Toyin Falola and the Assembly of Drums: An Ecosystemic Matrix between Scholarly Individuality and the Collective: The TOFAC Legacy
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Toyin Falola and the Assemby of Drums
An Ecosystemic Matrix between Scholarly Individuality and the Collective
The TOFAC Legacy
"Everyone and his own" is an Igbo greeting Chinua Achebe describes as indicating the universal and yet individualistic enablement of ike, energy, a life force akin to the Yoruba ase, also understood to empower all forms of being in unique ways.
Toyin Falola's scholarly enablement network provides a similar creative framework for Africa centred scholars in a broad span of disciplines-publication platforms from listserves to journals, books and conferences, through which an increasing number of scholars may seek self actualization.
The Adinkra symbol Kuntunkantan, above, from the Akan and Gyaman of Ghana, composed of circles projecting both individual poise and conjunctive rhythm, suggests for me, this globally impactful strategy, a research and publication network all the more effective in its informal character and organic growth from an individual's initiative, operating outside an overarching institutional context.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Abstract
This essay reflects on the author's transformative experience at the 14th Toyin
Falola Conference (TOFAC), held at Osun State University, Osogbo, from July 1-3,
2025, in relation to the intellectual significance of Toyin Falola
in whose honour the conference was held.
Through personal observation and analysis, the author explores the remarkable phenomenon of a conference series dedicated to honouring one scholar for fourteen consecutive years.
The essay examines Toyin Falola's unique position in Africana academia, characterized not merely by his prolific scholarship but by his unprecedented commitment to elevating other scholars and creatives, creating a vast intellectual ecosystem that nurtures and legitimizes diverse voices.
The essay argues that Falola's legacy transcends traditional scholarly metrics, representing instead a revolutionary approach to academic community-building that challenges individualistic paradigms in academia.
Through his extensive publication networks, collaborative book series, celebration of fellow scholars, and mentorship activities, Falola embodies an ecosystemic approach to knowledge production that prioritizes collective advancement over individual acclaim.
This essay was refined with the help of various AI software. The penultimate draft was also submitted to the AI platforms for improvement, but the changes suggested by DeepSeek and ChatGPT achieve a level of distinctiveness leading me to decide to publish them as stand alone pieces which better facilitate appreciation of the ideas being projected than if they are used simply as editorial guides.
All pictures are by me except the image of Kuntunkantan.
Entry into TOFAC
I was privileged to attend the 14th Toyin Falola Conference ( TOFAC) at the Osun State University in Osogbo from the 1st to the 3rd of July 2025, incidentally catalyzing profound creative growth in my life through the opportunity the experience gave me to visit Osogbo and its Osun forest, a long yearned for destination, an axis of my spiritual and philosophical life which I had long hungered to encounter again after more than twenty years since my last time there.
Proverb Metaphors
"The elephant, the water gathering in the holes created by whose footprints other animals drink from".
"The mighty hubbub of Nkandla, massive rocks under which elephants take shelter when the heavens frown".
"The house of a great man is known by the fact that whatever kind of drum you beat there, there will be someone to dance to it".
These are Urhobo, Zulu and possibly Yoruba, praise expressions I have had to apply to Toyin Falola, the scholar, writer and academic organiser whom the TOFAC conferences honour.
Apexical Celebrations, Galvanizing Questions
I have delayed writing this response to the conference partly because I wondered if my approach would not be overly adulatory.
The conference compelled me to reflect deeply on an extraordinary phenomenon. I was so moved by what I am still gaining from that conference and what I know others have gained that I have had to ask myself "what factors determine a person having a conference held in their honour- not just once but as an ongoing series now in its fourteenth year?"
"What drives dedicated scholars to expend their time and energy organizing such gatherings, in various universities in diverse African regions and what sustains this commitment across more than a decade and ongoing?"
"Could it be the person's gargantuan academic and writerly contributions, which Falola's productivity clearly demonstrates?"
"Why such dedicated commitment in the name of one person, which I observed first hand from the magnificent work of the 2018 TOFAC at the University of Ibadan by Adesina Afolayan, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and others, to the various officers in action at this year's TOFAC?"
"Why did I choose to not only attend but significantly cover this year's TOFAC through pictures and video, productions I shall be sharing once I have completed other pressing responsibilities?"
"Who is Falola to me, to those people organising the TOFAC conferences and those attending?"
"What is Falola's impact on various scholars across the world, particularly in Africa and the West?"
Toyin Falola and other dignitaries arrive at the venue of the opening ceremony of TOFAC 2025.
The manner in which Falola, centre front, in white, and the manner the Yoruba traditional ruler on his right, HRM Oba Professor Adekunle Oyedeji II, the Ebu of Iba, in particular, are dressed, suggests the grandeur of the occassion as both a cultural and an academic event, in which the conference theme-"African Cultural Creativity and Innovations" was dramatized in the scholarly discourses at the conference as well as in artistic demonstrations, from the magnificent Yoruba culture of dress, to poetry, dance and dramatic performance.
In Yoruba culture, dress demonstrates deep symbolic significance, and Falola, as the person being celebrated, and the traditional ruler, whose office is necessarily projected through an elaborate satorial culture, exemplify particular sensitivity to its evocative range.
Falola's Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies discusses, among other aspects of Yoruba civilization, Yoruba culture of clothing, in the context of the author as a bearer of that culture.
The Forest of Becoming
Toyin Falola is an ecosystem, a forest of enablement, a spirit passing through fecund earth, a breath causing plants to spring from soil, tender creativities in danger of not emerging or of delayed recognition if not for that creative, enabling impulse.
Is there any other scholar or writer who has expended so much effort in promoting other scholars and creatives?
The first conference and book on the magnificent theologian, philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko, the first book on the profound artist Victor Ekpuk, the first book on the artist and scholar Dele Jegede, the first book on the scholar and media writer Farooq Kperoqi, the first book, forthcoming, on the Ifa priest and writer Yemi Elebuibon, books on the cultural scholar Isaac Delano, the educationist Afolayan, books on Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Anikulapo Ransome Kuti, on Ogbu Kalu, and more scholars and creatives I don't recall or don't even know about within the gargantuan sweep of Falola's creativity, books organised by Falola as co-written texts or collaborations with various scholars to sole written works by himself, books constituting critical assessments or selections highlighting a scholar's work, all being demonstrations of Falola's relentless publication discipline, his creatively manic devotion to the culture of textualisation, his totalistic embodiment of the necessity of writing, of record keeping, of knowledgegizing, of distilling understanding from the universe of experience and preserving such treasures of mentation in texts, particularly books, bulwarks against the erasures of time, against the fleetingness of memory, the cry of the African Intelligence against the distortions, the negations, the near wiping out of centuries of creative achievement by colonising powers, all because Africans outside Egypt and perhaps some other peoples did not develop widespread writing before the colonial encounters.
Falola's celebration of fellow creatives in African Studies is a cry against centuries of inadequacy, an almost desperate determination to reshape the landscape of African discourse, in such a way that, along with the explorations of other bodies of knowledge, the human person, the individual in the African context, Africans and those who study Africa, are highlighted as creative agents, as active nexuses in the weaving of history.
Rebounding Elevations
When you celebrate others, when you create opportunities for others, when you help people actualize themselves, they will celebrate you.
This simple principle may help explain the phenomenon of TOFAC's sustained success. Falola's recognition flows not only from conventional academic metrics but from his transformative impact on scholarly careers and intellectual communities.
A Garden of Nurturing
Falola has created and runs a global publication network represented by collaborative book writing endeavours and many book series with various publishers, some being among the most prestigious in the world, along with what might be his own publishing network or one he enabled, the Pan African University Press.
Those book series create niches accommodating a broad range of scholarly initiatives which anyone producing adequate scholarship may participate in, whatever one's academic background or location within or outside academia.
In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation, is Falola's book length collection of his essays celebrating various scholars and creatives operating in relation to Africa.His best poetry known to me is centred in celebrating other people.
He has recently begun a series of essays dedicated to portraying the achievements of academics in Africa.
He also initiated and runs an online interview series engaging various creative individuals and broader subjects.
A good degree of his productivity centers on exploring, celebrating, and amplifying others' work while examining the full spectrum of African experience both on the continent and in its diaspora
All these taken together, the books, essays, poetry and interviews exploring, celebrating and highlighting the work of other creatives, along with studies of larger disciplinary fields, are two major constellations of Falola's productivity.
Looking Within, Exploring Outward
Another framework is represented by his writings about himself, from Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies to his two autobiographies to the third one expected this year.
The creative intelligence explores itself as it studies others, while examining a vast span of other bodies of knowledge, covering almost, if not all of the African experience on the continent and a depth and range of its diaspora existence.
A Journey into an Unfolding Destination
Where is this creative intelligence, this critical matrix, going?
What is its ultimate destination?
I suspect even that intelligence might not know.
Of recent, broader cognitive agglomerations are becoming increasingly visible from Falola's creativity.
Reworking a lifetime of exploration in terms of new syntheses- rethinking African knowledge systems, x-raying the sweep of Yoruba cognitive and social history, along with more discrete subjects, such as works on individuals and more limited themes.
Falola is a matrix of creative intelligence—ever evolving, synthesizing, excavating African histories and knowledge systems.
From continental narratives to diasporic identities, from Yoruba social histories to individual portraits, his work embodies motion toward “another intensity, a further union, a deeper communion,” to borrow from T.S. Eliot.
Even though the ultimate directions of the creative intelligence unfolds in ways defying neat categorisations, idea patterns emerging in structures resistant to the idea of tightly controlled planning, can one not use the journey of this mind for one's own ends?
Can projections from this imaginative and intellectual configuration not become a vehicle of being and becoming, a structure of possibilities for exploring how humanity, in general, and Africa, in particular, makes sense of existence in a journey experimentally visualised in terms of the actualization of all potential of which the human being is capable?
German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel's account of the universal development of Geist (Spirit/Mind), as understood by one consciousness, his own; the resonance of this idea in the Indian Shakti, the Yoruba ase, the Igbo ike, in Negritude and related efforts to make sense of human and cosmic dynamism as interrelated phenomena, may such ideas not be engaged with for inspiration in taking expansive advantage of the ideational possibilities provided by the Falola universe?
Conclusion
The TOFAC conferences represent more than academic gatherings—they embody an approach to scholarly community that prioritizes collective advancement over individual acclaim. Toyin Falola's legacy lies not merely in his impressive bibliography but in his revolutionary reconceptualization of what scholarly success might mean.
In an academic culture increasingly dominated by individual metrics and competitive frameworks, Falola demonstrates the transformative power of enablement. His work suggests that true scholarly greatness might be measured not by personal achievements alone, but by one's capacity to create conditions for others' flourishing.
The elephant whose footprints become watering holes for the entire scholarly ecosystem—this, perhaps, captures the essence of Toyin Falola's enduring contribution to Africana intellectual life.