Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
Abstract
This essay examines the immediate and more distant yet strikingly illuminating implications of the use, in his books and memorabilia of him, of artistic images of polymathic scholar, writer and institutional organizer Toyin Falola, exploring these images within an intercultural context, generating a global nexus in relation to their proximate African frameworks.
The essay initiates what is likely to be a new field of study, Falola iconography, the study of values relating to images of Toyin Falola, part of Falola Studies, the investigation of the life and work of the scholar, writer and academic entrepreneur.
I have identified the artists responsible for the images when I could get their names from the books.
Image Hermeneutics
What is going on in these images?
Falola does not write children’s books, so why is he depicted as speaking to children under a tree, an archetypal image of intergenerational cultural transmission from African cultures, where the tree serves as shade, spiritual centre and congregational space?
Why is a tree shown growing out of his head in the iconographic style of a deity figure unifying nature, the tree, and human creativity, creativity exemplified by the bodies of knowledge the tree’s branches are identified with?
He is not a trader, so why is he depicted as one, an elegantly attired market seller seating in front of his tray of tomatoes in a market?
Has he ever performed as an Egungun masquerade? Most unlikely given the highly systematized character of that cultural system, in which Falola is not likely to have participated, having moved from immersion in such cultural contexts in his youth, before he might have got the opportunity, to life as a university student, and later, academic, in Nigeria and the US.
Closer to factuality are other visualizations in Milestones, Falola’s face among a constellation constituted by those of African writers Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and others, but to what degree is Falola a writer like Soyinka and Okri are?
The most realistic image comes from Milestones, Falola seated with a laptop in front of him, his face aglow with delight as he holds an instrument of his interminable journeys in weaving landscapes of knowledge, the computer.
This sequence of images locate Falola in relation to the subject matter of the books where those images are placed. They also represent one of the oldest and most powerful of visual techniques, the shaping of an image of a person using diverse but ultimately unificatory visualizations, ranging from the realistic to the semi-realistic to the stylized, integrating archetypal forms striking deep into primordial depictions of universally enduring human values, in tandem with more basic depictions of the details of human life.
I understand this technique to have been best developed in the centuries long progression of the creation of images of the Buddha. The richest theorization known to me of such visualizations are Hindu yantra theory, unifying the anthropomorphic, the geometric and the sonic in a sequence from concreteness to abstraction, as this may be related to Buddhist mandala practice and theory.
Similar crafting of a person’s image occur in ancient Egyptian pharaonic and deity depictions, in Christianity, in African art, and, I expect, other cultures, but the most expansive scope known to me of such integration of the image of a human being with the archetypal and the everyday is in images of the Buddha.
This is so notwithstanding the scope of depictions of the Hindu deity Shiva, as a naked mendicant wandering with his dog, as a contemplative atop Mount Kailash, the sacred river Ganges streaming from his brow, as a dancer from whose rhythms issue the creation, sustenance and destruction of the cosmos, as lover of Parvati, Kali and Tripurasundari, versions of Shakti, the feminine principle in relation to whom Shiva exists as the flame and the heat of the flame, two poles in a dualistically unified rhythm, as stated by Abhinavagupta in his Tantraloka.
What the Falola visualizations achieve is the projection of a uniquely African equivalent of the kind of apotheosizing yet concrete visualizations of the fusion of the human being with locally inspired but universally resonant conceptions, even evocations of ultimate realities, so powerfully developed in Buddhist iconography, resonating with more partial but also profoundly powerful visualizations in other cultures.
Falola and the Tree of Existence
Falola is not a writer of children’s literature of any kind, not having written any text directed at children, as fellow Nigerian writer and scholar Chinua Achebe did, for example, with Chike and the River, alongside his well-known books for adults. Yet Falola is depicted in that drawing from Milestones as seated under a tree talking with children who surround him.
Does the image suggest he sees his audience for his books, essays and poems as children drinking from his far superior wisdom, after all, he is one of the world’s most prolific and multidisciplinary of scholars and multi-genred of writers?
That is not the tone of his writings or of his institutional network, the Toyin Falola Network, which exists due to wide ranging international collaboration between scholars at different stages of the scholarly journey and various levels of visibility in the global scholarly ecosystem.
The image of Falola talking with children seated round him under a tree may be best appreciated as a motif from the oral tradition at the headwaters of African literature in which similar images of storyteller and audience would have been actualized in various contexts with adult and child audiences, and combinations of these audience demographics, in cultures where orality was a primary means of information storage and knowledge transmission.
Falola and the children are depicted as clapping, suggesting the interactive mode of classical African storytelling, in which the singing of a refrain by narrator and audience and clapping, or both, enlivens the narrative process through complementary activity. That image demonstrates Falola imaginatively positioning himself within the time frame of social prominence of classical African oral literatures, when regular oral storytelling in informal contexts was a staple of such societies.
The sage like appearance of the narrator resonates with accounts of the more exalted roles of the African oral storyteller as transmitter of moral, philosophical and spiritual values. Such a narrator may be understood as not simply providing entertainment but as educating. The medium of education may be perceived as not simply the sounds that issues from his or her mouth but sound as embodying the creative power that sustains the universe, a force inhering in all forms of existence but particularly activated through speech, as may be described of this perception of orality in Ahmadou Hampate Ba’s account of the beliefs of “what was formerly called the Bafour and constituted the savannah zones of former French West Africa” represented by the Bambara, the Fulani and the Mande, among others (“The Living Tradition”, UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol.1) and Rowland Abiodun’s description of a similar culture in Yoruba Art and Language.
Beyond the historical immediacy of the associative value of that image of Falola, the tree and children in Milestones, the image operates within a global image galaxy, a universally circulating network of visual associations conflating three primordial images -the wise man, identified by his white beard and solicitous manner; the tree, an ancient symbol of ecosystemic harmony both terrestrial and cosmic, unifying the earth grounded world and the celestial world of sky, sun and moon to which it seems to reach as its trunk stretches towards the sky, its branches pointing towards the firmament as they provide shade and nourishment on earth in terms of fruits for humans and animals, qualities making it, in the imagination of various peoples, an axis mundi, a cosmic pivot, a doorway between dimensions; and the school of those who are learning from this human/nature nexus, learners here visualized as a group of children, the state of the child correlative with any situation in which the self is operating at a deeply receptive level of engagement, in which sensitivity to the distance between the reality one is confronted with and one’s own capacities is immense, reducing the most eloquent possibilities of expression of the person trying to grasp and express this immensity to the equivalent of “mama, papa”, the first, barely coherent babblings of a child as the infant begins to achieve coherent self consciousness and expressive capacity, as such a state of stupefied near coherence is described by the Italian poet Dante in the Divine Comedy.
The human/tree interface distantly evoked by the Falola image is most famously actualized in the image of the Buddha’s enlightenment to the ultimate meaning of existence under the Bodhi tree, leading to the founding of Buddhism, making the image of a meditating figure under a tree a globally evocative image, although Judith Hoch argues that the animistic values in which that image is best rooted, values indicating the Bodhi tree not only as shade but as inspirational presence, even as subtle inspirational guide, has been occluded by the human centric values of early Buddhist thought.
Further up the historical timeline of the wise man/tree correlation is the image of the most powerful Norse deity Odin hanging from the branches of Yggdrasil, the tree unifying the cosmos, its branches and roots penetrating into all aspects of existence, zones of cosmos in which diverse kinds of beings dwell and at the foot of which is Mimer, the well of wisdom, around which are positioned the three Norns, who, embodying the past, the present and the future, weave the threads of human life.
Odin sacrificed one of his eyes, throwing it into Mimer, hanging from the branches of Yggdrasil for nine days and nights in order to gain knowledge of the cosmic relationships constituted by Yggdrasil and the runes of knowledge, esoteric symbols facilitating understanding of existence and its dynamism.
The closest analogue, within Falola’s own self-identified African, and more specifically, Yoruba cultural universe, to the most expansive associations of the image of himself talking with children as they sit under a large tree, is a particularly symbol and image rich story from the Yoruba branch of the Ifa literary corpus retold in Wande Abimbola’s An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus, in which the disciples of Orunmila, the orisha or deity of wisdom, track him from Ile, Earth, to orun, after his disappearance from Earth, meeting him under a massive, sixteen branched tree, its branches huge as houses, at which meeting he teaches them the Ifa system of knowledge which he says will replace him in their lives as a guide to the wisdom unifying being and possibility, past, present and future, within the network shaping the interrelationships of various forces constituting the cosmos, knowledge accessed through the sixteen fold order of Ifa, composed of innumerable poems and stories.
The image of Falola seated under a tree as he speaks with children seated surrounding him resonates with various depictions of the wise man/ tree motif across cultures and an implied or explicitly depicted audience of disciples learning from the wisdom gained through the human/nature correlation, the convergence of human reflective capacity and the tree’s inspirational power.
Its closest evocative resonance, however, comes from Falola’s African culture, where the wise, elderly speaker and storyteller engaging children under a tree may be seen as a staple of the imagination, but even more so from his native Yoruba culture, where this image is expanded into an evocation of a wise man embodying ultimate wisdom, seated under a tree evoking his codification of an approach to accessing this wisdom, the sixteen branched tree emblematic of the sixteen structured order of Ifa, as he shares this knowledge to his disciples.
Taken to its logical conclusion of associative values, the Ifa tree may best be understood, from one perspective, as a tree of knowledge as well as of existence, unifying the cosmos and the processes through which existence may be understood.
In this context, the sixteen major categorisations of Ifa, the odu ifa, are sentient entities, spirits, the ”names” of identities of all possibilities of existence, not simply structuring forms created by the human mind but cosmological matrices inherent to the universe, as described by babalawo, adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, Joseph Ohomina, as described in my ”Cosmological Permutations: Joseph Ohomina’s Ifa Philosophy and the Quest for the Unity of Being” a view which one may appreciate as testifying to the human need to anchor human activity in cosmological range and depth.
The oral context of Falola’s engagement with the children in the drawing of him seated under a tree evokes the oral situations of classical African storytelling, amplified through the traditional oral character of Ifa poetry and stories, suggesting the tree of knowledge, massive in its sixteen branched formation, that Ifa literary forms constitute.
The philosophical and spiritual significance of orality is evoked by the oral dimension of that Falola image, values dramatized by African and other oral cultures, in particular, as well as cultures of written verbalization Falola also engages with in terms of the philosophies of language in his African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms, complemented, in my view, by my review of that book, “The Metaphysics of Language in the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge in a Comparative Context: Inspirational Echoes from Thinking through the Discussion of Sacred Language in Toyin Falola’s African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems: Sacred Words and Holy Realms“.
Global Falola and the Multi-Racial Conglomeration of Children
The image of Falola telling stories to children in Milestones is a variant of another one on the cover of his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies, 2022, in which similar associative values as those of the Milestones image are pursued- Falola is surrounded by a circle of children, in this instance, of different skin colours indicating both Black and possibly Asian and Caucasian children while the children seem all Black in the Milestones image.
In the earlier painting, Falola is holding a globe of the world in one hand, the globe and the multi-racial conglomeration of children projecting Falola in terms of the universal, global significance of his thought, on the cover of a book where he draws upon broad ranging and rigorously engaged thought of Western scholars in autoethnography in addressing lived African realities in relation to Africa developed theoretical constructs, such as classical Yoruba conceptions of visuality.
Ironically, the more explicitly universalist evocative aspirations of the cover art of Decolonizing African Knowledge are not as successful, in achieving the same goals, as the more understated but more technically proficient and conceptually mature approach of the Milestones image.
The Milestones depiction achieves the same universal reverberations much more effectively simply by limiting itself to archetypal, globally resonant images of the old man, the tree and children, placed in relation to each other according to universally recurring conventions of expression, the universality of value achieved through subliminal evocative force rather than through the explicit but less successful strategy of the image of the Decolonization cover, in which the rendering of the images is also not as fluidly depicted as in Milestones.
My response to this image from my review of the book “A Scholar Takes Stock of his Paradoxical Identity at a Nexus of Cultures: Toyin Falola’s Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies: Anticipatory Review” might be enlightening:
I can’t find a helpful associative logic justifying the cover design of a larger than life size image of the author surrounded by relatively diminutive human figures.
What idea is being suggested by this image? An adulatory group looking up at the author in his grand poise? An author whose eyes are held aloft away from those congregating at his feet, therefore not suggesting any identification with them, an imperial aloofness?
I don’t see the quality of execution of his features and hands, along with those of the group of people of different races around him, as justifiable in terms of any artistic strategy, whether minimalist, abstract or realist, unless in terms of an immature style of artistic expression.
What might be an effort at suggesting the global significance of Falola’s work through an image of a staff topped by a map of the world is strikingly valid but weak in the imaginative creativity of its execution.
Clearly, therefore, Falola seems to have been seeking to carve an image for himself in the history of knowledge, an image operating not only through his verbal texts comprising essays and particularly books but through visual images of himself on and in his books constructed in collaboration with artists, experimenting in various works, and in Milestones, he seems to have hit some of his most successful efforts so far in those aspirations.
Falola and the Tree of Knowledge
The evocative values of a tree in relation to knowledge and its verbal expression and organization are amplified in another use of the tree image in Milestones.
A tree of knowledge is depicted by the drawing of a tree rising from the crown of Falola’s head, his brow ringed by a majestic diadem akin to that of the glorious Ife sculptural heads, the tree’s branches defined by the various African bodies of knowledge Falola’s work addresses or employs or both, from the Ajami and Swahili languages to Ifa, to ritual to history to nation to poetry, prose and drama.
Falola’s brain becomes the nutrient through which this multidisciplinary tree of knowledge grows, the soil through which its configuration is nourished and constellated.
The self as embodying a universe of knowledge is thereby emphasized, the partially perceived creative syntheses occurring within the subterranean penetralia of the mind are evoked, the mysterious processes through which cognitive networks are constructed or conjoined, architectonic unities rising to the surface of consciousness over time, as a plant grows from soil, like trees grow from germinations in the rich darkness of earth, is hereby suggested, like a massive, myriad branched tree grows from a seed, a description adapting German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s stirring account, in his Critique of Pure Reason, of how the human mind most fruitfully constructs systems of knowledge through the unfolding of the potential of inspirational ideas in unanticipated and only partially understood ways.
The Judaic origin Kabbalistic Tree of Life adapts the tree of life motif in terms of a picture of the universe as a tree, its roots in the transcendental identity of the creator, its branches the various dimensions of existence as expressions of aspects of the identity of the ultimate creator, the entire complex encapsulated in the terrestrial cosmos, a point of entry to the other regions of existence which culminate in it and lead from it, a ” far flying cosmic chariot”, in the words of William Gray in his Office of the Holy Tree of Life, a cosmogram, a map of the cosmos yet understood as also a map of the human being as embodying in miniature this cosmic structure, hence the aspirant is enjoined, in such works as Israel Regardie’s edited The Golden Dawn and The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic, to contemplate themselves in the image of this cosmic tree, the tree image thus moving from its original occurrence in nature to its cosmological adaptation and eventual assimilation to the human being as a microcosm of the cosmos, a growth in human symbolization across centuries associatable with the image of a tree of knowledge rising from Falola’s head, exemplifying the assimilation of the image of the tree to that of the human being.
Falola and the Cap of Knowledge
In a related but less imaginatively radical kind of visualization, by Mike Efionayi on the cover of his Nigerian Literary Imagination and the Nationhood Project, 2022, Falola’s head is capped by a spherical constellation of names in multiple colours, names of the authors discussed in the book, suggesting integration of the knowledge represented by those authors in the self of Falola, the scholar who has internalized their work, distilling a broad range of its significance, projecting this knowledge through the book.
Knowledge as constitutive of the self, akin to a cap, as an acquisition such as a cap is, but closer to the reshaping of mind though the expansion and reconfiguration of knowing, a process restructuring the neural networks and matter of the brain, is suggested by this rich image, complementing the motif of the tree of knowledge rising from the head of the vastly informed scholar. “Knowledge, how it is acquired, held and used, is the core of the scholar’s work”, as one view on scholarship may be adapted, correlative with these images of the tree of knowledge and the cap of knowledge.
Falola as a Market Trader
What significance could there be to the image of Falola as a trader, an elegantly dressed, white bearded man seated in a market in front of a tray of tomatoes on the cover of Daily Life in Colonial Africa?
He is not a trader and might never have been one, in spite of his chequered history as a one time apprentice to a fraudulent pretend blind beggar and as a participant in the Nigerian Agbekoya anti-colonial rebellion, as described in his autobiographies.
Why, then, would a former professor in a Nigerian university, the then University of Ife, currently a professor in a US university, the University of Texas, be depicted as selling tomatoes in an African market?
Unlike the more fluid renditions of most of the other artistic works earlier discussed, the quality of the image could be much better, the central figure not being symmetrical with the rest of the painting, seeming to be superimposed on the background rather than integral to the scene, but the general idea of the elegant white bearded man seated before a tray of tomatoes and around whom one may see other traders and their wares, is clear.
Through this image, Falola positions himself in relation to his subject as an imaginative participant, projecting himself visually into the time stream he describes in the book, dramatizing the desire to experience vicariously the texture of the lives of the people he discusses, “farmers forced to switch to cash crops, people of faith melding native traditions and European Christian doctrine on beliefs about the afterlife, storytellers using allegory to discreetly challenge colonial rule”, as the book’s Amazon page describes its contents, even as Falola would employ his current immersion in African life through regular visits and close observation on the continent, reinforcing insights from his growth from childhood to maturity in Nigeria before emigration to the US, as a means of imaginatively identifying with and exploring what remains unchanged and what has changed in African lives during and after colonization, feeding his understanding into this book.
That cover thus eloquently suggests the implications of its title, Daily Life in Colonial Africa, but the significance of the image in the context of classical African thought goes beyond the temporal and geographical limitations of the title. The motif of the market is one of the richest in classical African thought, as represented by the Igbo expression, ”Uwa bu afia”, “the world is a market-place,”, amplified by the Yoruba expression,”ayé l’ọjà; ọ̀run n’ilé”, ” ayé, the world, is a marketplace, ọ̀run, the zone of ultimate origins, is home”.
“What were your wares that they sold out so quickly?” a funeral lament from another African ethnic group goes, asking why the wares representing the person’s give and take in the process of living had come to such a quick end.
Beyond the current appreciation of the world as a global market defined by instantaneous communication, frictionless money transfers, global movement of goods, all operating within globe spanning interpersonal mechanisms, as the current character of globally unifying commerce is described by Generative AI kicking in when I Googled, ”The World is a Marketplace”, the title of Nkeonye Otakpor’s 1996 paper exploring this idea in Igbo thought, the image of the world as a marketplace in classical African thought goes beyond its material reality to anchor this materiality in a sensitivity to the transience of life on Earth and its anchoring in what is understood as a permanent reality from which the human being comes and goes, returning with the fruits of the temporal and time bound transactional existence represented by life on Earth.
The market is thus understood as evoking life on Earth as a transient, transactional space, where existence is sustained through receiving and giving, shaping and being shaped in the process of living. It is also understood as an interdimensional nexus, a zone where spirits and humans interact, suggesting a place actualizing an understanding of the universe, its intersection of spirit and matter, as a vast market.
The image may provoke sensitivity to the book which has the image on its cover as a commercial instrument within the economic flows represented by publishing networks and their customers, as well as the economic network into which Africa was forcefully and exploitatively integrated by colonialism, and within which Africa still struggles to find its own identity, a mercantile nexus in relation to which Falola’s book exists within the trade in ideas and their reception and consumption constituted by scholarly research and writing represented by the book.
Falola as Egungun
Having traversed the market that is the world, having perhaps journeyed through the various markets converging in the world, having possibly participated in various markets of knowledge, the traveller in physical and mental space travels to the final destination, beyond space and time.
Can the traveller return, perhaps in the form of a newborn child? Can the traveller visit, to share wisdom gained from traversing existence with the eyes of flesh, and later, of spirit?
Such considerations are behind the Yoruba Egungun masquerade in which masked and costumed figures representing ancestors relate with people and which Falola adopts in the visualization of himself as an Egugun in In Praise of Greatness.
A person might not be able to die and return to Earth at will but one may imagine oneself doing so, as Falola does, carrying messages to his friends, messages styled as coming from behind the veil of death.