Pioneers of African Epistemic Decolonization : Okpure Obuke and the Cultivation of African Oral Literature Field Work Research at the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Pioneers of African Epistemic Decolonization
Okpure Obuke and the Cultivation of African Oral Literature Field Work Research
at the
Department of English and Literature, University of Benin
Learning Ancient Knowledge Beyond Books
A signal achievement of Okpure Obuke at the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin was the introduction of the students in the department to a culture of field work research in African oral literature through the compulsory course in African Oral Literature which he taught in the first year of the BA program.
During the first year of my BA there, and I expect in preceding and subsequent years, one had to submit to Dr. Obuke an assignment deriving from original fieldwork the student had done.
"Go to those informed about the oral literatures of various communities," he urged, "record and analyse what you are told and submit the resulting essay."
Combating Ignorance and Marginalization
The primary texts to be consulted were living libraries, human repositories of knowledge, thereby expanding the written corpus of a field of knowing about which eminent Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, on undertaking a fellowship at the University of Cambridge, in the 60s I think, and being placed in the Faculty of Anthropology, had been informed by decision makers at the school that "there is no such mythical beast as African literature", echoing Western supremacist denunciations of African history and African philosophy and the simultaneous celebration of Benin art as greater than English art by an English critic's first encounter with it, and the denigration of its creators as "nameless savages".
Scholarship has long superseded such ignorance. Yet, struggles against the repercussions of these denials within the globally dominant Western educational system are ongoing even today in the name of epistemic decolonization, the creation of ways of developing, assessing, organizing and applying knowledge that respect the creative abilities of peoples whose cognitive capacities have been marginalized by imperialist cultural dominance, Western imperialism being the primary point of reference in this context.
From the Past to the Present
Obuke's fundamental initiative meant that students were initiated, right from the first year, into that process of decolonization, although the term is only now beginning to gain currency, decades after I was initiated into the practice within the academy by Obuke and well after the seminal achievements of the pioneers in African oral literature research, such as Ruth Finnegan, Isidore Okpewho, Adeboye Babalola and the later Karin Barber.
The rapid rise of the vision of epistemic decolonisation also comes well after the achievements of the Ibadan History School and the flowering of African philosophy in Nigeria and other African locations.
This global effulgence also comes well after the achievements initiated by the students of the Zaria Art Society, who, with their philosophy of Natural Synthesis between Western art media and processes and African subjects and philosophies, laid the foundations for modern Nigerian art as a practical and theoretical discipline, resonating in such immortally powerful ideologies as Uli of the Nsukka Art School and Ona of the Ife art school, in relation to the achievements of the Osogbo Art School.
The current struggle over epistemic decolonization, creating space for people oppressed by the dominance of externally derived ways of knowing, draws heavily from African oral literature fieldwork pioneered by such scholars and teachers as Okpure Oboku, passing the flame on to succeeding generations through personal practice and teaching.
Multi- Literary Critical Competence
He was also grounded in oral literature theory from the West in its intersection with anthropology, those being the theoretical contexts available when I studied with him.
He taught how these theoretical models could illuminate the aesthetic complexity and semantic depth of African oral literature.
Being a person open to speculative thinking-I knew him to have an interest in mysticism, the quest for ultimate reality-I expect he would have been open to the currently growing demand for endogenously developed theory, theory built from within the lived realities of its creators rather than uncritically imported theory, theory that recognizes its own locality, its emergence from and determination by a particular cultural and spatio-temporal context and which yet aspires to speak to responsive minds universally-locality, plurality and universality in one.
Yet, in spite of his grounding in African oral literature, Dr. Obuke was a multi-literary critical scholar, as exemplified by a particularly rich essay of his comparing the US poet Ezra Pound and the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo published in the journal World Literature, if I recall the journal name correctly.
Ever Renewed Fruits
For myself, the first year BA fieldwork I did under Obuke's insistence proved recurrently useful.
I used it, expanded in terms of theory, in a BA final year 4 essay.
I expanded its literary content in a 2nd year essay in English medieval literature by comparing the African oral narrative I used with the Old English poem Beowulf.
This combination of old African and ancient Western literature helped me get an offer to do an MA in literature at the University of Edinburgh.
The purely African component of the essay was again useful in my MA in Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
It is also a bond of memory with my mum since I learnt it from her, one of the few literary texts I know in my native language, Okpameri, from Nigeria's Akoko-Edo, all of which I learnt from her.
I should publish the results of that fieldwork as an essay, particularly now that the story I gained from it means much more to me in terms of symbolic meaning at this point in the decades since I recorded it in 1985.
A Voice at the Crossroads
My most enduring memory of Obuke is as a compassionate voice as I sought direction as an eventual colleague in the Department English and Literature.
"If you have the opportunity to study in the West, you should take it," he counselled when I asked his advice on the subject. "You will have experiences you will treasure all your life."
I wonder if he could have put it better. Canterbury, London, Birmingham, Cambridge, and even the villages of Histon and Isleham in England, I have either lived in or lived and studied in these places, and understand them, particularly the University of Cambridge, to be stratospheric environments.
But the core of the kind of knowledge I am looking for is not really there.
This knowledge is not in any book because it lies wholly or partially understudied or unstudied in full view in Africa, even as its significance remains inadequately understood, knowledge developed, applied, and to some degree, theorised by ancient Africans and accessible only through field work research of the kind Obuke pioneered.
Unusual energy sources marked by or generated by sacred trees, rivers and other natural spaces, for example.
The knowledge associated with these contexts enshrined in Ogboni esotericism and conceptions of the Yoruba Iyami and Aje, the elegantly timeless visual symbols of Benin Olokun art, the exquisite symmetries of Cross River Ekpe Nisibidi symbolism, among other partially shadowed glories.
The books and PhD theses publicly accessible on each of these subjects could be counted on the fingers of both hands, with serious, analytical essays expanding on these subjects this number a little.
Yet the environment where these wonders of knowledge thrive is so challenging.
The West has all the enablements for the transformation of information into knowledge but a significant degree of the world's most strategic knowledge is not there in spite of the global convergence in those environments, enriching their gargantuan cognitive systems.
For me, Obuke, scholar and teacher of African oral literature who got his PhD in the US, I think, then moved to Nigeria, encouraging the first hand study of African oral literature, stands at the crossroads of this contradiction.
May his inspiration be with all wayfarers in various streams of knowledge.
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