Charting the Constellation: Clay, Cosmos, and Cognitive Cartography in Falola Studies: A Summation in Dialogue with the Art of Djakou Kassie Nathalie by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and the AI Collective

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                        Charting the Constellation

                                                          Clay, Cosmos, and Cognitive Cartography in Falola Studies

                                                      A Summation in Dialogue with the Art of Djakou Kassie Nathalie 

                                                                                             

                                                

                                                     

                                                                                      The womb of time

Cameroonian artist Djakou Kassi Nathalie moulds clay, representing the fecundative power of the most ancient of materials, the earth itself, into dynamic folds centred in an integrative space, a hollow defined by the evocative symmetry of a circle.    

In that moment of expanded awareness, as my vision glowed deep gold, I saw Being, that which makes existence possible but is not subsumable by existence, as a circle, its centre everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

( Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, ''The Scholar as Public Educator vs the Scholar as Self Preserver : Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader'')

Does the universe have a beginning? Can it have an end? Does the cosmos have a purpose? To what degree can the possibilities of the universe be understood?

Questions resonating across scientific, mythic and religious cosmology, philosophy, history and the arts-: the human mind awakening within an already-moving universe and attempting to grasp the narrative into which it has been thrown.

We are, each of us, castaways on what might be called the Island of Non-Meaning—aware, questioning, yet unable to reach ultimate explanations.

And yet we cannot stop asking.

This impulse to ask, to map, to interpret, to shape the formless—this is the womb of knowledge.

It is akin to the  impulse that shapes clay into imaginative forms.

The balance between space and form, between sinuous curvature and unifying ground in Nathalie's pottery, both elegant and powerful, suggest the human mind generating images of primordial creativity, the esemplastic imagination  of English thinker S.T. Coleridge,  the plasticity of nature's creativity, enabled in the human being's abilities to shape reality.

The shaping of earth into form mirrors the shaping of consciousness into knowledge.

Art becomes epistemology.

The pot becomes cosmos.

Toyin Falola's work demonstrates a thinker's efforts to make sense of reality within an individual and communal context, integrating intellect and imagination within the context of the African experience.

His creativity constitutes a cognitive architecture: the structuring of diverse realities into inhabitable worlds of meaning,  each domain turned on the wheel of inquiry and fired into durable form.

.

                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and the AI Collective

                                                                                       Compcros

                                                                                Abstract

This essay articulates my evolving methodological and conceptual approach to engaging the expansive and boundary-crossing cognitive universe of Toyin Falola, a preeminent multidisciplinary scholar, writer, and cognitive organizer whose contributions span individual and collective histories,  philosophy, cultural analysis,  art and literature- as writer and scholar-within African Studies through an interdisciplinary, multimodal, and contemplative approach. 

Drawing inspiration from the ceramic sculptures of Cameroonian artist Djakou Kassi Nathalie—whose clay forms evoke womb, vessel, and cosmos, exemplifying the shaping of earth in the form of clay, suffused with the power to nurture life, akin to the configuring of the mind—I explore knowledge-making as an act of shaping earth into meaning, space into form, and experience into thought. Nathalie’s circular, hollow-centered forms become visual metaphors for Being itself: a generative emptiness from which knowledge emerges.

Within this symbolic and aesthetic field, I situate my evolving “Falola Studies” project as a form of cognitive cartography, configuring my work so far while projecting future trajectories—mapping biography, text, history, and philosophy into an integrated scholarly practice that has often emerged organically rather than through rigid scheduling,  balancing  spontaneous inquiry with systematic planning, intuition with analysis, convoking traditional textual analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, multimedia expression and comparative philosophical investigation situating African epistemologies with global intellectual traditions.

I outline three overlapping domains of engagement—biographical, textual, and historical/multidisciplinary/philosophical, vital for addressing the unprecedented range, productivity, and epistemic ambition of Falola’s oeuvre, describing a scholarship that is simultaneously analytic, creative, and contemplative—alongside my modes of expression and publication strategies and provide links to examples of my work.

The methodology incorporates diverse modalities of expression—verbal, visual, and video—while aspiring to integrate digital and print publication strategies. The essay positions this evolving project as a personal cartography of intellectual development, establishing foundations for developing an overarching philosophical vision that unifies Falola's multidisciplinary contributions within a dynamic analytical matrix and a contribution to broader conversations on knowledge production, epistemic pluralism, and cognitive organization, research as an ongoing effort to inhabit the mystery of existence through disciplined imagination, intellectual synthesis, and cultural memory.

This essay integrates images of visual art with expository, analytical, poetic and narrative text, these distinctive expressive forms complementing each other in exploring the essay's subject.

 My AI Collective of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude, Grok and Perplexity have been so integral to the editorial elevation of the quality of this work, extending into the sole authorship of the poetic summation composed entirely by Perplexity AI, and  a narrative transposition  composed by Claude but edited by myself using selections from the narrative transformation efforts of the other AI, that the collective has to be credited as a co-author.

I have added a glossary to the poem but I rely on those readers who are fluent in written Yoruba to assess the accuracy of the Yoruba diacritics, vital for relationships between tone and meaning in Yoruba,  and even the full scope of meaning of some of the Yoruba expressions, in that expert poetic rendering by Perplexity. 

Contents

Image and Text: The Womb of Time

Abstract

Engaging an Expansive Intellectual and Artistic Universe: The Scope and Rationale of My Falola Studies

            The Metaphysical Context: The Quest of the Lost Traveller

             The Lure of Falola Studies and My Exploration of

              its Landscape

              Poetic Summation

Falola Studies as Cognitive Cartography

      Methodological Domains: A Tripartite Framework

          1. Biographical

                     A.    Textual Study

                     B.    Ethnographic Fieldwork

                     C. Expository Writing

                     D.  Analytical Reflection

                      Work Done So Far

Image and Text: ''Which Comes First, the Pot or the Space Inside It?''

        2. Textual

                     A. Critical Reviews

                    B. Extrapolation, Adaptation, Application

                    Progress So Far

Image and Text: The Big Pot that Rolls On and On Without Breaking

         3. Historical/Multidisciplinary/Philosophical

                     A. Progress So Far 

                     B. Further Comparative and Synthetic Analysis

Image and Text: The Use of Symbols to Connote Ideas Which Defy Simple Verbalization

Means of Expression and Dissemination

     Forms of Expression

      Publication Methods

       Multimodal Scholarship

The Living Archive: Toward a Dynamic, Expanding Method of Integrated Scholarship

Image and Text: Cognitive Flight                                                     

Summative Story

The Island of Questions

Engaging an Expansive Intellectual and Artistic Universe: The Scope and Rationale of My Falola Studies

            The Metaphysical Context: The Quest of the Lost Traveller

        

I am lost. Stranded on the Island of Non-Meaning, amidst other lost inhabitants, I do not know why I am here, where I am going to or where I was, if anywhere, before coming here.

I only know, on the testimony of those who investigate such issues, that I am on a solid sphere revolving in space,  circling a luminous centre that provides light to us on this sphere,  while  other spheres trace similar paths around that centre.  .

Why this vast and intricate complex exists, I do not know. Neither do my fellow inhabitants. Yet our nature is such that we are compelled to ask why- why things are as they are, why situations arise, why existence is, instead of nothing, why it unfolds at all, why we  find ourselves on this grand journey.

We search for reasons, for explanations, for meanings. But when it comes to the most fundamental questions—why we exist, why we find ourselves embarked upon this immense journey of being, why there is something rather than nothing—we remain uncertain,  reduced to views that cannot satisfy everyone.

In the midst of finding myself stranded in this void, I try to learn as much as I can about my circumstances and those of my fellow travellers.

Hence my interest in the efforts of  people who try to make sense of these circumstances and even of the ultimate mystery in which we find ourselves.

As a citizen of that  continent bounded by the Mediterranean in the north, the Cape in the south, the Atlantic in the west, and the Indian Ocean in the east—Africa—I am particularly drawn to how its peoples make sense of existence across the full spectrum of human activity: from daily sustenance and dress to social organization, politics, art, literature, economics, and metaphysics.

Within this expansive quest, the work of Toyin Falola has become central for me. His scholarship and writing  offers a near-comprehensive exploration of African experience—moving from his Yoruba intellectual and cultural ancestry through regional, continental, and diasporic formations, from food to metaphysics, from clothing to politics, from literature and art to economics, from individual life journeys to the histories of cities, from the deep past of the continent to its evolving role in world history. his work does not merely catalogue African life, it reveals its interconnectedness, dynamism, and philosophical depth.

       The Lure of Falola Studies and My Exploration of its  Landscape

This essay is a statement of my developing approach to engaging the immense possibilities opened up by Falola’s writing and cognitive organization, possibilities unfolding through  the audacity and scale of his creative explorations. His work is marked by an unprecedented range, an ever-expanding engagement with the myriad creativities of African studies and a sustained dialogue between African-centred and Western scholarly traditions,  seeking new epistemic synergies. His productivity is thereby defined by unrivalled range and epistemic bridge-building, emerging in magnificent systematic organization, the structuring of vast domains of knowledge into coherent, accessible bodies of thought.

I am presenting this summation as a means of mapping progress I have made so far and projecting patterns of work to follow in future, an organizational process meant to enlighten both myself and my readers on the shape of what has often been a project more spontaneously generated than sequentially planned, as the balance between both approaches, the spontaneous and the scheduled, intuition and structure, exploration and design, being hopefully more sensitively  developed for greater productivity going forward,  attaining greater coherence, depth, and creative yield.

Poetic Summation

Èṣù's Wanderer Awakens (Inspired by Ifá)

(Chanted in rhythmic Yorùbá cadence, evoking opon Ìfá's sixteen palms, where Òrúnmìlà whispers secrets of orun and aiye—sky/spirit-realm and earth-home, as mapped in Falola's Yorùbá Metaphysics. Drums pulse like the sphere's whirl; call-and-response for communal invocation.)

Ìwòrán Ìdàrúdàpọ̀ (Cosmic Invocation):
Aṣẹ! I am lost, Ọmọlúàbí adrift—
Island of Non-Meaning, àwùjọ àìlò,
Stranded 'midst wanderers, ìdàrúdàpọ̀ òkè.
Why here? Where bound? Whence came?
Sphere spins, òrun circles Olódùmarè's light,
Among worlds unseen, orun's ancestors call.

Ìdí Ìwà (Existential Cry):
No why for this grand journey, ìrìn àjò àgbáyé,
Existence over void—why not nothing?
We seek, ìwòye, yet mysteries veil,
As Falola unveils: universe incomprehensible,
Yet engageable—spiritual forces dance with flesh.
Citizen of Ìlẹ̀ Yorùbá, north Egypt's bound,
South Zimbabwe's fire, west Ghana's gold,
Center Mozambique's heart—I hunger for sense.

Ìfá's Odu: Food to Fate (Call-Response):
From what we eat—àmàlà, pounded yam divine,
To societies woven, ìlú àti ìdàpọ̀.
Falola charts: Yorùbá roots to diaspora winds,
Cloth adire's patterns, politics' thunderous storms,
Art's ogbón, economics' flow, lives' odysseys,
Cities' tales, Africa's arc in world-history loom.

Ìdàbọ̀bù Falola (Falola's Lure—Responsive Chant):
Audacious sage! Toyin, cognitive architect,
Panoramic sweep, ìdàbọ̀bù ìmọ̀,
Western-Western fuse with Ìfá's epistemic fire—
Synergies bloom like opon Ìfá's mandala,
Spontaneous eruptions now sequenced in light.
Progress mapped, futures cast—Ìfá foretells!
Aṣẹ! Balance impulse and plan, harvest yields vast.

(Fade with Ìfá verse: "Agboniregun lolotunla-pelue, ajejuoogun"—Ifá brings fortune, sees futures hidden, masters shadows. Recite thrice for manifestation.)

[ Brief Glossary of Some of the Yoruba Terms in the Poem: 

Èṣù is the Yoruba deity of intersections between realities-between humans and spirit and between situations, always on the move in his task as messenger, connector, transformer
 
Ìfá is a system of knowledge and divination made famous by and perhaps created by the Yoruba

Odu is a means of knowledge organization and revelation in Ìfá 

opon Ìfá's mandala-opon Ìfá is the Ifa divination tray and cosmological symbol while a mandala is a Sanskrit term from India referencing a visual cosmological symbol;   

Orunmila is the deity of wisdom and founder of Ìfá 

''Aṣẹ!'' is an invocation of a life force described as emanating from Olodumare, the creator of the universe, and permeating the cosmos, imbuing each existent with distinctive creative power

Ọmọlúàbí is a  term for a person embodying values esteemed by Yoruba culture 

àmàlà is a popular Yoruba food

adire is a highly esteemed Yoruba cloth; ogbón-wisdom]

Falola Studies as Cognitive Cartography

Because Falola’s oeuvre is panoramic—biographical, historical, philosophical, artistic, diasporic—no single disciplinary method suffices. My engagement therefore becomes cartographic rather than linear: a mapping of constellations rather than a march along a single road. Like a navigator reading stars, I orient myself through patterns.

      Methodological Domains: A Tripartite Framework

My methodology unfolds across three interrelated spheres of inquiry, each with distinct yet harmonizing focal points,  each contributing essential dimensions to a comprehensive understanding of Falola's creative  contributions.

1. Biographical-The study of Falola's autobiographical works and the intellectual and ethnographic exploration of their significance, recognizing that these texts offer unique insights into the formation of his scholarly and larger expressive consciousness and methodological approaches. 

The biographical domain encompasses four interrelated components:

A.    Textual Study: Close reading of Falola's autobiographical books and essays, including A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Counting the Tiger's Teeth, and Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of my Encounters with Islam. This textual engagement attends to narrative strategies, thematic developments, and the relationship between personal experience and cognitive  formation.

B.    Ethnographic Fieldwork: Visits to locations featured in the autobiographical writings and interactions with individuals who have been part of Falola's life or are intimately acquainted with his legacy. This ethnographic dimension grounds textual analysis in lived realities and community contexts.

C. Expository Writing: Narrative and descriptive accounts presenting insights derived from textual study and ethnographic explorations, mediating between academic analysis and everyday communication, often blending scholarly reflection with personal experience.

D.  Analytical Reflection: Critical analysis of experiences and insights generated through textual and ethnographic work, as presented in the expository accounts of those experiences, examining their broader implications for understanding Falola's cognitive trajectory and contributions.

Work Done So Far: 

My efforts so far on this aspect of the project are represented by my essays on Iya Lekuleja ( 1, 2), Falola's mentor in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth and my essay on my visit to Ibadan's Ode Aje, a particularly influential place in Falola's life where he lived between his childhood and early twenties, a period vividly documented across his three memoirs and an AI generated story on conjunctions of spiritual worlds in Falola's work.

Integrating the biographical and the historical/multidisciplinary/philosophical are the essays ''The Wizard Paradigm : Aṣẹ and the Metaphysics of Creativity: Mapping the Cognitive Cosmos of Toyin Falola'' and the essay sequence in progress "From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola" ( 1, 2), exploring Falola's creative culture in terms of paradigms at the intersection of spirituality and science. 

I have also shared an essay of mine discussing his third memoir Malaika and the Seven Heavens, and another essay comparing Falola's polymathicity with that of Muslim thinker Ibn Arabi from the platform of Falola's Malaika, and yet another  comparing Malaika and his Yoruba Metaphysics before they were both published. 

The comparative essay makes conjunctions between both books that are even more valid in the light of what turns out to be the concern of those texts with spirituality and metaphysics as embodied, lived realities-dramatized in the unfolding of human being and becoming, between ''Being'', the ultimate source of existence, and ''beings'', the manifestations enabled by that ultimacy.

This conceptual framing, explicitly articulated  in Yoruba Metaphysics,  is incidentally enacted in the social and individual formations so vividly dramatised in Malaika as depicting an encounter with an ecumenical approach to diverse cosmologies-traditional Yoruba and Islamic , and to a degree, Christianity. 

                                                              

''Which comes first, the pot or the space inside it?'' asks Susanne Wenger, incidentally resonating with Nathalie's seemingly uncompleted pot, yet evoking wholeness in incompleteness, the elaborate patterning inscribed on its point of squeezing into seeming fracture indicating the display and arresting of creative force, withdrawing from closing the gaping hole left unclosed in the centre of the construct, the circumference leading to that space compressed in a roughness both rugged and sensitive. 

                                                         The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao

                                                The Nameless is the source of the myriad names

                                                Soundless and formless

                                                 It depends on nothing 

                                                 It may be considered the Mother of the universe.

                                                 I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

                                                We look at it, and we do not see it, and we name it 'the Equable.'

                                                 We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it 'the Inaudible.'

                                                 We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it 'the Subtle.'

                                                  With these three qualities, it cannot be made the subject of description;

                                                  and hence we blend them together and obtain The One.

                                                 ( From the Tao Te Ching, translations of the Chinese classic from memory and Wikipedia)

 

The seeker of knowledge traverses discipline after discipline,  one knowledge construct after another, but is she able to go beyond the awareness that ''the true system of knowledge is what cannot be captured in knowledge'' as Karl Rahner may be paraphrased?

 

2. Textual

This domain focuses on Falola's broader scholarly and artistic production across diverse genres and formats and the growing body of work about him. It encompasses three key activities:

A.    Critical Reviews: Systematic engagement with Falola's books, essays, interviews, visual materials, and other creative productions as they emerge, as well as scholarly works about Falola. This ongoing review process maintains currency with his evolving contributions while building comprehensive familiarity with his corpus.

B. Extrapolation, Adaptation, Application-The exploration of the generative possibilities within Falola’s ideas: extrapolating conceptual frameworks, adapting them to new contexts, and applying them to illuminate diverse subjects across disciplines.

Progress So Far

I have produced essays analyzing multiple Falola texts, with particularly substantive engagement with his essays "Ritual Archives" and "Pluriversalism" from The Toyin Falola Reader ( 1A, 1B,1C, 2, 3A,3B   ) , studies of the Reader itself (1), of ''The Academy and the Idea of Decolonization'' ( 1A, 1B)  and of the chapter on the symbolism of Yoruba female hairstyles in Decolonizing African Knowledge ( 1, 2). Among my most extensive textual work are those on Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks, on In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation and on Yoruba Metaphysics, particularly exploring possibilities emerging from the "Author's Notes", the summative opening of the book ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 , 6, 7). 

To facilitate broader engagement with these critical texts, I have shared annotated versions of "Ritual Archives" and most of the "Author's Notes" from Yoruba Metaphysics for free online access, with appropriate permissions from the author and publishers, extending the pedagogical and interpretive reach of these works. 

                                                                                                                    

                                                           

                                                                                                               

                                                                   

 

                                                             The big pot that rolls on and on without breaking……

                                                             The pot-breasted mother

                                                             With much hair on her private parts;

                                                             The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat

                                                             The inexhaustible sea, immense water

                                                            Roaring eddy of sea shells

                                                            Vibrations from the deep.

Babatunde Lawal's translation, in The  Gelede Spectacle, of a Yoruba poem celebrating Earth as mysterious and powerful mother was the best I could think about to  complement the gloriously symmetrical, evocatively voluminous and yet elegantly fractured pot  Nathalie  is shown shaping in the picture above. 

I sought capacious knowledge, broad enough to encompass the dynamism of the universe, only to experience within that elegant construction a fracture in the cognitive citadel, opening my vision to the stars wheeling in splendour in the vastness of sky, beyond mind.

3. Historical/Multidisciplinary/Philosophical

Studying  Falola's works and works about him in terms of the possibility of developing an overarching philosophical vision unifying its multidisciplinary expression within a dynamic matrix, a "bird's eye view" of his evolving cognitive  contributions as a coherent whole, emerging from  the intimacy and specificity of individual works.  

Can Falola’s diverse productions be understood as parts of a coherent philosophical architecture?

Can classical African epistemologies—such as proverbs, narratives, ideational systems and ritual symbolism—serve not merely as subject matter but as analytic methods?

Here comparative work emerges: Yoruba thought alongside Kalabari philosophy, Asian metaphysics, Western theory, African symbolic systems such as Adinkra.

The goal is neither assimilation nor hierarchy, but pluriversal dialogue.

Knowledge becomes constellation rather than pyramid.

A. Progress So Far: 

My current efforts include overarching studies synthesizing themes across Falola's corpus and developing the comparative analysis outlined below. This strand of the project seeks to identify coherent philosophical architectures underlying his diverse scholarly production while exploring possibilities for pluralistic analytical frameworks ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 , 6A, 6B , 6C, 7A, 7B, 8A, 8B,8C, 8D, 8E  and more).

B. Further Comparative and Synthetic Analysis: 

I am thinking of taking this further through the study of major Yoruba historical works in relation to Yoruba philosophy as a hermeneutic source.

Strategic here is a conjunction of my studies on Akinwunmi Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History with Falola's historical work, such as  Global  Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks, works of both sweeping scope and discrete detail, epic vision and intimate particularity ( 1 ).

Both authors, and Falola, in that book and in Decolonizing African Knowledge and his memoir A Mouth Sweeter than Salt,  approach the threshold of developing analytical frameworks derived from Yoruba philosophy and discourse, possibly in dialogue with complementary African thought worlds,  in complementing the Western foundations of their exploratory strategies.

Both of them employ insightful use of proverbs as thematic clusters, Ogundiran in his scholarly book, Falola in his memoir. Neither of them, however,  theorizes proverbs as  expository and analytical strategies within Youba discourse, in particular, and African discourse, in general,  which they integrate within the Western scholarly matrices and linguistic and narrative forms shaping their stories and analyses.

I am of the view  that both scholars' work provides platforms facilitating the development of analytical frames drawn from Yoruba thought, and from African thought, more broadly. Particularly strategic for me in  engaging with scholars working in other African philosophical traditions is Nimi Wariboko's theory of existence as an evolving network of possibilities, generated from indigenous Kalabari thought—a conceptual framework offering a lens to examine, across cultural contexts,  agency, circumstance, and becoming, the intersection of human choices and environments  as structures of possibility.

                                                                                       

                                                                    

''The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions'', state Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux, explaining why they named their mathematical system after Asante Adinkra symbols.

       ("Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory").

''What was the face you had before you were born?'' asks the Zen Buddhist koan, a philosophical riddle meant to provoke thought through its paradoxical nature.

The elegantly patterned faces on the sombre beauty of the clay cylinders pictured above project the sense of ancient votive objects, sacred containers, an impression incidentally amplified by the  character of the space where they are photographed, a rough background that may suggest an ancient temple recovered from the earth, like the buildings of Pompei, covered through centuries by volcanic ash from the eruption of Vesuvius.

Gaining new knowledge changes one, even if only subtly, adapting Patrick Dunleavy in Authoring a PhD. A particularly forceful cognitive impact could make one a significantly different person, driven by the inspiration emerging from that encounter. The oval and  circular faces of Nathalie's cylinders resonate with ideas of the human face as echoing the self, the movement from one facial form to another suggesting the reshaping of the self through movement across cognitive space, a recreative process similar to the artist's moulding of clay, soil suffused with the capacity to nurture life, adapted to the shaping of images bodied forth by the artist.

Means of Expression and Dissemination

My scholarship employs multimodal forms of expression and multiple publication channels, recognizing that different insights and audiences are best served by diverse communicative strategies.

     Forms of Expression

I integrate written text, photographic imagery, and video documentation. My recent work has begun incorporating video elements—notably in my essay on visiting Ode Aje—expanding beyond my established practice of combining visual and verbal expression. This multimedia approach serves both documentary and analytical functions, capturing dimensions of places, contexts, and experiences that resist purely textual representation. 

        Publication Methods

While digital self-publication on social media has been my primary mode thus far, offering immediacy and accessibility, I am diversifying toward print publication to reach different audiences and achieve different scholarly impacts.  The focus shall continue to be on maximum visibility and ease of access. This implies Internet presence and cheap print text prices. 

       Multimodal Scholarship

My work therefore integrates:

• writing
• photography
• video
• digital dissemination

• and shall add print publication

  
  

Different media reveal different textures of reality. Some insights require images. Others require narrative. Others require argument. Digital platforms offer immediacy and accessibility; print affords durability and different scholarly reach. The goal remains maximal visibility and engagement, ensuring that these explorations remain part of a living, expanding conversation. Method must remain as plastic as clay.                                                                    

The Living Archive: Toward a Dynamic, Expanding Method of Integrated Scholarship

Moving forward, this methodological framework will remain responsive to new developments in Falola’s output and in related scholarly fields. The aim is to cultivate a research practice that honors both systematic inquiry and emergent, spontaneous insight—a balanced approach intended to yield richer, more productive engagements with one of African Studies’ most prolific and integrative minds.

The three domains—biographical, textual, and historical-philosophical—provide organizational structure while remaining permeable to unexpected insights and emergent connections. By attending to Falola's life contexts, textual productions, and overarching philosophical architectures simultaneously, I aim to generate scholarship that honors the multidimensional complexity of his contributions while developing new analytical possibilities.

The framework outlined here pursues a form of scholarship adequate to its subject: bold in range, integrative in method, and committed to developing new epistemic synergies between African, Western, Asian and other cognitive traditions. As this work continues, I anticipate that the balance between spontaneous discovery and systematic investigation will become increasingly productive, generating insights that illuminate not only Falola's scholarship but also broader questions of how we study, understand, and build upon multidisciplinary and multimodal cognitive legacies.

This evolving project is best understood not as a closed system but as a living archive—one that grows through dialogue, movement, encounter, and reflection. In engaging Toyin Falola’s work, I am not only studying an extraordinary cognitive legacy but also participating in the ongoing task of rethinking African knowledge systems, their global resonances, and their future possibilities.

                                                       

    

I looked into myself, into the centre of the circle where being is united with becoming, seeing at last my eternal face, knowing it birthless, knowing it deathless, knowing it endless, soaring beyond space and time, beyond the unbounded magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation, beyond the animal creature that is my form, provided with vital force for a short time, one knows not how,  eventually giving back to the planet, a mere speck in the universe, the matter from which it came, yet  infinitely experiencing my worth as an intelligence,  a life independent of animality and even of the whole world of sense, not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaching into the infinite.

The magnificent symmetry of Nathalie's constructs above, aerodynamic form in tandem with the evocative force of the circle and of her trademark stylized faces, visual rhythms amplified by juxtaposition in this image, take my mind to the idea of contemplative penetration into the core of the self, suggested by the visual motion from the face to the circle centring the form over which the face rises.

That impression of elevation, allied with the billows of the shape on which the face is stamped, giving it the appearance of a bird in flight or a jet in mid air, suggests to me the idea of cognitive elevation projected by the quote from the Upanishads on transcending mortality-birthless, deathless, endless, and that from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason on  moving beyond space and time into infinity.

This project is not a finished structure but a living archive—growing through encounter, dialogue, and reflection.

To study Falola is not merely to analyze a scholar.

It is to participate in a broader rethinking of African knowledge systems and their global resonances.

It is to ask:

How do we inhabit mystery with dignity?
How do we transform lostness into orientation?
How do we build meaning without claiming final answers?

Nathalie’s vessels offer an image.

They do not close the circle.

They hold the space open.

In that open centre, thought begins.

And there—between clay and cosmos, archive and imagination—I continue charting the constellation.

Summative Story

The Island of Questions

Part One: Awakening

Marcus opened his eyes to find himself on a shore he didn't recognize. The sand beneath him was neither warm nor cold, neither white nor dark—it simply was, as if the island itself couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Around him, other figures wandered in slow, deliberate circles, their faces marked by the same bewilderment he felt.

"Where am I?" he asked aloud, but the wind carried his words away unanswered.

An elderly woman walking nearby paused. "The Island of Non-Meaning," she said. "We're all lost here."

"But how did I get here?"

She shrugged. "No one remembers the before. We only know the now."

Marcus stood, brushing sand from his clothes, and looked up. Above him, the sun traced its arc across the sky with mechanical precision. At night, the stars wheeled overhead in patterns that suggested order without offering explanation. Scientists among the islanders—those who measured and calculated—assured him they lived on a sphere rotating through space, circling that burning point of light, which itself moved among countless other spheres in an incomprehensible dance.

"But why?" Marcus would ask them. "Why does any of this exist at all?"

They had no answers. Only theories, competing and contradictory, each satisfying some islanders while leaving others hollow with doubt.

Part Two: The Search Begins

Unable to accept his ignorance, Marcus began to wander the island, studying his fellow travelers. He listened to their stories, watched how they built their lives in the absence of ultimate meaning. Some gardened. Some sang. Some argued about how to organize their small communities. Each activity seemed to Marcus like a message in a bottle, cast into an indifferent sea—a desperate attempt to say, "I was here. I mattered."

One day, he met an old cartographer named Elder Kwame, who was mapping the island's territories. The man's dark, weathered hands traced lines across yellowed paper.

"You're from the southern continent, aren't you?" Kwame asked without looking up. "I can tell by the questions in your eyes. The same questions my people have asked for generations."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," Kwame said, finally meeting his gaze, "that you come from the land bounded in the north by Egypt, in the south by Zimbabwe, in the west by Ghana, in the center by Mozambique. Your ancestors also woke on this island, lost and seeking. And some of them spent their lives trying to understand—trying to map not just the terrain, but the meaning of being here."

Marcus felt something stir within him. "Did they find answers?"

"They found stories," Kwame replied. "Stories about how their people made sense of existence—through what they ate, how they dressed, how they loved and fought and dreamed. And one man, in particular, dedicated his life to collecting all these stories, weaving them into a tapestry so vast that anyone who studied it could begin to see the whole shape of African experience."

"Who?" Marcus asked, leaning forward.

"His name," Kwame said, "is Toyin Falola."

Part Three: The Library

Kwame led Marcus inland, through forests that whispered with ancestral voices, across rivers that flowed with the accumulated knowledge of centuries. They arrived at a structure that seemed to grow from the island itself—a library built not of stone but of living memory.

Inside, Marcus found shelves that stretched beyond sight, each filled with volumes bearing Falola's name. But these weren't ordinary books. Each one pulsed with life, containing not just words but entire worlds of experience.

"Start anywhere," Kwame advised. "His work covers everything—from the Yoruba roots to the diaspora branches, from the food that nourishes bodies to the metaphysics that nourishes souls, from individual lives to continental histories, from ancient times to the present moment."

Marcus pulled down a volume at random. It opened to reveal not pages but windows—into markets bustling with commerce, into councils debating governance, into artists painting their visions, into families sharing meals, into historians arguing about the past, into philosophers grappling with existence itself.

To read Falola was to receive an invitation. It felt less like studying and more like being given a lantern and shown a trailhead into a vast, vibrant forest. Every path connected: the culinary led to the economic, the artistic to the political, the personal to the historical. His work wasn’t just about Africa; it was an intellectual embodiment of it—diverse, interconnected, resilient, and stunningly creative. Marcus had found his guide. Not a guide who gives easy answers to the old, cosmic riddles, but one who says, “Look at all that has been built, even in the mystery. Let’s trace the patterns.”

Falola, Marcus realized, was not merely telling stories or analyzing facts. He was organizing cognition itself—mapping how knowledge could move across boundaries without losing depth or rigor. In his work, the African experience appeared not as a fragment of global history but as one of its structuring centers.

The writings of Falola, the cognitive weaver, unfurled like opon Ìfá trays across the sands. Falola's voice rose like Èṣù at the crossroads, charting the African odyssey—from Yorùbá cradle songs to diaspora storms, from the steam of pounded yam to the thunder of politics, from a single life’s quiet bend to cities breathing history, from continental scars to the world's entangled weave.

The wanderer knelt, devouring the sage's words. Falola's mind was no mere book but a living mandala: concentric realms of orun and aiye, white void at the core for Olódùmarè's mystery, blue threshold for spirit's dance with flesh, green unity where ancestors whispered through daily bread, yellow rim encircling infinite paths. Here was boldness unbound—Western logic braided with Ìfá's odu, spontaneous fire tempered into sequenced light. The wanderer traced the patterns, his own chaos gaining form: past ramblings now a mapped journey, future steps foretold like divination dust.

The more he read, the less lost he felt. The island remained mysterious, the ultimate Why still unanswered, but now there were companions on the journey: Falola's tireless mind, his bold questions, his refusal to let any fragment of African experience remain in shadow.

As dawn's light pierced the sphere's curve, the wanderer rose, no longer lost but launched. Falola's universe expanded within him—an artistic cosmos, intellectual hearth, where every question fueled the grand whirl.

And so the traveller decided to stay awhile in this library of living thought. He would map what he had learned so far—not in rigid lines, but in spirals and leaps, allowing spontaneity to dance with intention. Sometimes ideas arrived like sudden rain; other times he plotted careful trails for deeper excavation. He wrote his own notes, sketches of progress, hoping they might light a small fire for other wanderers who arrived on the same shore.

He spent days, then weeks, then months in that library. Each book led him deeper into understanding not just African experience, but human experience—the universal struggle to make meaning in a meaningless void. Falola's work, he realized, was itself a response to the Island of Non-Meaning. It said: We may not know why we're here, but we can document how we lived, what we created, what we believed, what we loved.

In time, he understood: the quest was not to escape the Island of Non-Meaning, but to transform it—one story, one insight, one shared human gesture at a time—into a place where meaning could be forged, even if never fully possessed.

And in the quiet hours, when the fire-star dipped below the horizon, the traveller whispered thanks to the scholar whose work had become his compass: Toyin Falola, cartographer of an expansive intellectual and artistic universe, guide through the vastness of African experience.

Part Four: The Student's Path

Marcus began to keep his own journals, documenting his journey through Falola's vast intellectual landscape. At first, his approach was chaotic, spontaneous—he followed whatever thread caught his interest, leaping from food studies to political history to literary criticism without plan or pattern.

But gradually, he felt the need for structure. He wanted to map his own progress, to create guideposts for others who might follow. One evening, sitting by candlelight, he wrote:

"I am presenting this summation as a means of mapping the progress I have made so far and projecting patterns of work to follow in future—an organizational process meant to enlighten both myself and my readers on the shape of what has often been a project more spontaneously generated than sequentially planned."

Kwame found him writing and smiled. "You're becoming what we call a 'Falola scholar,'" he said. "Someone who recognizes that while we may never escape this Island of Non-Meaning, we can at least make beautiful, truthful, meaningful maps of our time here."

Marcus looked up from his journal. "Is that enough?"

"Is anything ever enough?" Kwame countered. "But it's something. And sometimes, on an island of lost travelers, something is everything."

Epilogue: The Continuing Journey

Marcus still lives on the Island of Non-Meaning. He still doesn't know why he exists, where he came from, or where he's ultimately going. The sphere still rotates, the sun still burns, the mystery remains unsolved.

But now, when he walks the shore and encounters newly arrived travelers—confused, frightened, questioning—he takes them by the hand.

"Come," he says. "Let me show you the library. Let me introduce you to the work of a man who spent his life transforming lostness into scholarship, confusion into clarity, the void into a vast and beautiful archive of human experience."

"Will it answer my questions?" they always ask.

"No," Marcus admits. "But it will give you better questions to ask. And sometimes, that's the closest thing to an answer we'll ever find."

He leads them inland, through the whispering forests, across the flowing rivers of knowledge, toward the library that grows from living memory—where the works of Toyin Falola wait, patient and inexhaustible, offering not escape from the Island of Non-Meaning but a way to inhabit it with dignity, curiosity, and purpose.

And in that inhabiting, Marcus has discovered, lies something very much like home.