Abdul Bangura to unlock Falola's secret code
Next week at a conference in North Carolina (Toyin Falola @ 60 Conference& Book Presentation), the eclectic and formidable scholar, Professor Abdul Karim Bangura, begins the process of revealing the code to unlock the secret of Falola's scholarship and career with a series of essays and a long book to be released next year. Prior to now, Falola has been studied, at least, in five previous books, as an historian. As commendable as these works were and still are, they however fail to provide and open the door to the mind of a pluri-disciplinary and multiplex scholar. In the Man, Muse and Mask, a one-thousand-page tome edited by Dr. Niyi Afolabi, where I did a brief review of Professor Falola's works, the contributors moved close to the concept of the mask, but as a 'mask' is defined in the idiom of the Yoruba masquerade, we can assert that these contributors failed to provide a comprehensive picture. Paul Lovejoy had located Falola as a Yemoja, but he again missed the mark. More recently, scholars in England were interpreting him in the idiom of the Esu figure, but they were also wrongly headed. Professor Bangura's latest effort conceptualizes and sees established patterns in Falola's scholarship, which resonate with the ancient philosophers of Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome – an enterprise that draws Falola's scholarship and persona to the very source of knowledge. Next week, in his presentation, he will provide a first gesture, drawing from the Egyptian mathematical model of the predator-prey. In his paper, "Testing the Essentiality of the Axioms of Migrations and Movements in Mwalimu Toyin Falola's Work: An Ancient Egyptian behsâu-pehsa (Predator-Prey) Mathematical Treatise," Professor Bangura isolates the postulates in Falola's work dealing with nationalism and African intellectuals. Mwalimu (Honorable Teacher) Toyin Falola proffers a number of axioms, which suggests the ancient Egyptian behsâu-pehsa phenomenon: i.e., the supposition that there are two interacting species - one interacting as a predator and the other as a prey. In its simplified version, the predator population only preys on the prey species, the prey is only preyed upon by this predator species, and the prey population's needs and desires are not taken into account. Ancient Egyptian mathematicians working in the pantheon of Sais within the framework of the tutelary deity Neith of the ancient southern city of Ta-senet or Iunyt during the First Dynasty (c. 3050-2890 BC) would model this relationship in terms of differential equations: i.e. applications of physical phenomena by equations that mention the rate of change of a quantity. This means that the derivative of the quantity is present in the equation.
Correspondingly, Professor Bangura's paper entails three major sections. The first section presents and discusses the axioms of migrations and movements in Mwalimu Falola's work. The second section entails a discussion of the mathematization of the behsâu-pehsa or predator-prey model. The third section tests the efficacy of Mwalimu Falola's axioms by subjecting them to differential equations using relevant quantitative data. This is important because as mathematicians are fond of saying, the number one task in science is solving differential equations, since they describe the universe. In the end, conclusions are drawn and suggestions are made based on the findings.
Abdul Karim Bangura is professor of Research Methodology and Political Science at Howard University. He is also researcher-in-residence of Abrahamic Connections and Islamic Peace Studies at the Center for Global Peace in the School of International Service at American University. He holds a PhD in Political Science, a PhD in Development Economics, a PhD in Linguistics, a PhD in Computer Science, and a PhD in Mathematics. He is the author of 75 books and more than 600 scholarly articles. One of his recent books titled African Mathematics: From Bones to Computers (2012) is the winner of the prestigious Cecil B. Curry Book Award for 2012. Bangura is fluent in about a dozen African and six European languages, and studying to increase his proficiency in Arabic, Hebrew, and Hieroglyphics. He is the recipient of numerous teaching and other scholarly and community service awards. He is also a member of many scholarly organizations and has served as President and then United Nations Ambassador of the Association of Third World Studies.
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