A Carpet of Stars in a Partly Visible Sky: The Challenge of Access in Africa to Works Published about Africa Outside Africa: The Paradoxical Achievement of Toyin Falola

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                     

                                                  A Carpet of Stars in a Partly Visible Sky

                          The Challenge of Access in Africa to Works Published about Africa Outside Africa

                                                The Paradoxical Achievement of Toyin Falola

                                                         Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                          Compcros

                                                 Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                       Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                        Abstract

Through the example of the particularly prolific author Toyin Falola, this essay explores the challenges of knowledge development in Africa in relation to the circulation of knowledge about Africa. It expands my earlier essay ''Western Academic Publishing on Africa and the African Book Market: Paradoxes of Professional Development and Breadth of Access: A Few Lines''.

Contents

Between Luminosity and Distance

Paradoxical Reverberations 

What Options Are Available?

Between External and Internal Configurations

The Promise of the Internet

Between Luminosity and Distance

I woke up before daybreak thinking about the work of the polymathic African scholar of Africa, Toyin Falola, which, in their variety and number,  remind me of stars strewn across the sky.

''Who can see those stars?'', I asked myself.

US author Isaac Asimov's science fiction story ''Night'' is about what could happen if the stars come out only once a night in a thousand years. What would the effects be and how accurately could  such an event be transmitted across generations, from the time before the invention of writing, before the definitive understanding of what the stars are,  to the present time?

Paradoxical Reverberations 

Falola is a quintessential scholar in the Western tradition that dominates the world of scholarship, the tradition in which he was trained in Nigeria and in which he has practised since his emigration to the United States, a  culture in which endogenous African scholarly traditions, scholarship understood as the systematic organization, study and application of knowledge, has  been marginalized, but which scholars such as Falola are struggling to foreground, an  effort made paradoxical by the fact that such efforts by Western based scholars such as Falola are published by Western publishers and the scope of the  footprints of this scholarship in Africa is open to question.

From his life in Nigeria, to his emigration from Nigeria to the US, Falola's publications have covered almost every aspect of Africa in the humanities and social sciences. His two autobiographies also project marvellous insights into these subjects  from a first hand perspective, dramatized by the dynamism  represented by the unfolding of lived experience. Covering more than a hundred books amidst a  yearly expanding count, and  essays that might more than double that, these achievements make him one of the most prolific scholars in history, a powerful writer across various genres, from scholarship to autobiography to poetry.

A central question resonates, however, ''to what degree is Falola' work accessible in Africa and affordable by  his fellow Africans, the very people he is writing about, whose knowledge systems are increasingly inspirational for his productivity, published as this work is in terms of the strategies of the Western academic tradition as it has been formed since perhaps the 19th century, a question valid for all scholarship on Africa published in the West, and particularly poignant for Falola and his fellow African immigrant scholars in the West?''

Academic knowledge in Western countries, knowledge created by academics, people working within institutions of higher education,  is accessible largely through the high economic requirements of academic publishers,  publishers who specialize in such productions,   in those countries.

This is a situation modified in the West through rich libraries, through a surfeit of publications facilitating  access to published material and income ranges that facilitate degrees of access to various kinds of books.

Falola's  books are often expensive and being published by Western publishers, their distribution into Nigeria and perhaps other parts of Africa, could be minimal, given what I've observed so far from my observations in Lagos and my visit to Ife last year where I bought some at the OAU bookshop, the university where Falola was trained and where he began his academic career and became a professor.

The Western publishing,  bookselling and library  networks are very robust and dynamic, enabling access to different kinds of books through various channels, so the high cost of scholarly books in those cultures is not a significant deterrent to access to knowledge generally, and to scholarly knowledge in particular, but the situation is different in Nigeria, which I am better acquainted with,  and is likely to be so for parts of Africa.

The African situation is made more dire by the exodus of a significant number of Africa's scholars to the West, where, unifying their prior development in Africa with  the enablements of Western socio-economic organization and its focus in academia, have been able to produce a good number of the most important works in Africa, works which, in some cases, are disproportionately  representative of achievements in the field, and yet the accessibility of these works in Africa is either low or doubtful given the prices, distribution and marketing strategies of these publishers.

A good number of the more recent and most significant works on the Yoruba of Nigeria, for example, Falola's ethnicity and on which he is a major writer, and even more so, those about Ife, the spiritual and one time cultural centre of the Yoruba, were written by African and non-African scholars working in US universities, publishing with Western publishers, Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba:A New History, Suzanne Preston Blier's Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity, c. 1300, Jacob Olupona's  City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space and the Imagination and Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

A cluster of magnificent  works about one city, in one country, yet, how accessible are those books to the residents of that city, emblematic, in this instance, of the country as a whole,  where the culture of libraries and booksellers has shrunk drastically in the last twenty years in which I have been observing these trends, situations created by the devaluation of Nigeria's currency, and the shrinking of indigenous publishing, even as new publishers have emerged?

My exposure to the study of art as a child in Nigeria  came through children's books, the Ladybird series, beautifully colored small books  introducing me to pivotal periods of Western art, the Renaissance represented by  Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael and the 19th century revolution generated by van Gogh, Gauguin and others.
 
Fundamental to my later development in the study of art are the general audience but powerfully scholarly TIME-LIFE Library of  Art, dealing  with Western art which I bought in Lagos.  Decades after these initiatory encounters, I am yet to see in Lagos similar texts on African art, books meant to introduce such masters as Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibrahim El Saheli and El Anatsui to children and to excite and educate a general audience, as those other texts on Western art, the TIME-LIFE Library on Art are meant to do.

What Options Are Available?

It might be possible to republish works on Africa published outside Africa in more affordable formats for the African market, while continuing to develop a more vigorous scholarly book publishing culture by scholars in Africa. 

A percentage of open access publishing is also perhaps vital in today's world, as mainstream Western scholarly publishers are recognizing  and even more so with the dire socio-economic situations in different parts of Africa.

 

It could be helpful to have some of these  works on Africa from outside Africa, such as those pivotal to the theoretical orientations of a scholar such as Falola,  as also available as open access, along with their current partial access publication.

 

In the Falola context, these are such works as the essay "Ritual "Archives", the sections on his mentor Leku in his  two autobiographies ( which is what I'm doing with his permission in my essays on Leku), his essay on cognitive pluriversalism in The Toyin Falola Reader,  selections from his Decolonizing African Knowledge and Decolonizing African Studies,  and perhaps others.

 

I expect publishers are likely to be open to such a measured suggestion in the name of access for African and certainly Nigerian audiences who are less likely to be able to access such work on account of issues of cost and visibility.

Between External and Internal Configurations

What is the ultimate significance of scholarship on Africa published outside Africa for knowledge development in Africa? To what degree can a country or continent develop through reliance on an externally centred knowledge base? More specifically, to what degree can its academia and scholarship thrive if it does not maximise its own internally focused and externally expansive dialogical and distributive knowledge culture?

Scholars and writers based in Africa may need  to  intensify the development of a culture of book publishing. Academic articles are great but they can't replace books for scope of exploration  of a subject and for  audience penetration. There is a need to write and publish more of the highest calibre of  works, doing this in a manner that is readily affordable by individual Africans and libraries in Africa, works that need to circulate across the continent and beyond, aided by publishing and marketing initiatives and translations. That approach is central to how the West created a unified intellectual culture, strategic to its contemporary commanding position in the global knowledge and cultural space.

The Promise of the Internet

How can such initiatives be empowered by the Internet? To what degree can digital publications offset the challenges of print publications? What is the relative value of such publication in contrast to print publishing?

Can social media, the central globally unifying matrix in today's world play a role in such developments?

Social media provides content of different levels of seriousness and quality of presentation, at times representing emerging trends in various subjects. How can such enablements be organised to help generate knowledge economies, systems of learning,  that are representative of these new dynamics of social interaction? Was the great Greek philosopher Socrates not primarily a dialogist and are his student Plato's use of his ideas not presented through dialogue? The dialogues between Shiva and Parvati, between Shiva and Shakti, though not debates, as those of Socrates are closer to, are fundamental to Hindu Tantric literature.

Are we back full cycle, to dialogue as a  primary means of communication between humans, the dynamism and open ended character of such interaction a more accurate reflection of the dynamics of human knowledge than the often more formalised approach of academia, the dialogical suggesting the significantly open ended character of cognitive development at its best?

[Michael Afolayan]

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju:

As always, I say kudos to your relentless pursuit of internet intellection. 

You just brought to light one issue that I have spoken about a million and one times, figuratively, that is. And that is, the cost of materials coming from publishers of serious materials on Africa. I spoke so much about this anomaly and unfair phenomenon in the past that I deliberately stopped talking about it so I wouldn't begin to sound like a broken record and keep giving myself high blood pressure. 

It pains me to the bone when I see works of folks - serious scholars - like Falola, Ogundiran, Wariboko, Agozino, Ochonu, Kperogi, etc., etc that should be made readily available to the average reader but absolutely impossible for an easy access due to costs. Yet, your much-advocated online publishing, as wonderful as it may sound, comes with its own baggage of limitations as well. When I am thinking about the village headmaster, the village teacher, the village vicar, all of whom folks like me have benefitted from in life, I could easily see them completely taken out of the equation of online publishings. 

One model that I always admired is that of India in the 1970s and 1980s (and I'm not even sure what its situation is like today). Rather than crumble under the yoke of publishing financing imposed by the Western (capitalist) bloc, it decided to use its own "inferior" materials to publish in India. Many books and (especially) journals came out of that model of intentional indigenization of publishing. The materials may look frail, its contents were solid and respected. Why can't we think of something like that, at least to complement online and desk publishings? Otherwise, most of us would only see good books at a distance but they would always remain to us what the Yoruba phraseology often describes as, "Your eyes could see it, your lips would not taste it" model. 

Regardless of the value of the book, I wouldn't want to spend $50 of my retirement money to purchase it, even if my life depends on it, and $50 is small compared to what the average academic book costs today. Unfortunately, academic publishers are always in the red because they can't even break even. 

Sad!

MOA

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[Toyin Falola]

Is it just a publishing issue?

It is also a purchasing issue. Monographs don’t sell everywhere, and no need to exaggerate the market in the West.

 

 

From: 'Michael Afolayan' via Yoruba Affairs <yoruba...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2023 at 2:00 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yoruba...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Yoruba Affairs - Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Carpet of Stars in a Partly Visible Sky: The Challenge of Access in Africa to Works Published about Africa Outside Africa: The Paradoxical Achievement of Toyin Falola

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju:

 

As always, I say kudos to your relentless pursuit of internet intellection. 

 

You just brought to light one issue that I have spoken about a million and one times, figuratively, that is. And that is, the cost of materials coming from publishers of serious materials on Africa. I spoke so much about this anomaly and unfair phenomenon in the past that I deliberately stopped talking about it so I wouldn't begin to sound like a broken record and keep giving myself high blood pressure. 

 

It pains me to the bone when I see works of folks - serious scholars - like Falola, Ogundiran, Wariboko, Agozino, Ochonu, Kperogi, etc., etc that should be made readily available to the average reader but absolutely impossible for an easy access due to costs. Yet, your much-advocated online publishing, as wonderful as it may sound, comes with its own baggage of limitations as well. When I am thinking about the village headmaster, the village teacher, the village vicar, all of whom folks like me have benefitted from in life, I could easily see them completely taken out of the equation of online publishings. 

 

One model that I always admired is that of India in the 1970s and 1980s (and I'm not even sure what its situation is like today). Rather than crumble under the yoke of publishing financing imposed by the Western (capitalist) bloc, it decided to use its own "inferior" materials to publish in India. Many books and (especially) journals came out of that model of intentional indigenization of publishing. The materials may look frail, its contents were solid and respected. Why can't we think of something like that, at least to complement online and desk publishings? Otherwise, most of us would only see good books at a distance but they would always remain to us what the Yoruba phraseology often describes as, "Your eyes could see it, your lips would not taste it" model. 

 

Regardless of the value of the book, I wouldn't want to spend $50 of my retirement money to purchase it, even if my life depends on it, and $50 is small compared to what the average academic book costs today. Unfortunately, academic publishers are always in the red because they can't even break even. 

 

Sad!

 

MOA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Tuesday, July 25, 2023, 11:53:22 AM GMT+1, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

 

                                                     Error! Filename not specified.

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Very great thanks Prof Afolayan

We shall get there, with determination.

Toyin

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