Between the Universal and the Particular: Understanding the Universal Significance of Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                                       

                                                               

                                                       Between the Universal and the Particular

                     Understanding the Universal Significance of Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History

                                                                    Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                              Compcros

                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

My earlier title for the call for papers on the collaborative book I'm planning on Akinwumi Ogundiran's book, The Yoruba: A New History,  focused on the Ogundiran text as a  contribution to Yoruba history.

"Wait a minute," I asked myself. 

"Am I not falling into the trap of limiting the significance of  African scholarship even when the scholarship in question resonates beyond Africa?"

I am not an historian nor an archaeologist like Ogundiran. I have not read a single book on Yoruba history or archaeology and have read very few articles on those subjects. My interest used to be only in Yoruba philosophy, art, spirituality, literature and their intersections. 

But Ogundiran has brought this history alive for me through his storytelling skills. He also makes a valiant effort to historicise Yoruba philosophy and spirituality,  imaginatively  but critically exploring their historical flows and  points of concretisation into the dominant picture available today. This is a most challenging task, on account of the fact that this history of thought may be more readily approached through deduction than through definitive records on account of the originally oral character of classical Yoruba knowledge systems.

A writer of history who is able to bring a long vanished past alive for a person with little interest in that story, igniting the imaginative flame of its political, military, economic, medical, technological, spiritual and philosophical dynamics in their permutations across centuries, bringing alive memorable personalities  from the ashes of the past.

What does such achievement in a high level scholarly text imply?

It demonstrates the book is grounded in a particular approach to history, itself operating within debates about how to write history. 

This same writer is able to take us into the vanished worlds he vivifies by examining the pre-historic remains of human bodies and the associative  character of works of art, as in his discussion of Ile Ori, the House of the Head, the symbolic representation of the head as evoking the unity in difference  of the mortal  and immortal selves of the individual in Yoruba thought.

Such a strategy  also indicates a particular approach to history and it's relationship to art and archeology, an orientation likely framed by long debates within these fields.

These expressive qualities are relevant for all history writing and for all scholarship,  so why should such a work, though about  Yoruba history, be discussed only in terms of that history?

Such questions remain resonant even as one observes Ogundiran's splendid use of the oral narrative technique of proverbs, Yoruba proverbs, rendered in Yoruba and translated into English, to focus the significance of particular developments in his story and project it's associative powers.

This narrative technique speaks to the integration of different kinds of knowledge in historical exploration and narrative, of literature and history, of oral cultures into written cultures, of critical mediations between epistemic forms, a central challenge in dialogue between various knowledge cultures from different parts of the world.

May civilisations be understood as contributing particular ideas, distinctive forms of social organization, of modes of understanding reality, to the deposit represented by the progression of humanity into the partially known within the context of the cosmic unknown?

That central question of history resonates across those who explicitly or implicitly engage with it, a perspective Ogundiran boldy projects and argues for in mapping what he describes as the nature and interrelationships between what he describes as the Yoruba community of practice and Yoruba knowledge capital, thereby inspiring the interest of people like myself interested in Yoruba, African and other civilisations as matrices of knowledge, unfolding integrations of understanding developed by homo sapiens in their journey beneath the stars, an image adapting the English novelist J.R.R. Tolkien.

As a cultural polyglot, a seeker for diverse insights into reality one may adapt for one's own use from various cultures, I find a work such as Ogundiran's  a feast in which the author seeks critical immersion in  cultural and historical specificities within particular environmental contexts, yet makes these localisations meaningful as expressions of the human creature struggling to make meaning of a world in which they find themselves.

The explanatory framework Ogundiran has created also enables me conceive how his project could be taken further. This could address, in what I understand would be a more robust way than he has done, the philosophical and religious aspects of his project closer to my own more intimate orientations. Even though I don't possess the range of knowledge he brings to bear on his subject,  the creativity of his use of that knowledge facilitates my understanding of how a central aspect of that project may be more robustly engaged with. Such probable expansiveness demonstrates the character of the book as a consummate exploration of its subject that yet dramatises its own self as a milestone in a work in progress, an unending project, as various investigators try to recreate a past that is as much imagined as it is evidenced.

Creating the universal out of one's own locality, is a theme of this book, dramatised with particular force in Ogundiran's interpretation of Yoruba Orisa spirituality in terms of the construction of deity forms as mirrors reflecting the infinite multiplicity of human experience,  projected through a potentially endless range of deity constructs.

He thereby suggests intersections of ideas of the numinous, that beyond full human comprehension but enchanting for the human being, adapting Rudolph Otto, and that which is humanly constructed, but indicates possibilities beyond full human grasp, an aspect of Immanuel Kant's understanding of the Sublime, evoked by an image correlative with the Hindu Net of Indra, in which each node of an infinite net reflects every other node, generating infinite multiplication, an image of metaphysical symmetry constituting cosmic complexity. 

A bird flying out of the darkness of winter into a brightly lit hall and out again into the darkness, is a picture of human life from one of the earliest works of English history, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, an image rightly famous for it's evocative force within a magically resonant simplicity. 

The historian may limit themselves to such arresting crystallisations of ideas in trying to interpret the ultimate significance of their material. They may choose to go beyond such striking but modest summations which describe rather than predict, which sum up observations, rather than  trying to account for meaning beyond the relatively explicit.

The latter is  what some historians and philosophers of history do in going beyond the evidence to speculate on the ultimate direction of history,  as  Augustine of Hippo does in his image of all human beings as members of a great city in his City of God, as Oswald Spengler does in The Decline of the West and as demonstrated by Arnold Toynbee in his study of world civilisations, epic projects both admired and inspiring wariness on account of their sheer ambition.

Ogundiran's book resonates in relation to such grand visions, not in  trying to speak with a priestly or loftily philosophical accent, but through quiet musings on what is being observed as the author moves among the shards and embers of history, reigniting the flames, resting awhile at firesides to discuss with those long gone, seeking to understand their  motivations, their passions, the paths they took as they tried to construct meaningful lives, from the mountain dwelling proto-Yoruba, for whom the majestic hills in the distance evoked divine elevation and awe, to much later efforts to interpret the city of Ife as a unity of human creativity and divine design, to technological innovations, to warfare of resistance and of conquest, to the constitution of the meaning of Yoruba as a constellation of various demographics ultimately projected beyond it's geographical origins to distant lands where this identity continues to undergo permutations.