The Journey of the Children of Omoluabi : Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning in Akin Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History Part 1

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                                                           The Journey of the Children of Omoluabi 

                     Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning in  Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History 

                                                                                        Part 1

                                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                  Compcros

                                                      Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

                                                                                  Abstract

An interpretation  of Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History,2020,  in terms of an exploration of Yoruba history as a journey into the meanings of existence developed within Yoruba culture across time.

Discussions about Ogundiran's book are interspersed with examples of Yoruba oral literature, in writing and translation, and the art of Osi Audu, inspired  by Yoruba philosophy,     in order to amplify the focus of the main essay on the historical development of the understanding of existence through the experiences and responses that constitute the  culture's development.

The essay is written in a conversational manner, thinking the ideas through.

The first paragraph of the preface to Ogundiran's book reads as follows. I have changed the paragraphing in order to isolate and thereby highlight the points being made :

''The deep-time history of the Yorùbá is the subject of this book. It is an account of (1) the experiences and events that shaped the long-term history of the ancestral Yorùbá people; (2) the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions; and (3) the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. 

Based on new questions, evidence, and conceptual frameworks, this book offers the opportunity to rethink Yorùbá history in new ways. 

In the following pages, I emphasize the cultural-historical approach in order to understand the “ways of being” of the Yorùbá as historical subjects (ontology); their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology); and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology) that they created at different historical junctures.

 With these, I account for the cultural forms, practices, events, and ideas, as well as mentalities, imaginations, and meanings that constituted the Yorùbá experience for about two thousand years.'' ( xiii).

I find those lines exciting because they promise a robust exploration of how Yoruba people generally thought and behaved in relation to various developments during the period in question.

People's thinking is what defines them as conscious entities. Their consciousness is at the heart of their humanity. Understanding how people think, why they think that way and how their thinking shapes their actions and how those actions influence their thinking, in a continuous circle, is to understand their distinctive way of being human.

In framing the goals of his book the way he has, Ogundiran therefore promises to take us to the foundations of the beginnings of the development of the cultural entity represented by the Yoruba people.

How far may that be possible, even using Ogundiran's central tools of oral traditions, mutable as those are, and archaeology, highly dependent on interpretation  and perhaps speculation?

To what degree has he succeeded?

From my reading of the book so far, he does an admirable job. I think, though, that his engagement with the central Yoruba knowledge system, Ifa, in relation to the rise of Ife to centrality in Yoruba culture and history provides, at best, a foundation for future exploration, rather than the definitive lens in terms of which he describes that particularly strategic interpretation, as I point out in and suggest in

Whatever the limitations in his great project, though, the goals of the project and the manner of its execution constitute an inspiring challenge for Yoruba Studies, such that I find it motivational in relation to my primary interest in Yoruba Studies at  the intersection of the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality.

In the light of that, I'm going carefully through the book in a line by line analysis, part of which I am sharing with readers.

''The deep-time history of the Yorùbá is the subject of this book. 

It is an account of 

(1) the experiences and events that shaped the long-term history of the ancestral Yorùbá people; 

(2) the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions; and 

(3) the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. ''

The dialectic of experience and its interpretation. The interrelationship of action and thought.

  '' the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions''

Responding to experiences through actions that develop new experiences that make meaning out of the experiences being responded to.  

Generating meaning of such impact, such actions become traditions. 

''the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. ''

How this complex of response to experience represents or emerges in values, enshrined as principles, rules of belief and behaviour central to what is understood of why people should exist at all in the precariousness of the journey from terrestrial entry to terrestrial exit, within the marketplace of the world, in their journey from an unknown home to unknown home, adapting the Yoruba and Igbo expressions of life on Earth as a market visited on a journey from home and back home at the conclusion of the visit to the market.

                                     ''  Afẹ́fẹ́ lẹ́gẹ́lẹ́gẹ́ awo ilé aiyé

                                       Ẹ̀fúùfù lẹ̀lẹ̀ awo òde ọ̀rún

 

                                       Luminiferous ether is the mystery of Earth

                                       Cosmic dust is the mystery of the World of Origins

                                       The One of Earth Immersed in Mystery

                                      The Adept of Mystery in the Zone of the Beginning

                                       Opening lines of Ifa poem adapted from Yoruba text and translation by Seyi Ogunfuwa ''

   

                                                  '' cultural forms, practices, events,  

                                                     ideas, as well as mentalities, imaginations, and meanings ''

doings and happenings, plus styles of thinking 

            ''  I emphasize the cultural-historical approach in order to understand the “ways of being” of the Yorùbá 

                                                                 as historical subjects (ontology); 

                                                                 their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology); 

                                                                 and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology)

                                                                 that they created at different historical junctures. ''

I love this because of its conjunction of history and philosophy. 

'' as historical subjects '' (ontology)- identity defined by location in and across time and space.

'' their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology)"- what they believe is real and how they arrive at these conclusions.

 ''and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology) ''- what is good, what is bad and how should people live?

                                                                '' The  Tangible and Intangible

I am interested in issues of self identity, and in concepts of the self rooted in my cultural experiences growing up in Nigeria, as well as global metaphysical, scientific, and social concepts of the self. There is a Yoruba thought that consciousness, referred to as the “head”, has both a physical dimension called the “outer head” and a non-physical one: “the inner head”. It is the visual implications of concepts like this that I find intriguing.

                                                                                           

                                                             

I explore the light sheen of graphite, the matte, light absorbing quality of black pastel, the white of paper and canvas, as well as the visually affecting interactions of colors to investigate form and its evocative potential to suggest or hint at something about the shape of the head.

                                                                                   

                                                       

I am interested in the dualism of form and void, and the ontological relation between the tangible and intangible, something and nothing, light and dark, body and mind, the dual nature of being - the self in portraits.  

                                                                                 

                                                                   

The construction of a sense of self is a very complex process, perhaps even more so in our increasingly global age, in which the boundaries between race, nationality, gender and sexuality are getting more and more blurred.

                                                                                           

                                                            

                                                                 Text by Osi Audu. Images are of Osi Audu's art ''

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Additions in this edition:

I have  added subheadings to the essay to increase clarity of understanding of the relationships between its various parts.

I have clarified the role of the interjectory  references to Yoruba oral literature and to Osi Audu's  visual art inspired by Yoruba philosophy. I have also included a sequence of one line commentary on the art.

Links to previous essays in which I discussed the strengths  and limitations of Ogundiran's approach to the Ifa system of knowledge and the questions raised by those values have also been added to the  essay.

This critique will be kept in mind in relation to later examination of  his engagement with the tension between the various factors that constitute religion and its role in being shaped by and shaping Yoruba history and culture across time.

                                                                                           

                                                                 

                                                           The Journey of the Children of Omoluabi 

                     Yoruba History as a Quest for Meaning in  Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History 

                                                                                        Part 1

                                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                  Compcros

                                                      Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

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

                                                                                  Abstract

This is the first part of an interpretation  of Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá: A New History,2020,  in terms of an exploration of Yoruba history as a journey into the meanings of existence developed within Yoruba culture across time.

Discussions about Ogundiran's book are interspersed with examples of Yoruba oral literature, in writing and translation, and the art of Osi Audu, inspired  by Yoruba philosophy.

This is done    in order to amplify the focus of the main essay on the historical development of the understanding of existence through the experiences and responses that constitute the  culture's development.

The literary quote references cosmogenesis, as a complement to Ogundiran's exploration of the terrestrial genesis of the Yoruba people as it unfolds into subsequent history. 

The invocation of Audu's art foregrounds Yoruba ideas of the self as conjunctive of individual, social and spiritual dimensions, an idea complementing Ogundiran's exploration of the journey of the Yoruba social self across space and time.

The reference to this understanding  of the self also evokes the question of the points of intersection of the terrestrial, the material and factors beyond these immediacies in the shaping of individual and social history and the thought systems emerging in the course of these, a question provoked by Ogundiran's wrestling with the role of spirituality and cosmology in Yoruba history.

The essay is written in a conversational manner, thinking the ideas through. At times aphoristic rather than expository.

Deep-Time History and the Excavation of the Foundations and History of Thought

The first paragraph of the preface to Ogundiran's book reads as follows. I have changed the paragraphing in order to isolate and thereby highlight the points being made :

''The deep-time history of the Yorùbá is the subject of this book. It is an account of (1) the experiences and events that shaped the long-term history of the ancestral Yorùbá people; (2) the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions; and (3) the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. 

Based on new questions, evidence, and conceptual frameworks, this book offers the opportunity to rethink Yorùbá history in new ways. 

In the following pages, I emphasize the cultural-historical approach in order to understand the “ways of being” of the Yorùbá as historical subjects (ontology); their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology); and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology) that they created at different historical junctures.

 With these, I account for the cultural forms, practices, events, and ideas, as well as mentalities, imaginations, and meanings that constituted the Yorùbá experience for about two thousand years.'' ( xiii).

The Development of Thought as Centre of Human Existence

I find those lines exciting because they promise a robust exploration of how Yoruba people generally thought and behaved in relation to various developments during the period in question.

People's thinking is what defines them as conscious entities. Their consciousness is at the heart of their humanity. Understanding how people think, why they think that way and how their thinking shapes their actions and how those actions influence their thinking, in a continuous circle, is to understand their distinctive way of being human.

In framing the goals of his book the way he has, Ogundiran therefore promises to take us to the foundations of the beginnings of the development of the cultural entity represented by the Yoruba people.

How far may that be possible, even using Ogundiran's central tools of oral traditions, mutable as those are, and archaeology, highly dependent on interpretation  and perhaps speculation and previous scholarship, even if intellectually rigorous though to some degree speculative, as is to be expected in studying a culture that did not have written documents?

Evaluating Ogundiran's Accomplishment Between Research Formulation and Research Achievement

To what degree has he succeeded?

From my reading of the book so far, he does an admirable job. 

I think, though, that his engagement with the central Yoruba knowledge system, Ifa, in relation to the rise of Ife to centrality in Yoruba culture and history provides, at best, a foundation for future exploration, rather than the definitive lens in terms of which he describes that particularly strategic interpretation, as I point out in " Convergence and Divergence of Politics and Spirituality in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge: A Dilemma Emerging from Conflicts Between Akin Ogundiran as Scholarly Book Author and Social Media Contributor"     and as I suggest in "The Dilemma of a Babaláwo :  Ogunbiodun and the Tension between Politics and Spirituality in Classical Ifè.

Whatever the limitations in his great project, though, the goals of the project and the manner of its execution constitute an inspiring challenge for Yoruba Studies, such that I find it motivational in relation to my primary interest in Yoruba Studies at  the intersection of the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality.

Brief Line by Line Analysis of First Paragraph of Preface on Deep Time History of Cycle of Experience, Thought and Response as Shaping Yoruba History

The book demonstrates ways of framing styles of interpretation of experience and of simulating  interpretive possibilities beyond what it has explicitly stated, evocative possibilities which may be in agreement with or divergent from the positions advanced by the book.

In order to better take advantage of the inspirational power of the book,   I'm going carefully through it in a line by line analysis, part of which I am sharing with readers, beginning from the first paragraph of the preface:

''The deep-time history of the Yorùbá is the subject of this book. 

It is an account of 

(1) the experiences and events that shaped the long-term history of the ancestral Yorùbá people; 

(2) the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions; and 

(3) the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. ''

The dialectic of experience and its interpretation. The interrelationship of action and thought.

  '' the generative actions that they used to translate their experiences into new practices or traditions''

Responding to experiences through actions that develop new experiences thereby making  meaning out of the experiences being responded to.  

Generating meaning of such impact, such actions become traditions. 

''the principles and values that made life meaningful for them between ca. 300 BC and AD 1840. ''

How this complex of response to experience represents or emerges in values, enshrined as principles, rules of belief and behaviour central to what is understood of why people should exist at all and how they should live in the precariousness of the journey from terrestrial entry to terrestrial exit, within the marketplace of the world, in their journey from an unknown home to unknown home, adapting the Yoruba and Igbo expressions of life on Earth as a market visited on a journey from home, a home returned to  at the conclusion of the visit to the market.

From Deep Time Terrestrial History to Cosmogenesis

                                     ''  Afẹ́fẹ́ lẹ́gẹ́lẹ́gẹ́ awo ilé aiyé

                                       Ẹ̀fúùfù lẹ̀lẹ̀ awo òde ọ̀rún

 

                                       Luminiferous ether is the mystery of Earth

                                       Cosmic dust is the mystery of the World of Origins

                                       The One of Earth Immersed in Mystery

                                      The Adept of Mystery in the Zone of the Beginning

                         Opening lines of Ifa poem adapted by myself from Yoruba text and translation by Seyi Ogunfuwa ''

Culture as Evolving Styles of Thought  

                                                  '' cultural forms, practices, events,  

                                                     ideas, as well as mentalities, imaginations, and meanings ''

doings and happenings, plus styles of thinking 

            ''  I emphasize the cultural-historical approach in order to understand the “ways of being” of the Yorùbá 

                                                                 as historical subjects (ontology); 

                                                                 their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology); 

                                                                 and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology)

                                                                 that they created at different historical junctures. ''

I love this because of its conjunction of history and philosophy. 

'' as historical subjects (ontology)''- identity defined by location in and across time and space.

'' their “theories of knowledge” (epistemology)"- what they believe is real and how they arrive at these conclusions.

 ''and the regimes of value and aspirational principles (axiology) ''- what is good, what is bad and how should people live?

The Convergence of Culturally Influential Styles of Thought in the Self and their Expression from the Self: The Yoruba Ori Principle as Suggested by the Work of Osi Audu

                                                                '' The  Tangible and Intangible

I am interested in issues of self identity, and in concepts of the self rooted in my cultural experiences growing up in Nigeria, as well as global metaphysical, scientific, and social concepts of the self. There is a Yoruba thought that consciousness, referred to as the “head” [ori], has both a physical dimension called the “outer head” [ ori ode] and a non-physical one: “the inner head” [ori inu]. It is the visual implications of concepts like this that I find intriguing.

  

                                                 

The self as mysterious and beautiful, inaccessible to full perception, hence the evocation of darkness, yet reaching out from its concealment to engage with the world, hence the triangular formation emerging from the obsidian square-commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

I explore the light sheen of graphite, the matte, light absorbing quality of black pastel, the white of paper and canvas, as well as the visually affecting interactions of colors to investigate form and its evocative potential to suggest or hint at something about the shape of the head.

                                                                                   

                                                       

The self as a configuration of varied possibilities evoked by interlinked multi-coloured geometries, opening into space, a space of ultimate possiblity from where the self originates and in which it is grounded- commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

I am interested in the dualism of form and void, and the ontological relation between the tangible and intangible, something and nothing, light and dark, body and mind, the dual nature of being - the self in portraits.  

                                                                                 

                                                                   

The self as womb of possiblity, dark because significantly inaccessible in its depths to the conscious mind, a pregnant void  structured by its material frame, its biological imperatives and their mental coordinates - commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

The construction of a sense of self is a very complex process, perhaps even more so in our increasingly global age, in which the boundaries between race, nationality, gender and sexuality are getting more and more blurred.

                                                                                           

                                                            

    A luminous possiblity partially expressed in the mask that is the terrestrial self-commentary by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                        Text by Osi Audu except italicized text by myself. Images are of Osi Audu's art ''

My Exploratory  Journey with Akin Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History

General Summations

"In Search of the Children of Ọmọlúàbí: Yorùbá as Way of Life Rather than as Ethnic Identity: Reading Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yorùbá: A New History 1: The Preface and the Introduction" 

 "Struggle, Triumph, Destruction and Resurgence in Yoruba History as a Great Human Narrative: Akinwumi Ogundiran's The Yoruba : A New History."

On Ifa in Ogundiran's The Yoruba 

" Convergence and Divergence of Politics and Spirituality in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge: A Dilemma Emerging from Conflicts Between Akin Ogundiran as Scholarly Book Author and Social Media Contributor"    

 "The Dilemma of a Babaláwo :  Ogunbiodun and the Tension between Politics and Spirituality in Classical Ifè.