The Need for Further Textual Consolidation and Ideational Mapping in Yoruba Philosophy: Between Metaphysics, Epistemology and Historiography
Abstract
An essay arguing for the need for better organization and publication, in integrative volumes, of hitherto diffused texts in Yoruba philosophy, facilitating improved?mapping of relationships between ideas in the field.
The Need for Further Textual Consolidation?and Ideational Mapping? in?Yoruba Philosophy
There is a need for further textual?consolidation and ideational mapping in?Yoruba philosophy beyond the stage that has been reached so far.?Such efforts are indispensable to a clearer overview of the field, facilitating the assessment and use of ideas developed within it. What is Yoruba Philosophy?
Yoruba philosophy consists of reflections on the meaning of existence, through the lens of particular aspects of being or in terms of existence as a whole, developed within Yoruba culture or inspired by it, ideas constructed by Yoruba and non-Yoruba people, in any language.
Yoruba existence is addressed through a rich publishing history but still might still have a significant distance to go in order to arrive at adequate consolidation represented by easy access to major thinkers and major schools of thought in the field.
What is the degree of integration, of intertextual understanding and ideational correlation, between the various schools of Yoruba philosophy?
The Inspiration of Olabiyi Yai
These ideas came to my mind as I reflected on an enigmatic passage in Olabiyi Yai's majestic essay " In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of ‘’Tradition" and "Creativity" in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry Over Time and Space".
What does Yai mean in describing Yoruba thought, with particular reference to ori, its conception of the self as symbolized by the human head, as privileging "departure", "bifurcation ", an idea he correlates, though in an opaque way, with itinerancy, with spatial motion away from settled contexts, to new, unstructured horizons, as I understand the essay so far?
Can Yai's gnomic formulations not be better understood in the context of his uniquely rich description of ori in his wonderful review in?African Arts?journal ( 1992,?Vol. 25, No. 1),?of Abiodun, Drewal and Pemberton's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought??
? ? ? From Ori Inu to Oju Inu, from Metaphysics to Epistemology?
He defines ori as "??essence, attribute, and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond",? an interpretation of the concept that is better understood with reference to the dramatization of ori as the only orisha or deity that can follow its devotee on a distant journey without turning back, even the journey of death, in the ese ifa, Ifa literary form, "The Importance of Ori" in Wande Abimbola's?Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, and Babatunde Lawal 's account of the intertwining of Yoruba metaphysics-theory of being, represented by ori inu, the inward or spiritual self,?and Yoruba epistemology -theory of knowledge, in relation to oju inu, the inward eye or inward vision,??in the evocatively titled "Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art" in terms of ideas on how ori relates to the scope of human perceptual capacities, specifically vision and its affiliation with? various kinds of knowledge, conjunctions further enriched through observing similarities to Rosicrucian thought, from Western esotericism, and Akan thought, conjunctions which I have demonstrated in?''Immortality of Self in Upanishadic, Orisa/Ifa, AMORC and Adinkra Thought''.?
? ? ? ?On Human Life Life as a Journey Between Possibilities
Is Yai suggesting in "Metonymy" that the centralization of ori in Yoruba thought foregrounds the idea of life as motion between realities, between life on Earth and life beyond Earth, entered into through the death of the body, while the essence of ori lives on, predating birth and outliving death?
Is such an interpretation not fundamental to Yoruba thought given the strategic significance of the proverb "aye loja orun ni le", "life is a ( transient) marketplace, orun ( the zone of ultimate origins) is home", an expression also evident in other examples of classical African thought, as Nkeonye Otakpor's " The World is a Marketplace" ( Journal of Value?Inquiry, 1996, Vol.30)" demonstrates of Igbo thought?
Through these conjunctions may one not better appreciate Yai's outline of Yoruba historiography in "Metonymy" as privileging the idea of diaspora, of demographic and cultural diffusion across space and time as dramatizing the human condition as motion between possibilities, the known and the unknown, the structured and the unstructured?
To what degree are these historiographical summations of Yai's his own constructs, his own distillations, and to what degree are they ?summations of statements made by thinkers in Yoruba thought?
May Yai's conceptions not be further enriched through correlation with Henry Drewal 's "Yoruba Art and Life as Journeys" in The Yoruba Artist, edited by Abiodun, Pemberton and himself, in which he describes the experience of journey, of motion between possibilities, as strategic to the understanding of ?art, in particular,? and life,?in general,?in Yoruba thought?
?The Inspiration of?Toyin Falola's?Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks?
Why am I thinking these thoughts this morning of December 20, 2024 as the dry harmattan winds enable one inhale refreshing air as I take an invigorating walk in my Ikeja, Lagos neighborhood?
I am responding to the creatively provocative drawing by Michael Efionayi on page 10 of Toyin Falola's Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks (2024), which visualizes how the Yoruba diaspora was brought into existence primarily through slavery that transported Yoruba people and culture to the Americas, initiating events foundational to the globalization of Yoruba culture.
But did Yoruba physical and cultural migrations begin with the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
What about migrations within what is now known as Yorubaland?
领英推荐
What of the migrations suggested by the intimate similarities in cosmologies and divination systems between various ethnicities in what is now known as Southern Nigeria, and, as Falola put it when I presented this idea to him in conversation, between the philosophies?of various West African peoples?
Are these conjunctions and synergies, these migrational flows, not the foundations of the creative resilience demonstrated by the slaves who transported Yoruba culture to the Americas in such harrowing conditions?
If the idea of migration, of diaspora, may be described as strategic to Yoruba thought, from the perspective of Yai, one thinker in that tradition, may a discussion of the globalization of Yoruba culture not benefit from strategically positioning such an idea, thereby also contributing to the development of the embryonic field of Yoruba historiography?
Revisiting Hugh Trevor-Roper and G.W. F. Hegel's Challenge to African History
British historian Hugh Trevor Roper's infamous declaration that Africa had no history before the arrival of Europeans was also directed at his own European culture before a particular point in time, if I have understood Roper correctly.
By history, Roper may have been referring, not simply to the experience of history, to progression in time and space, and perhaps not even to textual accounts of such progressions, whether oral or written, but to reflections on the significance of history, to ideas about the meaning of those temporal progressions.
Roper may have been building on German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's efforts at mapping the development of human consciousness in relation to that of existence in general, as his philosophical project may be described.
In his account of existence as shaped by an immanent principle he calls "geist", which may be translated as "mind" or "spirit" or both, Hegel?is described as de-privileging Africa as demonstrating an undeveloped stage in human thought, a perspective correlative with such later conceptions as "there is no such mythical beast as African literature" ( Wole Soyinka's account of perceptions at Cambridge possibly in the 60s, perhaps narrated in Myth, Literature?and the African World) and "the idea of African philosophy is an oxymoron" ( an isolated view I encountered from a Caucasian at University College London in 2005, a by then unfashionable view, having been thoroughly debunked, but which the speaker insisted on holding onto while being careful to express it to me in a way that no one else could hear).
Exploring the Scope of African Philosophies of History
To what degree have classical African historiographies, philosophies of history,?as different from classical African histories, been foregrounded?
What is the degree of published insight on the explicit or implicit conceptions of history, of the significance of the?temporal development of human beings and of human societies,?and of how to study them, represented by the spatial, ideational, political and spiritual mapping demonstrated, for example, by the lukasa mapping system of the Luba in the Congo, by?the Benin ukhurhe which records lineages in relation to departed ancestors and the Cross River?Nsibidi spiral symbolizing the sun, journey and eternity?
Such questions do not imply efforts to conform to standards external to endogenous thought but represent strivings to develop this thought in terms of critical parameters and permanent recording strategies facilitated by writing, which these systems were not developed in terms of.
Book Publishing Urgencies
Would I have been able to arrive at those ideational conjunctions enabled by Yai's work and those of others if I had not read their essays, distributed across various publications, in which those ideas were expressed?
Would Yai's ideas and those of Lawal, expressed primarily or exclusively in essays in various publications, not be more readily accessed if they were collected and published in integrative volumes?
I am not aware of any published collection of Yai's essays although I understand one is in progress.
I am also not aware of the essays of Babatunde Lawal or of Henry Drewal or of the remarkable philosopher of Yoruba sociology Akinsola Akiwowo, being published in an integrative book.
The absence of such works indicates the need for expanded publishing of books in Yoruba philosophy, facilitating greater intertextual and ideational mappings in this sub-discipline.
Cover Image
I use the cover image in evoking the idea of a philosopher in Yoruba thought operating in heights of thought suggested by the stars, exploring possibilities of being and becoming, existence and change, through ideas related to the Ifa system of knowledge symbolized by the odu ifa graphic patterns, the information organizing structure of Ifa.
I’ve forgotten the source of the image and don’t know who created it.
Also published on