Toyin Falola's "Ritual Archives" A Remarkable Work on Sacred Spaces and Sacred Action, Introduced by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                        

                                       A Remarkable Work on Sacred Spaces and Sacred Action 

                  Toyin Falola's "Ritual Archives" A Remarkable Work on Sacred Spaces and Sacred Action

                                              Introduced by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

This is the best essay known to me by the polymathic writer and scholar Toyin Falola, judging particularly from my reading of two of his most significant essay collections, The Toyin Falola Reader and In Praise of Greatness:  A Poetics of African Adulation. My exposure to Falola’s work, however, is only to a small, but possibly representative fraction of his productivity, and his publications in various genres continue to grow speedily.

What makes “Ritual Archives’’ so impressive in the oeuvre of such an omnivorous scholar and writer?

In that essay the imaginative Falola of his poetry and autobiographies is perfectly meshed with the intellectual Falola of his scholarly writings, a synthesis bringing alive his amazing sensitivity to the sacred, a projection equalled only by his accounts of his mentor Iya Lekuleja in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth, two of his most powerful books, demonstrating the imaginative storyteller and compelling historian in action.

‘’Ritual Archives’’ belongs with the constellation of great essays inimitably portraying African philosophical and spiritual thought, from writings by Wole Soyinka to Mazisi Kunene to Amadou Hampate Ba, works demonstrating African aspirational genius reaching towards ultimate possibilities. “Ritual Archives’’, however, like some of those essays, goes beyond the African context in its extrapolative or evocative value.

 

Falola’s insights resonate profoundly with sacred space and sacred action in any context, temporal, geographical or cultural, ideationally and imaginatively actualizing the compelling force of the human encounter with the sacred.

The essay is being shared as an open access text with the permission of the author. Another version with illustrations chosen by me along with commentary will follow.  My earlier published essay on “Ritual Archives’’ is “Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African ‘Ritual Archives’: Disciplinary Formations in African Thought”.

academia.edu ( pdf)