In Search of the Children of Ọmọlúàbí: Yorùbá as Way of Life Rather than as Ethnic Identity: Reading Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yorùbá: A New History 1: The Preface and the Introduction

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                                                                                                    

                                                                               

                                                                      In Search of the Children of Ọmọlúàbí

                                                         Yorùbá   as Way of Life Rather than as Ethnic Identity

                                                          Reading Akinwumi Ogundiran's  The Yorùbá  : A New History 

                                                                                              1

                                                                         The Preface and the Introduction

                                                                              Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                        Compcros

                                                      Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                             “Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”

 

Between 300 BC and AD 300, as Ogundiran describes the process, groups of people found their way out of the  Niger-Benue Confluence, migrating many miles to where they are today. One of those groups has come to be known as the Yorùbá.

Over centuries of inter-marriage  between these various groups emerging from a common originary location, what came to define this particular group, enabling people to recognize in it a shared identity?

What does it mean to be Yorùbá?

Akinwumi Ogundiran seems to be arguing that being Yorùbá is more a way of life than a biological identity,  devoting his book The Yorùbá: A New History ( 2020) to proving this unusual point. 

Rather than the conventional emphasis on biological kinship,  he seems to be arguing   for the manner in which people interpret experiences and participate in shared values within particular geographical contexts as the primary marker of shared identity in this context:

I demonstrate that individuals and social groups became Yorùbá through learning...creating and participating in emergent knowledge production, communicative interactions, and regional social networks ...

...

[ These are forms of ] self-consciousness and interconnectedness that constitute our subject’s sociological and historical reality and whose geographical boundaries can be reconstructed from about AD 500 to 1840.

...

[They are ] values, knowledge, and practices... constitutive of the Yorùbá [ and ] recalibrated at different points in time as a result of the shifting spheres of regional interactions, transformations in political economies, and environmental changes (9-10).

He describes this  shared interpretive context as a ''community of practice,'' a term adapted from Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave's Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) and Wenger's Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998)  a concept  which Ogundiran  describes as ''consistent with my field evidence and the subject’s conceptual category'' ( 9), in other words, with what he has learnt from Yorùbá people he has interacted with.

He elaborates:

The “community of practice” concept allows me to make sense of the fluidity, permeability, and networked relations that defined the experience of ancestral Yorùbá in a broad regional context. 

This community was a multitiered, boundary-shifting constellation. It included networks of peoples and institutions across multiple polities and speech communities who subscribed to a common set of epistemologies and ontologies—knowledge systems, myths, reservoirs of symbols, cosmologies, and ideologies of social order through deep-time learning, socialization, and interactions. 

The ancestral Yorùbá who created, lived, and imagined this community did so through engagement in mutually reinforcing relationships within and outside the Yorùbá language continuum ( 9) .

He expresses his vision compellingly:

The deep-time history of the Yorùbá   is the subject of this book. It is an account of (1) the experiences and events that shaped the long-term history of the ancestral Yorùbá people; (2) the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions; and (3) the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840 ( xiii).

What method/s does he use?

The first chapter lays out the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological frame-works that shape the themes and contents of the volume.

I make the case why it is necessary to bring empirical, comparative, and theoretical-minded habits to the study of Yorùbá history (xiii).

How does he apply these techniques?

This book is a product of methodological pluralism and transdisciplinary interests in which I mesh multi-sited archaeological and material science data sets with oral traditions, objects and iconography, mythologies, his-torical ethnography, festivals, and several aspects of embodied practices, including bodily movements and language sources.

....juxtaposing, blending, integrating, disaggregating, and aggregating different knowledge systems, each of which requires different skill sets. Literacy and education in the subject’s language, cultural idioms, epistemology, ontology, and axiology are as important as literacy in archaeological stratigraphy, artifact interpretation, and material science ( 17).

What is the relationship between material objects and history in the Yorùbá story as told by Ogundiran:

I have privileged the material aspects of social relations in the stories that I tell in this book. 

I do so because materiality takes us to the intimate spaces and deep recesses where the experience of time and culture formation were negotiated and produced by people, communities, institutions, and polities. 

For example, I show that glass beads, as epistemic objects, hold the key to understanding the formation of a pan-regional Yorùbá community of practice between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

 Likewise, I argue that we cannot fully understand how the Yorùbá became entangled in the Atlantic commercial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without paying attention to the role of tobacco and cowrie shells. 

These are the linchpins for the taste, pleasure, addiction, and aspiration that facilitated the entanglement. These commodities were, therefore, constitutive of the experience of early modernity in the Yorùbá world. The everyday relationship between people and things (materiality) enables me to explore new questions and themes that link individuals and communities to one another and to broad historical processes. The attentiveness to materiality provides useful insights into the intimate processes by which culture is made, tradition is invented, and society is born (23-4).

 

Thus, adapting  ''ideas and methods from almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences...history meets anthropology, material science engages mythology, pottery and poetry are reconciled in their historical contexts, and everyday philosophies and language are in conversation'' (24-5).

These strategies are employed in relation to a critical imagination,  because ''Writing about the past requires some creativity in interpreting the information derived from our multifaceted sources. The imagination that we deploy is shaped by the kinds of questions we seek to answer and the story we want to tell ( 25).

What is the outcome of this effort?

Based on new questions, evidence, and conceptual frameworks, this book offers the opportunity to rethink Yorùbá history in new ways. In the following pages, I emphasize the cultural-historical approach in order to understand the “ways of being” of the Yorùbá as historical subjects (ontology); their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology); and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology) that they created at different historical junctures. 

With these, I account for the cultural forms, practices, events, and ideas, as well as mentalities, imaginations, and meanings that constituted the Yorùbá experience for about two thousand years ( xiii).

 

How does Ogundiran see these values that defined the people known as Yorùbá?

In chapter 2, I provide a sketch of the historical groundwork that laid the foundation for the emergence of the Yorùbá world ca. 300 BC–AD 500. I also use a suite of archaeological, historical, and linguistic data to shed light on the four core principles that shaped the Yorùbá cultural identity in the second half of the first millennium AD. 

The first is the ilé (House), the building block of their sociopolitical organization. 

The second, the  dyadic oba/ìlú-aládé(divine kingship/urban), served as the model of political culture and ideology of governance. 

The third is the complementarity of gendered duality as the epistemological framework for constructing and imagining social order. 

And the fourth centers on the search for meaningful living through the quest for immortality. 

In chapter 3, I examine how these four principles and the knowledge capital associated with primary glass production and a universal cosmology/theogony were deployed to create the consciousness of a regional Yorùbá community of practice between the eleventh and the late fourteenth century (xiii-xiv).

What scope of experience does the book cover beyond the foundations of the community it discusses?

It explores war, economics, inter-continental slavery, politics and the interweaving of these social processes  in terms of  “interlocking threads of the political, economic, social, ideological, and intellectual innovations that wove the Yorùbá world into the web of the early modern economy,’’(xiv) summarizing its scope in a timeline on page 7.

The work concludes, in the  final chapter, in an  examination of '' the implications of comparative and deep-time approaches to Yorùbá history and summarize [s] the major trends, events, eventfulness, practices, meanings, and experiences that anchored this two-thousand-year history.'' (xv)

What is the communicative reach, the interpretive scope, of this initiative?

 All histories are patently particular and local, including those often presented as global or world history. In this regard, this book is no different. It is a regional history of the Yorùbá before 1840. Even so, I have paid close attention to the global and regional interactions that framed the actions of local actors who created their own theory of knowledge and defined it as their universal. In so doing, I draw attention to how the ancestral Yorùbá experiences were constitutive of global, transcontinental, and subcontinental histories, and vice versa. (xv).

I find these ideas exciting on account of their focus on what Ogundiran describes in his introduction as hermeneutics (14-15), the theory and practice of interpretation, ranging from interpreting lived experience to interpreting human constructs as part of lived experience. 

Ogundiran describes his project as operating at the intersection of critical hermeneutics, demonstrated by "representations, conceptualization, and symbolic constitution of experience'' and ''political economy,'' relating to the patterns demonstrated by varied access to resources, intangible and tangible.

Hermeneutics was developed in the history of Biblical interpretation, particularly in Europe,  and consummated in European philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and particular Hans Gadamer  who built upon those foundations while expanding them into other kinds of texts, centred in the understanding of all experience as objects of interpretation as well as constructors of interpretations.

Ogundiran's work is centred on helping Yorùbá thinkers speak for themselves as demonstrated in the development of their understanding of their society's experiences.

He describes himself as writing a ''regional history that is grounded in Yorùbá theories of knowledge, ways of being, logics of value, experience of time, and history of practice.''

He justifies this aspiration memorably:

[My] holistic approach to oral traditions made it possible to explore how ideas and meanings shaped Yorùbá history; how these changed over time and why; and how different layers of ideas and meanings influenced social memory and the creation of oral archives. 

This engagement with people’s intellectual lives and knowledge has enabled me to place my subjects at the center of their history; use their language as the basis of disclosing their history; and use their discursive forms, metaphors, logics, and sensibility as the groundwork for understanding their past.

 More important, this approach has offered the opportunity to apply some of the tenets of conceptual history to Yorùbá studies, whereby the transformations in the meaning of paradigmatic concepts and value systems, especially relating to gender, personhood, self-realization, and power, are explored and used to explain the Yorùbá experience of time (20).

The intertwining of Yorùbá and Western cultural history is so deep, however,  that even in pursuing these goals, Ogundiran  is compelled to engage them through a marriage of Yorùbá and Western cognitive systems, thereby achieving a clarity, interpretive depth, synoptic scope  and communicative range he is not likely to have achieved through a dependence on only one of these cognitive systems.

The Yorùbá  thinkers who created these conceptual systems are no longer known, but their influence persists, and it is this influence Ogundiran is inspired to explore, an influence he is determined to demonstrate as transcending the limitations of biology to shape understandings of existence as a whole as grasped through encounters within a moving spatio-temporal frame.

The exploration of this influence is engaged with by emphasizing  the human beings whose responses to experience constitute human  history, a focus involving both obvious and reconstructed information from the past : 

Whenever possible, I have used certain individuals and materials as the springboard for my narratives and structural analysis of events, actions, thoughts, and practices. The names of many historical actors are preserved in the oral traditions and documentary sources. 

In other sources, especially in archaeological sites, we come across the remains of individuals whose names we do not know.

 I have taken the liberty of giving these individuals nicknames—first, to acknowledge their personhood as social beings whose actions and thoughts contributed to the making of Yorùbá history, and second, to realize my preference for the narrative style in some sections of the book (25).

The study of this influence is also centred in engagement with contemporary individuals ''whose everyday living and mentality are rooted in indigenous epistemology... an idea and a practice...a social product that is learned...a cumulative living tradition that changes, with additions and subtractions, from time to time...'' 

'[These people are ] ''priests and priestesses, chieftains of Yorùbá political and social institutions, diviners, and members of the different schools of Òrìsà thought...''

[They are] ''Yorùbá intellectuals, cutting across several socioeconomic spectra and power relations, from whom I have garnered the verbal, performative, and visual representations that underpin this study [often through] long-term relationships'' [ developed through physical engagement and virtual interaction, the virtual having become central to the Òrìsà community] (21-22).

Why is this focus on hermeneutics important?

It is vital because it highlights  those being discussed as creative responders to the necessities represented by human beings finding themselves in the world, on a road whose beginning and whose end is unknown, a road Ogundiran argues the style of thought known as Yorùbá interprets  in terms of ideas that give meaning to this road, enabling the nature of the journey to be surmised and the ultimate destination projected, even if not definitively known.

Ogundiran's mapping of this scope of reflection is particularly powerful:

 

An experience, even when perceived and received differently by diverse agents in the same community of practice, must be translated into a mutually intelligible system of meanings.

This communicative interaction is central to the coherence, resilience, self-organizing, and continuity of any community. 

Experience is more than what happened, what is conscious, or what is in the discursive realm.

It is also the anticipated, the conscious and unconscious, the discursive and nondiscursive; the feelings, fears, sentiments, concerns, and aspirations; the consideration of what is possible and impossible; the explanation and theorization of the known and unknown; the rumor, perception of reality, and intellectual disposition of the time. 

All of these facets of experience—mentality—make people think and act in particular and similar ways, irrespective of the differences in their material relations, and cause them to relate to the world and others in profoundly consequential ways. 

Experience defines imaginaries that may become codified as mythologies, ritual performances, and iconographic representations, among others. 

They not only make what is seemingly unreal (to the contemporary outsider) believable but also turn the thoughts of men and women toward actualizing or preventing them.

This translation of experience generates what Manfred Frank calls the “semantic foundation of any consciousness”—meaning, significance, and intention.

 Therefore, the experience of time generates its own transcripts and historical sources, which, in the case of the Yorùbá, include myths, objects, language, performances, and iconographies. 

The uniqueness of these transcripts and their value in understanding the past have served as the basis of the clamor for a decolonized African historiography.

 Thus, Bassey Andah, in his critique of the encumbrance of Western social science on African historical study, charged the students of African cultural history to “descend into the burrows of Africa’s invisible silent times, persons, peoples, places and things, the ritual ground where one can truly examine African relationships with history in all its textual manifestation[s] and strive for control of the text of our experience” ( “Prologue.” In Cultural Resource Management: An African Dimension, edited by B. W. Andah, 2–8. Ibadan: Wisdom, 1990.)

 He insisted that the focus of such study must be about “the daily activities, . . . social life and institutions, and . . . scientific and literary explorations” of ancestral Africans. 

I share Bassey Andah’s conviction that this is the only pathway for identifying what he variously called “an inside history,” an “authentic cultural history,” and an “authentic African biography” where an African can discover his or her “true historical self” ( “Studying African Societies in Cultural Context.” In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings, edited by P. Schmidt and Thomas Peterson, 149–81. 1995. 180).

 This book is a response to his clarion call and those of like minds. 

I am not preoccupied with what we ought to be doing to write an inside, authentic history of Africa, as many critics of African historiography have advocated. Rather, I have set out to implement this agenda for the study of Yorùbá history. I should clarify, though, that I interpret Andah’s “authentic African cultural history” as a history that is compatible with the transcripts of the Yorùbá experience in all of its epistemological, ontological, and axiological ramifications (16-17).

 

Ogundiran's framing resonates with previous work on Yorùbá thought on space/house/home, represented by ilé, on gender polarities as ultimate unities defining the foundations of human terrestrial existence and even of metaphysical values, of the quest for immortality in the midst of mortality and studies in relationships between Yorùbá   kingship and  Yorùbá communities.

The closest approximation to this cluster of ideas in Yorùbá thought as known me is the philosophy of the Yorùbá origin Ògbóni  esoteric order, particularly as mediated by the work of Babatunde Lawal, in consonance with that of Rowland Abiodun, two of the most trenchant thinkers on  Yorùbá thought in its multiple convergences.

Ogundiran's book may thus be understood as an effort to rethink classical  Yorùbá thought in dialogue with broader contexts. 

He uses this synthesis in explaining Yorùbá history as a progression of thought and action, of history as an epistemic process. 

The preface and introduction  present him as demonstrating this process as one  in which the total complex of cultural, economic and general social and political activity constitute a dialogue between a community of actors and their spatio-temporal contexts, a dialogue speaking to its originating situations and beyond, for humanity in general, on account of the convergences that define humanity. 

The work is directed at exploring the ''local contexts that shaped Yorùbá experience in the long term and gave it its unique qualities as an integral part of global history'' within a cross-cultural context (5).

It  ''delineates the major historical threads that linked the different parts of the Yorùbá world together as an epistemic unit and that linked them to other cultural and epistemic zones and communities of practice at the subcontinental and transcontinental levels (e.g., Western Sudan and the Atlantic world) at different junctures of time'' (11).

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Toyin,

Those of us who study the Hausa/ Hausaphone world have always used the analytic of "becoming Hausa" to understand the process of the emergence of Hausa ethnic identity and the expansion of its cosmopolitan tentacles beyond Hausaland. It is gratifying to see from your analysis that Ogundiran applies that analytical bromide to the Yoruba. This, as far as I know, is a radical intervention in the historiography of the Yoruba, since most scholarly and popular commentaries on the Yoruba people are steeped in the narrative of "being Yoruba" rather than "becoming Yoruba." As we know, there is a significant analytical and conceptual distinction between "being" and "becoming." I'll order Ogundiran's excellent book.

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