The Scholar as Public Educator vs the Scholar as Self Preserver : Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader

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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 from African art and accompanying explicatory text, both signifying the effort to understand existence as process, as a historical continuum, as well as the striving to grasp the ultimate direction of this unfolding, of the symmetry of being and becoming it actualises, suggesting the resolution of the tension between the understanding of history as an open ended development, the ultimate orientation of which is beyond human perception, as exemplified by Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, by his The Open Society and its Enemies 2 : Hegel and Marx and by his autobiographical The Unfinished Journey, in contrast to  the cosmologising understanding of historical consummation  represented by Georg Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and Phenomenology of Mind and Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God.

 The use of images in complementing verbal text also seeks to cultivate the mutual  reinforcement between my development of the ideational force of art, in general, and African art, in particular, in amplifying textual meaning, as demonstrated, for example,  in ​"Memory and Amnesia: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exploration" and “Manifestations at Cosmogenesis: Three Yoruba Cosmogonic Narratives” (academia.edu and Scribd : PDF),  Facebook,​ Part 1 and Part 2​)   and  Falola’s advocacy in “The Ritual Archives” chapter in the Reader, of African art as a catalyst for idea generation across disciplines.

One of the strengths of The Toyin Falola Reader is the sensitivity of the writer to scholarship as primarily an engagement with ideas, with the ability of the human mind to distill understanding from reflecting on phenomena, to take account of the various  motivations and outcomes that shape and are shaped by human experience in its multifarious constellations as well as with the contemporary prominence of academia, specifically the university, as the primary platform in which the dedicated development of ideas takes place.

 His perspective on this intersection of a primordial capacity of humanity and the development of institutions to cultivate this capacity and project its creations, is both visionary and pragmatic. It is effervescent with the delight in learning represented by his assimilation of and reflection on vast bodies of knowledge dramatized by the flow of history and its mediation through a galaxy of scholarly texts. 

 His perspective is rigorous in his painstaking engagement with the various social contexts and external factors shaping the cognitive activity of living in history as participant and observer, as an immersive and as a contemplative, a participant in the action and a reflector on that action. The historian in this text thus dramatizes the ideal role of the human being within existence as primarily a historical entity, a person caught up within the ambit of inexorable temporalizing forces, straining between simply moving with the flow or also observing and reflecting on that flow, thereby guiding their own being within this dynamic as well as they can while reflecting on the ultimate significance of it all. 

I am yet to read Falola in the Reader reflecting on the metaphysics of history though his visualisation of the magnificent sweep of social time and reflection on the conjoined depths of various significations emerging from this flow as the historian is able to perceive and understand this progression. 

 One may be motivated by this book, however, as by such great accounts of massive historical process as Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God, to reflect on the ultimate direction of this human tide, even if the writer does not explicitly deliberate on the metaphysical implications of the journey they narrate, as Augustine does and as Georg Hegel is famous for doing in his Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Mind, ideas later adapted by Karl Marx in interpreting historical development in terms of  the social relations emerging from the tension between individual and group psychology and economics.

I would like to share with you a section of the Reader, pages 396-397, in chapter 13, “The Humanities and Development in Africa: Discordances and Dysfunctional Narratives”, striking in its sober pragmatism, its sensitive recognition of the tension between human limitations and human possibilities, communicated in prose almost poetic in its rhythm. The passage evokes the circumstances particularly of the African scholar in and outside Africa, and, by implication, the Africanist scholar in all contexts, as well as all scholars who originate from or who study the more economically challenged regions of the world, along with raising questions about the vocation of the scholar in general and the relationship of that vocation to the total scope of their lives as individuals and social creatures. I have broken it into paragraphs and edited its grammar slightly for ease of reading:

“…knowledge must serve the cause of development. As scholars, we may be fully embedded in the project of advancing underdevelopment, rather than enhancing [ development]. We have definitely acquired the certificates of privileges, the PhDs that moved us far away from the villages and rural areas [ as well as from the lower middle class and downward generally], disconnecting us from the people we study. In so doing, we might have left very many aspects of culture behind, and created a distance with the language of empowerment. Our aspirations, in attending conferences and publishing papers subsequently, are to seek career mobility and climb the social ladder.

We know very well the papers we write are read by a few- sometimes no one even reads them other than those who evaluate us for promotion. From a badge of honour conferred by the doctorate, one seeks additional badges or titles ending in a professorship.

Our academic constituencies-comprising the universities, associations and campus communities- are not necessarily connected with the poor [ the poor are described by Falola in the Reader as constituting the majority of Africans on the continent]. Our lifestyle is to run way from a rural foundation, and our comfort may even remove us from lives of struggle. Our banners and certificates are not necessarily connected with a development membership base in the society, not even with public policy of any significance. Certainly we do not represent poverty-driven interests or community-driven obligations.

We have not developed the adequate framework to pressure the government and politicians to behave in positive ways. We are mainly careerists totally divorced from the currency of rights and justices. Those badges and honors, those BSc, MSc and PhD, are not conscience driven certifications but an ever expanding movement in the politics of the belly.

Let us reinvent ourselves-we won’t make history the way we choose, but we will make history all the same. For us to make this history, we must free ourselves of the bondage that supports the failing state, the shackles that bind Africans to poverty, and the fear that commits us to silence”.

This line of expression also involves the African scholar speaking about his own personal orientation to scholarship, as in Nimi Wariboko’s prefaces to Nigerian Pentecostalism and The Split God, and, as with the Wariboko texts, includes  scholars in other contexts speaking in the first person about their vocation as scholars, such  as Hans Jonas’ “Wissenschaft as Personal Experience”, Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” and Homi Bhaba’s “Unpacking My Library Again”.

This genre also integrates others writing about particular scholars, African and non-African, such as Adele Jinadu’s “Claude Ake : An Appreciation”, Paul Mendes Flohr’s, “Scholarship as Craft: Reflections on the Legacy of Nahum Glatzer”, and Jeremiah Arowosegbe’s recurrent engagement with Claude Ake, represented by  “The Making of an Organic Intellectual: Claude Ake, Biographical and Theoretical Orientations”, “Decolonising the Social Sciences in the Global South: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production in Africa” and “Claude E. Ake: Political Integration and the

Challenges of Nationhood in Africa”.

All these examples are a miniscule, serendipitously organised  selection from a  large field representing a subsection of an even larger field, a subdivision signifying either African scholars, and thus directly aligned with the concerns Falola highlights in the passage above, or, as with Glatzer and Jonas,  Jewish scholars  transmuting a sacred ethnic scholarly tradition into secular terms, a strategy Falola advocates for Africanist scholarship in the “Ritual Archives” essay in the Reader,  or is a marked dramatization of intimate bibliophila, as with Benjamin, and the adaptation by Bhaba of the expressive strategy of Benjamin’s famous essay.

All these texts represent depth of reflection on the writers’ experience of scholarship in relation to the material and cognitive contexts in which they or their subjects, these two often conjoining, worked at the time of composing the essays.

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Image of Totalistic Process

“Good Morning, Sunrise (detail) Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria 2001 Acrylic on canvas Collection of the artist

Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and graphic symbols. His drawings, paintings and digital images are abuzz with language. The artist employs invented script as well as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi to create richly textured works. In this painting, the spiral is an nsibidi sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the overall sense of animation”.

Image and verbal text from “Nsibidi” in Inscribing Meaning Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

References

Abiola Irele, “The African Scholar : Is Black Africa Entering the Dark Ages of Scholarship?” Transition, No. 51, 1991, 56-69.

Adele Jinadu, “Claude Ake : An Appreciation”. African Journal of Political Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1996, 232-239.

Ali Mazrui, “The Scholar and His Residence Permit”. Transition. No. 50, 1975 -1976, 48-49.

Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans. 426 AD. (First publication, in Latin).

Biodun Jeyifo, “One Year in the First Instance”in Meditations on African Literature , Dubem Okafor (ed), Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Six volumes. London: Strahan & Cadell, 1776–1789 (First publication).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated from the German edition of Johannes Hoffmeister from Hegel papers assembled by H. B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge UP, 1975. First publication, in German, 1837.

……Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie.London: Harper & Row, 1967. An earlier 20th century edition. First publication of original, in German, 180 7.

Hans Jonas’ “Wissenschaft as Personal Experience”. The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2002, 27-35.

Homi Bhaba, “Unpacking My Library Again”. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities, 1995, 5-18.

Jeremiah Arowosegbe, “The Making of an Organic Intellectual: Claude Ake, Biographical and Theoretical Orientations”. African and Asian Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1-2,123 – 143.

…“Decolonising the Social Sciences in the Global South: Claude E. Ake and the Praxis of Knowledge Production in Africa”, Africa Development Journal, Vol 38, No 3-4,2013, 1 – 19.

…“Claude E. Ake: Political Integration and the Challenges of Nationhood in Africa”, Development and Change 42(1), 2011:349 – 365.

Karl Popper​, The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge, 1957.

​…The Open Society and its Enemies ​2​: Hegel and Marx. London: Routledge, 1945.

​...Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1976.

​Mazisi Kunene, Anthem of the Decades.​ London: Heinemann, 1981.

Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press , 2014.

...The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory. New York: SUNY Press, 2018.

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, “Manifestations at Cosmogenesis: Three Yoruba Cosmogonic Narratives”, academia.edu and Scribd : PDF, Facebook,​ Part 1 and Part 2​. October- November 2016.

…​"Memory and Amnesia: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Exploration", Facebook. 20th November 2016.

…“South African Poet Mazisi Kunene on Classical Zulu Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and its Relationships to Metaphysics (Theory of Being)”, Cognitive Diary, 17th June 2009.

Paul Mendes Flohr, “Scholarship as Craft: Reflections on the Legacy of Nahum Glatzer, Modern Judaism, Vol 13, no 3, 1993, 269-276.

Toyin Falola, The Toyin Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies. Austin: Pan African University Press, 2018.

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” in Illuminations. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. London : Fontana, 1992.

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Images of Totalising Symmetry : Dialectics of Space in Yoruba/Ifa Sculpture

Top: Igba Iwa, the Calabash of Existence. Bottom left: opon ifa. Bottom right: agere ifa.

These cosmological and functional forms of Yoruba cosmology and its Ifa cognitive system are correlative in their relationship between empty centre and full bodied exterior in suggesting emptiness as space of manifestation.

The divination patterns are shaped on the empty centre of the opon ifa, the divination tray on which the divination instruments are cast to yield those patterns.

One of such instruments, the ikin or divination nuts, are kept in the bowl of the agere ifa, which may be held by a sculpture of a kneeling woman, her maternal possibilities thus evoking a metaphysical matrix, resonating in the concavity of the bowl which holds the ikin, the means of expression of this fecund potential.

The metaphysical universe unfolded by this system is symbolised by the conjoined calabashes of Igba Iwa, evoking earth and sky, orun, the world of metaphysical origins and aye, the material universe, the elaborate spiral on this particular example reinforcing this idea of complexly symmetrical unity as the egret poised on its surface may suggest the avian like flight of consciousness through which this cosmological configuration may be traced and explored.
These metaphysical and epistemic conjunctions emerging through the image of  conjoined calabashes are reinforced by their resonance with Mazisi Kunene’s summations  in Anthem of the Decades on calabash symbolism in classical Zulu thought, as summed up in my essay “South African Poet Mazisi Kunene on Classical Zulu Epistemology (Theory of Knowledge) and its Relationships to Metaphysics (Theory of Being)” in a blog post of 17th June 2009 at my blog Cognitive Diary :
 “ ‘While the precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesises fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge’. The precision mind represents the ability to arrive at discrete forms of knowledge while the cosmic mind consists in the capacity of integrating these discrete forms in a manner that demonstrates their universal significance.
‘At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with universal concepts...’ At its most penetrative, this synthesis enables an initiation into the convergence of past, present and future, of life and death, in a unified awareness. ‘When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which ...erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s all-round vision, the power toconceptualise the totality of life at once.’
This synoptic scope is symbolised by the circularity and amplitude of a calabash. The circularity of the calabash could be understood as evocative of cognitive range as developed in terms of the cognitive integration of different aspects of existence into a unity that is expressive of unity of being. The amplitude of the calabash may be perceived in relation to a cognitive depth that represents a penetrative grasp of particular aspects of being in terms of their central aspects as well as their constituents, and the relationships between these two units”.
In that moment of expanded awareness, as my vision glowed deep gold, I saw Being, that which makes existence possible but is not subsumable by existence, as a circle, its centre everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

Igba Iwa image from Babatunde Lawal, “Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture”, African Arts 41(1)2008:24-39. Opon ifa picture from Rowland Abiodun et al,  The Yoruba Artist: New Theoritical Perspectives in African Arts. Washington : Smithsonian, 1994. Agere Ifa image from MichaelChapuis’ Facebook post of 6^th March 2018.