric and exoteric knowledge and institutions?

In what way/s have I presented Ogboni as exotic?

In what way/s does  the concept of 'Ogboni aesthetics' represent a reductionist tendency?

Is it not informative to describe Ogboni art and its informing values in terms of the discipline of aesthetics?

Has Ogboni discourse in particular or Yoruba discourse in general developed an interpretive framework that makes redundant the idea of describing Ogboni or Yoruba art in terms of aesthetics, a term created by and a discipline formalized in the current globally dominant knowledge system, by Western scholarship?  

Ever since Babatunde Lawal's epochal programmatic essay "The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective" the study of Yoruba art has centred on trying to understand the concepts through which  the creators of and  respondents to classical Yoruba art in its endogenous context understand that art, and in some cases, the application of  such concepts, such as "oju inu", 'inward vision' to the study of that art, a trend represented by such landmark works as Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought and Rowland Abiodun et al's The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives in African Arts, with various sole written works of Drewal, Abiodun and Lawal, among others,  being landmarks in this effort.

How should we name these conceptual configurations-Yoruba Aesthetics or something else, perhaps derived from a Yoruba term that is more representative of the intrinsic character of Yoruba discourse?

This question evokes the subject of classical African and other non-Western discursive self formulations.

 Its clear, for example,  that Yoruba oral literature exists in the form of Ese Ifa-Ifa literature,  Ijala-hunter's poetry,  Oriki-praise poetry,  Ofo-incantations  etc but does that imply they should not be collectively labeled by the English term 'literature', to give a basic example of what I understand as being at stake here?

Does Yoruba thought have a collective term for these imaginative verbal forms that is more apt than the term 'literature'?

Are there qualities or assumptions in the term "aesthetics" that make it inadequate for use in describing Ogboni relationship with its own art?

      On Similarities and Differences Between Esoteric and Exoteric Institutions and Knowledge

Can you substantiate this- 

'There is nothing more secretive about the Ogboni than any other institution anywhere, committed to governance, indigenous rights, and self determination.  

I have had the opportunity and privilege of speaking with Ogboni members, and visiting Ogboni houses in the course of my research. I've also been to the US Congress for closed door meetings, and visited some of the most admirable but highly restricted institutions in the Western world. I don't see the difference between them and the Ogboni.' 

Are you not making an unsustainable conflation between various degrees and kinds of secrecy?

Does your assertion not avoid making the vital distinction  between religious and secular institutions and various kinds among these institutions?

Do your conflations not ignore established facts in what may be described as the emerging field of Africana esotericism, represented in the Yoruba context by strategic concepts of secrecy and taboo?

Are you not ignoring Yoruba conceptions of degrees of cognitive access at various levels of exposure?

These are levels of access made possible by others.

They are also represent by  levels of access enabled by  personal capacity.

These ideas are related to  such Yoruba terms as eewo, which may be translated as taboo,   awo, translated by some as 'secret',  asiri, translated by some as 'secret',  oju inu, inward vision  and ori inu, inward head/identity.

Does your  approach  not  ignores established realities developed in the established established field of  Western Esotericism, where social, epistemic and metaphysical distinctions between various Western institutions have been spelt out in scholarship spanning centuries of focus justifying the concept of a Western esoteric tradition in terms of various kinds and degrees of concealment and disclosure, of marginal  and mainstream knowledge?

Western Esotericism resonating in the study of Jewish esotericism, represented particularly  by approaches to Kabbalah as different from the more public traditions such as the Talmudic.

These resonance also reach into the esoteric orientations of Islam, represented by some forms of Sufism as different from more public strains of the religion.

These correlations extend into  such schools of Hinduism as  Mahdva Vedanta which I understand forbids people from outside certain strict categories reading their texts,  as different from the public accessibility of the Vedas, for example. 

      Levels of Secrecy: The US Congress and Ogboni

In relation to distinctions between  levels of secrecy, can you point out the platforms, like the website of the US Congress, where traditional Ogboni of various schools, the Aboriginal Ogboni Fraternity,  the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity  and perhaps others I am not able to bring up now, present the details of their philosophies and practices as well as their various deliberations on various matters, issues well known on a daily basis about the US Congress?

Ogboni were once the acme of Yoruba political and judicial authority,  potent in spirituality and art, like the US Congress and the US Supreme Court are central political and judicial institutions of those nations.

In the centuries of existence of Ogboni, across the Ijebu, Egba, in Oyo and among other Yoruba peoples, states and communities, are you aware of any tradition of collating knowledge of government, of statecraft, of the law, of spirituality and art, passing it across generations in a form that can be readily presented, even in an oral tradition, something like what the Yoruba origin Ifa tradition did with ese ifa, one of the largest bodies of literature in existence, with its meticulous and elaborate cataloging system, the Odu Ifa,  and which the industry of writings by members of the US Congress and the US Supreme Court and scholarship on these institutions has been doing for centuries?

Can you give info on essays or books written by Ogboni members, of any school, that achieve the goals above?

Can you reference texts by Ogboni members describing their personal experience of these systems or even  such texts by non-Ogboni members  composed from encounters with Ogboni members, descriptions of personal experience existing as an industry in discourse on various Western institutions, not least being the public organs of governance represented by the US Congress and Supreme Court?

Yoruba have long been prominent in Western literacy and Yoruba history and culture is one of the most researched and published on in African Studies.

What is the scope of Ogboni Studies in this efflorescence and how much of writings on  is due to Ogboni members, particularly as different from scholars like Margret Thomson Drewal who joined Ogboni most likely to conduct their research? 

      Kinds of Secrecy: The US Congress and Ogboni

Does there exist any distinction in US government, for example, between  not only what may be disclosed or not, but also distinctions between the metaphysical and epistemic  implications of certain kinds of knowledge, those who have them and how they may be gained, a distinction central to Yoruba philosophy and spirituality and particularly relevant to the constellation of disciplines known as forms of 'awo', ranging from Ifa to Ogboni, among others, and of which Ogboni is particularly expressive of the need-to-know dimension of such knowledge as well as its location within a numinous realm not readily accessed?

Along those lines, how would you interpret the term 'babalawo', which some translate as 'father of secrets'?

Given that interpretation of  'awo'  as 'secrets', an interpretation which aligns with your conflation of secrecy in US govt and all aspects of Ogboni, would you see such secrets as being of the same kind as those of the US govt, such as  missile launch codes or any other kinds of   secrets they might hold?

How would you define  the Yoruba terms 'Alawo' and 'Alase' in their difference from the Yoruba term 'Ologberi' which Drewal et al describe  as signifying various levels  of  insider/outsider cognitive and practical knowledge and capacity?

Would you see these distinctions as similar to or different from those between the informed and the uniformed in terms of US state secrets represented by the field of operations of the US Congress which you reference?

Do you think the Yoruba concepts of 'eewo', translated by some as 'taboo' and 'asiri' translated by some as 'secret' refer purely to such basic social injunctions as not stealing and  keeping confidences?

Do ideas like Yoruba philosophy and spirituality's description of human nature as represented by a biological, socially constructed self and an immortal self, transcendent of biology and mortality, a contrastive complementarity reflected in the division of perception as ranging from the conventional to the unconventional, from sensory perception to the extra-sensory, conceptions central to Ogboni philosophy and spirituality,  resonate with the epistemic categories that shape thought and action in organs like the US Congress?

The Scope of Public Knowledge About Ogboni

You state-

'If [ Ogboni]  is that secretive, how come Babatunde Lawal, Henry Drewal, Rowland Abiodun, and David Doris (all art historians-Caucasian and Black), among others, know so much (and share so much) about the Ogboni?'

What is the scope of  the collective public knowledge about Ogboni?

Does  the scholarship on Ogboni go beyond general accounts of Ogboni philosophy, some descriptions of its spirituality and art and general accounts of its role in the history of Yoruba government?

What information exists on

 Ogboni ritual

[ brief descriptions in Denis Williams 'Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni',  briefer in Morton-Williams' 'The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo' and even briefer but tantalizing, in Lawal's 'Ayagbo Ayato- New Perspectives on Edan Ogboni']

Ogboni architecture and ritual space

[ Wenger and Ulli Beir in The Return of the Gods and A Life with the Gods on the Osogbo Ogboni iledi, sacred meeting house, Denis Williams' 'Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni' and Pierre Verger  on iledi ritual space]

Ogboni dance

 [ a picture in Drewal et al and  two pics and a brief description in Margaret Thompson Drewal'sYoruba Ritual] 

Ogboni music

[ a very brief Facebook discussion]

 Ogboni musical instruments 

 [J.T.R. Ojo, 'Ogboni Drums']

 Ogboni myth 

[ brief social media and online references] 

Ogboni literature

[ im not aware of any info on this] 

Ogboni ethics 

[ Lawal, superb but brief summation, magnificent but brief summation by Kolawole Ositola in Magret Drewal's Yoruba Ritual and rich and  brief but magnificent online summation by Awo Orunmila Mark Casilas] 

Ogboni metaphysics

 [ Ositola and Drewal in Yoruba Ritual and discussions by Denis Williams and Lawal on the intersection of Ogboni art and thought

Ogboni art beyond the focus on edan ogboni of which Denis Williams and Lawal are magnificent and the brief but rich descriptions of edan and other Ogboni art  by Morton-Williams,  the essay by Slogar on Ogboni wood sculpture and the more expansive range of works described as studied by Hans Witte in Earth and the Ancestors and in Dobbelman's The Secret Ogboni Society.

Ogboni art, however, is a centuries old artistic tradition in which edan ogboni or Onile art alone, as distinctive forms of Ogboni art  might need a book industry of their own to respond to their semantic values and historical development within Yorubaland, other parts of Nigeria and the Diaspora ] 

among other categories developed across many centuries by Ogboni, the references in brackets indicating the single or few references I am aware of on those subjects?

I have not read Witte's book which seems to be in Dutch, on Ogboni. There are also other books, likely published in Nigeria but  but which I have also not read. 

My textual explorations have been centred in the academic journal databases JSTOR, Project Muse and Project Muse, with JSTOR producing the only articles that discuss Ogboni as a primary subject, as represented by their titles.

I expect there could be   unpublished academic theses and dissertations on Ogboni  and would be happy to be directed to them.

While noting the limitations of my research so far, let us compare the situation with the study of Rosicrucianism, a Western esoteric system that has perhaps the same length of existence as Ogboni. A general Google  and Google Scholar search will show the difference. Going to JSTOR and similar specialized scholarly databases will further clarify that difference.

We can do the same for Wicca or modern Western witchcraft, a 20th century development, much younger than Ogboni.

The difference would be clear.

These differences remain relevant, even with the much more recent entry of Yorubaland into widespread wiring culture.

Is this difference due purely to factors with no relationship to secrecy in Ogboni?

If so, why is there so much info on Rosicrucian beliefs and practices, for example,  and so little on Ogboni?

The Public Image of Ogboni

Why has such a venerable institution as Ogboni developed such a horrible image in the Nigerian public mind and what are they doing about this?

Is the often reflex association of Ogboni with human sacrifice, with depictions of Ogboni as an occult mafia, due purely to the slandering efforts of the Western colonizers you reference?

Does Ogboni owe Nigerians a responsibility for greater clarity about their beliefs and practices?

Does Ogboni  have an intellectual wing, like various spiritualities have their theologians and philosophers?

  If not, wont it be vital to have that?

A great lot is known about the Catholic church and the Vatican, itself a tourist attraction, but that does not imply they dont have their secrets. 

Christian theologians and philosophers are among the most influential in history.

Even they reference an esoteric dimension to their practice, what is known as the zone beyond knowing, but they discuss it anyway. 

How informed are Ogboni members about scholarship on or related to Ogboni at various levels of closeness and distance, about the configurations of public knowledge about Ogboni, about intersections between Ogboni and other systems of thought globally, such as Earth centered thought, practices and institutions,  facilitating questions of individual or group self positioning within this discursive complex?

Can some secrecy not be maintained while sharing some significant knowledge with the world?

Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi

On Complementary Varieties in Scholarship-Textual and Embodied/Interpersonal

Olayinka states-  

'I have myself remarked on Toyin Adepoju's preoccupation with dialoguing with extant Yoruba institutions tangentially from afar through other people's encounter with them.  I dont see the ethnographic value of this scholarship attitude.'

Limited  as the existing scholarship on Ogboni is,  a scholar could choose to limit themselves to organizing, interpreting, and applying this scholarship to various phenomena.

The process of cultivating knowledge about institutions, ideas and behavior through direct observational or participant engagement is one kind of scholarship. The process of interpreting this information occurs at various levels, intertwined with observation and participation  and extending beyond those to the level of theoretical distillation and application within and beyond the cultural contexts where that knowledge was developed.

Whether kind or  level the scholar chooses to stay on may be more a matter of choice rather than an externally imposed necessity.

Has Akin Ogundiran's response demonstrated the blend of first person familiarity with Ogboni and interpretation of Ogboni within the context of exoteric and esoteric institutions and knowledge he claims his view presents, by equating Ogboni with the US Congress?

Are the possible insights his response suggests not more on the role of Ogboni as a resistance movement in intra-Yoruba wars, and in relation to Western colonization, an approach resonating within the account of Ogboni as possibly founded to preserve indigenous political and social authority in Yorubaland in conflict between the Oduduwa and Obatala factions,  a perspective on indigene/external forces conflicts at the origins of Yoruba society, Ogundiran's angle of approach  being correlative with the role of Voodoo in the Haitian independence from the French?

Such an approach could open up to a discussion of the role of secrecy as a tool of social cohesion, as with Haitian Voodoo at that epochal  point, perhaps of invocations of Earth in the concept of Onile, Owner of Land, a central Ogboni concept, and perhaps one stemming from the effort to emphasize  an aboriginal authority  rooted in the land.

On Personal Encounter with Classical African Institutions

Olayinka states- 

I have related my own encounter with an Ifa priest in situ for a curative and I still remember the first line of ese Ifa used in the curative till today.  These are not institutions foreclosed in the past and lack of close contact is betrayed in Toyin Adepoju's analysis.  For instance what does 'centrality of a binary principle in a unifying triad' mean?  Is Toyin Adepoju a European commenting on an African institution through the lenses of another African because he is alien ( and forbidden from making direct contact) to that culture?

As stated earlier, styles of scholarship depend on the scholar. Scholarship on Africa has long left the level in which one must  do face to face research. Therefore I will not invoke any experience of mine along such lines as a badge of authenticity. At the same time, I need to honour my Ifa teacher, Joseph Ohomina, whom I have written about in " Cosmological Permutation: Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being".   

As for  'alien ( and forbidden from making direct contact) to that culture' most of the scholars on Ogboni known to me are not Africans or African-American. 

On  Conceptual Translations  

Olayinka asks- 

'For instance what does 'centrality of a binary principle in a unifying triad' mean?' 

 I  am not able to understand why Olayinka sees this summation as exemplifying something unhelpful to an authentic understanding of Ogboni in particular and Yoruba thought in general.  

Its a summation of an idea that is central to Ogboni, to Hegel, to Chinese thought.

Hegel calls it the dialetic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in which the thesis and the antithesis are unified in a synthesis, an idea often encountered in Western thought.

In Ogboni thought, a similar idea is described by Morton-Williams and Lawal as central to Ogboni   in terms of the Ogboni expression 'Two Ogboni, they are three' and represented in Ogboni insignia by three vertical lines,  a triadic symbol which they  provide beautiful analyses of , with Morton-Williams referencing   'process and change' and Lawal's particularly rich analysis expanding that idea in terms of  interpersonal and cosmic dynamism, in which two stands for stability and three for a progression beyond the stability of two into a unification in a third principle, employing striking  Yoruba expressions in anchoring his analysis.

thanks

toyin

--

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

--

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

GE;

Thank you for this insightful analysis.

You made my day regarding Pan-,Africanism and the African Union  in which proponents make this ' God' in their regional image as I maintained in my previous posts; so we have different "Gods' or hydra-headed Gods with multiple faces of Janus.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>

Date: 21/06/2020 18:54 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde  Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (gloria.e...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Mudimbe’s texts are largely 

historiographical/methodological

and focus very peripherally on 

Yoruba culture, if at all, in my view,

but correct me if I am missing out 

something specific.

Symbols and the interpretation 

of the African past; 

Which idea of Africa;The power of the 

Greek paradigm; and Domestication 

and the Conflict of memories -

constitute the agenda for “The idea

Of Africa.”

 In “The Invention  of Africa”

he begins with: Discourse of Power

and Knowledge; Questions of Method;

The Power of Speech; Blyden’s 

legacy and questions; and the

 patience of philosophy.

His West African bibliographic 

references are scanty and so, too,

overall content- heavily inspired

by Central African realities.

GE

On Jun 21, 2020, at 11:59 AM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

i get the impression that ken is addressing mudimbe's general idea of  the construction of africa as a field of study in western discourse, an orientation  he perhaps sees akin's post as projecting in terms of seeking to let african discourses speak for and define themselves

toyin  

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2437F7C9-BE04-401F-AE7E-490FAA56CEFE%40gmail.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

mudimbe's work deals with this point of akin's:

"One problem with many of our studies is that when we approach African institutions from the narrow view of a discipline, we reduce them to the limitation of that discipline (whether it's art history or physics). "Ogboni aesthetics" is one example of this reductionist tendency. "

nobody has done a more brilliant job of showing the limitations of disciplinary knowledge, how the epistemes of european culture framed anthropology or history and the like, and in so doing framed the ways that african scholars approached that "knowledge." l'odeur du pere iis another of his titles dealing with that topic.

his metaphor is that of the elevator, with the scholars not able to get off as it moves. of course he used foucault heavily to make these points, as did edward said.

he did not "work" on yoruba culture per se; his points of reference in african culture were usually central africa, his region beiing the congo....

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2020 2:36 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB2982AD09E649FF627B5831E9A6960%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

When I saw the paradigm of interpretation Mudimbe used it struck me too that this was quintessentially Foucaultian.  So his elevator metaphor is appositely self-critical.  Why not use Congolese conceit instead of Foucaultian.

So if Africans not studying in the western metropolis encounter his books of what use are the books to them?  Foucault in much of his analyses is Eurocentric.  In other words Mudimbe is not writing for African scholars in Africa but African scholars and Africanists in the West.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB24560DF3D8559D732A8662ABDA960%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

EDITED

with addition of references to Ogboni History,  Ogboni in Politics,  Ogboni (Internal) Politics and Ogboni and Ifa- From Written Texts to Social Media.

Can you substantiate this- 

'There is nothing more secretive about the Ogboni than any other institution anywhere, committed to governance, indigenous rights, and self determination.  

[ Wenger and Ulli Beir in The Return of the Gods and A Life with the Gods on the Osogbo Ogboni iledi, sacred meeting house, Denis Williams' 'Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni' and Pierre Verger  on iledi ritual space]

Ogboni dance

 [ a picture in Drewal et al and  two pics and a brief description in Margaret Thompson Drewal'sYoruba Ritual] 

Ogboni music

[ a very brief Facebook discussion]

 Ogboni musical instruments 

 [J.T.R. Ojo, 'Ogboni Drums']

 Ogboni myth 

[ brief social media and online references] 

Ogboni literature

[ im not aware of any info on this] 

Ogboni ethics 

[ Lawal, superb but brief summation, magnificent but brief summation by Kolawole Ositola in Magret Drewal's Yoruba Ritual and rich and  brief but magnificent online summation by Awo Orunmila Mark Casilas] 

Ogboni metaphysics

 [ Ositola and Drewal in Yoruba Ritual and discussions by Denis Williams and Lawal on the intersection of Ogboni art and thought

Ogboni history

[ Atanda, 'The Yoruba Ogboni Cult: Dud It Exist in Old Oyo?; Olaide Ismail Aro, 'The Ogboni of Egbaland and Constitutional Controversy']

Ogboni in Politics

[ Restricted in most cases to the articles centred on other categorizes rather than focused on Ogboni role in govt]

Ogboni (Internal) Politics

[ The info I' ve seen so far is limited to counters claims of authority within Ogboni] 

Ogboni art beyond the focus on edan ogboni of which Denis Williams and Lawal are magnificent and the brief but rich descriptions of edan and other Ogboni art  by Morton-Williams,  the essay by Slogar on Ogboni wood sculpture and the more expansive range of works described as studied by Hans Witte in Earth and the Ancestors and in Dobbelman's The Secret Ogboni Society.

Ogboni art, however, is a centuries old artistic tradition in which edan ogboni or Onile art alone, as distinctive forms of Ogboni art  might need a book industry of their own to respond to their semantic values and historical development within Yorubaland, other parts of Nigeria and the Diaspora ] 

among other categories developed across many centuries by Ogboni, the references in brackets indicating the single or few references I am aware of on those subjects?

I have not read Witte's book which seems to be in Dutch, on Ogboni. There are also other books, likely published in Nigeria but  but which I have also not read. 

My textual explorations have been centred in the academic journal databases JSTOR, Project Muse and Project Muse, with JSTOR producing the only articles that discuss Ogboni as a primary subject, as represented by their titles.

I expect there could be   unpublished academic theses and dissertations on Ogboni  and would be happy to be directed to them.

While noting the limitations of my research so far, let us compare the situation with the study of Rosicrucianism, a Western esoteric system that has perhaps the same length of existence as Ogboni. A general Google  and Google Scholar search will show the difference. Going to JSTOR and similar specialized scholarly databases will further clarify that difference.

We can do the same for Wicca or modern Western witchcraft, a 20th century development, much younger than Ogboni.

The difference would be clear.

These differences remain relevant, even with the much more recent entry of Yorubaland into widespread wiring culture.

Is this difference due purely to factors with no relationship to secrecy in Ogboni?

If so, why is there so much info on Rosicrucian beliefs and practices, for example,  and so little on Ogboni?

The Public Image of Ogboni

Why has such a venerable institution as Ogboni developed such a horrible image in the Nigerian public mind and what are they doing about this?

Is the often reflex association of Ogboni with human sacrifice, with depictions of Ogboni as an occult mafia, due purely to the slandering efforts of the Western colonizers you reference?

Does Ogboni owe Nigerians a responsibility for greater clarity about their beliefs and practices?

Does Ogboni  have an intellectual wing, like various spiritualities have their theologians and philosophers?

  If not, wont it be vital to have that?

A great lot is known about the Catholic church and the Vatican, itself a tourist attraction, but that does not imply they dont have their secrets. 

Christian theologians and philosophers are among the most influential in history.

Even they reference an esoteric dimension to their practice, what is known as the zone beyond knowing, but they discuss it anyway. 

How informed are Ogboni members about scholarship on or related to Ogboni at various levels of closeness and distance, about the configurations of public knowledge about Ogboni, about intersections between Ogboni and other systems of thought globally, such as Earth centered thought, practices and institutions,  facilitating questions of individual or group self positioning within this discursive complex?

Can some secrecy not be maintained while sharing some significant knowledge with the world?

Ogboni and Ifa- From Written Texts to Social Media

A comparison of activities of Ogboni members in their capacity  as Ogboni members and adherents and scholars of the Yoruba philosophical and spiritual system Ifa, which has enjoyed equal authority and prominence in Yoruba culture as Ogboni,  raises the following observations-

The writings by Ifa adherents and scholars on Ifa who might not be adherents is a steadily growing industry. Conferences on Ifa and conference papers on Ifa are very visible, all these developments expanding in a steady stream since the pioneering work of scholars such as Bascom, followed by scholars such as Wande Abimbola.

Essays, books, in abundance, complemented by websites, teaching schemes, Youtube videos on Ifa   roll out daily. 

What about Ogboni, and if there  is a vast difference in self representation by Ogboni members and by others on Ogboni, why is this so?

What is the comparative visibility of Ogboni and Ifa on social media?

Various Ifa and Ogboni groups exist on Facebook for example.

The Ifa groups, such as the Ifa Studies Group and Ifa University,  are alive with sharing of ideas and spiritual techniques and discussions of Ifa artifacts, with debates aplenty.

To what degree do the Ogboni groups, seemingly largely official organs of Ogboni fraternizes rather than  individual initiatives as the Ifa groups, not surprising given the largely decentralized character of Ifa, demonstrate sharing of ideas, debates on any subjects, or depictions of Ogboni artifacts?

To what  degree do  Ogboni members on social discuss Ogboni subjects, such as Ogboni philosophy, spirituality, practice, history etc ?

Ifa adherents hold forth endlessly on social media, with some such as Awo Falokun making their Facebook Walls their primary teaching platform.

Doers such sharing of ideas exist on social media by Ogboni ?

If not, why?

Does that communicate anything about how Ogboni is perceived by its members?

In that light, moving on from the directly comparable Yoruba institution Ifa, would Ogboni, quoting Akin,  be  no 'more secretive...than any other institution anywhere, committed to governance, indigenous rights, and self determination' such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the struggle for Native American Rights, the Indigenous People of Biafra, the Arab Spring campaigners who organised using social media,  movements within the categories explicitly referenced by Akin in comparison with Ogboni?

Response to Olayinka Agbetuyi

On Complementary Varieties in Scholarship-Textual and Embodied/Interpersonal

Olayinka states-  

'I have myself remarked on Toyin Adepoju's preoccupation with dialoguing with extant Yoruba institutions tangentially from afar through other people's encounter with them.  I dont see the ethnographic value of this scholarship attitude.'

Limited  as the existing scholarship on Ogboni is,  a scholar could choose to limit themselves to organizing, interpreting, and applying this scholarship to various phenomena.

The process of cultivating knowledge about institutions, ideas and behavior through direct observational or participant engagement is one kind of scholarship. The process of interpreting this information occurs at various levels, intertwined with observation and participation  and extending beyond those to the level of theoretical distillation and application within and beyond the cultural contexts where that knowledge was developed.

Whether kind or  level the scholar chooses to stay on may be more a matter of choice rather than an externally imposed necessity.

Has Akin Ogundiran's response demonstrated the blend of first person familiarity with Ogboni and interpretation of Ogboni within the context of exoteric and esoteric institutions and knowledge he claims his view presents, by equating Ogboni with the US Congress?

Are the possible insights his response suggests not more on the role of Ogboni as a resistance movement in intra-Yoruba wars, and in relation to Western colonization, an approach resonating within the account of Ogboni as possibly founded to preserve indigenous political and social authority in Yorubaland in conflict between the Oduduwa and Obatala factions,  a perspective on indigene/external forces conflicts at the origins of Yoruba society, Ogundiran's angle of approach  being correlative with the role of Voodoo in the Haitian independence from the French?

Such an approach could open up to a discussion of the role of secrecy as a tool of social cohesion, as with Haitian Voodoo at that epochal  point, perhaps of invocations of Earth in the concept of Onile, Owner of Land, a central Ogboni concept, and perhaps one stemming from the effort to emphasize  an aboriginal authority  rooted in the land.

On Personal Encounter with Classical African Institutions

Olayinka states- 

I have related my own encounter with an Ifa priest in situ for a curative and I still remember the first line of ese Ifa used in the curative till today.  These are not institutions foreclosed in the past and lack of close contact is betrayed in Toyin Adepoju's analysis.  For instance what does 'centrality of a binary principle in a unifying triad' mean?  Is Toyin Adepoju a European commenting on an African institution through the lenses of another African because he is alien ( and forbidden from making direct contact) to that culture?

As stated earlier, styles of scholarship depend on the scholar. Scholarship on Africa has long left the level in which one must  do face to face research. Therefore I will not invoke any experience of mine along such lines as a badge of authenticity. At the same time, I need to honour my Ifa teacher, Joseph Ohomina, whom I have written about in " Cosmological Permutation: Joseph Ohomina's Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being".   

As for  'alien ( and forbidden from making direct contact) to that culture' most of the scholars on Ogboni known to me are not Africans or African-American. 

On  Conceptual Translations  

Olayinka asks- 

'For instance what does 'centrality of a binary principle in a unifying triad' mean?' 

 I  am not able to understand why Olayinka sees this summation as exemplifying something unhelpful to an authentic understanding of Ogboni in particular and Yoruba thought in general.  

Its a summation of an idea that is central to Ogboni, to Hegel, to Chinese thought.

Hegel calls it the dialetic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in which the thesis and the antithesis are unified in a synthesis, an idea often encountered in Western thought.

In Ogboni thought, a similar idea is described by Morton-Williams and Lawal as central to Ogboni   in terms of the Ogboni expression 'Two Ogboni, they are three' and represented in Ogboni insignia by three vertical lines,  a triadic symbol which they  provide beautiful analyses of , with Morton-Williams referencing   'process and change' and Lawal's particularly rich analysis expanding that idea in terms of  interpersonal and cosmic dynamism, in which two stands for stability and three for a progression beyond the stability of two into a unification in a third principle, employing striking  Yoruba expressions in anchoring his analysis.

thanks

toyin

[Gloria Emeagwali]

Well by the time you are done with

 Mudimbe, you may start to question

 the great project you are embarking 

on, and abandon it. He is a master 

of spin.   For focusing

on Ogboni Studies he may label you 

an ethnocentric - and shame you 

into silence. 

He dismisses Blyden, Diop, Obenga

and all the great pan Africanists, with

arguments that cater for a 

particular demographic - with a

questionable agenda. Blyden 

is his punching bag.

The Eurocentrics

actually love Mudimbe 

because he creates 

a vacuum for them to fill.

This is somewhat speculative but

I won’t be surprised if 

to the Black Lives Matter movement

he  retorted “all lives matter”-

in total distortion of the gravity

and organizational necessities

of the here and now, in this

moment of resistance against 

police brutality. He would probably 

reject the logical construct:

 All Lives Matter

Black people have Lives

Therefore Black Lives Matter

Don’t get me wrong. I recognize 

Mudimbe’s profound understanding 

of colonialist historiography.He 

even critiques  some Eurocentric works

that  only a master of the French 

and Belgian archives 

would come across,

and provides unforgettable,

illuminating, intellectual insights 

and contributions to epistemology-

but his frequent  dismissal

of Black identity, indirectly or

otherwise, is suspect.

With intentional or

accidental sleight of 

hand, this erudite philosopher

of Romance Languages and 

Literature, often undermines

the Black people who speak for 

themselves. 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali 

emea...@ccsu.edu

africahistory.net

Vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali

On Jun 21, 2020, at 2:42 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQPM0G_M_NG44q5_syXDn-qzw-fjSQeWcEf%2Burr5M8MuA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Wow-

'the great project you are embarking 

on'

powerfully uplifting from Gloria

very great thanks

toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2CE640EC-019C-4D76-83E2-65C0FE5BD5E6%40gmail.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

toyin is correct; it has to do wiith the place of disciplines within discourse. i doon't know if i have to will to refute gloria's denigration of mudimbe. i don't think you get him.  not sure what good it would do to defend him.. as far as i am concerned, th field of contemporary african studies was built on his work, with that of others who were foundational to postcoloniialism at the time--bhabha and spivak, then mudimbe, then mbembe -- the trajectory is clear.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2020 4:55 PM

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Well I jope I meet Mudimbe one day and challenge him to present me with his syllogism ( if he believes in it):

All Lives Matter

Black People Have Lives

Therefore Black Lives Matter.

Whereupon Ill march with him hand in hand to the next white American police officer and ask him to recite his lformulation to that police officer.

He will learn the hard way ( if a stray bullet does obliterate all possibility of learning altogether  for obstructing a police officer)- the Gates way- in hand cuffs where he will be chanting his mantra behind bars.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>

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[Akin Ogundiran]

Toyin,

You have raised excellent questions, and you have also answered most of them. I may have misunderstood what Chika was saying about Doris’s work on Ogboni, but his first book has extensive sections on the Ogboni. He has a lengthy transcript of his interview with at least one Ogboni member. You should read the book when you have the chance. And, there is nothing in the book that displaces the important work of Farris Thompson on the cool aesthetics. If Ogboni is the primary subject of his second book project, I can’t speak to that.

Ogboni developed about a thousand years ago to address issues of social order, rights and privileges, and checks and balances, in a world of competing interests and diversity such as you will find in ancient Yoruba cities and towns. It is primarily a civic institution. The multidimensional aspects of Ogboni that you have identified should make us wonder why no university in southwest Nigeria (the ancestral home of the Ogboni) has a single course in the history or political science department on this ancient institution. Ogboni exists beyond the Yoruba-speaking area. In Edo, Esan, and Urhobo areas, you will come across the Ogboni houses (not the Reformed ones). Of course, the purpose of the Ogboni has changed since the colonial rule because the meaning of “community” has also drastically changed.This is what gave birth to the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity.

The secular versus religious dichotomies that Western epistemology imposes on African Studies are useless for Africans. In their own Western traditions, such dichotomies do not exist. I encourage you to think more about this. American students like Doris encountered Ogboni in the US, in the classes taught by the Abioduns, Lawals, Drewals, and Ogundirans of this world, and they bravely travel to Nigeria to study the institution. They gain some access because they are humble (at least when they are there). Yet, the Nigerian students of the humanities living there know nothing about the institution and instead parrot colonial narratives of esotericism. By the way, Senators don’t usually write the history of the US Senate. Scholars do.

 

Gloria has already responded to Ken about Mudimbe. What I said about the disciplines and African Studies is such common knowledge. Mudimbe may have popularized it for the West, but those ideas were expressed in Africa by Africa-based scholars many years before Mudimbe. 

Akin Ogundiran

UNC Charlotte

On Friday, June 19, 2020 at 1:11:31 PM UTC-4, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:

[Michael Afolayan]

"the field of contemporary african studies was built on (Mudumbe)'s work . . ." (kh)

Really? First of all, I duff my hat in the direction of all of you who have read and fully understood Mudumbe's work(s). I have failed miserably in that area but it probably has nothing to do with the great philosopher. I still hail the depth of his intellect. Indeed, Parables & Fables is one of the most prominent classics in my library in Nigeria. But if I may ask, Ken, why would V.Y. Mudumbe be the "father of African Studies", just to paraphrase you? Where does that live the likes of Jan Vansina, M.J. Herskovits, D.P. Kunene, Philip Curtin, A.C. Jordan, L. Harries, and the list goes on and on . . .? But that is not the issue. . .

I think the counsel that Dr. Ogundiran offered Toyin in his first critique of Toyin's work is quite solid and critical in terms of the need to reach out to practicing Ogboni members with humility so as to gain a phenomenological insight into the meaning of their practice so he would not be misconstrued as an armed-chair investigator and he would be able to provide an organic analysis because the "mother's milk is sweet", the anthem of the Ogbonis is no gimmick. As the Yorba say, "No one can know the mother of Ošo,  the child, more than the child itself." If Toyin would adhere to that counsel, his work on the Ogbonis could be as ground-breaking as Marcel Griaule's Conversation with Ogotemmeli, that was the single counsel the Griaule's team followed and broke the ground for the world's knowledge of the much-acclaimed Dongon cosmology today. I happen to know a member of his team at Yale, the late John Middleton, and he would be the first to tell you that you cannot truly grasp, let alone interpret, the meaning of a culture and the phenomenal nuances that surround it when you only read about it, and your analysis or interpretation would always be warped if it fails to align with what the practitioners of that culture consider as its meaning/s!

Keep it up, Oluwatoyin!

Michael

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

dear michael

you glossed over my use of the term "contemporary." african studies goes back to the period you cite, though you are emphasizing history and my own interest would focus more on literary studies. i;d look at those who initiated work on negritude say, like kesteloot, and later anglophone writers like irele. all that work on structuralist, sociological, cultural studies that early critics relied on created the first wave of african studies, that generated the scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s. mudimbe changed the terrain with his first two books in french, and then the Invention of Africa, which, as i said, was foundational for postcolonial african studies. we saw gikandi and after him mbembe rely on mudimbe's work in integrating poststructural thinking into africanist scholarship.

Invention came out in 1988. those who followed were radically different in their approaches to text from their predecessors. during those years, the 1990s, all serious scholarship on african literature, cinema, arts, had to take the work of mudimbe and those who followed, whose names i mentioned, seriously. that influence and impact lasted twenty years or more.

we are in a new phase where the shape of postcolonial studies has shifted dramatically, and the major thinkers of that period, including bhabha and spivak, are no longer leading the direction of scholars. and that includes mudimbe as well.

my initial mention had to do with his work on disciplines, deriving much from foucault.

what happens to all the scholarship of the past as the trends change?  i believe the stronger scholars attempt to grapple with the work of the past, but take new directions. i do not believe they lose value,but, as russian formalists once put it, pass to the back burners.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2020 10:38 PM

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2020404125.1131416.1592793506567%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Gloria Emeagwali]

Who is the real father of African Studies?

Definitely not Mudimbe.He is not even on

the list and one wonders how Ken 

arrived at that conclusion. Is there any

reason why Diop, his predecessor

 is ignored?

 But how about Edward Blyden?

 In 1887 he wrote Christianity, 

Islam and the Negro Race;

West Africa before the Europeans in

1905 and about twenty books.

Then there are William Leo 

Hansberry, Du Bois, Rogers,

Schomburg, John Hendrik Clarke etc.

a few decades later.

“Well I was only referring to the

recent era not the earlier one”

Ok. Got your point. How about

Cheikh Anta Diop, author of

Precolonial Black Africa in 1987,

one year BEFORE Mudimbe’s 

Invention of Africa!Come to

think of it Falola is a more

appropriate candidate given

the number of books produced,

his publishing house and vast number

of scholars in the field that

 he has worked with.

“Well I was only looking for someone

 who spoke French and English”

Really? In that case it’s back to

Diop.

Gloria Emeagwali

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 22, 2020, at 7:30 AM, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Clarification 

I wrote my comment before reading Ken’s

response to Michael.

I wouldn’t change a word after reading his

comment but I have one suggestion.

Avoid making Literary Studies

synonymous with African Studies.If you

want to crown Mudimbe the King of

Literary Studies, good luck with that.

GE

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>

Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 9:06 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

Is Diop not African enough for you?

That old divide and rule strategy

 is passé.   What is Mudimbe’s 

great theory? 

Gloria

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 22, 2020, at 12:24 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



i can't figure out a good way to respond to this thread. not sure whom i would be addressing.

i believe african studies is a field grounded in interdisciplinarity and intersectionality. the great thinkers who promoted postcolonial studies came from post-structural backgrounds. some developed marxist tendencies from cultural studies, and gave us black cultural studies, with giants like stuart hall and paul gilroy. others followed french traditions influenced by structuralism, like irele who never stopped citing levy-strauss, leading to mudimbe, influenced as i said by foucault.

the threads of black studies gloria wants to privilege is de-theorized. the work of reading hall, along with bhabha and spivak, was difficult, but we couldn't have had black cultural studies without it; and we couldn't have had postcolonial studies without mudimbe and those who followed, names i cited as including gikandi and mbembe, and those who studied those thinkers.

african studies can't advance without the work of those writers of the past. we can't read ferguson or geschiere or the comaroffs in a vacuum. the intellectual history that gloria wants to cite for black studies includes good works to study--or some, anyway--but leads totally away from everything irele tried to transmit, a world that did not  draw lines in deciding whom to read but opened our thought to what proved useful. I asked skip gates that question about the usefulness of european thinkers in developing african studies almost 40 years ago, and he replied, why shoot myself in the foot? use what's useful, and he went on to do just that with the structuralist approach in  his Signifying Monkey. You can't read Appiah without that attempt to understand the arguments of anthro and theory of his day; you can't read about the way discourses developed in disciplines without foucault and then, in african studies, wiith mudimbe, who made the great breakthroughs in the 1980s.

i don't believe you can claim competency in the field of african studies without having read the successors of these thinkers, and i am thinking of mbembe here whose work would be incomprehensible without understanding those references.

there are other approaches that gloria favors, and they represent a different intellectual universe; and even the one i am citing stops too soon, it needs to continue with new developments that people like weheliye have created using agamben, or that iheka has done using eco criticism. i will end on this note, seeking not to disparage the line suggested by gloria but simply to state, we differ fundamentally in our conception of the field.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 9:57 AM
To: Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/MN2PR01MB5568BD2B1E169297DE2E824FDE970%40MN2PR01MB5568.prod.exchangelabs.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

i can't figure out a good way to respond to this thread. not sure whom i would be addressing.

i believe african studies is a field grounded in interdisciplinarity and intersectionality. the great thinkers who promoted postcolonial studies came from post-structural backgrounds. some developed marxist tendencies from cultural studies, and gave us black cultural studies, with giants like stuart hall and paul gilroy. others followed french traditions influenced by structuralism, like irele who never stopped citing levy-strauss, leading to mudimbe, influenced as i said by foucault.

the threads of black studies gloria wants to privilege is de-theorized. the work of reading hall, along with bhabha and spivak, was difficult, but we couldn't have had black cultural studies without it; and we couldn't have had postcolonial studies without mudimbe and those who followed, names i cited as including gikandi and mbembe, and those who studied those thinkers.

african studies can't advance without the work of those writers of the past. we can't read ferguson or geschiere or the comaroffs in a vacuum. the intellectual history that gloria wants to cite for black studies includes good works to study--or some, anyway--but leads totally away from everything irele tried to transmit, a world that did not  draw lines in deciding whom to read but opened our thought to what proved useful. I asked skip gates that question about the usefulness of european thinkers in developing african studies almost 40 years ago, and he replied, why shoot myself in the foot? use what's useful, and he went on to do just that with the structuralist approach in  his Signifying Monkey. You can't read Appiah without that attempt to understand the arguments of anthro and theory of his day; you can't read about the way discourses developed in disciplines without foucault and then, in african studies, wiith mudimbe, who made the great breakthroughs in the 1980s.

i don't believe you can claim competency in the field of african studies without having read the successors of these thinkers, and i am thinking of mbembe here whose work would be incomprehensible without understanding those references.

there are other approaches that gloria favors, and they represent a different intellectual universe; and even the one i am citing stops too soon, it needs to continue with new developments that people like weheliye have created using agamben, or that iheka has done using eco criticism. i will end on this note, seeking not to disparage the line suggested by gloria but simply to state, we differ fundamentally in our conception of the field.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 9:57 AM

To: Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/MN2PR01MB5568BD2B1E169297DE2E824FDE970%40MN2PR01MB5568.prod.exchangelabs.com.

[Gloria Emeagwali]

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 22, 2020, at 12:35 PM, Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is Diop not African enough for you?

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

I always love it when Ken does intellectual history.

I am for reading everybody.

It would be great to be grounded in these various unlocking streams and even go beyond them so as to better contextualise them.

thanks

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

thanks toyin. i agree, all streams are valuable, all are useful, and need not be the only path to follow. also, i cannot claim to be up on more than a bit of what has appeared in the past decade, and already i know the older streams of theory have been very much supplanted; we are in a new age for all of literature and cinema, and the humanities. diigital is a monster whale that has swallowed us all. and either we make prayers like jonah and come out of the old belly, or we are done for....

ask cornelius, he likes biblical metaphors!

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2020 2:14 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

“the threads of black studies

Gloria wants to
privilege is de- theorized” harrow

You are right, Ken, if by theory you

refer to the web of structuralist-

deconstructionist -post structuralist

”obscurantist gobbledygook” jargon

and terminology -  to quote Ken Wylie, 

in his critique of Mudimbe.

 I hope that the African Studies thread 

that embodies straightforward , lucid,

 unpretentious discourse, and

empowers  people in understanding 

their history, culture, Indigenous 

Knowledges, and society, would 

ultimately prevail. In the meanwhile 

let a thousand flowers bloom.

GE

On Jun 22, 2020, at 12:35 PM, Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is Diop not African enough for you?

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks Michael Afolayan, for the encouragement and advice. 

Ogundiran's advice is problematic bcs it is not given from the position of the generally valuable idea of the value of hearing direct from the practitioners of a knowledge system but from an effort to present perspectives he is yet to justify and which contradict known reality.

On kinds of scholarship, its wonderful to interact with and learn from the practitioners of a knowledge system, but simply reading what others have already discovered about that system is a sufficiently valid approach in itself, even for a scholar who aspires to advance knowledge in that field.

Armchair scholarship is a vital kind of scholarship. One may thereby harvest the field work done by many people, systematize and  distill it, theorize on it and apply that knowledge.

Griaule, Dieterlen and others within that circle were great scholars, in spite of the controversies generated by Van Beek's revisionary field work among the Dogon, which he describes as yielding no evidence of the factuality of Grialue's claims about Dogon cosmology and its esoteric knowledge, eventually leading Andrew Apter to try to reconcile the Grialue and Van Beek accounts and the controversies, a difficult task.

When Griaule wrote, scholarship on the Dogon was still virgin. So, to know almost anything, one had to go  to the Dogon. 

Not so, however, with Ogboni, in spite of the limitations of knowledge in the field. A researcher  is free to decide the character of their research, whether purely textual or a mixture of the textual and the interpersonal.

I have begun interacting with Ogboni members, though, online and by phone and will visit their communities, beginning from Lagos and possibly further afield.

The logical conclusion of the quest for insider knowledge is to join Ogboni, but it seems the group/s' control of knowledge about itself is to tight my aspirations as a person who is motivated by public sharing of knowledge could be  frustrated.

 I am also more comfortable operating on my own.

This is partly true-

'you cannot truly grasp, let alone interpret, the meaning of a culture and the phenomenal nuances that surround it when you only read about it'

Much of human culture is transmitted purely by texts, such as the transmission from Palestine to Europe of what became the Bible and from Europe, which created the Bible as we know it today, to the rest of the world. 

Buddhism, as it exists in China, Japan and Tibet, is very different from Buddhism as it existed in  its Indian founding context, and while the pioneers of those transmissions travelled to India for the texts and training they brought back to found new lineages in their countries, such pilgrimages  are no more to India but to those countries where Buddhism has  been transplanted.

'No one can know the mother of Ošo,  the child, more than the child itself." 

 partly true bcs human beings and social phenomena are complex entities that are hardly, if ever,  fully transparent  to themselves.

An outsider may therefore posses a valuable vantage point on those individual and social entities  that the entities themselves may  not have not grasped on account of the intimacy of their  own involvement in themselves.

 'your analysis or interpretation would always be warped if it fails to align with what the practitioners of that culture consider as its meaning/s!'

Its vital to understand how members of a culture see themselves, but one may even understand the implications of cultural phenomena in productive ways ways that differ from that of  those living that culture.  

A US based Ogboni member  insisted to me on Facebook that Ogboni is purely a spiritual system and that written texts are of no use in relation to understanding Ogboni.  

Before I could explain that Ogboni methods of relating with spirit/s constitute forms of text, verbal and performative, and that enough information exists to reconstruct the broad outlines of such Ogboni texts, he had blocked me, perhaps in anger at my stated ambition to pursue such a reconstruction.

A non-Ogboni member could also develop interpretations of Ogboni knowledge productively different from  or more expansive than those of  Ogboni members on account of the interpretive range that non-member brings to the process.

Ogboni, as currently constituted, seems determinedly inward looking, seeking no intersection with cultural forms beyond its immediate scope, even though it demonstrates profound confluences with other Earth centred spiritualities, and in its celebration of female spiritual power in relation to Earth, it is particularly close to modern pagan witchcraft as developed in the West, a development most suggestive for possibilities within Yoruba spirituality of the feminine in relation to Earth.

I see the relationship between cultural insiders and outsiders more as an interweaving, learning from each other, each feeding the other the perspectives enabled by their unique positions.

thanks

toyin

 

dismiss the idea of Ogboni as an esoteric system, while ignoring the formidable exclusion of most knowledge of itself from public view that is central to Ogboni ethos,  along with claiming that references to Ogboni esotericism represent colonial slanders while "the Nigerian students of the humanities living [ in Nigeria]  know nothing about the institution and instead parrot colonial narratives of esotericism",  equating secrecy in Ogboni with closed door meetings of the US Senate, jettisoning the  harmony of spiritual, political and judicial functions that has defined Ogboni history within the context of Yoruba culture in its construction of degrres of access to knowledge represented both epistemological and metaphysical categories represented by such terms as 'awo', which Ogboni

exemplifies par excellence, ignoring the strategic role of secret societies in African social history till the present, from Ekpe of Cross River to Poro of the Mende, and the stregic role of secret socities in Western history, as if the term 'secret society' and 'esotericism' are terms of denigration invented for Africans by Western interests, while esotericism is a global field of study and Western Esotericism a thriving academic field.

He also described the concept of 'Ogboni Aesthetics' is a reductionist term representing the reduction of African realities to the narrow lenses of Western disciplines, describing 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2020404125.1131416.1592793506567%40mail.yahoo.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Na wa, as it is said in Nigerian pidgin.

Great thanks to the founder and managers on this group for their foresight and heroic efforts.

In my response to Michael Afolayan, i had decided to remove the section that comes after the rest of the comment but i forgot to delete it.

Anyway, its there.

Its my view, only i wanted to adopt a different tone in my eventual response.

The unexpected revelation of the mind that sought to partly conceal its full orientation....an Esu experience...the Yoruba deity of of revelation of the concealed 

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Great thanks, Akin.

On Texts to Read on Ogboni

Thanks for the clarification on Doris' book and its Ogboni discussions. All the more reason why I must study it. I have already reached out to him.

If you have  any published work that discusses Ogboni I would be pleased to be directed to it. I have not found any yet through Googling 'Akin Ogundiran Ogboni'. If you can share ongoing research that would also be good. I am also interested in course outlines and readings  relevant to the subject.

My Vision in Ogboni Studies Intersecting Yoruba, African, Asian, Western and Other Systems of Knowledge

My vision is the expansion of scholarship on Ogboni and of the further development of Ogboni philosophy and spirituality.

This scholarship begins at the level of textual analysis. 

It continues at the level of embodied investigation represented by  personal experimentation,  dialogical interaction and the investigation of  relevant spaces, such as shrines.

It also includes developing and applying theory inspired by these investigations.

I am using this scholarship as a means of constructing an openly accessible  Ogboni philosophical and spiritual system that people may study and practice.

In the process I would  demonstrate correlations between the Yoruba knowledge systems Ogboni, Ifa and Gelede, constructing a unified system of theory and practice.

    From Unifying Ogboni, Ifa and Gelede to Developing Modern African Witchcraft 

In relation to Gelede this would involve contributing to developing a form of modern African witchcraft, witchcraft being a term whose historical development in Western history I understand as broadly correlative with the Yoruba Iyami and aje concepts.

This would proceed  by harnessing constructions of feminine power in relation to nature central to Gelede  and rooted in the unification of Ifa and Ogboni.

These unifications emerge through conceptions of  the Earth grounded and yet cosmic feminine  identities represented by Odu, in Ifa and Ile, Earth, in Ogboni  and correlative with Iyami, Our Mothers, in Gelede.

These unifications are already extant in the tradition and made explicit at different levels by various  interpreters.

 It is vital however, to foreground them, making them explicit and systematizing the scope of human female centred spirituality in Yoruba thought, developing these possibilities   into a definitive philosophical and spiritual practice with guidance on how it may be practiced.

These efforts will contribute to taking Iyami and aje conceptions from the superstition that often defines them to philosophical clarity, from theory represented by a significant degree of scholarship on them, to a system of spiritual practice, with its own epistemology, metaphysics, investigative methods and ethics. 

     Beyond the Yoruba Context to African and Global Correlations 


The Yoruba systems would be further integrated with other African and non-African cognitive systems,  creating a unified whole.

On Ogboni Esotericism in Relation to African and Western Esotericisms

I am puzzled by your continued disparagement of the idea of esotericism in relation to Ogboni.

I am puzzled because your stance  is at variance with the empirical reality of Ogboni as observable by anyone and as doggedly pursued by Ogboni members in Nigeria and the Americas and as carefully described by decades of scholarship on Ogboni.

 Are you suggesting that Ogboni is not esoteric  or its form of esotericism is different from that described by some?

One aspect of esotericism is secrecy.

Ogboni secrecy is demonstrated  through the questions I asked in my last post about the scope of Ogboni knowledge in public contexts, an exclusion of information made starker in comparison with the other comparatively venerable Yoruba institution, Ifa,as I also pointed out in that post.  

Perhaps you have other information that contradicts these observations?

You may have had "the opportunity and privilege of speaking with Ogboni members, and visiting Ogboni houses in the course of [ your]  research" but  what is the scope of information made available to you and to what degree are you allowed to publicly share wjat ypou have learnt?

If you were educated on Ogboni initiation, are you allowed to inform the world about the details of this  initiation beyond such  general outlines provided by Dennis Williams in 'The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni'?

If you were you initiated, are you permitted  to share your initiatory experience and subjective impressions  as John McCall does of his initiation into Igbo dibia in "Making Peace with Agwu"? 

Were you granted an edan ogboni of your own after initiation and allowed to share with the world your subjective experience of relating with this intimate spiritual form, central to Ogboni, as attested by scholarship and as confirmed by contemporary Ogboni?

The issue here is not so much   "the opportunity and privilege of speaking with Ogboni members, and visiting Ogboni houses in the course of [ your]  research" but of the scope of knowledge made available to such an investigator and what they are allowed to share with the world of what they have learnt.

Jordan Fenton's PhD on the Cross River Ekpe/Mgbe esoteric order, Take it to the Streets: Performing Ekpe/Mgbe Power in Contemporary Calabar, Nigeria, enabled by his initiation into the order, is fantastic, but, as he told me in conversation, he published only what he was allowed to. No more. A significant amount of material in his archives, he can't publish, he states. 

My essay "Developing an Nsibidi Philosophy and Mysticism 2 : Entry into the Forest Cosmographic 1" and "Developing an Nsibidi Philosophy and Mysticism 2: Entry into the Forest Cosmographic 2" part of my "Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism : Research and Publication Project" makes clear the amazing visual and perfomative achievement represented by Ekpe Nsibidi symbolism, in its alignment with Ekpe thought, but all that visual splendour is carefully managed to provide the peripheries of knowledge about the system, with strategic interpretive keys of the symbolic physical gestures and graphic art withheld, and with an entire section of the multiple signification systems kept from public view-the use of symbolic object placement of which I am yet to find any image and only one description,   this being the situation when I worked  on Nsibidi in 2016.

"Everyone in a community [ may know] the members of the Ogboni [the representatives of the offices of ]  Apena, Olurin, Erelu, etc' like its well  known that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang von Goethe and many of the greatest and the most influential figures in Western history till the present time were/are Freemasons, yet Freemasonry has a long history of tension between secrecy and disclosure, with the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannia describing the order as the world's largest  secret society  and a 2018 Guardian UK article stating "The secret society is still pretty secret, and recent claims have reawakened long-held suspicions over its influence in public life", describing the orders' efforts to publicize themselves-

'After closely guarding their secrets for centuries, Britain’s Freemasons have spent the last decade trying to open up their organisation, and some of its rituals, to outside scrutiny.  Public relations consultants have been hired, some doors at Freemasons’ Hall in central London have been unbolted for the public, and documentary makers have been allowed into lodge meetings. There are even Freemasons’ Twitter feeds – and a hashtag, #ASK12B1.'

Yet, even with whatever secrecy they maintained before this point,  Ronald Hutton is able to testify in The Triumph of the Moon: the Rise of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, to their incalculable influence in Western esotericism, largely through those Masons who transposed Masonic ritual knowledge in building the Golden Dawn, the most influential modern Western esoteric school.

Secret societies, such as Ogboni, Ekpe, Poro (Beryl L. Bellman,  'The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual')  the Bumbudye  (John D. Studstill, " Education in a Luba Secret Society") etc  are integral to African social history.

Their Western counterparts, such as the Freemasons,  are also integral to Western history, both of these integralities well established by decades of scholarship.  So, the recognition of the existence of secret societies in Africa  does  not necessarily stem from colonialist  slandering. 

Is it not more realistic, in line with evident reality and established facts in the field of Ogboni Studies, to acknowledge the fact of Ogboni as a secret society, a society whose workings and even most of the details of their beliefs and expressive activities are kept away from public gaze, and examine the intrinsic character, history, purposes and significance of Ogboni secrecy,  in relation to secrecy in Yoruba spirituality and philosophy, in the African and global contexts, secrecy in religious and secular contexts being itself a well established field of study, in African Studies and beyond,  the questions I asked about kinds and levels of secrecy being a pointer in that direction?

Within these contexts, one could integrate the concept of secret societies into the broader context of esotericism, which secret societies exemplify, and examine what I would describe as the social, epistemic and metaphysical character of Ogboni esotericism, considerations without which Ogboni cannot be adequately understood, from its politics to its art, considerations suggested in the questions I asked in my last comment, considerations grounded in central Yoruba concepts I pointed out- awo, eewo, asiri, oju inu and ori inu, ideas relating to a nexus between concealment and revelation, as demonstrated both by the boundaries and scope of being human in relation to the character of reality beyond the human and the social controls through which reality is managed.

Ogboni Spirituality in Intersection with Ogboni Political and Judicial Functions

Ogboni has  been, in the course of its history,   a civic  institution, an arm of government,  a judicial body and a religious institution, these functions intertwining.  

Without understanding Ogboni's relationship with Ile, Earth, how is one to adequately understand the foundations of their authority? 

Without appreciating the implications of their relationship with Earth as a sentient entity with whom they relate as universal mother, how is one to understand their use of that relationship as an instrument of power, power communicated through the belief that they could invoke the presence of Earth and her  varied expressions into such instruments as the edan ogboni, metal art thus becoming repositories of the presence of sentient agents whose activity extends beyond the physical properties of their form, that being one understanding of spirit, thus enabling them to use edan ogboni as means of healing, means of protection and guidance for members, as emblems of office, as means of symbolically communicating  messages?

On Studying Classical African Cognitive Systems

I'm also puzzled by your declaration that "What I said about the disciplines and African Studies is such common knowledge. Mudimbe may have popularized it for the West, but those ideas were expressed in Africa by Africa-based scholars many years before Mudimbe"  thereby reinforcing your earlier claim that "One problem with many of our studies is that when we approach African institutions from the narrow view of a discipline, we reduce them to the limitation of that discipline (whether it's art history or physics). "Ogboni aesthetics" is one example of this reductionist tendency."

Disciplinary Refinement and Expansions and Disciplinary Transformations

In relation to your claim on 'Ogboni Aesthetics', I wonder if you are not conflating what I would describe as ongoing conceptual, procedural, epistemic and metaphysical refinements and expansions within disciplines with disciplinary transformations. Or conflating ongoing disciplinary explorations with definitive developments. 

The research programs in action within African Studies as known to me may be described as operating more within the scope of conceptual, procedural, epistemic and metaphysical refinements and expansions than of disciplinary transformations.

 Refining and expanding a discipline or a system of disciplines involves reworking and/or expanding its concepts, its scope of reference and its epistemic and metaphysical possibilities while maintaining the ultimate orientation of the  epistemic and metaphysical foundations and direction of its investigative procedures. 

Disciplinary transformation involves fundamentally reworking/changing  the epistemic and metaphysical foundations and goals of a discipline or of the system of disciplines to which it belongs.

I'm not sure into which of these groups or what intermediate group I would place your earlier statements on the idea of 'Ogboni aesthetics' as reductionist, but the following examples drawn from the generation of scholarship you reference could  help.

Akinsola Akiwowo, at the then University of Ife, in his seminal "Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry" and his constellation of associated publications, did not argue, for example, that the idea of a "Yoruba Sociology" is reductionist as you seem to be arguing for the idea of an Ogboni Aesthetics. 

He did not claim that the discipline of sociology could not subsume classical Yoruba conceptions of social understanding and management. He simply argued for what he described as an indigenous sociology fed by Yoruba concepts such as `asuwada', `ajobi', `ajogbe' and `ifogbontayese', and such interlocutors of his as Lawuyi and Taiwo  who sought to refine his conceptions remained within the epistemic and metaphysical framework of sociology as conventionally understood, a position similar to that taken by the decades growing current orientation in studies in Yoruba art. 

Even initiatives like that suggested by Toyin Falola in 'Ritual Archives', in which he seems to be arguing for the correlation of   mythic/ritual  and contemplative means of knowledge  with the ratiocinative procedures currently dominant in the globally pervasive Western origin knowledge system,    represent an expansion of the existing disciplinary systems, rather than a fundamental reworking of those systems. 

This approach includes theorists such  as Moyo Okediji and Henry John Drewal arguing for terminology indicating sensitivity to a broader perceptual range in studying the arts, particularly African arts.

Like Falola, they are not arguing for changes in disciplinary nomenclature or for  transformative changes within disciplinary epistemologies  and investigative methods but for an expansion of the exploratory procedures that shape disciplines.

The processes that constructed the current epistemic and metaphysical foundations of the Western knowledge system and the varied but ultimately correlative investigative procedures of the disciplines constituting this systems, from the arts, to the social sciences to the sciences, are examples of disciplinary transformation.

These transformations are represented by the movement from astrology to astronomy, from astrological and religious cosmology to scientific cosmology and astro-physics, from alchemy to chemistry and physics, from faith based, dogmatic  Biblical interpretation to hermeneutics, from folk knowledge and general belief to philosophy, these being some of the most prominent examples.

I would be pleased to read arguments for  the inadequacy of Western derived names of scholarly disciplines, as different from suggestions about introducing non-Western terms into the same disciplines, or emphasizing investigative approaches different from those dominant in the Western academy,  whether or not those arguments validate your claim about Ogboni Aesthetics. I would also be pleased to read any argument from you describing why the concept of Ogboni Aesthetics is reductionist, as you claim.

I would also be interested in arguments for disciplinary transformations.

It is possible to derive new names for various academic disciplines, on the grounds perhaps, that such names, such as the range of German terms for forms of knowledge represented by variations on the term 'wissenschaft', evoke more clearly the scope of that discipline.

That approach, however, would need to struggle against the fact that the current disciplinary names are mainstays of the English language, the most pervasive in the world.

Religious/Secular Conjunctions and Divergences

I also wonder if African Studies has not gone beyond this stage- 'The secular versus religious dichotomies that Western epistemology imposes on African Studies '''.

I thought African Studies and those who respond to it are generally sensitive to the specificities of African cultures at various stages of their development. 

 I would also like to better understand why you state''In their own Western traditions, such dichotomies do not exist''   because I understand the history of Western thought could be written in relation to the convergence and divergence of secular and spiritual orientations.

Between Recording and Not Recording History in the US Senate and Ogboni

On recording US  Senate history, individual senators are known to record their experiences as Senators, thereby providing insights into Senate history from the perspective of  intimate  participants, as demonstrated by the Wikipedia articles "U.S. Senator Bibliography (Congressional Memoirs)" and "U.S. Representative Bibliography (Congressional Memoirs)".

Along with these personal initiatives, the US Senate has an official historian,  as demonstrated by the Wikipedia article on this office along with the official website of the office, which, interestingly, has a section titled "Oral History Project":

"Since 1976 the Senate Historical Office has conducted interviews with senators and staff. The mission of this project is to document and preserve the individual histories of a diverse group of personalities who witnessed events first-hand and offer a unique perspective on Senate history, many of whom may otherwise be missed by biographers, historians, and other scholars.

 These interviews cover the breadth of the 20th century and now the 21st century. The recording and preservation of these individual oral histories will lead to a fuller and richer understanding of the history of the Senate and of its role in governing the nation."

Can you see the meaning of this in relation to Ogboni Studies?

This relates to the question I asked earlier, emphases added-

"Ogboni were once the acme of Yoruba political and judicial authority,  potent in spirituality and art, like the US Congress and the US Supreme Court are central political and judicial institutions of those nations.

In the centuries of existence of Ogboni, across the Ijebu, Egba, in Oyo and among other Yoruba peoples, states and communities, are you aware of any tradition of collating knowledge of government, of statecraft, of the law, of spirituality and art, passing it across generations in a form that can be readily presented, even in an oral tradition, something like what the Yoruba origin Ifa tradition did with ese ifa, one of the largest bodies of literature in existence, with its meticulous and elaborate cataloging system, the Odu Ifa,  and which the industry of writings by members of the US Congress and the US Supreme Court and scholarship on these institutions has been doing for centuries?

Can you reference texts by Ogboni members describing their personal experience of these systems or even  such texts by non-Ogboni members  composed from encounters with Ogboni members, descriptions of personal experience existing as an industry in discourse on various Western institutions, not least being the public organs of governance represented by the US Congress and Supreme Court?

Yoruba have long been prominent in Western literacy and Yoruba history and culture is one of the most researched and published on in African Studies.

What is the scope of Ogboni Studies in this efflorescence and how much of writings on it  is due to Ogboni members, particularly as different from scholars like Margaret Thompson Drewal who joined Ogboni most likely to conduct their research?"  

Is this juxtaposition with the determined efforts of the US Senate and individual Senators to record their personal and group experience of this historic institution not a great challenge in relation to the also old Ogboni institution?

Frontiers in Ogboni Studies

I bow to those scholars in African and Western institutions who have brought us this far in Ogboni Studies.

The scholars who have provided the little known and yet rich information about Ogboni, the scope as known to me  which I outlined in my previous comment, clearly invested heavily, in time and cultivation of confidence,  in the effort to get that information. Some, like Margaret Thompson Drewal become Ogboni initiates. 

Even then they have given us the foundations, at best, of Ogboni. So much is unknown, either bcs it is restricted information, as with Ogboni spirituality and ritual or scholars need to expend  more effort into investigating those aspects, such as Ogboni dance, musical instruments and music. 

      Constructing Scholarly/Academic Courses on Ogboni 

I acknowledge the following  situation, if its so, needs to be speedily redressed-

'The multidimensional aspects of Ogboni that you have identified should make us wonder why no university in southwest Nigeria (the ancestral home of the Ogboni) has a single course in the history or political science  department on this ancient institution.' 

 particularly since the two  scholars whose work is known to me who have focused on Ogboni history and their role in politics are  Nigeria based scholars - Olaide Ismail Aro ( Legal Practitioner and Consultant in Nigeria )  "The Ogboni of Egbaland and Constitutional Controversy" ( International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 4, Issue 7, July 2014) and  J. A. Atanda (Dept of History, Univ. of Ibadan  ) "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult: Did it Exist in Old Oyọ?"  (Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. vi, No. 4 June 1973) . 

Regrettably, Joseph Adebowale Atanda    has passed away. Olaide Aro's contact details are at his academia.edu page and his professional profile at the conclusion of his "Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria : Its Implication and Way Forwards toward Avoidance of Future Insurgency"

 The level of knowledge demonstrated by the Atanda and Aro essays is fantastic. Chatting with Aro on the phone yesyerday, he states he gained that knowledge as an Egba person who not only lives in Abeokuta, the capital of Egbaland, but through his father's role as a chief and his own contacts in Egbaland, in the context of Ogboni being the central political authority, perhaps outside the state/fed govt, in my view, in Egbaland.

In developing courses in Ogboni, such scholars would be priceless. He has published significantly in academic journals in various aspects of contemporary Nigerian history, economics and education. Such a person could be employed at the very least at the level of a senior lecturer, working out with him  a research program that would facilitate developing more knowledge in this field, research that perhaps begins with undergraduates being guided in investigating this subject through interpersonal research/field work, all the way to post-graduate and faculty research, thereby building up a solid knowledge base,  shared with the world through online repositories,  a departmental library, articles and books.

        Ogboni Culture and History  as a Multidisciplinary Body of Knowledge 

Even then, Ogboni Studies needs to go beyond courses in various departments. Ogboni itself constitutes a disciplinary system, a complex of epistemic and metaphysical orientations that need to be both understood on its own terms, in its  intersections with other bodies of thought  as well as being open to development, in harmony with other epistemic orientations,  as a method of seeking knowledge. 

thanks

toyin

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Toyin Adepoju.

You seem to imply that philosoohy is absent in folk knowledge and belief and that there is now an epistemic transformation from one to the other.  This is inaccurate dichotomy.  Your general categories of conceptual refinements  versus  transformations are not as clearcut as you present them here.

2. Your comparison between the US Congress preserving its history and activities and your project on Ògbóni is inaccurate.  You are not a member of the Ògboni and have not been appointed to this project by any ÌIédiì Ògbóni.

OAA

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde  Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

OAA,

Thanks.  

On Reworking Bodies and Systems of Knowledge

Could  you explain why my 'general categories of conceptual refinements  versus  transformations are not as clearcut as [ I]  present them here'?

On your statement that  I  ''seem to imply that philosophy is absent in folk knowledge and belief and that there is now an epistemic transformation from one to the other.  This is inaccurate dichotomy'' I referenced the movement  from  the social foregrounding of ''folk knowledge and general belief to philosophy'' as an example of disciplinary transformation, in which bodies of knowledge undergo fundamental change in their epistemic premises, metaphysical foundations, investigative procedures and ultimate orientation.

By philosophy, I mean the practice of being self critical, the process of critically examining the validity of one's opinions, in the spirit championed by Socrates.  

I understand folk knowledge as represented by various beliefs passed across generations in a society but often not subject to critical investigation. Many, if not most ideas about witchcraft in Nigerian societies fall into that category.

When those beliefs are subjected to scrutiny as to their logical validity, the terms of observation and analysis in which they may be adequately examined and the range of coherence they may demonstrate in terms of what may or may not be real, we have philosophy. 

I do not include herbal  knowledge,  known through experience, to be effective,    in that category of uncritical belief . I also do not include in that category methods of healing or any other knowledge, also known, through experience, to be effective.

'The world is flat' was an example of general belief in many societies until the efforts of  experimental natural philosophers, as they were known in 17th century Europe  and sea voyagers proved otherwise.

''The Earth is the centre of the universe' is another example of such a belief in Europe until the  experimental natural philosophers such as Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise.

The movement from accepting opinions without critical examination to insisting on examining them according to the full system of investigative tools required for such an examination, is a fundamental transformation in the development of human knowledge, perhaps as significant as being able to walk upright and create physical tools.

In developing these investigative tools and the epistemic and metaphysical frameworks shaping them, scholarly disciplines, as different from general bodies of belief, are  created.

That description may be described as a counsel of perfection, because disciplines are often formed, not from  the full system of investigative tools required for such an examination but from the selection of those tools chosen favoured by the investigating intelligentsia of the time. 

Thus, while divinatory systems may be understood as demonstrating their own validity, astrology is not considered an aspect of astronomy and scientific cosmology bcs its premises, methods and goals are not in alignment with the completely ratiocincative stance in terms of which astronomy and scientific cosmology were developed.

This is so even though an astrologer,  Johannes Kepler was involved in this process. Also involved was  a  theological cosmologist, Isaac  Newton, but they both ultimately came to  to the conclusion that the new discipline needed to be separated from their more subjective pursuits along related lines, hence they focused on the use of mathematics in creating what is now known as scientific cosmology. 

Newton has a magnificent summation along such lines, relating his religious beliefs with his scientific work,  in the 'General Scholium', the conclusion of his greatest work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

The vision of  examining phenomena   according to the full system of investigative tools required for such an examination may be understood as a work in process, constantly unfolding as the limitations of dominant  epistemological and metaphysical frameworks, of social formations of knowledge, are appreciated.  

Perhaps the ratiocinactive methods particularly influential in the Western academy may be seen as needing an explicit alignment with more subjective methods for the full fulfillment of human potential.

Comparing  the Historiography of the US Congress and Ogboni Historiography

On the historiography of the US Congress in relation to Ogboni historiography I suggest you read again my comparison between them and confirm if I arrogated to myself the role of official Ogboni historian, a role performed for the US Congress by its official historian.

I did a stark portrayal of the immensity of our epistemic deficit as a people, a people possessed of huge archives and possibilities of knowledge.

I  compared those systems to those of others who are using all means available to record, build upon and apply their own knowledge, thereby creating a Mecca of knowledge that has made them a global knowledge hub.

How are we to  adequately respond  to the crisis indicated by that portrayal?  

My own self chosen goal is that of foregrounding the character of Ogboni philosophy and spirituality as I understand  them, and developing them in terms of their contemporary and timeless significance  in their intersection with global bodies and systems of knowledge.

I am employing  textual study,interaction with Ogboni members and visits to dedicated Ogboni spaces, such as the iledi, the sacred Ogboni meeting house. 

This textual study covers both scholarly publications and social media statements.  My interactions with Ogboni members have been through online and phone discussions and   I shall be extending them to face to face conversations. 

Thanks

toyin 

 

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Toyin Adepoju.

When you refer to philosophy as being self critical many societies have been self critical for thousands of years.  Even Western philosophy that you implicitly lean on as a walking crutch has been self critical since the Classical period of Aristotelian times.  Your implied self critical period of the 17th century does not apply globally, is arbitrary and is only a convenient point for Western thought.

You have yourself in part answered why your categories of conceptual refinements versus transformations is not clearcut in the paragraphs dealing with raciocinative methods needing explicit alignment with subjective methods.

Did you know that long before Isaac Newton stumbled on the idea of using mathematics to construct scientific cosmology Yoruba thought did the same through Ifá divinatory system?  So in relation to the Ifá system the Newtonian effort represents a refinement rather than a radical transformation and that is why your categorisation is not really clearcut in a definitive way.  Are you aware of the centuries old dialogic Yoruba ' Socratic' system called Ęlå lòrò?

Also your example of witchcraft demonstrates your ambivalence toward the subject which needs to be reconciled.  In one breath it is an example of superstitious beliefs and folk tales.  In another attitude to it ( by the West) marks a transformative process of self critical investigation.  This demonstrates to me that you have all along been involved in a self serving process of on going myth making in the Barthesian sense.  

Are you aware that the concept of ' Ìyá mi àjé' as a technical phrase by the indigenous learned Yorùbá community is not the same as 'àjé' as understood by Yorùbá common folks even within the same  synchronic time frame? Are you aware that one is a Christian Western inspired bastardization of an indigenous system they were desperate to supplant with their own negative version of witchcraft ( as it existed in their own society in the same way the Yorùbá concept of  Èsù was violently changed to the Western Biblical concept of Satan)) as part of the colonisation project?

When I stated that your comparison with the US Congress is far fetched you retort that you have been in conversations with Ògbóni members.  Only that you would not clearly include which Ògbóni member and from which Ìlédi as the Americans cited by Professor Akin Ògúndìran did.  This makes your claims suspect and demonstrates that you are the one being secretive to reinforce your prejudice and not the Ògbóni.

Thank you.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

I agree with many of OA’s criticisms here.

I didn’t know about “Ela Loro” and would appreciate other references to it.

 Comparison with the US Congress is really irrelevant and somewhat awkward. I agree with that, criticism, too.

Toyin Adepoju has to realize that knowledge and all its manifestations did not start with the West  nor does he constantly need the West for approval and validation. 

It is quite true that the  17th century that Eurocentrics stuff into their accounts of world history / the history of science is an exaggerated, arbitrary date, particularly as we know now that the so-called European enlightenment and after,  marked a descent into bigotry, racism and non-science. Tarikhu Farrah(2020) really does a great job on this  in his chapter on the Origins  of Modern  Race Theory  in the European enlightenment  ie 17th century. BTW  Chimakonam shocked me when on pages 7  and 8 of Ezumezu, he slipped into this kind of Eurocentric propaganda mode - but I soon realized that the rest of the work soared exceedingly high above it. (My 

 Choice review of the work was positive because of that realization). Getting out of the clutches of Eurocentric hyperboles, lies and deceit about the past is a tedious, lifelong project. 

But to get back to OA on TA’s work,  I was also unhappy about the term “folk”because it is laden with prejudice when used in reference to Africana Knowledge.  My suggestion is that TA should

quickly read Sefa Dei, Bewaji (Beauty and Culture),Feyerabend,  Chilisa etc. to decolonize perceptions and methodology.  

A Eurocentric genius is our nightmare -  but a decolonial/ decolonized genius would be a priceless gem.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2020 7:10 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies:Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Toyin Adepoju.

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

GE.

You are right about the duty that faces us as a life long project.  That is why Professor Wole Soyinka ( and Henry Louis Gates Jr) refer to this process as ' a process of uncovering' to recover the past.

What  the Yoruba Christian priesthood ( and their other Nigerian and African counterparts)have done as they stepped into the shoes of the departing colonial missionary priesthood after receiving their thirty silvers of shekels in form of their clerical pay is to continue their Judasaic demonisation of their own culture as work of the devil till today.

As a graduate of Cultural Studies this process of uncovering is what African Cultural Studies means to me.  Not the transplantation of Foucault onto African soil.

We invite Toyin Adepoju to John us in this noble work of uncovering of the past to recover the gems of African meanings twisted out of focus.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Great thanks to all respondents to my post.

Apologies for the late response.

Olayinka's  and Glorias's  commens are in italics. My responses are in conventional font :

Did you know that long before Isaac Newton stumbled on the idea of using mathematics to construct scientific cosmology Yoruba thought did the same through Ifá divinatory system? 

 So in relation to the Ifá system the Newtonian effort represents a refinement rather than a radical transformation and that is why your categorisation is not really clearcut in a definitive way.  

Are you aware of the centuries old dialogic Yoruba ' Socratic' system called Ęlå lòrò?

I’m puzzled. I thought scientific cosmology deals with the large scale physical properties that constitute the material cosmos, using instruments of precise quantitative measurement, generating results verifiable by anyone  using the same methods.

 

Does Ifa do that?

Ęlå lòrò”, which may be translated as “Ela, owner or embodiment of the Word or of discourse” may be related to the understanding  of Ela as a spiritual personality embodying the creative word through which the world came into being, as described in Rowland Abiodun’s “Visual and Verbal Metaphors in Yoruba Ritualistic  Art of Ori” and Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art and Susanne Wenger’s A Life with the Gods.

 

I would to learn of a Socratic use of the Ela concept, perhaps understood in a manner sharing similarities with what I know of it or completely different. 

Also your example of witchcraft demonstrates your ambivalence toward the subject which needs to be reconciled.  In one breath it is an example of superstitious beliefs and folk tales.  In another attitude to it ( by the West) marks a transformative process of self critical investigation.  This demonstrates to me that you have all along been involved in a self serving process of on going myth making in the Barthesian sense.  

As is evident from the linked Wikipedia essay on witchcraft, there is of course a world of difference between the current character of African witchcraft beliefs and those of the contemporary West.

 

The African situation is represented  by the demonization,  ostracism  and perhaps killing of children and old women, the most vulnerable members of society, on charges of being witches, the mode of identification being unverifiable  by any empirical means.

 

This is correlative with the even more horrific pre-modern European context, in which large numbers of women were executed  for being witches, again based on nebulous and ridiculous claims, a period known in Britain as the Witch Trials of the Early Modern Period, a highpoint from 1580 to 1630 … when an estimated 50,000" people were burned at the stake, , of which roughly 80% were women,and most often over the age ofg 40"according to the linked very rich Wikiedea article on the subject.

 

This barbarism was stopped in Great Britain by the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which "made it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. With this, the law abolished the hunting and executions of witches in Great Britain" as the linked Wikipedia article states.

After it was  repealed in 1951, Gerald Gardner in England initiated Wicca, also known as modern Pagan witchcraft, with its beliefs, ethics, practices, history and main figures clearly spelt out in published texts, written by witches and by non-witches, texts that have become an industry, allied also to vigorous scholarly discourse and  its academic representation. 

The difference is clear.

Are you aware that the concept of ' Ìyá mi àjé' as a technical phrase by the indigenous learned Yorùbá community is not the same as 'àjé' as understood by Yorùbá common folks even within the same  synchronic time frame? 

Are you aware that one is a Christian Western inspired bastardization of an indigenous system they were desperate to supplant with their own negative version of witchcraft ( as it existed in their own society in the same way the Yorùbá concept of  Èsù was violently changed to the Western Biblical concept of Satan)) as part of the colonisation project?

On the Iyami aje example, I wonder how you will substantiate  your argument.

Who composed those ese ifa, canonical texts of Yoruba spirituality, which depict aje as irrationally bloodthirsty creatures, feeding on human flesh, human internal organs and human life, as in when Orunmila gave then a lift in his stomach on the journey from orun, the world of ultimate origins  to Earth and they rewarded him by feeding on his intestines during the trip?

 

Who created the ese ifa that declare all women are aje and  Osun is aje ( Rowland Abiodun,  “Hidden Power: Osun, the Seventeenth Odu,” )  a honorific, since Osun is a most honoured  female orisa or deity and yet belpongs oinm the same artistic family as those ese ifa composers  composed ese ifa the majority of which project aje as irremediably destructive, irrationally bloodthirsty and evil?

 

Who composed the song of Gelede, another central Yoruba institution, that depicts Iya Nla, the mother of the aje, as killing her husband even as she pities him, with no account of why the poor man is being killed? (Drewal,  ''Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture'' or one of his articles on Gelede)?

 

The classical Yoruba construction of the feminine is paradoxical and contradictory.  Women were  understood  as particularly spiritually powerful  and thus played  a central role in strategic  social contexts but they were  also seen  as potentially particularly evil,  open to assuming the identities of the dreaded aje.

 

 

Practically all studies on the Yoruba construction of the feminine,  of written by  both men and women, Yoruba and non Yoruba,  African and non-African demonstrate this paradox-

 

Karin Barber, Oriki; Oyerunke Olajubu, Women in the Yorùbá Religious Sphere; Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle, etc

I’m trying to understand Teresa Washington’s Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature , and hopefully move on to her The Architects of Existence: Aje in Yoruba Cosmology, Ontology, and Orature.

 

My memory of  Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature  , emerging from her PhD at then University of Ife, is that she records much of horrible depictions of aje from Yoruba oral lore but rationalizes these horrors as exemplifying the creative role of aje in the cosmic order as agents of harsh justice, stories  I see as examples of sheer misogyny.
 

Why should the only Yoruba spirituality centered in human women be characterized by horrible, destructive characters whose bloodthirsty and irrational behavior people could try to rationalize?

 

Why is the creative feminine presence in ese ifa so muted?

 

Equating the aje with such potentially devastating but revered Hindu Goddesses as Kali, as could be done, is not sustainable bcs the Hindu tradition is one of the richest, if not the richest in the world,  in terms of Goddesses and the association of human women with sacred feminine power, both cosmic and expressed by various Goddesses, with even the characterizations of Kali in particular reaching a depth of characterization, conceptual range, scope of literary mythic representation, visual artistic depiction and philosophical interpretation that takes her into a different level from the iyami aje conception, a level that conception  could hopefully reach one day, after due refinement,  although women may have been more respected and valued in classical Yoruba culture than in Hindu culture of a comparable historical period.

When I stated that your comparison with the US Congress is far fetched you retort that you have been in conversations with Ògbóni members.  Only that you would not clearly include which Ògbóni member and from which Ìlédi as the Americans cited by Professor Akin Ògúndìran did.  This makes your claims suspect and demonstrates that you are the one being secretive to reinforce your prejudice and not the Ògbóni.

On the  US Congress you earlier argued that I an not an official Ogboni historian. I responded that I never made such a claim. So, what point are you making on this?

On naming Ogboni members I am in contact with, I am not presenting at this time any info i have got from them so i dont need to name them. 

When you refer to philosophy as being self critical many societies have been self critical for thousands of years.  Even Western philosophy that you implicitly lean on as a walking crutch has been self critical since the Classical period of Aristotelian times.  Your implied self critical period of the 17th century does not apply globally, is arbitrary and is only a convenient point for Western thought.

...

Toyin Adepoju has to realize that knowledge and all its manifestations did not start with the West  nor does he constantly need the West for approval and validation. 

 

It is quite true that the  17th century that Eurocentrics stuff into their accounts of world history / the history of science is an exaggerated, arbitrary date, particularly as we know now that the so-called European enlightenment and after,  marked a descent into bigotry, racism and non-science. Tarikhu Farrah(2020) really does a great job on this  in his chapter on the Origins  of Modern  Race Theory  in the European enlightenment  ie 17th century. BTW  Chimakonam shocked me when on pages 7  and 8 of Ezumezu, he slipped into this kind of Eurocentric propaganda mode - but I soon realized that the rest of the work soared exceedingly high above it. (My Choice review of the work was positive because of that realization). Getting out of the clutches of Eurocentric hyperboles, lies and deceit about the past is a tedious, lifelong project. 

I was also unhappy about the term “folk”because it is laden with prejudice when used in reference to Africana Knowledge.  My suggestion is that TA should quickly read Sefa Dei, Bewaji (Beauty and Culture),Feyerabend,  Chilisa etc. to decolonize perceptions and methodology.  

 

I discussed bodies of knowledge and disciplines, not societies. I referenced uncritical beliefs both in Africa and the West.

I used the emergence of modern science in the 17th century, exemplified by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler's transitions from theological cosmology and astrology, respectively, to modern science, beceause those examples are particularly striking as demonstrations of people who em,bodied two different epistemological and metaphysical cultures and were particularly strategic ion the development of one of those cultures into what is now known as modern scientific cosmology.

I am interested in other examples outside the West of such embodiment of contrary epistemes that have achieved at the fundamental levels of Newton and Kepler and thereby shaped science as strategically.

On the particularly strategic role of the 17th Century Scientific Revolution in the history of science, I am also interested in efforts to decentre the Scientific Revolution in the global history of science. 

I would be particularly interested in summations giving a description/s of a similar cluster of achievement in science represented by the achievements of the scope of that of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and others in the development of science and its global impact.

I would be particularly interested in reading summaries, with names and descriptions of their achievements and impact in their fields, rather than being directed to books which would take me more time to go through. 

In always happy for suggestions of  things to read or do but its much better when the validity of what drives those suggestions is proven.

Along similar lines, I would also be interested in efforts to decentre the nexus of Germany( Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger etc) Denmark   (Bohr) Frances ( the Curies etc) and Britain(  Eddington, Crick and Watson etc ) in the efflorescence of 20th century science that created relativity theory and quantum theory.

I would also be interested in efforts to decentre the role of Europe ( Tim Berner's Leet at CERN and the creation of http) and the US ( Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc) in the development of the ongoing Information Revolution.

I would also be interested in efforts to decentre Europe and the US in the development of rocketry and space travel after the early development of rocketry in China ( Germany and the V2 rocket, NASA and now Elon Musk and Space X).

Modern science and technology since the 17th century is a primarily Western achievement, even when, it has been fed by advances from other cultures, and as with the Information Age, by immigrants to the West. 

Any effort to retell this obvious narrative, in my view, needs to go beyond ethnic affiliation  to addressing concrete history.

Whatever limitations the West demonstrates does not obscure the fact that it has been the crucible for global direction in modern science. The challenge is to learn from this example and creatively adapt it, not to deny unassailable facts.

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

TA,

Please ignore my last comment.

This morning I looked at the rest of your 

discussion and concluded that I rushed

to judgement, because your follow-up

sentence stated that you are ready to

look at the books - and judging from

the number of books already

consulted it is really unfair for

anyone to suggest that you don’t 

read books. I have no right to assume

that you don’t want to read 

non-Eurocentric books either.

So accept my apology. 

Gloria Emeagwali 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 1, 2020, at 9:33 PM, Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com> wrote:



"I would be particularly interested in reading summaries, with names and descriptions 

of their achievements and impact in their fields, rather than being directed to books

 which would take me more time to go through. " Adepoju

So you are looking for a quick fix and  a short cut .But that's the problem with academics and  scholarship.

You have to do the spade work yourself and burn the candle, so to speak, especially if you want to get out of the eurocentric

trap that you are in with respect to the history of science. No. I  would not give you summaries. The journey begins

with you. I urge you to read Feyerabend's  "Against Method".It is a good place to start. I can even send you a copy. 

The Tyranny of science, Science in a Free Society and the Conquest of Abundance are his other  relevant works

but one step at a time.Feyerabend's mission is the demystification and   democratization of science; the restoration of local initiative 

and understanding; acknowledgement of the diversity and plurality of knowledge; and the recognition that

 science is not just one tradition. No need for me to give more references at this point. That is all that I would say for now.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration (Edison).

GE

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 7:09 PM Chika Okeke-Agulu <okeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On current Ogboni research, you might want to check the ongoing work of David T. Doris at Michigan. His Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (2011) compellingly challenged Robert Farris Thompson's dominant "cool" aesthetic that for decades served as the primary code for understanding Yoruba Aesthetic; and I suspect that his research on Ogboni, based on years of understudying leading members of the Ogboni Society--from the little I have seen--will vigorously trouble current scholarly on the subject.

Chika

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[Michael Afolayan]

"Please ignore my last comment. This morning I looked at the rest of your 

discussion and concluded that I rushed to judgement . . ." (GE)

Gloria:

Thanks for your humility. Rarely do folks in academia accept they are ever wrong. I would have called you, "Ìyá Onírèlè" but since you may not understand the meaning, let me just say "True Mother in Africa!"

Utmost respect,

MOA

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

Follow up 

 Toyin Adepoju,

 I want to add to the list of texts mentioned, Chimakonam's EZUMEZU. As I pointed out 

  in a Choice Review:

 Ezumezu, the philosophical system of ideas expounded, is aimed at decentering and replacing 

"the Aristotelian Greco-European logocentric view of reason" with a system of logic that is inspired by

 African ontological realities and dynamism, thus providing “a foundation for African philosophy.”

 The final chapter focuses on “epistemicide” and the destruction of African

 epistemologies as well as Christian missionary collaboration with the colonialists to achieve this end.

 The text shines a brilliant spotlight on African knowledge, philosophy, and

 intellectual endogeneity from one of Africa’s leading philosophers. (Modified Abstract)

But you have to decenter the eurocentric approach from various disciplines and perspectives

simultaneously. I appreciate the way Feyerabend does this from within the belly of the beast 

and  from within the history of science. That is why I make reference to his works.

George Sefa Dei does it from within Indigenous  Knowledge epistemology and  education, 

Bewaji from philosophy, Biko does it from criminology and law, Bangura from mathematics; Van Sertima, 

Molefi Asante,  Chilisa and Diop got us to rethink methodology;Joseph Inikori from economics.

George James in Stolen Legacy points to the real foundation of Greek philosophy.  It is a long list.

I have tried to do it from history and AIK along with several historians of Africa, none the least

Toyin Falola, our distinguished moderator.

The Western world did not singlehandedly build the modern technologies you cited and I shall 

certainly revisit that issue, so this  is not the last of my responses to your brilliant rejoinder.

 

Gloria Emeagwali

[Gloria Emeagwali]

Follow up 

  I want to add to the list of texts mentioned, Chimakonam's EZUMEZU. As I pointed out 

  in a Choice Review:

 Ezumezu, the philosophical system of ideas expounded, is aimed at decentering and replacing 

"the Aristotelian Greco-European logocentric view of reason" with a system of logic that is inspired by

 African ontological realities and dynamism, thus providing “a foundation for African philosophy.”

 The final chapter focuses on “epistemicide” and the destruction of African

 epistemologies as well as Christian missionary collaboration with the colonialists to achieve this end.

 The text shines a brilliant spotlight on African knowledge, philosophy, and

 intellectual endogeneity from one of Africa’s leading philosophers. (Modified Abstract)

But you have to decenter the eurocentric approach from various disciplines and perspectives

simultaneously. I appreciate the way Feyerabend does this from within the belly of the beast 

and  from within the history of science. That is why I make reference to his works.

George Sefa Dei does it from within Indigenous  Knowledge epistemology and  education, 

Bewaji from philosophy, Biko does it from criminology and law, Bangura from mathematics; Van Sertima, 

Molefi Asante,  Chilisa and Diop got us to rethink methodology;Joseph Inikori from economics.

George James in Stolen Legacy points to the real foundation of Greek philosophy.  It is a long list.

I have tried to do it from history and AIK along with several historians of Africa, none the least

Toyin Falola, our distinguished moderator.

The Western world did not singlehandedly build the modern technologies you cited and I shall 

certainly revisit that issue, so this  is not the last of my responses to your brilliant rejoinder.

 

Gloria Emeagwali

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Great thanks, Gloria,  for that fine list of texts and scholars, which I will visit, a summation vital as a reading list.

I am not arguing the Western world singlehandedly created the scientific and technological advances I highlight. They were fed from different cultural and geographical streams and even shaped, at times, by people from outside the West, as in immigrants to the 20th century US being crucial to shaping the Information Revolution and South African immigrant to the US Elon Musk building a  pioneering civilian rocket system.

 I understand the West, however,  to be the crucible for the 17th Century Scientific Revolution, the 19th century Industrial Revolution and the 20th century Information Revolution.

I am pleased to examine contrastive perspectives on this.

thanks

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Gloria.

Please dont feel bad about your earlier response. It was polite but firm as you thought was needed. It was bracing and actually inspiring bcs you stated the fact of scholarship. Creativity is fed by knowledge and knowledge is generated by investigation, of which reading is strategic. 

I have that Feyerabend text and will also address the others. 

Great thanks for the offer to send me Feyerabend, which I have, but any other book/s we agree on would also be welcome. One cant have too many books. 

Back to my comment on book recommendations.

What I was trying to state, which I might not have stated adequately perhaps bcs I did not edit my response carefully enough since I was anxious to dispatch it bcs  it had lain so long in my drafts box, is that-

I am happy to engage suggestions for reading but those suggestions need to be justified by the demonstration of a clear understanding of the rationale for making those suggestions.

In your previous response, you stated that I was over-privileging Western science and suggested reading particular scholars.

I responded by declaring that the centring of the West in the development of modern science is unassailable and I stated why. 

I would need to see some effort to demonstrate why you think my position is untenable before we move to the books you recommend, books from which I could draw conclusions different from yours.

The argument for the "democratization of science; the restoration of local initiative  and understanding; acknowledgement of the diversity and plurality of knowledge; and the recognition that  science is not just one tradition" as you state, is a vital one.

I would benefit from more exposure to texts exploring that perspective. 

At the moment, though, I have been exposed to such texts along such lines as   George Gheverghese Joseph's  The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics , Ron Eglash's African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, Aime Dafon Segla's  Yoruba Mathematics : Archeology and Anthropology of Knowledge in a Culture of Orality ( Segla is very important in this field and its intersection with Yoruba systems of thought generally. The book and  a no of his articles are in French but he has some publications in English, some free online. My blog on him, Aime Dafon Segla,  needs updating but its useful)  texts on Indian mathematics such as  the magnificent geometry of Sri Yantra, on the symbolism and application of which I have written severally, and  texts on on the intersection of cognitive traditions such as the Buddhist Net of Indra and fractal geometry, which gives its name to David Mumford et al's Indra's Pearl's :The Vision of Felix Klein, exploring Klein's  discovery  in mathematics of an  idea prefigured in Buddhist mythology, Laura Marks' Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, discussing structural parallels between Islamic geometry and new media art in the context of the influence of Islamic culture on Western culture, and correlations  between the mathematics of Islamic architecture and modern mathematics relatively recently foregrounded by Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt's" "Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval  Islamic Architecture", discussed for laypeople in such articles as Sebastian Prange's "The Tiles of Infinity" and Philip Ball's  "Islamic Tiles Reveal Sophisticated Maths : Muslim Artists Were 500 Years Ahead of Western Researchers" and  US scientists Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux' mathematical system of which they state in "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.'  

I detail convergences between their symbols and the Akan/Gyaman Adinkra in "Classical and Super Symmetric Adinkra : Visual Correlations".

Having noted the cultural and geographical diversity in the development of science, however, I wonder if it can be successfully contested   that science did not become a dominant force of society, and even more so with such world shaping impact, until the 17th century Scientific Revolution in Europe and the 19th century  Industrial Revolution, also in Europe, with further transformations emerging  with the Information Revolution crucibled  in the 20th century  US. 

I am happy to examine alternative histories of the development of science in terms of its globally transforming force represented by the emergence of  a critical mass within particular societies, but I am happier with anyone making such claims first presenting the argument themselves rather than directing me to books without developing such an argument, even if only in brief. 

If a significant case can be made for such an alternative history, then I would not need any persuasion to read the sources providing the knowledge justifying  such a history.

I presented and justified my perspective on the subject instead of simply invoking such texts in support of my position as   Frances Yates' Giodarno Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition which is foundational in making the case for the transition of epistemes   in the 17th century or Richard Westfall's and others' revisionary works on Newton, strategic for  Newton as exemplar of that transition, or Tian Yu Cao's preface and intro to his  Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories, drawing heavily from Yates' thesis  ( Cao is an Asian philosopher of science in the US who also has a book on the Chinese Model of Development, so he's likely to be in tune with the cross cultural issues in the development of knowledge).

thanks

toyin

 

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

toyin adepoju

i mostly agree w you, but would probably frame it slightly differently. to share, i have been reading work on physics for the past two years, most of which provide the broad overview of the development of physics leading to the key fields of relativity and quantum in the twentieth century. the most exciting, after hawking's groundbreaking Brief History, are books by rovelli [Rovelli, Carlo. 2014. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books.

--2017. Reality Is Not What It Seems. New York: Riverhead Books.], and then some vast overviews like Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps; some bracing philosophy of science, [Michael North, What Is the PResent] Richard Muller's The Physics of Time, and more, works by Sean Carroll (From Eternity to Here) and Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos).

the work of physics is astounding, and in the accounts, especially rovelli, that are most compelling, you see amazing stuff come from the greeks. Their heirs, especially after the romans, were stopped dead by the church for 1000 years, or more. When copernicus and then especially galileo got to start again, the work leading to what you outline, got serious...leading to newton. all these accounts trace how the Classic Physics got started, culminating in Newton, and then finally got supplanted by relativity and quantum with the work of great european scientists of the 19th and early 20th c.

after midcentury, germans and russians, working with english and danish physicists, gave us the heart of quantum, leading finally to more andmore work done in america, with oppenheimer, with einstein ane thorne and all the collaborators of their teams. great indian mathematicians, bose and chandrasekhar especially etc.

the teams became increasingly fed by asian scientists, as you note.

that last sentence is even truer of today. perhaps the majority of physics students in advanced universities are asian.

the notion that this science, and those who fed into it, are "western," never arises in any of the many books i read, where the authors are not interrested in proving any eurocentric claims. much of the great work of the mid twentieth century involved russians, who had to struggle against stalin; or americans, who had to struggle against the anti-commuinist mania of the cold war in the u.s. they killed off the work of oppenheimer, thanks to the insanity of the red scare. of course the play of the nazis was critical in the u.s. becoming the center after wwII.

i am writing this note only to suggest that it iis unprofitable to apply issues of contention with eurocentrism at every turn; and here in particular. the best of science and of human thought takes the work and ideas from any of the great minds that care to contribute; and resists ideological denigrations of categories of people; scorns racisms and -centrisms of any kind. the hell that stalin and hitler iinstalled was an obstacle, like that of the inquisiition, and the red scare was hardly any better, wiith teller undermining anyone he thought was leftist.

when i read these histories--as an africanist--i don't see the struggle of mid century physics in the cold war as involving "the west" as any kind of meaningful entity.  it's irrelevant, i should say.

once we dump it, we can proceed to brilliant work on ogboni thought without a need to see it as countering anything.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 12:27 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQFTw%2BMRNr38KJxMZgCK07zdYCo4Qpg2hNcJbQ5YBDhtA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Toyin,

You seem to have a fair amount of empirical sources, although I realize that you have not read much on ancient Egypt, if any. The Westcar papyrus and the Egyptian kherheb (lector priests and juju men) may have some direct relevance to Ogboni Studies. 

The only thing left is a “gestalt switch” with respect to methodology.

We can shout “mission accomplished “once you start seeing the vase and the trumpet blower in the image above😁.

BTW, James Watt’s steam engine, perhaps the most crucial device in the early phase of the British Industrial Revolution was a major beneficiary of capital from the “slave traders” David and Alexander Barclays. Any scholarly discussion of the cause  and context of the industrial revolution has to reflect on the external factors and not just internal factors (Williams/Rodney/Inikori).

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 12:27 PM

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

Great thanks, Gloria,  for that fine list of texts and scholars, which I will visit, a summation vital as a reading list.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQFTw%2BMRNr38KJxMZgCK07zdYCo4Qpg2hNcJbQ5YBDhtA%40mail.gmail.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Ken:

Let me add that as much as I support your view of the nationality spread and ideological diversity of the works leading to what is today's view of physics, they were all working on the continuum of western science from its Greco- Roman origins as Toyin Adepoju understands it..

I have read one or two of the view of physics as you outline in the past twenty years as I have once posted like Michio Kaku and the End of Science (Hogarth).  

I know that in fits and starts and with gaps the atomic theory is a reformulation of (Greek philosopher) Spinoza's theory of the monads.  I also know that it was because it was found unsatisfactory for 20th century questions  of mind and matter duality that theorists moved closer to that resolution in  the reformulation of quantum physics that took place.  Also in the 1000 years lacuna that was created by the ascendancy of Christian thought its creation  myth ( in Genesis) that supplanted Greco- Roman thought gave rise to the big bang theory of the cosmos with a stretching out of 7 days to 4 to 6 billion years with a mathematical remodeling and the knocking out of the idea of God to be replaced by gases that exploded into solar systems ( and I have taught American students the implications of these insights.)  

So those saying science is a religion that replaced traditional religion are in fact right as both are deliberate acts of myth making.  All that Steven Hawkins did was extemporate on the implications of this scientific myth making.

 In the final analysis it is refo

rmulation along the same trajectory  and tradition when theories with better explanatory force were invented and accepted.  These reformulations excluded sub- Saharan African ways of imagining what 'western science' explained in a particular mode.  And that is the crux of the matter.  A question of representation -whose representation and not who is doing the representation nor the geographical background of the person doing the representation ( be they Asians or Yoruba or Russian.)

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 02/07/2020 22:09 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde  Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

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toyin adepoju

i mostly agree w you, but would probably frame it slightly differently. to share, i have been reading work on physics for the past two years, most of which provide the broad overview of the development of physics leading to the key fields of relativity and quantum in the twentieth century. the most exciting, after hawking's groundbreaking Brief History, are books by rovelli [Rovelli, Carlo. 2014. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books.

--2017. Reality Is Not What It Seems. New York: Riverhead Books.], and then some vast overviews like Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps; some bracing philosophy of science, [Michael North, What Is the PResent] Richard Muller's The Physics of Time, and more, works by Sean Carroll (From Eternity to Here) and Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos).

the work of physics is astounding, and in the accounts, especially rovelli, that are most compelling, you see amazing stuff come from the greeks. Their heirs, especially after the romans, were stopped dead by the church for 1000 years, or more. When copernicus and then especially galileo got to start again, the work leading to what you outline, got serious...leading to newton. all these accounts trace how the Classic Physics got started, culminating in Newton, and then finally got supplanted by relativity and quantum with the work of great european scientists of the 19th and early 20th c.

after midcentury, germans and russians, working with english and danish physicists, gave us the heart of quantum, leading finally to more andmore work done in america, with oppenheimer, with einstein ane thorne and all the collaborators of their teams. great indian mathematicians, bose and chandrasekhar especially etc.

the teams became increasingly fed by asian scientists, as you note.

that last sentence is even truer of today. perhaps the majority of physics students in advanced universities are asian.

the notion that this science, and those who fed into it, are "western," never arises in any of the many books i read, where the authors are not interrested in proving any eurocentric claims. much of the great work of the mid twentieth century involved russians, who had to struggle against stalin; or americans, who had to struggle against the anti-commuinist mania of the cold war in the u.s. they killed off the work of oppenheimer, thanks to the insanity of the red scare. of course the play of the nazis was critical in the u.s. becoming the center after wwII.

i am writing this note only to suggest that it iis unprofitable to apply issues of contention with eurocentrism at every turn; and here in particular. the best of science and of human thought takes the work and ideas from any of the great minds that care to contribute; and resists ideological denigrations of categories of people; scorns racisms and -centrisms of any kind. the hell that stalin and hitler iinstalled was an obstacle, like that of the inquisiition, and the red scare was hardly any better, wiith teller undermining anyone he thought was leftist.

when i read these histories--as an africanist--i don't see the struggle of mid century physics in the cold war as involving "the west" as any kind of meaningful entity.  it's irrelevant, i should say.

once we dump it, we can proceed to brilliant work on ogboni thought without a need to see it as countering anything.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

dear olayinka

your use of the word myth is something i'd chew on.

myth as in--something like, horizon of expectations; limit of expectations, what heidegger called "world." the frame for an epistemology, right?

when people want to move away from spiritual realities as explanatory, they might say, mythus?

it's how we construct a world picture, right?

i don't think of the Big Bang as really being a transposition of judeo-christian creation myths. i've taught about a zillion african creation stories iin the past; and in many cases they evoke a portrait of spiritual/human worlds, how the interact and have come to be separated, etc etc. the same as in the gardenof eden story.

lots of resemblances in creation stories, in trickster stories, etc.

when hawking learned about how the radiation in the galaxies and so on were retreating, they had to account for it, and eventually came to a shift back due to gravity and black holes were postulated. big bang goes back to lemaitre; but black holes are the model for where things started.

the latest quantum stuff i saw suggests this process might have been occurring over and over, not just as a single occurrence.

in other words, i don't think hawking began w a judeo-christian mythos to get to black holes, and then to how the expanding universe, and its limits, were due to the Big Bang.

i do think that the world picture as grounded in science has become dominant, as althusser said. what is being taught in schools, everywhere? what science is being taught to kids. no one associates a world picture with calculus; they simply say, this is how you calculate the tangent of a line at a point, or the area under a curve. the kids who learn this could care less whether newton or leibnitz or anyone else invented it. they mostly try their best to get out of taking the math courses.

at least here they do!

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 8:04 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29823F8EE2700800D77364C2A66A0%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Addendum:

Now to Toyin Adepoju:

This completes my initial objection to your collage of theorizing ogboni/ Ifa and the Asian artistic infusion into the European super- collider project.  

There is a reason for the authorising of the Asian infusion contained in my response to Ama' s critique of Mamdani's style of engagement when I stated that the acceptance of people of Indian culture to contemporary  British high society is at odds with comparative acceptance of people of African descent because money talks (every disparate action is organically linked in an overarching bigger picture as Moses Ochonu recently suggested citing an epistemic theory supporting that view and that is why I am surprised by what I called the disciplinary narcissism involved in his view of fictional narratives in an interview as I demonstrate in the link between Prof Soyinka's artistic creativity and social activism below.)

The decision to include Asian world view into contemporary scientific myth making is not unconnected with the pisition of Indians at the commanding heights if British Economy as represented by the Mittal brothers and another Indian in the top ten British billionaires.  It is true there are sculptural  portraits made by Africans such as Yinka Sonibare in the centre of town they do not attract the same type of mytho- poetic significance as that which you referenced in the super collider project.

Let us imagine that Dangote invests 5 billion dollars of his fortune in the UK in a project (s) at the commanding heights of British economy with a second home in the country you will see how the image of the African will be radically transformed in the British Isles and African myths will be worked into British myth making.

This was the direction in which Aare Abiola was inching his way ( remember he described his electoral win as the 25 year strategy of a long distance runner) with his several homes in the UK before the Nigerian Northern Oligarchy's agents in the army assassinated him for his electoral decision to end their strangle hold on the Nigerian economy in addition to their decision to install a northern Abiola ( Dangote) in his stead.  So the creation of the Northern Abiola is yet incomplete without the international profile.  That is just having similar amounts of money is not what makes people similar but the totality of how such funds are deployed.  This is the aspect of African life that is lacking in British high society today that is necessary for a change in the way people of African descent are perceived and treated ( This is why the UK does not need more wage earner  immigrants but wealthy successful businessmen with legitimate funds- what late Premier Margaret Thatcher in a coded phrase referred to as immigrants putting their best foot forward.)

This emergent  Abiola persona in the UK was the reason the leadership of Prof Soyinka provided by his creative artist genius opened gates for him in the British Parliament where his incessant visits prevailed on parliamentarians to convince Her Majesty as head of the British Commonwealth  to read the riot act on the impostor and Northern Oligarchy military frontman Ibrahim Babangida, thus changing the course of Nigerian history forever.. So this contradicts Ochonu's view on the relevance of fictional writing in a country like Nigeria.

For one the Indian mythological infusion you reference in your essay  seems asymmetrical because of incongruity of the myths involved and will take decades before it is admitted into global scientific academy ( if it is admitted at all)  the juxtaposition of animism suggested in your own  ( Ifa/ Ogboni) formulation will further compound the problem in a western trajectory trying to distance itself from such antecedents onto  a secular welthanchauung ( the same reason the infusion of the sculpted Asian world view you reference will prove problematic in the long run.)

This is why I have argued in the past for the recognition of a multiverse  ( and a substitution of multiversities in Mamdani's paper on the African University based on the cogent idea of plurality raised,) rather than a problematic fusion of western thought and its others into a specious universalism. 

 The world will have to broaden adapt and adopt globally the kernel of thought embedded in the separate but equal philosophy embedded in the Black Civil Rights campaign in the United States which created adequate space for Black Americans, and  apply this to the global diverse epistemologies.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com>

Date: 03/07/2020 01:26 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies:Babatunde   Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

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Ken:

Let me add that as much as I support your view of the nationality spread and ideological diversity of the works leading to what is today's view of physics, they were all working on the continuum of western science from its Greco- Roman origins as Toyin Adepoju understands it..

I have read one or two of the view of physics as you outline in the past twenty years as I have once posted like Michio Kaku and the End of Science (Hogarth).  

I know that in fits and starts and with gaps the atomic theory is a reformulation of (Greek philosopher) Spinoza's theory of the monads.  I also know that it was because it was found unsatisfactory for 20th century questions  of mind and matter duality that theorists moved closer to that resolution in  the reformulation of quantum physics that took place.  Also in the 1000 years lacuna that was created by the ascendancy of Christian thought its creation  myth ( in Genesis) that supplanted Greco- Roman thought gave rise to the big bang theory of the cosmos with a stretching out of 7 days to 4 to 6 billion years with a mathematical remodeling and the knocking out of the idea of God to be replaced by gases that exploded into solar systems ( and I have taught American students the implications of these insights.)  

So those saying science is a religion that replaced traditional religion are in fact right as both are deliberate acts of myth making.  All that Steven Hawkins did was extemporate on the implications of this scientific myth making.

 In the final analysis it is refo

rmulation along the same trajectory  and tradition when theories with better explanatory force were invented and accepted.  These reformulations excluded sub- Saharan African ways of imagining what 'western science' explained in a particular mode.  And that is the crux of the matter.  A question of representation -whose representation and not who is doing the representation nor the geographical background of the person doing the representation ( be they Asians or Yoruba or Russian.)

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Harrow, Kenneth" <har...@msu.edu>

Date: 02/07/2020 22:09 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde  Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (har...@msu.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

toyin adepoju

i mostly agree w you, but would probably frame it slightly differently. to share, i have been reading work on physics for the past two years, most of which provide the broad overview of the development of physics leading to the key fields of relativity and quantum in the twentieth century. the most exciting, after hawking's groundbreaking Brief History, are books by rovelli [Rovelli, Carlo. 2014. The Order of Time. New York: Riverhead Books.

--2017. Reality Is Not What It Seems. New York: Riverhead Books.], and then some vast overviews like Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps; some bracing philosophy of science, [Michael North, What Is the PResent] Richard Muller's The Physics of Time, and more, works by Sean Carroll (From Eternity to Here) and Brian Greene (The Fabric of the Cosmos).

the work of physics is astounding, and in the accounts, especially rovelli, that are most compelling, you see amazing stuff come from the greeks. Their heirs, especially after the romans, were stopped dead by the church for 1000 years, or more. When copernicus and then especially galileo got to start again, the work leading to what you outline, got serious...leading to newton. all these accounts trace how the Classic Physics got started, culminating in Newton, and then finally got supplanted by relativity and quantum with the work of great european scientists of the 19th and early 20th c.

after midcentury, germans and russians, working with english and danish physicists, gave us the heart of quantum, leading finally to more andmore work done in america, with oppenheimer, with einstein ane thorne and all the collaborators of their teams. great indian mathematicians, bose and chandrasekhar especially etc.

the teams became increasingly fed by asian scientists, as you note.

that last sentence is even truer of today. perhaps the majority of physics students in advanced universities are asian.

the notion that this science, and those who fed into it, are "western," never arises in any of the many books i read, where the authors are not interrested in proving any eurocentric claims. much of the great work of the mid twentieth century involved russians, who had to struggle against stalin; or americans, who had to struggle against the anti-commuinist mania of the cold war in the u.s. they killed off the work of oppenheimer, thanks to the insanity of the red scare. of course the play of the nazis was critical in the u.s. becoming the center after wwII.

i am writing this note only to suggest that it iis unprofitable to apply issues of contention with eurocentrism at every turn; and here in particular. the best of science and of human thought takes the work and ideas from any of the great minds that care to contribute; and resists ideological denigrations of categories of people; scorns racisms and -centrisms of any kind. the hell that stalin and hitler iinstalled was an obstacle, like that of the inquisiition, and the red scare was hardly any better, wiith teller undermining anyone he thought was leftist.

when i read these histories--as an africanist--i don't see the struggle of mid century physics in the cold war as involving "the west" as any kind of meaningful entity.  it's irrelevant, i should say.

once we dump it, we can proceed to brilliant work on ogboni thought without a need to see it as countering anything.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

A response to the previous comments before the latest by Olayinka and Ken.

Great thanks, my people.

Gloria, my ancient Egyptian is limited to my exposure through the astonishing scope and creativity demonstrated by the integration of ancient Egyptian myth and ritual into Western esotericism, a synthesis introduced to me by Israel Regardie's The Tree of Life A Study in Magic, with this integration reaching its height in Regardie's edited The Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the most influential works in Western esotericism, a book that rivals such texts as the Bible and the Upanishads and outdoes them by describing contemplative and ritual techniques for reaching the spiritual realities they celebrate, while the others largely limit themselves to the poetic celebrations.

One needs to go to the ancient Egyptian sources, of course, to experience the originating inspiration for oneself.

I shall check out the  Westcar papyrus and the Egyptian kherheb.

I would like to better appreciate your views on methodology. 

Western civilization as it exists today is not adequately understandable without its feeding by slavery and colonialism, so I'm not privileging the West as composed of exceptional humans who achieved purely through their own native powers.

We need to ask ourselves, though, how people from one part of the world were able to dominate others, an answer to which question  might lead back to faster development of mechanized weapons such as the machine gun, and further back, to the invention of the printing press, enabling faster and broader dissemination of knowledge, and social developments that facilitated such inventions.

Thanks, Ken. May we achieve brilliant work on  Ogboni work as you hope. This group has contributed a lot to my work on Ogboni through these debates. I shall be linking them in my compilations of the work as central aspects of the project.

It was the challenge from Olayinka and another group member to one of my posts that ignited the project in the first place, something I conceived in a one line statement about ten years ago and did not pursue, only for it to grow in the background as its current emergence under that stimulus seems to suggest.

I will read Rovelli since you recommend him so highly.

True, unnecessarily invoking race conflict is unhelpful. When relevant, though,  one could profitably  engage  the sociology,  politics and economics of science, particularly in its intersections with the complexities of relative influence between cognitive traditions, thereby examining such live issues as  the developments of science in relation to gender, class and race- the place of women and minorities in science across cultures, the growing visibility of women in science in the West as contrasted with earlier centuries, the rising ascendancy of Asians, the place of African and Native-Americans in global impact science, of various peoples within their own continents, the educational, economic, family and larger social systems that influence all these configurations, are central to the complete picture.

The best we can do perhaps, as you suggest, is to invoke these when necessary, and focus on science ideas and work  alone when necessary.

It is in the context of relative influence between cognitive traditions  that I appreciate this point by Olayinka:

"In the final analysis, it is reformulation along the same trajectory  and tradition when theories with better explanatory force were invented and accepted.  These reformulations excluded sub- Saharan African ways of imagining what 'western science' explained in a particular mode.  And that is the crux of the matter.  A question of representation -whose representation and not who is doing the representation nor the geographical background of the person doing the representation ( be they Asians or Yoruba or Russian.)"

although the person doing the representation is vital bcs they could favour  frames of thought privileged within cultures they are familiar with.

Thus, it may be argued, as Olayinka has stated, that the Big Bang theory is a reformulation of the big bang of Genesis, although one must also note that that was not the only theory in contention, the other, the Steady State theory, describing a cosmos that did not begin at any particular point in time, was a rival, with the name Big Bang actually coined by a critic of the theory, Fred Hoyle, who supported the Steady State theory. 

Physics luminary Roger Penrose' relatively recent cyclical universe theory, however, was centuries ago prefigured in Asian cosmology, although I dont know if the older, mythic version influenced him.

I wonder if large scale scientific concepts, such as that of energy, do not resonate with ideas from different non-scientific contexts, as with ase of the Yoruba.

To what degree is it true that  'These reformulations excluded sub- Saharan African ways of imagining'?

How different from these African ways were the scientific models that became dominant?

thanks

toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29823F8EE2700800D77364C2A66A0%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

A superb piece Olayinka, even though I dont agree with all of it.

Can you clarify this- emphases mine-

"This is why I have argued in the past for the recognition of a multiverse  ( and a substitution of multiversities in Mamdani's paper on the African University based on the cogent idea of plurality raised,) rather than a problematic fusion of western thought and its others into a specious universalism.

 The world will have to broaden adapt and adopt globally the kernel of thought embedded in the separate but equal philosophy embedded in the Black Civil Rights campaign in the United States which created adequate space for Black Americans, and  apply this to the global diverse epistemologies.''

I love this- 

'That is just having similar amounts of money is not what makes people similar but the totality of how such funds are deployed.'

Interesting-

'This is the aspect of African life that is lacking in British high society today that is necessary for a change in the way people of African descent are perceived and treated ( This is why the UK does not need more wage earner  immigrants but wealthy successful businessmen with legitimate funds- what late Premier Margaret Thatcher in a coded phrase referred to as immigrants putting their best foot forward.)'

How true is this?-

'The decision to include Asian world view into contemporary scientific myth making is not unconnected with the position of Indians at the commanding heights of British Economy as represented by the Mittal brothers and another Indian in the top ten British billionaires.'

I have doubts about that.   It could be partly true, but i wonder if its influence is so great. 

If you are referencing the presence at CERN of the Shiva statue, that motif was decisively developed by US scientist Fritjof Capra in his The Tao of Physics, partly inspired, as he stated, by a vision he had under the influence of a mind altering plant, if I recall correctly, and fed by his knowledge of physics and his reading in Asian cosmologies.

Well before then and after, Asian philosophies and spiritualities have had a powerful influence in the West well before the 20th century and the blossoming of Asian economic presence in Britain, if I get the timeline of British timeline right, influence generated through  such foundational texts as Max Muller's translations of Asian classics,the work of such Traditionalist scholars as Ananda Coomaraswamy, the influence of Theosophy, which is inspired significantly by Asian spiritualities, along with a good no of very influential Western writers on Asian thought, such as Paul Brunton on Hinduism and Allan Watts on Zen, all these influences leading to the development of a counter culture in the West, fed by massive impact migrations of Buddhist and Hindu gurus to the US in particular, setting up ashrams, universities, publishing houses, generating a massive book and artifact industry-ritual tools and art etc- books written by themselves and by others about them, with very rich academic studies in many universities Europe and North America, , along with the influence of yoga and the martial arts, which even though deeply spiritual, can be practiced without reference to their spiritual orientations and have become part of Western culture, with such a Sanskrit term as the Indian cosmological concept  'karma' becoming part of the English language.

In sum, Asian philosophies and spiritualites both provided a  spiritual counterweight to Christianity, in facilitating individuality and self effort in contrast to group religion and are  easily adaptable to secular world views.

I wonder to what degree African origin spiritual and general self development  systems have reached this level of  elaboration and diversity of expression.

I can easily reference  lines/episodes  from the Upanishads-the meeting between Death and Nachiketas, the Gita-Arjuna and Krishna at the battle of Kurukshetra and the expression 'I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds' quoted by physicist Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb detonation-- motifs from Buddhism- the adepts of Shambalah -  that many people across the world, who are neither Indian, Hindu or Buddhist will be acquainted with, on account of both the inspirational power of these lines and their spread through ancient texts as well as reference great works of art from Buddhism- the image of the Buddha in contemplation has become part of the global imagination-  whose motifs are globally ubiquitous. 

The most powerful texts  I know of from the Yoruba origin Ifa- 'The Importance of Ori', 'Eshu, God of Fate',  'Ayajo Asuwada' from the work of Akinsola Akowowo, from Yoruba spirituality generally- as by Soyinka-the magnificent ritual scene in Death and the Kings Horseman, the poem at the conclusion of Credo  of Being and Nothingness, the best short summation of Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology known to me,  later published as The Seven Signposts of Existence, Myth, Literature and the African World and from African spiritualities, both classical and in modern expressions- 'An Igbo Diviner Invokes Truth Before Consulting his Bones' trans by Romanus Egudu ,   and Armah's Healers from Akan thought-the discussion between Densu and Damfo; and the companions of these verbal texts in classical and modern African art, from Ogboni edan to the art of Owusu-Ankomah, dont yet have such global resonance.

That is the kind of vision I aspire to contribute to with African spiritualities generally and African esoteric systems particularly,  expansion of understanding and appreciation through conceptual  elucidation and diversity of application. 

These are not visions one pursues in the name of being assured of the outcome. There are too many factors in play. You simply do your best and let it fly. I doubt if Capra anticipated the Indian govt would donate the Shiva statues to CERN, but Hindus are very proud of their culture  and its highlighting  by Capra and  others took their notice and years after these works were published, the Indian govt  donated the statue to CERN.

How true is this-

"For one the Indian mythological infusion you reference in your essay  seems asymmetrical because of incongruity of the myths involved and will take decades before it is admitted into global scientific academy ( if it is admitted at all)  the juxtaposition of animism suggested in your own  ( Ifa/ Ogboni) formulation will further compound the problem in a western trajectory trying to distance itself from such antecedents onto  a secular welthanchauung ( the same reason the infusion of the sculpted Asian world view you reference will prove problematic in the long run.)"

  I have addressed the Indian/Ifa/Ogboni conjunction in the essay within the discussions we had about it.

  In writing on the subject, I'm simply doing what I enjoy on a  subject I think needs to be better appreciated. If anyone or any govt takes it up and chooses to donate a sculpture of the Ogboni cosmogram,  as I describe that Ogboni symbol cluster, to CERN or another scientific institution, clarifying its interpretive possibilities  in relation to science, as I have presented them in those essays, that would be wonderful. If not, I would have done my part like others also have.

How true is it, though, that mainstream Western thought seeks to distance itself from animism in the progression into secularism?

The picture might be more complex than that.

I was struck on reading about environmental ethics, perhaps sin the Oxford handbook of Environmental Ethics, that scientists are reference their understanding of the environment in a terms that suggest animism, if I recall clearly, as  i discussed it in my essay on African environmental ethics in the Palgrave Handook of African Social Ethics edited by Nimi Wariboko and Toyin Falola.


Who killed Abiola?

IBB anulled the election Abiola is described as winning. He protested and was imprisoned by Abacha who supplanted the govt that replaced IBB. His wife Kudirat was assassinated by Abacha in the course of her campaigning for her husband's rights.

Abiola was in a meeting with US reps, including Susan Rice, African-American US Secretary of state, who, as the story goes, handed him a glass of water or some liquid, upon drinking which liquid he developed incessant running stomach and died shortly thereafter. Nigerian docs were not allowed to be part of the medical team that examined him.

Abacha died mysteriously about the same time. How he died remains even more mysterious that that of Abiola. There are vague stories about poisoning by Asian prostitutes. 

With the deaths of those two mean, the tension that had engulfed the country with Abacha's brutally pursued  ambition to become a civilian  ruler, the sole candidate of all political parties, who had all fallen into line in fear for their lives,  and with the split between Abiola loyalists and former loyalists and those who had been neither, and between those Yoruba who saw their son being cheated, such  organisations  as NADECO which had been fighting for justice, dissipated.

Who did the killings and thereby orchestrated that outcome?

Or were these deaths accidental?

thanks

Toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/AM5PR04MB297870070DAAB17C2FEB03BAA66A0%40AM5PR04MB2978.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

this is in response to toyin's comments on the following points:

"In the final analysis, it is reformulation along the same trajectory  and tradition when theories with better explanatory force were invented and accepted.  These reformulations excluded sub- Saharan African ways of imagining what 'western science' explained in a particular mode.  And that is the crux of the matter.  A question of representation -whose representation and not who is doing the representation nor the geographical background of the person doing the representation ( be they Asians or Yoruba or Russian.)"

although the person doing the representation is vital bcs they could favour  frames of thought privileged within cultures they are familiar with.

Thus, it may be argued, as Olayinka has stated, that the Big Bang theory is a reformulation of the big bang of Genesis, although one must also note that that was not the only theory in contention, the other, the Steady State theory, describing a cosmos that did not begin at any particular point in time, was a rival, with the name Big Bang actually coined by a critic of the theory, Fred Hoyle, who supported the Steady State theory. 

Physics luminary Roger Penrose' relatively recent cyclical universe theory, however, was centuries ago prefigured in Asian cosmology, although I dont know if the older, mythic version influenced him.

Here is my response. i don't see what representation has to do with it. an electron goes around a nucleus. you try to figure out what forces are in play. why bring in representation or culture or any of that? you have instruments with which to observe the electron, nd most of what i've seen that matters is the mathematical models that need working out. the idea of a quantum level and of the probabilities of the electron's location, force, were worked out mathematically, not through some mythic model.

nobody was asking, what is the religious or cultural idea at play here.

and when they finally got the whole thing of quantum worked out, some of the scientists vaguely said they believed in some higher god, and others said they didn't. nobody really evoked a theology, not even lemaitre, a priest, a modest admirable person, who first evoked the big bang.

my sense from the readings i've done is that hoyle's steady state has long since been supplanted by big bang. or maybe many big bangs, an idea perhaps impossible to prove, but which i like anyway. the latest reference to penrose you gave astounded me since i associate him with two generations back of scientists, yet his is alive and wrote a book i probably need to read on time (my favorite topic), which i certainly won't be able to understand because of dense math.

i've gone through a good number of quantum scientists' books and philosophers of science, and some of them make their points using a good amount of math, explaining how it substantiates their claims. i can't for the life of me see anything in those formulations that they use to prove this or that point with eastern or any other theology, much less cultural cosmology. for instance, they tried to make ether explain how light, or anything, travels through the universe. then along came michaelson-morley and showed how ether couldn't explain the bending of light; and einstein published the paper in 1905 that put ether to rest.

why talk about anything besides how the scientists approached this enormous question, and came to be convinced ether doesn't exist?

what i admire about the science that developed since then, and how it works nowadays, is how open it is: prove your claim, show your equations, challenge the readers to come up with a better explanation: show it, give the evidence of the observations, and then the math that explains it. not easy to do. but open. and with speculations that are often nothing short of astounding.

ken

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Sent: Friday, July 3, 2020 7:55 AM

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTQ3f_uO1sCzpXT6KcMhkwJUMwb-EWh4hvJJEmyj8p4mQw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

great thanks, Ken.

im still digesting your salutary emphasis on empiricism in studying the history of science and its intersection with its surrounding culture.

i should be able to have something more to add after adequately digesting your words.

thanks to you and others for your contributions to this exploration of ogboni and its implications.

toyin

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

An article on religion and science that I wrote

in 2015, makes reference to the Egyptian Kherheb 

https://books.google.com/books?id=AfHqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=religion+and+african+gloria+emeagwali&source=bl&ots=QB40I918OT&sig=ACfU3U0z6Sm1PsNegixQ7tuBJn_2Ew9dTw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkub6yl7bqAhVYlXIEHRjDBB8Q6AEwA3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=religion%20and%20african%20gloria%20emeagwali&f=false

I have one more to locate.

Professor Gloria Emeagwali 

Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU

africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 4:54 AM

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

great thanks, Ken.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

nice article, gloria. it poses one or two questions in my thinking.

first, although the beliefs you cite were widely held in a culture, i would be interested in just how widely held, and what replaced them. and why.

the reason is that there are two things going on: what were the prevalent beliefs, call them dominant, and why they were dominant, or retained their dominance. and how and where and when they were challenged. i am thinking -- in fictional terms here--of how, let's call it modernity cracks so much of traditional ways of thinking. but even before the entry of the foreign values, how achebe went out of his to way to point out how so many of the igbo practices were challenging by open thinkers, obviously those set in contrast to okonkwo.

that part humanized the community, in achebe's thinking. e.g.throwing away twins, or the sacrifice of the boy. all that challenged by characters with whom the reader was more inclined to sympathize. that knd of challenge is pushed still further in arrow of god, and even , or especially, in no longer at ease where caste values are put down.

the other question i had was over this distinction between science and religion, a distinction that i would attribute to the englightenment period in europe, around 17-18th c.

again mudimbe is good for the question of disciplines and their discourses, what drives them, how they shift. and foucault was central to this particular question in The Order ofThings, when science came to dominate over religion. 17th c. he saw thiis riise of disciplinarity, the rise of the panopticon as discipline in the worst sense. we impose those terms on african thought where the division was not truly meaningful. but that must have changed as people would have challenged spiritual explanations, sooner or later.

if you do the magic, and nothing happens; you do the sacrifice, and nothing helps. some people will begin to challenge the beliefs. others will rationalize. but humans won't all take it the same way.

and of course, if you were galileo, who had trouble keeping his mouth shut, you might get in trouble.

i liked the broad listing you had across so much of the continent. i was thinking of how much of the arab texts were translations from the greek, how without the arabs we'd have almost nothing of greek texts, including their sciences too.

for greeks, what i know of it, for presocratics etc., no real line between religion and science, i think. their views of the universe were varied, but all were consistent with some kind of religious epistemology.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 9:28 AM
To: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>; usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/MN2PR01MB556829CF18810679FE74605FDE680%40MN2PR01MB5568.prod.exchangelabs.com.

[Harrow, Kenneth]

before the romans, before the persian wars, greece was spread across the aegean. i never think of it as simple on the western side of the sea. miletus and at one point more cities and buildings and archeological ruins on the eastern side.

of course i know about Black Athena, all the conflict over that issue. when i taught greek art, esp sculpture, i began with the egyptian statues that the greeks imitated.

gloria, i don't follow originary thought a lot. i'm happier recognizing the influences on the greeks, and before them on east mediterraneans, cretans and egyptians etc.

but as i learned about their thought, it became apparent to me that if you want to study some moment in history, you have to see what was there before; and there was always a before for everyone, egyptians no less than greeks.

the rovelli texts i recommended include his focus on a few thinkers like anaximander and others whose speculations on ontology were really exciting....until the christian church put a stop to cosmological speculation. a crime against humanity, i would say.

we are all in this together--in my world view. and i hope we can all benefit from our collective knowledge.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 12:56 PM
To: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Well before Christianity and Islam  went on ite colonizing mission, these views were pretty widespread. Intellectual historians of the respective regions have approached this issue.

On another point,  the Arabs are credited with translating Greek works and that is true but let us not forget that the Greeks got a lot of their ideas from Northeast Africa  as well as West Asia, in the first place. The Arabs were translating some of the ideas of African and Arab  pioneers in the field that the Greeks adopted and adapted, in the first place.That is not to say that the Greeks

 contributed nothing new. I believe their work on Optics would be among the latter but in the field of medicine, mathematics and engineering etc

less so. In other words stating that the Arabs translated Greek texts is half of the story.

Indeed, the  Ionians were the main Greeks reflecting on science about 600BCE incorporating ideas first formulated two millennia earlier in some cases.They were located in Miletus and surrounding areas on the peninsula in modern Turkish terrain. Theorists such as Thales may  have been of part Phoenician (Lebanese)

ancestry too. Their constant references and citations of northeast Africans must also be noted. They were not ungrateful - unlike some of their western contemporary commentators.

Check the work of the Athenian scholars of two hundred years later around 400BC and you see the frequent references as well.

Recall that The European Enlightenment 

was also a period of vitriolic racism and

 genocide and quite unenlightened and barbaric.

........................

Reference

Religion and Science(Emeagwali, 2015)

https://books.google.com/books?id=AfHqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=religion+and+african+gloria+emeagwali&source=bl&ots=QB40I918OT&sig=ACfU3U0z6Sm1PsNegixQ7tuBJn_2Ew9dTw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkub6yl7bqAhVYlXIEHRjDBB8Q6AEwA3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=religion%20and%20african%20gloria%20emeagwali&f=false

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 11:57 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB245698DEDE08E4B757408BACDA680%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Well before Christianity and Islam  went on ite colonizing mission, these views were pretty widespread. Intellectual historians of the respective regions have approached this issue.

On another point,  the Arabs are credited with translating Greek works and that is true but let us not forget that the Greeks got a lot of their ideas from Northeast Africa  as well as West Asia, in the first place. The Arabs were translating some of the ideas of African and Arab  pioneers in the field that the Greeks adopted and adapted, in the first place.That is not to say that the Greeks

 contributed nothing new. I believe their work on Optics would be among the latter but in the field of medicine, mathematics and engineering etc

less so. In other words stating that the Arabs translated Greek texts is half of the story.

Indeed, the  Ionians were the main Greeks reflecting on science about 600BCE incorporating ideas first formulated two millennia earlier in some cases.They were located in Miletus and surrounding areas on the peninsula in modern Turkish terrain. Theorists such as Thales may  have been of part Phoenician (Lebanese)

ancestry too. Their constant references and citations of northeast Africans must also be noted. They were not ungrateful - unlike some of their western contemporary commentators.

Check the work of the Athenian scholars of two hundred years later around 400BC and you see the frequent references as well.

Recall that The European Enlightenment 

was also a period of vitriolic racism and

 genocide and quite unenlightened and barbaric.

........................

Reference

Religion and Science(Emeagwali, 2015)

https://books.google.com/books?id=AfHqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=religion+and+african+gloria+emeagwali&source=bl&ots=QB40I918OT&sig=ACfU3U0z6Sm1PsNegixQ7tuBJn_2Ew9dTw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkub6yl7bqAhVYlXIEHRjDBB8Q6AEwA3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=religion%20and%20african%20gloria%20emeagwali&f=false

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 11:57 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

Please be cautious: **External Email**

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM5PR12MB245698DEDE08E4B757408BACDA680%40DM5PR12MB2456.namprd12.prod.outlook.com.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Ken,

I think it boils down to one’s professional 

calling. If you are a historian,  “originaries” fall within your portfolio even back to the emergence of Homo sapiens about three hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts- at least in theory

I have to say though that you certainly hold your own on the history of physics and a lot of other historical  issues and your input  deeply appreciated.

GE

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

---

From: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 5, 2020 2:07 PM
To: Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu>; usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Ken.  

You misconstrue my point.  A narrative predated Hawkuns intervention. It was a staple called the Big Bang   As a physicist he had no choice except he could suggest an alternative.  The idea of radiation retreatibg had to be explained in relation to the scientific zeitgeist and thats all he did.

You dont have to be a genius to see the parallel in Genesis account of creation with the spirit of God traversing the void and then seeing that the spirit of God was actually the gases which ignited at a point to form our universe and to add the revelations of advances in telescopes to come to the conclusion this ' God' was creating other universes.

I used myth to suggest speculations by scientists until proven. Hypothesis if you like.  Like the age of the Big Bang and our universe.  I was not implying kindergarten mathematics in any of these.  These are complex stuff.

The Big Bang is the Genesis creation story writ large in the age of science complete the sequential evolution replacing the daily piecemeal creation of beings by God.  Period.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies:Babatunde   Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

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dear olayinka

your use of the word myth is something i'd chew on.

myth as in--something like, horizon of expectations; limit of expectations, what heidegger called "world." the frame for an epistemology, right?

when people want to move away from spiritual realities as explanatory, they might say, mythus?

it's how we construct a world picture, right?

i don't think of the Big Bang as really being a transposition of judeo-christian creation myths. i've taught about a zillion african creation stories iin the past; and in many cases they evoke a portrait of spiritual/human worlds, how the interact and have come to be separated, etc etc. the same as in the gardenof eden story.

lots of resemblances in creation stories, in trickster stories, etc.

when hawking learned about how the radiation in the galaxies and so on were retreating, they had to account for it, and eventually came to a shift back due to gravity and black holes were postulated. big bang goes back to lemaitre; but black holes are the model for where things started.

the latest quantum stuff i saw suggests this process might have been occurring over and over, not just as a single occurrence.

in other words, i don't think hawking began w a judeo-christian mythos to get to black holes, and then to how the expanding universe, and its limits, were due to the Big Bang.

i do think that the world picture as grounded in science has become dominant, as althusser said. what is being taught in schools, everywhere? what science is being taught to kids. no one associates a world picture with calculus; they simply say, this is how you calculate the tangent of a line at a point, or the area under a curve. the kids who learn this could care less whether newton or leibnitz or anyone else invented it. they mostly try their best to get out of taking the math courses.

at least here they do!

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

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Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 8:04 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Classics in Ogboni Studies :Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni

 

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

hi olayinka

i see your point,and am comfortable with the idea of a hypothesis etc.

but in reading the old testament account of creation, there is no hypothesis to be tested. if you want to see it as an account of the Big Bang, you can do so. another reader, say me, might not read the words in the same way; and no hypothesis could be tested in comparing our readings.

our readings, what i am calling readings, are like the commentaries onn the original texts, be they biblical or muslim or whatever. the commentaries are where the religions really are put together, iin my opinion, which the original texts are mostly springboards.

whether they served to frame the scientists' hypotheses or not is not evident to me. i can see the parallel you suggest, but i believe thoseopening lines of genesis could be read in many ways....

and are better read without the distortions of king james' s translations either.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

 

                     

      

   Reverberations from the Mystic Art of                                         Shurel Reynolds

                               Dancer and Scientist

                           

      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                          Compcros

                                                        Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

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

         

Abstract How can dance and science, particularly computer programming and software development, be synchronized?

Shurel Reynolds demonstrates an answer to this question, through her magnificent dances as she describes their intersection with her work as a computer programmer and software developer, a synthesis pursued through the matrix of her native Caribbean knowledge systems and artistic culture from which her dances and creative sensibility emerge.

                     

Shurel Reynolds is dancer extraordinaire, software developer and choreographer, her dance a dynamic display of amazing art, a projection of physical imagination unifying body and mind.

Ablaze with creative powers evoking a ritual essence, suggesting a deep personal and spiritual history flowing from a link with archetypal roots.

Image Above

“[At the beginning of time] When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” Job.35: 7. The Holy Bible. King James Version.

How may the ritualistic vibrance of this art, its combination of the sacred and the athletic, be adequately understood?

                                         

Hear her: “Brought up by my grandmother, a woman steeped in time past and time present at the convergence of dimensions, I became connected to the intersections of worlds.

Through dance, I travel between these zones. The dance is prayer. My dances are based on the Caribbean ritual dance Bele in which there is the appearance, the greeting to the four corners and the living and the dead, the introduction to infinity and then the end.”

This matrix of possibility, this dynamic blend of of spiritual drive and physical expression, is even more striking in being integrated in a person at the cutting edged of modern technology, a trained and certified software developer fluent in a number of European languages through her educational and professional journeys beyond her Caribbean home, yet embodying the island complex's ancient and archetypal cultures, cultural embodiment and technological creative in one.

Image Above The middle picture shows Reynolds in a Caribbean performance art known as Jabjab, which she so describes: “In Jabjab we use things which are fundamental to our existence, things of economic value.

Over the past 400yrs, it was mud or clay which was used to build houses. Then lastly it was tar. Some use paint. We also use glitter to symbolize sand and mirrors. These varied things are used to cover the body.

In the image, I am using glitter dust and plastic. I was on a frozen pond, demonstrating the character of Jabjab as being about fearlessness.

Plastic suffocates and yet insulates, suggesting both death and nurturing, complementary contraries of life and its transformative character evoking the spiritual roots of Jab.

I also have a tube in my mouth which provides the air that I breath yet it may also be a source of death, as shown by its being coiled around my neck, and like a good jab-referencing the dancer, myself, the instruments of dance and the dance- I pull at it.

Using the European landscape and its material culture I thereby transpose Jab from its Caribbean origins to Europe.”

“Where things for me meet is in abstraction” she states. “In computer programming,” she continues, “to understand complexities you must first abstract. It is the bringing together of symbolism from my culture which create an artistic abstraction. In our way of life in the Caribbean, they are all one. Sciences, law, everything, has one source of knowledge.”

In thought and action she is daughter of Ile, Earth, in Ile’s identity as all men and all women, as Íyá Nlá, great, venerable female, in her form as Olókun Sèniade, of whom Babatunde Lawal writes:

“To the coastal Yorùbá , the movement of the sea is a reverberation of the drumming, dancing and feasting going on in the rambling palace of Íyá Nlá at the bottom. Hence, the popular saying: Gbogbo ìlù ní mbẹ l’ókun, Olókun Sèniade Àjífilùpe Ọba Omi (All kinds of drumming occur beneath the sea, Olókun Sèniade, The one who wakes up to the rhythm of drums, lord of the waters).

As the Mother of All, she receives and entertains visitors, all day, all night-the òriṣà, spirits of the newly dead, spirits of plants and animals, souls of thousands of children waiting to be born into the earth, souls of “returning” Àbíkú [ children believed to die prematurely and are reborn to continue the cycle) all flock around her as she dances through her huge reception hall dressed in immaculate white cloth and decked in white coral beads, welcoming one group after another.
As Asimi Ọlatunji-Onígèlèdé of Ìmèkọ puts it, ‘Íyá Nlá likes music and dance so much that she can celebrate for weeks without caring for food’ ( The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. 74).”

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__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

 

                   

    

  Mathematician and Artist Evelyne Huet

                     Essences, Expressions, Unity

                                                

                       

      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                       Compcros

                                          Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

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

Abstract

An introduction to the creativity and vision of artist and mathematician Evelyne Huet in her quest for essences of existence and their varied but ultimately correlative expressions.

How can a person be both a professional mathematician, teaching in one of the world's oldest, most prestigious and most influential universities, the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, and be an artist of marked originality, her work gaining acclaim in various parts of the world?

After the demonstration of the unity of knowledge by ancient civilizations, as in the achievements of the Pythagoreans, of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece and the mathematicisation of reality represented by the Yoruba origin Ifa system, the arts and the sciences have too often been seen as representing different skill sets, even different mentalities, sharply divergent ways of approaching the world and of developing human potential.

With exceptions exemplified particularly powerfully by the European renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, combining the visual imagination of art with the supposedly more ratiocinative, step by step thinking of the sciences was seen as an anomaly.

But Evelyne Huet exists to prove that something has been missing in this style of understanding reality and human creative possibility.

Image Above

This image juxtaposes the exquisitely visaged Evelyne Huet alongside one of her visualizations of the rhythms that constitute the human person and human possibility, alive with patterns of line, flows and intensities of colour, shapes and luminosities of heart, passion and action.

The contemporary Ghanaian visual and performance artist and Efa cosmologist Nyornuwofia Agorsor is an artist of mathematics, a person whose art uncovers the evocative force of mathematical symbols, their visual inspiration, unifying this with a cosmology in which mathematics becomes a springboard to cosmic voyaging in imagination and understanding, as demonstrated by her Cosmos series of paintings on Facebook.

Evelyne Huet, though a professional mathematician, operating at high levels of the global activity of the discipline, does not explicitly demonstrate her mathematical orientation in her visual art.

What she does is take us into the imaginative universe she sees as underlying mathematics and the physical, mental, social and historical universes.

Her perception operates through an imaginative eye empowered by a visual intelligence.

This imagistic awareness is actualised in spatial configurations and colour harmonies, a world of patterns, of dynamic essences, in which the present and the past are perceived in terms of forms neither definite nor ungraspable, historical but beyond history, religious and mythic and yet touching humanity in all particulars.

"What lies beyond your face?" her art asks.

"What pulses within your body?" it questions.

The rhythms of care for fellow humans, of dehumanization of human by human, of hate and courage, of love and pain, reverberate through her cycle of works, ranging deep into African and Western history to the present.

"African Queens", "Myth and Religion", "The Humans", "The Fighting", "Insanity", "Bloodshed", the titles of some of the groups of her paintings, give an idea of the scope of her scouring, of her excavation, through visual forms, of the depths and range of human possibility, the landscape generated by her digital art.