From Trinity Street, Cambridge, UK to Shomolu, Lagos, Nigeria: The Journey of the 2nd Edition of Rowland Abiodun's Epic Work Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                 From Trinity Street, Cambridge, UK to Shomolu, Lagos, Nigeria

                                                  The Journey of the 2nd Edition of Rowland Abiodun's Epic Book

                                                       Yoruba Art and Language:Seeking the African in African Art    

                                                                                         

                    

                                                                                                                    

                                                         

Ara e dide e bami jo
Eniyan mi e ba mi yo
Oluwa mi lo gbe mi ga

People, rise and and dance with me
My brethren, let us drink the drink of joy
My Creator has lifted me high


2015. Cambridge, UK.

I had just purchased from the Cambridge University Press bookshop on Trinity Street, a new copy of Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, a landmark in the study of aesthetics, the theory/ies of beauty and art, a book strategic for African Studies from within its centring in Yoruba Studies.

The bookshop sells only books published by Cambridge UP, which had brought out some of the greatest books in Yoruba/African Studies, such as Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger and Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World.

Books are my most prized possessions. I had just acquired an indispensable work at the intersection of the visual arts, literature, philosophy and spirituality, the fruit of a lifetime of effort by Abiodun, fifty years of scholarship building on his immersion from childhood in Yoruba arts, spiritualities and philosophies and further studying them in the context of his superb education in the Western tradition.

But at  £80, could I afford to keep the book? 

How would I pay my rent?

I had to return the volume and get my money back.

Little did I know that I would one day become the editor and publisher of an enhanced second edition of that very book, and all the way in Nigeria, where the knowledge in the book came from, the same country from where I had travelled to the UK seeking knowledge, first as a student and later as an Independent Scholar when even the capacious possibilities of the UK universities I attended could no longer accommodate my restlessness, perpetually seeking to go ''beyond the skyline where the great roads go down'' as Dion Fortune puts it.

Today, the 8th of June 2026, I received from my printers at Shomolu, Lagos, the final draft of the jacket cover design of the second edition of the book, published exclusively by my company, Compcros, based in Ikeja, Lagos.

               

The images above show the jacket cover design and a collage showing a picture of myself, right, and  Sholola Tobiloba Owolabi, the owner  of the printing press in Shomolu, Lagos, which is preparing a proof copy of the book, surrounded by pictures of the Shomolu environment around the printing press offices.

On the left is a mosque and its minaret, looking down onto the street. On the bottom right is a generator in use by one of the many printing presses in the area and a worker with the press standing by the machine.

At the top right is the view of the street seen from the balcony of  Owolabi’s office. In the background is a picture by Trip Advisor showing the Cambridge University Press bookshop in Cambridge at night, the radiance of gold light from the windows evoking for me the magic of the place, as a repository for one of the world's greatest publishers.