News and Reflections from the Toyin Falola Studies Review: The Emergence of a Dedicated Publication Platform and of New Engagements with Theoritical Knowledge Structures Within a Growing Ecosystem
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
This essay announces the establishment of a dedicated Academia.edu home for The Toyin Falola Studies Review and clarifies the methodology through which the publication is becoming both an archive and an experimental laboratory of ideas. It describes the periodical as recording an unfolding intellectual history while exploring the capacity of different knowledge systems to illuminate Falola’s remarkably varied scholarship and public engagements.
Current and forthcoming initiatives in theoretical engagement are discussed, from the relational philosophy of Ayi Kwei Armah’s fictional character Damfo to the Hindu Mahavidyas. Finally, the essay examines the ethical challenges and the paradoxes of time and effort that the periodical has brought into being and their implications in building a research ecology.
The evocative range of the essay is amplified through selections of some of my favourite images by ChatGPT from the Review, accompanied by my commentary on the images.
Toyin Falola Studies, the study of the life and work of the polymathic scholar, writer and intellectual organizer Toyin Falola and everything directly associated with him, is an ambitious exploration of every aspect of African existence in relation to the cognitive development of humanity. Ibibio cuisine, African and non-African mythic cosmologies as well as scientific cosmologies, the Yoruba city of Ibadan from its founding as a war camp to its later identity as a modern intellectual crucible, the intersections of Islam, Christianity and traditional religions in Africa, questions about methods, histories and implications of how knowledge about Africa is produced-on almost every field of knowledge about Africa, Falola's footprint can be found.
One might not be satisfied with his handling of a particular subject, but his pioneering work in various fields makes his creativity a necessary point of departure, an indispensable point of reference, even in that subject on which one might have wanted something more than he provides. Having opened a door in one's mind through reading him, one may be stimulated to ask-''how can I do something similar, building on what this trail clearer has done and taking it further? How do I cultivate the stamina even to achieve what he has achieved, talk less going beyond it?
Falola is a consummate book writer, a dedicate to the culture of the scholarly book, but to introduce oneself to the quintessential Falola, the fearless sprinter between the opening sentence and closing full stop in a piece of writing, a very useful beginning is his essays, where the challenge of evenness of quality is always more readily sustained than in the varied achievements represented by the more ambitious architecture of his books. But such a capacious mind cannot operate otherwise than in terms of his oscillation between the gem like grandeur of the essay and the prismatic multiplicity of a book. How else will the grand cognitive architectures of such masterpiece as Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks be allowed full expression?
The essay allows his thought to achieve compression, velocity and brilliance; the book enables it to unfold through expansive architectures of association, argument and synthesis.
Yet, if all Falola had written were his three memoirs and his best poetry, he would still be a very significant writer. Falola Studies, therefore, has something to offer everyone, from the aesthetics, sociology and symbolism of Yoruba female hairstyles, as demonstrated in a superlative chapter in his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, to the memorable image of life as narrative at the intersection of human and cosmic complexity in Yoruba Metaphysics, to the wonderful picture of his fearsome and yet endearing childhood mentor the herbalist Leku in his memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, to his poignant poems of loss celebrating Clara Adeyemi and Ayo Olukotun, these being a few of my favourite Falola creativities drawn from the small fraction of his immense body of work that I have read so far.
That such richness emerges from only a limited portion of his corpus suggests the magnitude of the undertaking. Toyin Falola Studies is not simply the study of one extraordinarily productive individual. It is a passage into the histories, cultures, spiritualities and knowledge systems of Africa at their best and wealthiest—and, through them, into humanity’s continuing adventure of understanding and making meaning of existence.
From Weekly Chronicle to Interpretive Laboratory
This development is more than an expansion of distribution. A dedicated account gives the Review a recognizable intellectual home. It enables readers to follow its development across successive editions, observe continuities among its themes and access individual studies within a growing body of work.
The platform should eventually function as both repository and map: a repository preserving the Review’s weekly documentation, and a map revealing the expanding conceptual relationships generated through sustained engagement with Falola’s work.
Inspiration from the Past, the Present and the Future
''In one gesture of gratitude, I have come to realize that we never travel alone in our knowledge. What I have become reflects a gathering of extraordinary people who, in the fullness of their presence, have loved, encouraged, supported, challenged, inspired, questioned, corrected, and mentored me: seen and unseen, living and dead, and the unborn.
I am thankful to the ancestors, to the guilds of shamans, diviners, herbalists, griots, wisdom elders, and quiet spiritual workers whose biographies form the scaffolding of this continent's metaphysical infrastructure. But it's for a service to this earth that has been woefully underappreciated, at times even the target of scorn, that history will absolve them. They are the custodians of memory, the architects of Africa's epistemic resilience. The fact that they are the intellectual behemoths whose shoulders we stand on is the firmest ground I have for speaking up in support of indigeneity.
And I also acknowledge, in the secret places of power and grace, the unseen hands and voices: the ancestors who whisper in the ears of seekers; the spirits of knowledge who open roads when people close doors; and the cosmic forces of creation that insist, without cease, that who we are can never be ended, and that what we know can never be forgotten. I would not have this book realized but for your blessing; it remains in this acknowledgment to all who believe in the divine intelligence of our heritage.''
Toyin Falola, ''Acknowledgements'', in Ifa Priestcraft: Ifayemi Elebuibon and African Ancestral Knowledge Systems. 2026: 345, 346.
''Authors write acknowledgements to publicly record their indebtedness to the living and the dead who helped them in the process of researching and writing their books. I have done a lot of this in my previous sixteen monographs and four edited volumes.
Now that I am on my seventeenth monograph, it occurred to me that my acknowledgement should properly focus on the not-yet born. I expect their coming onto the academic scene, to carry forward the ideas in this book. I acknowledge their accomplishments of this task and the claim past scholarship has on them.
This approach to acknowledgement is very important for those of us who are Africans and/or Pentecostals. We write not only with an eye on the current intellectual questions and debates, but also with an ear on the distant sound of the footsteps of coming generations.
We are building a body of work for the next generations, whose coming is expected and whose joy in inheriting and encountering works and ideas left for them by their own deeply excites me. I acknowledge here the inspiration I received from the generations of Africans and Pentecostals who are coming after me.
I acknowledge the intellectual powers of those who come after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. I have no greater joy than to expect that my brothers and sisters, my children, will be committed to the quest for truth rooted in the public intercourse of rigorous ideas.
Now let me turn to the past and present generations who assisted me in bringing the idea of this book to fruition.
I acknowledge all my teachers, past and present, in formal and informal settings, who helped to form and inspire me to work at the uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines. I am a scholar on the boundary. I work on the boundaries of economics and ethics, economics and religion, economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophy and theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, and present and not-yet-present knowledges.
My thinking always functions at an interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/ nor. This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating between spheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights. I am talking of the uncanny non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in history.
My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach. This book reflects this orientation of my scholarship. And I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance in walking and working with me in this unhomely space.''
Nimi Wariboko, The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory. 2018: ix-x.
The Development of New Knowledge Systems and the Pioneering Presentation of Old Ones
This would amplify discourse on the significance of the knowledge already presented.The purpose is not simply to decorate a chronicle with theoretical language. It is to discover what becomes visible when the same body of evidence is approached through different systems of thought.
A historical report may consequently become an experiment in hermeneutics, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics or comparative epistemology. Falola’s publications, lectures, institutional projects and public interventions become materials through which the explanatory power of the selected framework can be explored and the further significance of Falola's week developed.
Making African Knowledge Systems More Visible and Escalating Dialogue Between African Realities and Thought and Non-African Knowledge Systems
When the ideas are developed from African experiential and/or cognitive soil, the project would contribute to escalating the visibility of Africa developed theory, in great need of visibility.
The underlying problem is not that Africa lacks sophisticated theoretical traditions. It is that those traditions have often been classified as religion, mythology, folklore, oral literature or cultural practice without receiving equivalent recognition as philosophy, epistemology or general theory.
The Review therefore seeks to bring African ideas into wider conceptual conversation without stripping them of their historical and cultural particularity. It asks what these systems can reveal about Falola’s work and, equally importantly, what Falola’s work can reveal about their continuing explanatory capacities.
This is not merely the recovery of supposedly static traditions. Interpretation places inherited ideas in new relationships. It may disclose affinities among traditions, reveal irreducible differences or generate theoretical combinations that did not previously exist in precisely the same form.
The ambition is consequently double: to make insufficiently recognized knowledge systems more visible and to explore the new knowledge that can emerge when they enter disciplined comparative dialogue.
Damfo as Intellectual Resource and Ethical Test
In pursuing this goal, I have, at times had to first make more visible African ideational constructs which need better appreciation.This is exemplified, for example, by the magnificent Akan inspired philosophy of healing, a masterpiece of world literature and philosophy, developed by the healer Damfo in Ayi Kwei Armah's novel The Healers.I don't have permission from Armah or his publishers to re-present his work. I am taking this step after years of non-response to my emails to him and the publishers for permission. That silence does not justify what is in essence a transgression of the rights of the writer and his publisher. I'll be grateful for contact with them to address the issue.
For a forthcoming edition, I am thinking of employing a Hindu metaphysical scheme known as the Ten Mahāvidyās, a complex of Goddesses who may be described as collectively embodying all the possibilities of existence.The Mahāvidyās are a constellation of Goddesses forms through which Hindu tantric traditions explore distinct powers, transformations and possibilities of existence. Taken together, they have been interpreted as presenting a remarkably comprehensive vision of reality: creation and destruction, beauty and terror, abundance and loss, speech and silence, time and transcendence.
Could the multifarious scope of Falola Studies be clarified and amplified through dialogue with this ambitious religious schema? At the intersection of metaphysics-cosmic structure and dynamism-and epistemology- theories of knowledge integrating abstract and figurative images and verbalization, correlative with the expressive scope and thematic range of Falola Studies?
More precisely:
- metaphysics as the investigation of cosmic structure, energy and transformation;
- epistemology as the exploration of different modes of knowing;
- visual art as a system through which abstract principles acquire figurative form;
- language as the verbal articulation of realities also expressed through image, ritual and symbol.
Falola’s scholarship ranges across history, politics, culture, religion, cities, violence, migration, identity, education, epistemology and metaphysics. The Mahāvidyās might provide a complex structure for asking whether these different fields constitute independent specializations or varied manifestations of a deeper intellectual totality.
The comparison would need to remain disciplined. It should not force each Goddess into a mechanical correspondence with one field of Falola’s work, nor should it collapse Hindu and Yoruba traditions into an undifferentiated spirituality. Its value would lie in dialogue rather than equivalence: permitting each system to illuminate the other while preserving their differences.
Could a religious structure developed to embody the plurality of existence become a lens for understanding the thematic plurality of Falola Studies? The thought is mouth watering.
I think I have landed on my feet in my tumble into an escalated engagement with Falola Studies represented by the Review. Re-presenting existing knowledge systems, as with the Armah example or outlining new combinations of known knowledge systems, as in conjoining Western esotericism, Tibetan Buddhism and African thought and arts ( Part 1; Part 2; Part 3), has made preparing the Review into the very full time job I saw myself as avoiding by outsourcing the Review to ChatGPT. The labour has therefore shifted rather than disappeared. Some processes have been accelerated, but the time released by automation has been reinvested in more ambitious research.
What appeared to be outsourcing is becoming a form of intellectual apprenticeship. My cognitive horizon is expanding. My awareness of intellectual possibilities is growing. Preparing conceptual material for computational interpretation and bringing different bodies of knowledge into productive relationship are leading to strategic changes in my cognitive coordinates-what I know, what I can know and what I can do with this knowledge. I am undergoing an initiation. I have passed through the door of no return.
I also seem to have arrived at the necessary balance in terms of time, knowledge and energy management.The goal is not to do everything at once, but to identify the forms of work that only I can perform and use artificial intelligence to extend—rather than replace—that intellectual agency.An Expanding Research Ecology
I should be able to devote sufficient time to its continuing development, even when that work consists primarily of preparing knowledge systems for the AI to use in interpreting its preceding account of Falola’s week.
This weekly activity will coexist with several other projects:
- my continuing chapter-by-chapter study of Falola’s Ifá Priestcraft;
- my ongoing study of his Yoruba Metaphysics;
- a return to fieldwork exploring his biographical roots, such as my engagement with Ode Aje in Ibadan;
- and perhaps exploring the totality of his work for a creative thrust moving from the material and social to the metaphysical, from his books on Ibadan, for example, to his writings on Yoruba metaphysics and global cosmologies. Taking off from Falola’s writings on Ibadan—its streets, institutions, histories, social energies and cultural transformations—and proceed toward his work on Yoruba metaphysics and global cosmologies.Such an exploratory movement would not abandon the material world in favour of abstraction. It would examine how place, biography, history, society, spirituality and cosmology interact within a single intellectual career.
At the same time, Falola Studies must not absorb every dimension of my work. Other projects will continue along their own paths. Maintaining that plurality may ultimately strengthen the Review by allowing insights developed elsewhere to enter it without making it the sole destination of all inquiry.
What began as a weekly record is therefore becoming a research ecology composed of:
documentation → interpretation → theoretical recovery → comparative experimentation → close reading → fieldwork → intellectual synthesis.
The dedicated Academia.edu account gives this ecology an archive. The weekly interpretive method gives it a laboratory. The engagement with African and global knowledge systems gives it a comparative horizon. Fieldwork gives it geographical and biographical grounding.
The Review is no longer simply reporting developments in Toyin Falola’s intellectual life. It is becoming a method for exploring how an extraordinary body of work may serve as a meeting ground for histories, metaphysics, arts, places and knowledge systems.