Oluwatoyin Adepoju
With Falola’s Global Yoruba, one arrives at the latest stage in the long journey of Yoruba historiography and can better track the journey traveled, orienting oneself accordingly, even in African and world history, possibly using the Yoruba matrix as an inspirational starting point.With the exposure and incentive provided by books like these, I can start to more systematically educate myself in Yoruba Studies, complementing the approach I’ve employed before now.
Ironically, my journey in Yoruba Studies, in general, and Yoruba spirituality, in particular, began in Benin City, where, hungry for literature not available on Africa in my family’s relatively rich library, I discovered Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World, Bolaji Idowu’s Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief and Wande Abinmbola’s books on Ifa.
I doubt if even Benin culture has such a staple of masterwriters, initiating one into their philosophies and spiritualities with such a combination of intellectual force and spiritual sensitivity.
The presence of a Soyinka, for example, in the Yoruba cultural space represents an awesome advantage which I wonder if any other African culture possesses. By the time one adds the Susanne Wengers, the Ulli Beiers, the Pierre Vergers, the Falolas, Ogundirans, Afolayans, Yoruba and non-Yoruba people addressing Yoruba culture, the harvest is momentous.
Yoruba philosophy, spirituality and arts have been so thoroughly intellectualized, enabling easy lifting from their geographical contexts and application elsewhere, they have proven invaluable in understanding my journey in Benin spirituality at intersections with Igbo thought and other Southern Nigerian and Akan thought.
Mazisi Kunene on Zulu philosophy, Ayi Kwei Armah on Akan thought, Ahmadou Hampate Ba on Fulani thought, are among my encounters with the heights of human thought. I need to read more of such masters on other African thought.
Reading such books as Global Yoruba and The Yoruba:A New History and responding to them helps one organize one’s knowledge, as one wonders how such books are written, so powerful they are.
Falola’s trajectory towards Global Yoruba , however, may be understood as relatively clear since his post-PhD publications, as he assimilated what was known, and reflected upon various levels of knowledge as they became available in succeeding decades.
I get the impression that his treatment of Yoruba cosmology in The Yoruba: From Prehistory to the Present, with Aribidesi Usman, is different from that of Global Yoruba .
In the previous book, devoting just one chapter to the subject, Yoruba cosmology seems to have been presented in the conventional static manner, a frozen approach that Ogundiran critiqued, in favour of the need to historicize the development of ideas and practices represented by the tradition, even though I’m still trying to adequately understand Ogundiran’s rationale, in terms of temporal identification and motivation for innovations in the tradition, for his various historicizations, and I wish he gave more room for the speculative and genuinely spiritual element in classical Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, although his characterization of the Orisha, the deities of the classical cosmology, is sublime, comparable in imaginative force with a correlative image of infinity from Buddhism, the famous Net of Indra, though Ogundiran draws on an idea from physics of a kind likely unknown when the Buddhist text was composed.
Falola strives, in Global Yoruba, to engage the philosophical and spiritual tradition as an evolving entity, as it were, metamorphosing across Yorubaland, and beyond, into the Americas, where it has taken on an amazing life.
Falola’s book on Yoruba metaphysics is coming out this year.
Will it include his personal relationship with this metaphysics, in dialogue, perhaps with other systems he has explored, such as the meditation Vik Bahl, perhaps, recommended he use in order to recover from the trauma of losing his manuscripts in transit before he began to store them in the digital cloud, as he states in an interview?
Falola also presents a rich and unconventional meditation on the Yoruba origin Orisha tradition deity Eshu in ”Ritual Archives”, a version of what is known in Western magic as the Assumption of God Form, the contemplative assumption of the identity of a deity, also well developed in Hinduism and Buddhism, and correlative with deity identifications in classical African spiritualities, although the little I have read so far about the latter emphasizes possession of devotee by deity, suspending the devotee’s consciousness in the process while the possession proceeds, while the Western, Hindu and Buddhist approaches I am referencing emphasize the expansion of the consciousness of the devotee through contact with the being of the deity, an approach the Falola Eshu meditation seems to suggest.
Is more to be expected on his relationship with his childhood mentor Iya Lekuleja, his accounts of her in his autobiographies being classics of description of a spiritual master, although he states in Counting the Tiger’s Teeth that his efforts to reveal her mystery have led to dreams of being chased by a fierce and powerful animal?
He claims, in the first chapter, I think, of Decolonizing African Knowledge: Auto-Ethnography and African Epistemologies, that his memory is aided by magic, if I recall correctly, performed by Leku, but what Leku is described as doing seems to be giving him a herbal concoction to drink, the use of such ingested material enablements also known as employed in the training of Ifa priests to aid memory.
So, is the active ingredient therefore a material, herbal preparation, even though with Leku and some instances of Yoruba herbalogy, spirituality and herbs go together, at times through ofo, incantatory language meant to empower oogun, the material preparation which may be medicinal or spiritual or both?
It would be great if African scholars were to open up more on the intersection of their spirituality and their scholarship, as some Western scholars are doing.
As magnificent as the Ogundiran and Falola books are, they leave me yearning for more, having taken one to a mountaintop where new vistas become visible in the unfolding landscape.
In terms of communicative technique, one of the wisest things Falola has done of recent is to use rich, original illustrations for his book covers and in the interiors, thereby creating synergy between the aesthetic stimulation of art, its ideational projection and the intellectual power of written text.
If I had the opportunity, I would not only republish Global Yoruba for the African market but commission the artists to reproduce those works in colour, as much as possible, further actualizing the character of the book as a means of both pleasure and learning.
I continue to marvel at what Yoruba scholars are doing with Yoruba civilization in their scholarship. It might not be a popular observation, but has it been up to 200 years since the widespread art of writing emerged in Yorubaland through the colonial encounter?
Islam in Yorubaland, before Western colonization, would have come with the art of writing but that scribal culture does not seem to have impacted what we now know as Yorubaland in a deep manner. I wonder why.
One commentator on the contemporary escalation of the struggle for cultural dominance in Ilorin by Fulani jihad inspired Islam which conquered Ilorin after the dramatic story of Afonja and Alimi holds that the strain of Islam dominant there understands itself in terms of cultural superiority to classical Yoruba civilization represented by Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology, a situation partly represented by the fact that they, the Muslims, were literate while their Isese, Yoruba tradition practising neighbors were not.
Books like Global Yoruba might not often be invoked when discussing contemporary cultural politics, but the incidental intersections between the Ilorin struggle of last year, if I recall properly, and such an ecumenical text as Global Yoruba and Falola’s Sacred Words and Holy Realms, the latter being both particularly rich on Islam and Ifa, in relation to Falola’s projected third part of his autobiography which he says will deal with his time in an Islamic school, may provoke questions on what Falola’s teacher J. D. Y. Peel describes in his book of that title as further developments in religious encounter in the making of the Yoruba.
Books like Global Yoruba, Ogundiran’s The Yoruba:A New History and Soyinka’s awesome Myth, Literature and the African World, valorize classical Yoruba cosmology but what is the fate of that cosmology and its arts, among the greatest contributions of Yorubaland to civilization, in the land of origin of that cultural system?
How live is it beyond Nollywood?
As a person put it to Isese partitioners during the Ilorin debacle, ”how many members of government or other prominent people in Nigeria publicly subscribe to your religion?”
We have all become Christians and Muslims.
Happily the growing literature will help distill the inspirational core of this classical spirituality and philosophy, taking it beyond its accustomed ritual contexts, making it more accessible, more mobile, more portable, so that its efflorescence will not be limited to the diaspora.
The future for classical Yoruba spirituality and philosophy in Yorubaland might lie in syncretism with Christianity and Islam.
My almost heartbreaking experience in Ijebu-Ode this year convinced me that the battle for the centralization in Yorubaland of classical Yoruba philosophy and spirituality and its awesome arts is irrevocably lost, as I observed the total dominance of that capital city by mosques and churches at various levels of grandeur, with traditional spirituality locations not readily found and commanding nothing like the visual vigour and care of the Abrahamic sites, while in the centre of the city, the memorial to the story of a legendary magical exploit by an Ifa diviner at the founding of Ijebu Ode was not in impressive condition though the story is still gloriously told.
At the former University of Ife, the city that is the heartland of Yoruba spirituality as perhaps Mecca is to Islam, I saw in 2022 a superb church and mosque, with superb art in the church but I saw nothing for the worship of classical African spiritualities, decades after Soyinka took up that struggle, as he recounts in A Credo of Being and Nothingness.
So, a Yoruba philosophy and spirituality practitioner such as myself and scholars who appreciate the significance of that cosmology as centrally demonstrating a culture’s creativity would be excited by the wonderful work of Global Yoruba and Ogundiran’s The Yoruba in highlighting these systems, African Americans and other orisha devotees in the Americas will see such books as a form of Christmas, a wondrous gift, but, for the philosophical and spirituality sections of those books dealing with classical Yruba thought, what is likely to be the story in Nigeria, where I understood some Yoruba parents don’t want their children to study Ifa literature because it is seen as fetishistic?
What could be the future for Yoruba scribal philosophy in Yorubaland, philosophy that is primarily written rather than oral?
For how long will such philosophy foreground a marginalized school of thought represented by classical Yoruba thought, rich as that is?
Will the way forward be akin to that taken by ancient Greek religion, in its assimilation into and transcendence by philosophy, as different from India in which direct continuity between the classical and contemporary traditions is ensured through allegiances of faith and the existence of ancient texts to draw on?
Will classical Yoruba cosmology survive largely as a form of myth, as ancient Greek myth has?
Or will the picture in the next one hundred years be closer to that of the Yoruba community at Ikpodo, near Ikeja-Under-Bridge in Lagos, where Muslims and practitioners of traditional Yoruba spirituality collectively manage the Eshu, Aje and Egungun shrines, as I observed some years ago?
Falola discusess examples of such integrations in how Yorubas in Nigeria and the Diaspora practice Islam. He also examines the Yorubanization of Christianity.
A correlative example is the philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, fed by traditional Kalabari, Pentecostal and Christian thought. Such syncretisms might be more visible in the future.