STUDYING TOYIN FALOLA

Image Above Image of Totalistic Process The Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Gye Nyame “Except Nyame”, evoking the Twi expression, “Abode santan yi firi tete: obi nte ase a onim n'ahyase, na obi ntena ase nkosi n'awie, Gye Nyame” “This Great Panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial, no one lives who saw its beginning, no one will live to see its end, except Nyame”as rendered at “ Meanings of Symbols in Adinkra Cloth ”. Accessed 23/03/2018. Image from J.B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God.                                                      Abstract A short statement on the cognitive expansion enabled by the narrative sweep and range of reflection demonstrated by The Toyin Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies ( Austin: Pan African University Press, 2018), exemplified by a passage from the book on the social challenges of scholarship. The purely verbal text of the essay is complemented by images

One of my favourite sources of inspiration, an opon ifa, a cosmological symbol and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, the intersecting vertical and horizontal lines suggesting, for me, the intersection of being and becoming, of each circumstance and its larger, enveloping framework, of the everyday self and the larger self beyond the confines of time and space, of earth and cosmos, of conventional forms of perception and their unconventional expansions to include larger universes of knowing, while the nuts at the point of intersection of the lines evokes the seeds of possibility latent in all situations, structures, dynamisms and potentialities which Ifa divination explores as an expression of the perennial human quest to maximize the capacity for interpreting possibilities in decision making, the pattern assumed by the casting of the nuts constituting the symbolic message from the Ifa oracle, an idea one may adapt without recourse to a