Imaginative Matrices and the Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: Exploring Toyin Falola's Thought World through his Account of his Relationshop with Iya Lekuleja, the Magical Herbalist
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
This essay explores imaginative creativity as
strategic for appreciating the multidisciplinary creativity of writer and scholar
Toyin Falola, focusing on his account of his relationship with the
magical herbalist Iya Lekuleja.
The essay follows from ''Textual, Conceptual and Imagistic
Windows into the Prolific Multidisciplinarity of Writer and Scholar Toyin
Falola''.
Contents
Forms of Imagination
Mysteries of the Known
A Great Knowledge System and its Mysterious Practitioner
The Self Transcendence of the Adept
Enquiries into Strange Knowledges
The Transformative Encounter
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
The Final Departure of the Adept and the
Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
A Magnificent
Contribution to Biographies of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space
Forms of Imagination
The ability of [ bodying ] forth the forms of things unknown, [giving] to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"? as English writer William Shakespeare puts it so beautifully in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
The skill to make the common look uncommon as English Romantic poet and theorist William Wordsworth perhaps indicates in his preface to Lyrical Ballads?
The capacity to see beyond the obvious, perceiving otherwise concealed depths of phenomena, as Babatunde Lawal indicates in his description of the oju theory of perception from Yoruba thought in " Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art"?
May such inward perception enable the perceiver appreciate relationships between the phenomenon in question and other phenomena in the network of existence, in relation to the infinite, as Nimi Wariboko's interpretation building upon Kalabari thought may be summed up?
Is it the ability to give life to something through words or other expressive forms, making both the non-existent and the existent vivid for an audience?
May all these possibilities be unified in a theory of imagination?
At the centre of the multifarious universe represented by the omnivorous writings of Toyin Falola, covering various genres and disciplines, may be observed an imaginative creativity, demonstrating various understandings of imagination.
The endowment to tell a story in a manner that powerfully vivifies it for the reader, as demonstrated in his autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
The creativity to project emotion in a way that makes it concrete for an audience, as in his poem ''Remembrance: Clara Adeyemi.''
The prowess to energise the abstract, bringing it alive, making it almost an immediate reality of the reader, as in ''Ritual Archives.''
The expertise to sum up a complex of ideas in a compelling manner, projecting forcefully their intellectual force, even in a very brief summary, as in his call for papers on Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba:A New History and for an edited volume on the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko.
The power to sum up a vast scope of individual intellectual journeying in a manner that lights up its inward dynamisms, conjuring the flesh and blood individuality, the living vitality, of the union of thought and life making up a thinker and writer, as in his ''Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi : 1929-2014: Our Foundation, Our Mainframe, and Our Roof".
One demonstration of the capacity to bring past history into living reality is his account of his relationship with the herbalist Iyalekuleja, popularly known as Leku, from chapter seven, ''Herbs and Charms'' in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir, his autobiography of his childhood, and Counting The Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story.
Apologies to the writer for breaking up longer paragraphs and the concluding poem for easier reading on social media and for rearranging the sequence in which some paragraphs follow each other, even integrating text from one book into a sequence of text from another book, in order to assist the reader in following the observations I try to make, and doing this without indicating that these texts are from different books.
I also commit the perhaps sacrilegious act of introducing full stops and removing commas in the conclusions of some of the stanza divisions I create to indicate shifts in the cluster of references through which the poem cascades.
Mysteries of the Known
The full discovery of Leku led me to the mysterious
world of herbs and magic, secrecy and healing. She actually was an iwin [''a spirit in human skin''] but not of the kind described in the literature. Indeed, no literature,
then or now, has been able to record, capture, and analyze the women in
Leku’s category. And half of what I later found out I cannot reveal.
By
the time I could seek her permission to reveal her essence and quote her, she
was long dead. And each time I feel like revealing the full essence I
am tormented by an overpowering feeling of awe and danger.
The first time I
mentioned a small part of her secret at a seminar at the Institute of
African Studies at the University of Ibadan, I had a nightmare in which I was
pursued by a tiger that would have killed me if I had not awakened in time.
Most of my misfortunes, all my negative feelings, and my anticipation of
troubles I attribute to a part of me that desires to unlock what I know about
Leku. Perhaps I will, but not today, not even tomorrow. Nobody tells all he
knows.
Who is writing this?
One of the most prolific writers in the world, in command of multiple expressive forms, registers and styles of expression, from poetry to prose, from narrative to exposition and analysis, a master of proverb discourse, a scholar deeply grounded in the imperatives of self expression as fundamental to the illumination and transmission of civilization, a historian dedicated to deep exploration of the past to clarify the present and shape the future, a consummate writer on Yorba spirituality and philosophy in its arcane palpitations and ideational configurations, unable to articulate understanding of one person, describing himself as locked into silence by a sense of something beyond his full comprehension, something awesome, something numinous, ''inspiring both dread and fascination [constituting] the non-rational element of vital religion'', as Rudolph Otto's term from The Idea of the Holy is clarified in Webster's Third New Advanced Dictionary of the English Language, the esoteric, awo, as understood in Yoruba thought, as these values are embodied by the herbalist Leku, according to this account?
A Great Knowledge System and its Mysterious Practitioner
She had a successful store on a streetcorner about six miles from the house. This was the most famous store for herbs, ingredients for all diseases and ailments, and mixtures and materials for all kinds of charms, both for good and for evil. Kola took me to the store, and we did not have to disguise ourselves. We walked in and sat down, and she continued to smoke her pipe and attend to customers.
I would visit this store many times in seven years, in part because I became fascinated with her and also because of the knowledge offered by Leku and her store. I doubt if Leku herself could have known the number of items in the store.
Arranged in a way known only to her, they comprised an assortment of all known herbs, dried leaves, roots of many kinds of trees and shrubs, fresh and dead plants, bones of various animals (including tigers, leopards, and hyenas), skulls of various animals, dried rats, rodents, other animals, dry and living insects such as millipedes and centipedes, reptiles (including parts of snakes, lizards, and alligators), rocks and soils, and ritual lamps and pots. Tortoises, snails, and small cats walked around, and they, too, were for sale.
Dangerous scorpions in bottles, as well as snakes in cages, were waiting for food and ready to bite. It was from these various objects, as I came to learn from Kola and others, that she got her name of Iya Lekuleja (the seller of assorted charms and medicine). Leku was just an abbreviation, used mainly behind her back; it is shorter, but it cuts off the dignified word, Iya (elderly mother).
Leku was an iya, but she had no children, so this was not a motherhood label. She was superior to all of us, men and women alike. Leku was a man, as they often referred to her as “Kabiyesi,” a title that can be rendered as “Excellency” and is reserved for male kings, or as “Baba Nla,” the great father. Still in the same skin, she was a woman to others, but not as an obinrin (the Yoruba name for women), but as an iya, a superior elder. When men wanted something from her, they would lie down flat on the floor until she gestured to them to stand up. There were women like her, with knowledge and skills that gave them prestige and definitions beyond the association of women with motherhood.
Some among the women had the
skill to combine herbal knowledge with incantations to make their charms and medicines work, as in the apetebi.
They were the powerful members of the “Club of Sixteen” [ ''since they referred to
themselves as Eerindinlogun, which in Yoruba means sixteen...They were female diviners who used sixteen cowries as their main device on the divination
tray'' and] who engaged in rituals. Leku knew how to perform
rituals, and many could be caught whispering that Leku could kill anyone, but by what means I did not know.
Leku was never home during
the day—she left at dawn and returned at dusk. She cooked no food, hardly spoke to anybody in the house, smoked
her pipe in silence, and kept to herself in her overcrowded room full of dead plants and insects.
The
plants and insects were not objects of dirt, but clusters of valuable materials
and knowledge, which required research to
reveal their meanings. There was electricity, but she never touched the knob to switch it on. Rather, she used
her lamp, multi-eyed with cotton wicks and palm oil.
As
Leku poured more oil
into the lamp, she would also put in seeds, uttering strange words only she
could understand. The words empowered
the lamp and fire, providing more than just light.
Leku kept no friends, had no children, and had relatives who
revered her but only spoke to her about their diseases or good health. She listened to them, told them what to do,
and stopped talking. They thanked her, women kneeling down, men prostrating, both moving on, knowing
full well that Leku would not engage in redundant conversations.
She must return to her pipe, to inhale the
nicotine that gave her limitless energy, to puff out the smoke that would ward off evil spirits. Wandering spirits, we all
believed, hated nothing more than the smell of tobacco and would keep their distance, as far as three miles away.
The smell provoked them to flight, but also to insulting human beings, not because smoking was a vice, but because
humans were a nuisance to the spirits, not leaving them alone to roam the streets
and do their damage.
There were times when, on reaching the house, she would stop and say some words to herself, as if uttering powerful prayers, before entering. Even mysterious were the days when she would enter the house backward, as if she must not see certain people or objects.
[ On being sent on an errand to see Leku and take a message from her ] When I reached Ojagbo, the
city ward where Leku’s store was located, she was not to be found. Her store
was closed, but not locked.
Leku never locked her store; she would only
close it to indicate to her customers and visitors
that she had gone for the day. Even the rascally would not dare enter Leku’s
store with all the myths surrounding
it and its owner.
To
threaten to push a boy into Leku’s store was enough to frighten him, as boys
all believed that it was full of live
scorpions and snakes, sorcerers and witches, and other agents of death.
Leku’s
store was her life. Yet women in adjacent and opposite stores said that she had
not been seen for days.
There
were no traces of her. In the case of most other women traders, emissaries
would have been sent to their houses
to find out why they were absent from work, usually due to an illness that had
befallen them, their husbands,
or their children, or some emergency, all calling for the expression of
sympathy.
However, Leku was not in their league, she did not relate to them, and none would even nurse a desire to find out why she was not at her store. At best, they would say “a a ri iya” (we did not see the elderly woman) and return to their businesses, gesturing to indicate that they were not supposed to know her movements or even bother to find out about her.
Leku was not the kind of
woman who could be declared missing. Who would steal a burden, carrying a woman who could become a dangerous scorpion,
bite you, and then escape?
The
talk about Leku was always closer to truth than fiction [closer to fiction than truth?]—when
everyone was complaining of cold, she was hot; and when they were hot, she was
cold; when they were hungry, she was full; and
when they were full, she was hungry. She reversed the order of existence, a master of her own rules.
When city officials were
asking the women around her to buy licenses for their
small stores and checking their husbands’ tax receipts in front of their wives,
they ran past Leku’s store.
Men who had paid no taxes could just sit around her, and the most powerful tax
collectors became powerless,
as they were so afraid to come near her, lest their fingers should wither away.
The Self Transcendence of the Adept
Even more wondrous, the amazing cosmos of organic and inorganic forms evident in her store is internalised by Leku, not only in terms of its contents, but also regarding their uses individually and in combination, a creative power all the more astonishing on account of the spirit of self denying, abstemious service in which it is employed, an image of self sacrificing power:
Leku knew three things, two of which were public knowledge and the third a secret known to only a few.
To start with what was obvious, she was knowledgeable about all items used to cure diseases, that is, she was a trader in herbs and all ingredients for charms and medicine. Her knowledge of traditional pharmacology was deep.
She had not gone to school and had memorized all the items. Even the smaller items, the visible dried leaves, and the wrapped ground leaves ran to over a thousand types. The bone pieces ran to another thousand. Even the various types of clay lamps were many. Leku could produce an object in a split second, pointing to where a customer should go and get it when she was not in the mood to get up.
Leku’s second strength was a source of mystery: she knew the combinations of plants and other objects needed to cure all common diseases, and she could provide advice for the more complicated ailments.
Leku operated in a less than commercial manner. If the babalawo and herbalists charged for consultations, Leku did not, charging only token fees for her herbs and charms. If the babalawo and herbalists explained the illnesses and diseases and how they wanted to cure them, Leku offered no explanation.
She was recirculating her profits to buy more items for the store rather than for herself. Her only passion was the store, not as a space in which to make money but one in which to make herbs and medicine available to whoever wanted them. She was certainly not counting on riches.
I witnessed her method many times. A woman would walk in complaining that her son was suffering from prolonged stomach pain. Leku would listen to the story. As she picked one herb from one part of the store, she would pose a question, and the answer would prompt her to drop one leaf and take another. When she was done, she would simply instruct, “Grind them together, cook in a boiling pot, and give to your son for two days.”
No more questions, no more explanation. She mentioned her price; the woman paid and left. Leku would not even check the money or touch it, only pointing the client in the direction of a bowl in which to drop it and from which to take the change, which she also never checked. If the woman had no money, Leku would still give her the medicine and refused to reply or respond to the long statement of gratitude. It was not that the gratitude was wasted or the beneficiary should not thank her; it was as if she were saying that her help was rendered on behalf of some higher forces.
When Leku had no answer to a medical problem, she referred the client to another herbalist or babalawo. One day when she saw a very deep wound on my right leg, which left a scar that remains noticeable even today, she advised me to go to Adeoyo, which was a facility for Western medicine. She gave no explanation, just a single sentence.
This combination of inexplicable scope of knowledge and profound asceticism provokes questions as to its source, with a wonderful story emerging about how such an unusual personage came to be:
[ Her ] knowledge impressed even the most talented person. My headmaster once used her in a school sermon, saying that what the teachers wanted us to learn was nothing compared to what Leku knew. This was true, although we were dealing with different kinds of knowledge. Because she knew so much, she became an object of discussions on knowledge.
As the story goes, a powerful tornado had occurred many years before, and she was a victim of it. Carried by the tornado to a distant land, she was suspended in air for over seven years. It was there that she was able to observe the earth and all of its contents, knowing not just the name but the purpose of each item. Suspended without food or water, she could endure hardship, and her body was tiny so she would not need much food to survive. Other than her nonstop smoking, not many saw Leku when she cooked or ate. Even when I saw her cooking pot, it was so small that I could have eaten the entire contents as an appetizer.
The lessons on what to do with all plants, insects, animals, and other objects were given to Leku by heavenly bodies. As the story goes, she signed a pact with the heavenly bodies not to reveal the sources of her knowledge but to constantly renew her vow. As Leku did not transmit this knowledge directly to others, people believed the story. She had no apprentice, no one interested in inheriting the store or learning the herbs. Indeed, when she died her death meant the end of the store and her knowledge, the loss of an entire laboratory and library.
A climatic point of Falola's relationship with this enigmatic yet darkly illuminating figure is described:
It was Leku’s third type of knowledge that bound us in secrecy and actually made me the most informed about her. A simple act led to some bonding, which in turn led to greater interaction. It started casually, without any thought on my part.
[ He narrates how he helped Leku carry her luggage, leading to friendship between them, but the secrecy and knowledge referenced above are not elaborated on, only stated in general but tantalizing terms, without mapping their contents]
I walked into a deadly trap, like the restless feet walking into a snake pit. Nothing had prepared my mind for it. No warning came in a dream. No clue was visible.
Saturday came quickly, and all the boys gathered at school. We had decided to ignore Leku’s instruction that not all of us should come to the store. We all decided to go, but the rest would stay out of Leku’s reach and sight. One boy said that Leku could not see beyond five feet, which was why people did not move closer to her, so that she could not put them on her list of whom to kill or roast for medication.
...everybody was afraid of Leku
for various reasons. Sali told me that he had heard a rumor that Leku could turn a client into a
snake and that the skulls in the store were
not those of animals but of human beings. According to Sali, several small boys had gone there to buy herbs
and never returned, as Leku had
converted them into ingredients to make powerful charms. According to Sali, Leku only ate one meal a year,
usually around June, and she needed
only small snacks for the next twelve months.
[Sali insisted to Falola that ]“You are alive because Iya Lekuleja’s stomach is full.” [ He] explained that her annual big meal comprised human flesh and blood. In any case, I needed to help him [since Falola was close to Leku] .
I was to grab the medication and rush out. In contrast to visiting other places and people, one did not have to rehearse what to say, what words and sentences to avoid, and how long to speak. Leku would not speak anyway.
I had nothing to fear. She had always welcomed me to her store, gesturing for me to sit down, and removing her pipe to signal “bye bye” when I decided to leave. I even took fruits from the store without seeking permission to do so. I would peel bananas and oranges and leave the skins on the ground. Leku would pick them up, sun dry them, and store them for reasons that I did not know. She had in store dried skins of many nuts and fruits, including those that did not even grow in Western Nigeria where the Yoruba are located.
Sali and the rest of his advisory board [ those schoolboys helping Sali with his plans to gain Risi's friendship] walked jubilantly toward the store [expecting success for Sali's mission]. As we approached the site, the boys stopped, leaving me to cross the street while they looked on from a distance.
As I walked in, I was grabbed by two fierce-looking adults and pushed to the back of the store. Two women quickly held up a long piece of blue cloth to create a curtain so that no one could see the inside of the store. Without the curtain, the entire store could be seen from the roadside by onlookers.
Then I saw my mother, my mother’s mother, my mother’s father, and some other faces, about twelve or so. I could not count.
Events were moving too fast for me. They must have been hiding and suddenly appeared when I showed up. I was held on the ground, so firmly that I could hardly breathe. Within two minutes, my entire head was shaved with a sharp knife. I protested once, but when I saw blood I gave up.
Then Leku came with a new blade and made over a hundred incisions on my head. She opened a small container and rubbed a dark-looking powder on the small cuts, speaking in tongues as she did. The words and lines were archaic, too fast for me to grasp. I know the chorus, which was a prayer to cast evil out of my brain.
Then a more frightening part followed, too much for me to bear then and even now as I write. Leku took a dried rat, mixed it with some ingredients in a bowl and stirred it many times. As she prepared my mind for the fact that I would drink the mixture, she removed her cloth, and stood naked for all to see.
She moved in circles many times, uttering archaic words in rapid succession. Then she knelt over the bowl and washed her breasts and vagina into its contents. I very much doubt that anyone paid attention to her nakedness, only to her performance. No one but me was shocked about the short and dirty bath that I witnessed. When she said something they would reply “ase” (amen). Only Leku could ever repeat what she said. For someone who was always quiet, the rapidity of her speech and its esotericism were astounding. One line was repeated many times: “May he not die at the hands of a woman.”
When she finished, she lifted the bowl and asked me to drink. I refused. I was probably telling myself that this could not have been intended for a human being; even if thrown to the ground as a waste product, one should take care not to step in it. I was hit by the two men who had originally grabbed me, ordering me to drink. I did, remembering the saying that we had used in reference to the schoolteachers several times: an oppressor that one cannot stand up to should be committed to God.
I became like an accused man who proclaimed his guilt quickly in order to avoid staying too long on his knees. As I drank the medication slowly, I wanted to throw up. “If you vomit, you will lick all of it with your tongue,” said Leku. I looked around for sympathy, but I realized that I was a cockroach in a court of fowls. It was only my will that kept the dangerous liquid inside me.
The experience stayed with me for a long time; I had to close my eyes before I could swallow any medication. The ceremony was over within a few minutes. Leku returned to her chair; now dressed, she lit her pipe, ordered that the temporary screen be removed, and pretended nothing had happened.
She was so calm that no one would ever associate her with the leadership of the ritual that had just occurred. I was asked to sit down. Everybody departed, saying nothing other than thanking Leku for “removing evil from his head” and “saving his life.” No one was ready to challenge Leku, but they probably knew what they were doing—even one who is feebleminded knows the location of his house.
I stayed in the store for the rest of the day, speechless. I did not even think of the boys who had followed me. I am sure they took to their heels when they saw the screen held up. When the store closed, as darkness came, Leku closed the door.
I noticed that she did not lock it, only putting an assortment of charms in three pots outside it. Neither did she bother to take the money from the bowl. Kola had told me that even if Leku’s money fell on the ground, no one would pick it up for fear of contracting smallpox.
On that evening, everybody I knew was bad. I had committed no offense to deserve their punishment. Even if I had, I told myself that there must be guilt in innocence, just as there is innocence in guilt. I did not understand their willingness to collaborate with Leku if they departed so quickly. To me, all the adults were like the cane that was used to kill a snake but was not invited to share the meal when the animal was roasted.
I carried Leku’s loads, walking side by side for the entire journey. She walked too slowly for me, like the moon that travels slowly as he crosses the city. I could not push her, shout, or walk faster, as I would have done with Sali and my other friends. I was the termite in Leku’s rock: a termite can do nothing to a rock but lick it. I had already licked too much. If the heart is sad, tears will flow like a stream, but I knew that Leku had no eyes to see, and if she did she would say that my eyes smelled. I could do nothing, not even talk or yawn: for the mouse to laugh in the presence of a cat, there must be a hole close by.
I dropped her loads without even caring to look at her room. I went into my own room, without even asking for food. I noticed that no one wanted to speak with me, including Kola, who had gone into hiding: well, he who derided the unfortunate person should carry no blame; it was the fate of the ridiculed that was at fault.
Friends and relatives had become detractors, so I believed, and I had to make sure that they did not damage my destiny. I had become a broken chain that could not regain its wholeness.
I told myself that they were all talking about me, reminding myself of many famous lines in which the disreputable person thinks that people are speaking of him; the wicked are full of suspicion.
As I lay down, I was plotting revenge in my head, thinking of how I would obtain the power to make them eat cow dung. I agreed with what I had heard, that it is better to spend the night in anger than in repentance. I fell asleep, but my sleep must have been short.
Early the next morning, Baba Olopa instructed me to wake up. Since he only woke me up when I was in trouble, I immediately knew that he was calling a dog with a whip in his hand. Leku was ready for me.
On Sunday and Monday, I repeated the journey with Leku, staying with her for three days in her store, and eating only minimally, notably fruits and bean cake. I missed school on Monday and was disconnected from all my friends. I was not allowed to bathe or clean my head or face so that the concoction would not be washed off. I ate and drank little so that the medicine would stay in my body for some time.
I understood Leku a little bit more. When she was not smoking her pipe, she was talking to unseen strangers, appealing to gods, cursing witches, praising herbs, and begging the gods. Too strange for me to understand, she was obsessed with appealing to the gods and all universal forces not to make impotent the plants, roots, bones, and other items in her store. The Yoruba she used to communicate, to talk to herself, and to say all these strange things was not the language we used at home or school.
Leku was so strange that I began to believe Sali, who claimed that the woman had twenty-four eyes. When I thought she was dozing off, she was quick to welcome a customer to her store. I paid attention to what the customers wanted, much of which sounded curious and strange. Some needed medicine to ward off bad dreams, and Leku would give them powders to apply to their eyelashes or to drink dissolved in water. The regular customers said nothing, just collecting their routine medication. A few men came for mixtures to treat sexually transmitted diseases, and Leku asked one of them to show her his penis, using a short stick to examine it.
I did not understand the purpose of the magic involved in incising my head and forcing a powerful concoction down my throat. I could not have understood it. I knew that they had performed elaborate magic on me, casting out some spell but returning some forces to create a balance. They believed that I was evil, based on only one piece of evidence: I wanted to procure the medicine to help a friend.
Could they have had other evidence unknown to me? I was not the one who was after Risi. It had never occurred to me to have a girlfriend. I had had a wife or even several in dramas in which I acted the role of a successful man or a chief, but I did not turn these dramas into dreams.
No one had ever discussed sex with me. It was not one of those topics that came up in any discussions among us: talking about soccer and bicycle rides had greater priority. The big boys used to talk of girls, but not of sex. Sali wanted Risi, but he never fully explained to us what he wanted her for. I was further confused about their fear that I would be destroyed by a woman, necessitating the use of magic to prevent it. I could not understand Leku’s intent since I was not Sali.
Were they saying that I should stay away from all women or some women? Was the magic about overcoming the power of the naked body, fully revealed in the aging nakedness of Leku? Could it be that the love of a woman would not undermine my masculinity, sap my energy, damage my brain?
Would I be saved from the influence of men like Sali and the members of his advisory board? Could it be that evil and women were associated and had to be disconnected? Did I drink enough of the hidden contents of breast and vagina that I would no longer desire them? Did I drink the breast and vagina juice to make me scared of their excesses? Or was the medication to assert manliness over femininity or to prevent a possible perpetual subordination to a woman? To one who is ignorant, a small garden is a forest.
By the time I could seriously demand answers, Leku had completely overwhelmed me, showing me her other side, which was more secretive, more frightening, more threatening, and more powerful. I became like a person who, because he is bored to death at a meeting with the king and his chiefs, decides to put a lot of salt in his mouth: it is impossible to spit out the salt and also impossible to swallow the saliva. I couldn’t [ could?] learn but not talk, see but not admit.
As I learned more about Leku, without all the details of what she did, I worried no more about my own rituals and experience. Eventually, I was able to claim, and even then only privately, that I fully understood her essence, her representation in the realm of the living and the underworld. I never said that I understood her power or its sources. I could only know bits and pieces: but for the reality of death, even diviners and herbalists could claim to be God.
Whenever I read the literature or listen to
speeches claiming that African women lack power, I repeat quietly “Leku,
Leku, Leku,” to remind myself that the picture has never been fully
revealed. A mouth that turns into a knife will cut its own lips. The full
picture will not be revealed until many more people discover an iwin who
will either grant their requests or torment them. Even then, the
experience of the last person to die will be hard to imagine.
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
His experience with Leku continues with his interaction with her in the context of her hidden involvement in South-Western Nigerian politics as a consultant and a spiritual specialist, as described in Counting the Tiger's Teeth. His errand to find her and take a message from her leads to his discovering her role in the South-West Nigerian peasant revolt known as the Agbekoya Revolt, prosecuted by the rebels through both material and spiritual weapons:
...after a long walk, we reached the village of Kusela, which had been deserted as people were talking about an impending war. I knew the village, and I was surprised that we were coming here. We passed by the empty houses and reached the farms. There she was! I could now collect whatever message I had to take from Leku and head back to Akanran which I missed so much.
Leku had been at work,
perhaps overworked for a person of her age and smallish stature. She was frailer
than the last time I had seen her, and she looked
tired as well. She could no longer stand fully erect. She was moving more slowly than before, and her words came
too slowly.
She was at center stage, directing a large number of people to grind various herbs and mix
them with other ingredients. These were for medicine, charms, and rituals. The
wet ground plants and seeds were the visible
components, but the most potent were the words, the incantations she chanted over those items which
transformed ordinary leaves to something else. Memorize and repeat what Leku said to those plants, you would not be
able to produce the effects that she was able to produce with her own incantations! Hers were the ogidi
ogede, “concentrated incantations” with potency.
Those incantations, which I heard at different times in various forms, when written down sometimes looked like biblical psalms. The words communicated magical meanings, capable of turning ordinary-looking pouches of leather into power. These pouches were all over the place, in hundreds, ranging from small ones that could hold a few cowries to larger ones that could take more objects. The smaller pouches were put in pockets or sewn on
shirts; the bigger ones could be worn around the neck or waist, or tied to the arms. There were no leather workers around, so I figured that the pouches had been brought to this hidden farm.
Leku had left the city to
become part of a large team of herbal and charm makers, working together at a
secret location. Only those behind closed doors
knew what went on inside. She must have left the city days before to come to Kusela. No one could
come to the farm without secret codes, without being led there by the gate keeper, a man believed to be capable of
seeing the “very inside” of human beings, to know their contents and what they were actually thinking—their
intentions and level of wickedness and goodness.
The gathering at Kusela [ was] mainly [of] herbalists and diviners (babalawo) and
their apprentices. They spoke various Yoruba dialects, and they were from all over the land—from
Ijebu-Igbo in the south, Owo in the east, Ikare in the north, Ilaro in the
west. I did not know what to call them: a
diocesan council of eminences or a conclave of priests? They called themselves “Awo Osan,” that is, the “cult of
daylight,” which might mean that there could be an awo oru (cult of the
night) or an awo asale/awo
irole (cult of the evening). Or does awo osan refer to the good and awo
oru refer to the evil?
They were working together like a team: The fingers may look different, one short, the other long, and a thumb may look sideways, but all must cooperate to get any work done.
In that long-gone past, the
babalawo had a role in selecting a king for them, interpreting
the course of life, changing a bad destiny to good, performing midwifery,
telling people what to do, and even more so what not to
do.
Leku was more of a healer than a diviner. She knew about the power of herbs and dead bones, roots and tree bark, seeds and skins, and all their various limitless combinations needed to treat a host of diseases. She was not a babalawo, but, on October 19 and on the days thereafter, she was among them, directing them on what to grind, and the ingredients to combine. To me, she was like a resource person but to them, a superhuman whose words carried divine weight.
She was so quick to anger, and making a mistake near her was a mistake in itself: Her body language would communicate displeasure, especially her eyes, which would turn wicked. She was a commanding presence, as if even those who divined already knew from their divination trays that Leku was untouchable and could harm them.
The apprentices were always
terrified, trembling when they moved closer to her, treading carefully, bowing almost to the point of never even seeing
her face to take her instructions. As I stood erect observing her, panic-stricken men signaled to me
to bend, not to look at her; I would stand, disobedient, rude, untamable, rotten, and raw, as far as they were
concerned.
The space was active, with one task or another performed with little communication. People prepared herbal concoctions, half explained as preventive charms; the other half were stuffed in pouches without any explanation.
People came to bring plants,
corn, beans, powder, and pouches. People left to take with them concoctions and bags of herbs and leather pouches.
I was now an active observer of a complicated knowledge assembly, moving from one babalawo to another—listening, hearing, and looking. I could report what I saw, but the meanings were never clear to me. Both their process and its outcome were vague, appearing disconnected. They divided themselves into groups undertaking different tasks and missions. Some were preparing fortification medicine and rituals, preparing ingredients of wholeness and health that people could take in anticipation of health problems, to prevent a host of diseases, and to cure fatigue and fever.
The herbal concoctions for diseases were made for many purposes. They expected malaria attacks, and they put many herbal liquids in bottles. I was asked to prepare labels, writing iba (fever) on pieces of paper, each glued to a bottle with liquefied cassava starch. The bottles were available to anyone for free.
Men collected as many as they wanted for their wives and children to
drink, whether they had fever or not. The preparation of the
herbal medicine was also dependent on a large number of children and women who
kept visiting with baskets of plants on their
heads. I did not know where they were coming from, or who was organizing them. They dropped the
baskets and were ordered to leave, which they did without questions. Once in a while, a few were asked to stay behind
to work with pestles and mortars to pound the herbs to pulp.
I saw the workers combining the plants in various ways, changing them according to the diseases they were intended to cure, but the most common medicines were for dysentery and malaria. The use of the preparations varied: Some were put into caps and hats, and many rags were soaked in herbal preparations. Those on caps and hats were expected to blend with the fabric and then be worn. I did not know what diseases they would cure or how; and they appeared too dirty to me to put on my head or to be good for human consumption.
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
The message Falola takes back from her demonstrates her mastery of aroko, another aspect of the classical Yoruba knowledge system:
In the very middle of the
night on October 29, Leku woke me up. [ She] walked me through the hallway and led me to
the front of the house. I was confused as to what she was up to. As quiet as she was, she was full of
tricks and surprises.
She did not know that I had made up my mind to leave. For me to announce my exit or now
ask her where she was leading me was to open the mouth of a cobra to see its teeth. Did Leku know
my mind, and was she now leading me to the beehive to disturb the nest and
release the bees in hundreds to sting me?
My
mind was instantly clouded. As she walked too slowly, I clenched my teeth and tried to walk like a snail behind
her. Both of us were now engaged in an affair without a nose.
When we reached the front of the house,
the women who had been keeping vigil outside came forward. When they saw Leku, they dispersed. She
crossed the road to the other side. It was dark, and the light from her lamp
was not strong.
There was probably now a
message to give to others, but certainly not a careless one: Her tongue had now arrived to sew things together,
although Leku’s tongue would never spread beyond her mouth. Leku did not have a yellow mouth, as those with
yellow mouths communicate unreliable words, and they must be ignored.
Since she did not greet me
or ask how I had endured for so long, how the pinch from the shoe tormented my foot, surely
Leku must have been ready to give me a package for Pasitor. But Leku had no
package, did not tie any to her wrapper, and the
only thing she had on her was the lamp.
Where then was the package that I had been waiting for all along? Blood
rushed to my veins, but Leku could not see it. Divining cowries were fighting one another: The crisis was so
great that the matter could no longer be resolved by the gods. I kept quiet, not aiming at walking about town with my
belly, a foolish kind of behavior.
Then came the very low voice with which Leku spoke, asking me to deliver a package of words, not of objects. I must tell Pasitor the following:
1.) The moon and the sun do not hold a meeting; one is not available during the day and the other must
work at night;
2.) The cat, the tiger, and the lion are family members; all cherish raw meat; and
3.) In the rivulet of blood, a spoonful collected cannot tell us whose blood it is; in the house of Death, fresh and dry skulls litter the ground for Death to walk over.
Leku then placed her right hand on my head, said some meaningless words and phrases, and concluded that the message was forever sealed in my memory. Indeed, it has been sealed there, word for word.
We crossed the road back to the house; she handed over the lamp to me and asked me to leave immediately. I wanted to leave anyway, but now my departure was official, sanctioned, and the mission, although it had taken many more days than expected, was successful. Patience had now given birth to a baby: success.
When I wanted to move to the left of the house, she asked me to go to the right and told me never to make any left turn unless that was the only option open to me. When I asked how I would avoid a left turn, she said to make a right turn in a circle, and then walk backwards to the left, then turn. I did not understand the reasons behind any of her words or her instruction to avoid left turns.
The message reaches those it is meant for:
When the joy of seeing me subsided, Pasitor took me out of the church to the very compound where my journey had begun. I was eager to deliver the message, but Pasitor asked me not to, saying that the message required more than two eyes and ears to receive it. If I was an elephant capable of carrying its load, Pasitor was not big enough to receive it from me. All my rivulets had now become a large river that many wanted to swim in. Pasitor and the others had been waiting for the rain with the big drops. I saw myself as a star, competing with the moon in importance. Leku’s words had turned me into a rich boy, a live reed stuck in the mud.
Unlike before, I was allowed to enter the house, where Pasitor joined many other men in a crowded room. Their “chairman,” wearing an agbada (a large, free-flowing garment), thanked me for assisting them and asked me to deliver the message, telling me neither to add nor subtract, change the order, or forget anything. This was quite
easy since I had memorized the strange words and recited them to myself times without number. Whether it was Leku’s hand placed on my head or my ability to remember things learned by rote, I delivered the words as they were originally rendered. Line by line; not a word more, not a word less.
Panic struck all the faces. Elephant hunters are mobilized with only one word: unite! They were now united in
sorrow as they looked
at me, the elephant with the big message. Raised heads were lowered as if
someone just died, jaws were
widely opened, and flies would have an easy passage all the way to the throat.
All eyes stared at me.
A messenger has no malice; malice is the one who sent him. The king has
excreted in public; you want to run away from the smell,
but doing so without permission will bring trouble. Someone has to clean up and
collect the feces. My job was
done, turning my riches into a mist that evaporated in the twinkle of an eye.
The man who broke the silence added to my confusion with his explanation: “Iru aroko buruku wo leyi?” (What
kind of bad aroko is
this?). Aroko was a coded message. As Pasitor later told me, it
was a way of communicating in code
between two parties. Code words included names of people, animals, food items,
and the like. They could be
given in combination with objects to express messages of peace, war,
reconciliation, and much more. A few among
those present who understood the words began to interpret the messages:
1) Many of us would die;
2) The death could not be prevented and would include both the young and old;
3) Enemies would never be reconciled; and
4) Friends would betray one another; trust would be broken.
The mood was gloomy. They had been expecting a message of comfort or a solution to their problem. What they got did not make them happy. The house of a rich man is always beautiful from the outside to strangers who do not know about the strife within. The powerful were inside, as those outside would be thinking, but it was a house of sorrow.
I understood what an aroko was, how coded words could be decoded by those who understood. I became fascinated by aroko and requested Pasitor to introduce me to those men who explained Leku’s message in ways that others accepted. No one had ever mentioned aroko to me in school; perhaps the schoolteachers did not know about it either. As I came to understand aroko, I realized that objects and words opened a library of meaning.
Perhaps Leku had sent an object preceding my words so that the objects were then combined with the words to reach the gloomy conclusion. Aroko delivered communications, and replies were offered also in a symbolic manner so that if you sent words and embers of fire to me to indicate trouble and war, I could send a calabash full of water to you to indicate that I had the means to quench your fire; or I could send you additional firewood to say
that we should keep
fighting.
To receive a string of six cowries was being asked to visit the
sender; ten in a string meant
that this visitation was urgent. If your reply was to send a string of two cowries,
you were rejecting the offer
of visitation and announcing that you were no longer on good terms. If two were
sent to you without prior conversation, you would expect bad news: Your father
or mother was probably dead. When other objects were added to those strings of cowries, the
contents of the message changed: Add the red tail feather of a parrot to a string of six cowries, and you would be
telling the person that he had outstayed his welcome; change the feather to that of a guinea fowl,
and the message would change to one of goodwill.
“Baba Chairman,” as
the head of this gathering was called, adjourned the meeting with a very sad
face and in a dejected voice. When
someone asked him to make an effort to call a babalawo to make sacrifices, he
dismissed him as an ignorant
man who did not know that Leku did not talk lightly and knew more than any
babalawo in the land.
“Awon aye lo ran an si wa”; Leku sent them a message she had received
from powerful forces that no sacrifices
could change. He told everyone to double all their energies, to commission more
charms, and to watch out
for evil forces.
The Final Departure of the Adept and the Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
Falola's concluding encounter with Leku is climatic in its mysterious drama:
I lived with Leku [ “ my ‘godmother’] at Ode Aje from 1963 to 1965, for most days of the year … I cannot thank her enough, and our relationship requires a separate book.
....
On Friday, December 12, 1969, Leku sent for me. Her first statement was a blow: “My time is up: I want to go home!”
People of her age, according to a strong belief, actually knew when to die. They would begin to communicate it as a premonition. Sometimes, they would be conversing with their dead relatives. Or, we would accuse them of losing their coherence and memory. The phrase “eating the tongue” could be used to describe their meaningless statements.
When you gave them food, they would eat little and say they were saving the rest for the journey they were embarking upon. They would ask you whether you saw the woman who died three years ago. When the elderly began to “eat the tongue,” you needed to look at your savings and start to make funeral arrangements. If you needed blessings, this was the time to collect them. If you needed to stake a claim on a piece of land, this was the time to let the elderly transfer it to you, as there were no written wills.
Then Leku told me that I was the only one she wanted to tell. For a woman who did not like to talk, she gave a long speech, almost an hour nonstop—telling an incredible autobiography; the time is not yet ripe enough to retell it. She punctuated her speech by puffing and putting more tobacco in her pipe. She gave me the pipe and asked me to inhale it three times. I did. She held on firmly to my head, asking me to swallow the smoke instead of releasing it. I did. She said certain things that I will always remember. She told me what to do with her stuff and stores.
She asked me to take some soap and go to the stream with flowing water to wash with it, in the early hours of the morning. I must do so within twenty-four hours of her death. She told me the reason for this, a reason I will share in later years.
Finally, she licked an agbalumo seed, asked me to open my mouth, put it in my mouth as if it were a kiss, but not the kiss of two lips touching in a romance, and asked me to lick it. The agbalumo is a seed that grows inside a pod, much smaller than a cocoa pod. In looking for an English word for it, I found that agbalumo is called the “white star apple.” The tree on which it grows carries the Latin name of Chrysophyllum albidum, which has several varieties that do well in tropical weather.
Like cocoa, the seed has a creamy taste, and when licked, it is revealed as a very beautiful, hard seed that one can play with. Schoolchildren used it to practice counting numbers, among other things. After seven days, I was instructed, I must go and bury the seed at a location she specified. I still know the location and what I should not do with the site.
Then she recited incantations that would allow me always to overcome all adversities, so that no matter how hard the struggle, the other person would lose. She gave me a long list of instructions about key aspects of life.
Then, she brought out three bowls whose contents I did not recognize. She asked me to choose one. I did, and she said that my fate was sealed, irrevocable. She did not tell me the details of the fate, but she told me the ultimate punishment for attempting to deviate from it. There is a dreadful component, tormenting even to remember. She warned that what I would later call mistakes and accidents would be part of the journey, as those mistakes and accidents were built into the fate, in part to ward off negative forces and people.
She asked me to look away from her and told me I must never see her again, must never attend her funeral, and must never see her grave. And she uttered her last words, slowly as a command:
Ohun ti o ba se di asegbe
Any act that you execute is sealed, unassailable
This concluded her speech and rituals, ending with those powerful words telling me that whatever I do, which she never specified, is unquestionable, permanently irreversible. I could even wear a grass robe and move new fire.
The next day, Leku died at dawn. Farewell, Iya Leku. I await Leku’s permission to say more. The time will come.
The Iya-hun of many mysteries
Odor of smoke and of the numinous fire
Enclosed in a closet of snakes and scorpions
Dark leather belts on minuscule buttocks.
Closed eyes that see far beyond common sight
Weak limbs that run faster than a hunted hare
Feeble fingers that cut like knives
The wisdom of the deep jungle and of the township
The tempting grain that even a fowl must not dare to swallow.
A tall tree once attempted to fall and crush Iya-hun
Ka-ka, it cracked, and crashed almost, then . . . it stopped mid-way
Iya-hun, the crafty smith, turned the tree into an umbrella
That protects and secures the eye of the earth.
Where the three knuckles of time meet
The solo sun that beats cowardly men and their manhoods!
The mindboggling moon, daughter of the wild spirit
The restless One that shuttles between
The crypts of heaven and earth.
When Iya-hun arrived on earth,
She had ten heads, twenty starry eyes
And with them, she sees the four corners of the earth, at once
Holds dialogue with heaven and earth at once
Eats with one mouth, drinks with another,
And vomits all she had in her womb with the tenth mouth.
Her small body is resting in a corner,
But her heads sleep in a dozen other places:
Today at the foot of a mighty rock
Tomorrow at the ocean’s deep
Ten big heads balanced on the frail body
Of a chameleon that leaps and never sleeps.
Iya-hun carries the bag of the world’s wisdom with her left hand
With her right hand she holds the calabash of life.
The only being that inhabits the sky in company of birds;
In the waters she makes her abode with crocodiles and whales;
A tether that enters the ground not once, and not twice, but at will!
In the sky, Iya-hun is fed by the birds; in the waters by the whales;
And underneath [in] the ground by half-human, half-animal gnomes.
That I no longer can see Leku does not mean that she cannot see me.
My tears are invisible, like the cries and tears of the fish hidden by the water in which it lives.
I should stop crying in the rain and wait for a drier season.
I was now a few days short of turning seventeen—on January 1, 1970.
A Magnificent Contribution to Biographies of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
I was struck speechless, my mind filled by a profound silence in which thought was eliminated, yet leaving my mental space alive with a deep sense of meaning, suggesting I had been changed in a visceral but subtle manner, on reading this magnificent contribution
to what I understand as a severely underdeveloped field in African non-fiction,
first and second hand accounts of spiritual masters in African classical traditions, those predating Christianity and Islam and often surviving the later dominance of those two religions.
There is an urgent need for texts that image the personalities of these figures, their ways of life, philosophies and life journeys, dramatizing their evolving embodiment of ancient spiritualities that need to be more often spoken for by practitioners, participants in the effort to engage with fundamental values at the intersection of the arcane and the everyday, the numinous and the mundane.
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
What eventually happened with Toyin Falola, Leku's semi-apprentice? Semi, because he was initiated into a bond with the adept but not trained in her profession, combining the herbal and the magical.
Why was he not so tutored, given how fascinated he was by her occult and yet motherly personage, the mysterious majesties of her arcane and yet very practical knowledge?
The adept and her acolyte met at the great parting of ways between ancient African knowledge systems and the future of the continent represented by the eventually dominant knowledge systems imported into Africa by Western colonizers and Christian and earlier Islamic proselytizers.
The agents of the now dominant systems, with few exceptions, negated the values of the endogenous African systems, seeing them as incompatible with what they introduced into a continent they saw themselves as illuminating with superior knowledge, hence taking part in both systems, the classical African and the Western or Islamic, particularly the Western, was often seen as incompatible, a view with many exceptions, but a dominant view.
Hence, Falola's guardians, and perhaps even Falola himself and Iya Lekuleja, so powerful was the pervasive force of this orientation, might not have considered or even if they did, taken forward the idea of the youth being trained in that magnificent cornucopia of knowledge, a unique cosmos invaluable in a world in which various tried and tested medical systems may be understood as more complementary than exclusive, in which classical African bone healers may supplement the work of Western orthopaedics, Islamic and classical African obstetrics may balance the Western, complementarities recognized even by Leku herself in referring Falola to a Western style hospital for treatment of a serious wound on one occasion.
Leku's world also involved the intense convergence of the material and the spiritual, herbalogy and spirituality. Could this arcane orientation, both unsettling and fascinating, have been understood as beyond what was safe for the youth to enter into, so much so that Falola or his guardians did not suggest his being initiated into and groomed in its practice? Perhaps Leku was not keen on bringing him in depth into that world?
Falola eventually became a scholar in the Western tradition in its African and American expressions, his intellectual capacities enhanced, as he states in Decolonizing African Knowledge :Autoethnography and African Epistemologies (2022) by a magical process of memory enhancement he describes Leku in
A Mouth Sweeter than Salt as enabling him with just before he started secondary school.
At the pinnacle of a decades long and uniquely successful career in scholarship, having moved from Nigeria and establishing himself in the ultra-competitive US academic pool, Falola looks around him, at the tools and orientations of his work and looks behind him, at the more complex universe from which he emerged as a youth, at the different knowledge systems he has been intimate with, and tries to reach a balance, particularly in the name of testimonies of those like Leku, whose cognitive universe is inadequately represented by the globally dominant knowledge system in which Falola has himself become a master, Western scholarship as originating in Europe and centred on the intellectual and the ratiocinative, and yet increasingly projecting varieties of styles of thought in its vision as the storehouse of the world's knowledge, integrator of various possibilities into a recreative matrix from which anyone may draw.
Hence, among other texts written by himself in this process of reckoning between diverse epistemic universes, various ways of developing, assessing, organizing, storing and applying knowledge, Falola wrote Decolonizing African Knowledge, published by a flagship publisher of the Western intellectual tradition, Cambridge University Press, in the footnotes of which I read Falola's references to his experience with Leku, leading me to seek out, in his autobiographies, the sources of those accounts.
Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
In an earlier era of Yoruba culture, such a figure as Leku could have been deified by a community, as Falola has done for her in his concluding, poetic salutation, a process of deification various spiritualities employ to canonize those they understand as demonstrating qualities exceptional within the matrix of values at the intersection of ultimate reality and the spatio-temporal universe of Earth, the saints of Catholicism, the Buddhas of Buddhism, the gurus of Hinduism, the Mahatmas of Theosophy and the Masters of Wisdom of Western esotericism.
Like the list of gurus, spiritual teachers, whose names are invoked at the beginning of the Hindu Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual, for example, Leku becomes, in the poetic summation by her acolyte, not simply the enigmatically powerful woman he once knew at Ibadan, but a cosmic personage, both individualized and elemental.
He thereby distills in grand images the overwhelming majesty of the persona dramatized by the small bodied woman, not taller than himself even as a boy, ''she
was short, about my height at
over four feet but less than five. She
had tied a wrapper around her waist, exposing her
upper body. Her breasts were flat and so unnoticeable'' as he visualizes his first encounter with her as a relative living in the same house as himself in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt.
Osanyin, as I discuss in Opa Osanyin Philosophy, Mysticism and Magic, is the Yoruba Orisa tradition deity of herbalogy and its intersection with spirituality. After Osanyin, within the structure of personalities related to his calling, may be located such dedicates as Iya Lekuleja. After her, in the system of inspiration represented by the values the figure of Osanyin embodies, come those inspired by such people as Iya Lekuleja, people such as Toyin Falola, and after Falola come those moved by his account of her and their relationship.
This is a
structure of inspiration adapted from the lineage trees of Hinduism and
Buddhism but also evident in other spiritualities, used as a means of
correlating the inspirational value of figures in a spiritual tradition and
drawing from this inspiration.
One could employ such a strategy in taking
advantage of this marvellous narrative by Toyin Falola, depicting a great
personality comparable with the greatest figures from other spiritualities, a
figure particularly significant at a time in which classical Nigerian
spiritualities and healing practices have not retained much of their old prestige in their native land, disciplines which people nevertheless take advantage of but the significance of which is not publicly emphasised, disciplines which are too often referenced in terms of their negative possibilities.
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
With Falola, the semiotic networks of Leku's ecological cosmos, the immediate and associative significance of her wondrous collection of living and non-living animate and inanimate organic forms and other objects, itself a microcosm of the material, particularly natural universe, as latent with creative, destructive and transformative possibilities open to use by the informed person, as understood in Yoruba herbal and magical disciplines, is transformed into the restless search for the interpretive possibilities of phenomena across a wide spectrum in the African cosmos, seeking an understanding of how historical processes and conglomerations of people, activities, ideas and objects converge to generate meaning, his multifarious publications in many disciplines correlative with Leku's vast pharmacological universe and her applicatory powers.
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space
Her shop and the room where she lives, its role as a storehouse making it an extension of the shop, may readily be understood in
symbolic terms, along the lines of Buddhist and Hindu symbolism of
relationships between circumscribed space and possibilities of endlessly
unfolding scope, such as the Ālaya-vijñāna of
Buddhism, a room containing precious things representing a person's creative
potential, adapting Ernest Wood's imagistic rendering of this concept of ''storehouse consciousness'' as it is called, in his Zen Dictionary, and the small room within the heart in the Hindu Upanishads which yet opens onto the cosmos.
''Alaya'', as Wood defines it, is ''a house or rather a home, which is in turn a place where all the valued things for use by us are kept and among which we dwell. It came to mean also the spiritual storehouse of all the potentialities of life, which is to be regarded as our true home, and also as our ultimate destination.''
Wood thereby presents, in terms of imagistic clarity and evocative force, a pithy summation of this complex idea, developed in various but convergent ways by various Buddhist schools.
Along similar lines as the Alaya concept, Falola develops a correlation between the character of Leku's room and the character of her mind, between her inward spatial configuration, constituted by the complex of values, thought, emotion and vocation, ''the orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission'' ( Webster's) , and the physical identity of her room, its internal pattern an expression of her values, of her perception of the meaning of her life:
The clue to her strategy
might have been in her room. It contained no objects
other than those that could be found in her store. Her room looked exactly like her store, only with
a space to spread a sleeping mat.
She acquired no property, bought few clothes and shoes. In other words, there was no evidence that she was channeling profits from her trade into other forms of investment or savings.
…
She was recirculating her profits to buy more items for the store rather than for herself. Her only passion was the store, not as a space in which to make money but one in which to make herbs and medicine available to whoever wanted them. She was certainly not counting on riches.
W. B. Yeats' and Purohit Swami's translation of the ''Chhandogya Upanishad'' in The Ten Principal Upanishads takes further a related conjunction between inner and outer space, projecting this image in terms of ideas of ultimate reality :
In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there.
What is there? Why is it so important?
There is as much in that little space within the heart, as there is in the whole world outside. Heaven, earth, fire, wind, sun, moon, lightning, stars; whatever is and whatever is not, everything is there.
What lies in that space, does not decay when the body decays, nor does it fall when the body falls. That space is the home of Spirit. Every desire is there. Self is there, beyond decay and death; sin and sorrow; hunger and thirst ; His aim truth, His will truth.
...
Earthly pleasures
exhaust themselves ; heavenly pleasures exhaust themselves. Wherever men go
without attaining Self or knowing truth, they cannot move at their pleasure;
but after attaining Self and knowing truth, wherever they go, they move at
their pleasure.
The Upanishadic vision resonates with the self abnegation, the focus on inward rather than external fulfillment, the identification with the unseen and yet potent, rather than the immediaces represented by materially derived satisfactions, of Leku's lifestyle, even in business, a traditionally financially centred activity, focused on profit and accumulation rather than on charity and self sacrifice:
If the woman [ a hypothetical customer] had no money, Leku would still give her the medicine and refused to reply or respond to the long statement of gratitude. It was not that the gratitude was wasted or the beneficiary should not thank her; it was as if she were saying that her help was rendered on behalf of some higher forces.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
A presentation and brief examination of the story of a relationship between an enigmatically powerful herbalist, Iya Lekuleja, and a boy, Toyin Falola, in Nigeria's South-West in the 1960s, as told by Falola as an adult, focusing on his account of his relationship with the
magical herbalist Iya Lekuleja.
The essay is a slightly modified version of another one by myself ''Imaginative Matrices and the
Multifarious Universe of Knowledge: Exploring Toyin Falola's Thought World
through his Account of his Relationship with Iya Lekuleja, the Magical
Herbalist'' which itself takes forward an earlier essay ''Textual, Conceptual and Imagistic Windows into the Prolific Multidisciplinarity of Writer and Scholar Toyin Falola''.
The earlier essay of which this is a variant is an essay inspired by an exploration of Falola's work in search of a unifying motif, thereby framing it in terms of theory, a body of ideas covering a broad range of phenomena in an abstract manner, correlating the essay with bodies of knowledge beyond even the particular disciplines the contents primarily relate to.
This reframing of the essay is directed at a broader audience than the more scholarly contextualisation of the earlier one. The undivided focus here is on the story of the relationship between the Iya Lekuleja and Toyin Falola, the herbal and magical adept and the acolyte. All ideas developed in the commentary are rooted in the story
Contents
Mysteries of the Known
A Great Knowledge System and its Mysterious Practitioner
The Self Transcendence of the Adept
Enquiries into Strange Knowledges
The Transformative Encounter
Further Adventures with the Magical Herbalist
Mistress of Ancient Communication Systems
The Final Departure of the Adept and the
Consummating Initiation of the Acolyte
A Magnificent
Contribution to Biographies of Masters in Classical African Spiritualities
Reverberations of Possibility in the Acolyte after the Departure of the Adept
Deification of the Adept, the Acolyte and their Divine Progenitor
From Herbalogy and Magic to Prolific Intellectual and Artistic Multidisciplinarity
Mutualities of Inner and Outer Space