BENIN CITY AND PHILOSOPHIES OF SPACE
Toyin Adepoju
[ The Bini expressions] "Agha sẹ Ẹdo, Ẹdo rree " ("When one arrives in Benin, Benin is distant") refers to a place that requires a deep comprehension, while Ẹdo ore isi agbọn ("Benin is the center of the world") refers to cosmological and social space."
Joseph Nevadomsky
There are different ways of defining space and philosophy as well as the relationships between these terms but I want to use those in that definition in this instance.
It is safe to state that all societies have developed philosophies of space. It can be most fascinating observing the similarities and differences in how people across the centuries in various continents conceive the spatial formations which are common to the human race.
In my study of comparative cognitive processes, one of my central interests is the development of the contemporary and perennial significance of classical African philosophies of space. At the centre of this interest is my effort to interpret my experience of the landscape of the Nigerian city of Benin. This experience emerges in terms of the intersection of the cultural cosmology in terms of which the city is designed, the complication of this by the intersection of classical forms and Western modernity, and the development of my own personal cosmology, central to which is my engagement with the knowledge centres represented by shrines, booksellers, libraries, schools and informed people I have encountered in Benin.
I am in the process of exploring the significance of my experience of that city as a template for understanding not only Bini cosmology, its links, both direct and indirect, with other cosmologies within and beyond the Africana context, as well as for developing a personal cosmology, but also for understanding cognitive processes in general in terms of spatial navigation.
I was really struck when Joseph Nevadomsky, an authority on Bini art and cosmology, informed me that he would quote my essay, "Spatial Cosmology, Ethno-National History and the History of Ideas: Relationships between the Palace of the Oba of Benin and the Structure of Benin City" which he had first read as an email, later posted on Facebookand blogger, in his paper "Iconoclash or Iconocontain? The Contemporary Traditional in Benin Art or The Traditional Contemporary in Benin Art" at the 15th Triennial Symposium on African Art to be held by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association at the University of California, Los Angeles, from March 23 to 26, 2011.
This is the quotation:
"Toyin Adepoju touches the lodestone, as it were, the heart of the landscape, in Ẹdo terms the cosmological/physical four corner junction (ada [n]enẹ), the contact point: "The significance of the spatial location of the palace of the Ọba of Benin consists of much more than the bare physical value of its architectural structure and location in relation to the spatial correlates of Benin City…The Palace is a cosmographic and historical center of the Bini people. As a cosmographic center, it is understood as a central point of intersection of the…spiritual and material universes and of the manifestation of this correlation in terms of Bini geography. It represents a privileged location in terms of which the intersection of profound metaphysical realities and their material dramatizations…This conception of the palace and the idealized understanding of the monarchy is demonstrated in the fact that Benin was built to radiate outward from the palace to the rest of the city, which is then imaginatively and actually seen as radiating outward to surrounding villages and the rest of the kingdom".
The sentence that introduces the quotation, in relation to the content of the quotation, implies the various interlocking aspects of the Bini concept of "ada nene" as a means of cognitive navigation at various levels. At its most basic level it is a means of navigating directions in the space defined by the junction created by the meeting place of four roads. At another level it indicates the four directions of space and the four zones of time. At yet another level it evokes the convergence of the worlds of matter and spirit and the possibility of navigating between these worlds.
These aspects of meaning demonstrates the intimate similarity of the ada nene concept to the Yoruba/Orisa Ifa symbol Ifa symbol of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines, the Voodoo veve of Papa Legba, and the Congo cosmogram, all of which share some of the ideas the concept of ada nene represents. It also demonstrates more distant but still vital relationships of form and meaning with the symbolism in Hindu and Budhhist art of the mandala and the yantra.
At another level not indicted in accounts of its meaning in the classical Bini context, the concept of ada nene can serve, among other possibilities, as a means of indicating relationships between ideas and phenomena through the image of centripetal radiation from a centre and centrifugal convergence towards a centre. This possibility is suggested by the similarity of the ada nene symbol to conceptions of centrifugal and centripetal motion of the Buddhist womb and diamond mandalas but may be applied to any effort to demonstrate relationships between a centre and a circumference.
Evoking further possibilities in relation to the linear logic of a relationship between centre and circumference indicated by the Bini ada nene and the Voodoo veve of Legba is the similarity and difference between these depiction of centripetal and centrifugal symmetry and its development in the art of the Yoruba/Orisa opon ifa, the Ifa tray. In the design of this tray, the symmetrical rhythm of the tray is broken by the face of Esu as it peers from the top of the tray. Esu being emblematic of the indeterminate and the unanticipated, the design of the opon ifa introduces into this family of visual forms represented by the culturally close ada nene and the veve of Legba, and more indirectly related mandala and yantra symbols, a sense of the reality of life as operating in terms of tension between the ideal of symmetry evoked by the flawless harmony of the ada nene and its related forms, and the ruptures, upsettings and unanticipated reworking of expectations, that at times drives not only the workings of nature but human efforts to make meaning out of the possibilities made available by nature.
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