EDITED
Assensoh was presenting Falola's view of the nature of a living legend to which he added Falola as one such legend.
Chidi was responding to the definition of a living legend attributed to Falola.
Chidi was responding to the definition of a living legend attributed to Falola.
Even though I see IBK as mistaken in seeing Chidi as trying to deny Falola's stature, I like the idea of comparing Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka suggested by this exchange beceause such comparisons facilitate understanding of the character of human possibility in the institutional contexts that enable and project human achievement.
Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka are both great writers and scholars, with an international range of visibility as well as of migratory motion between Africa and the West, geographic mobilities also vital to their work.
Soyinka is better known because of his political activism, the penetration of some of his works to school curricula, their literary character enabling their general appreciation, and the visibility of his achievement beyond Nigeria, enabled by the combination of a focus on literature, complemented by his scholarship and the publishing strategies he has employed.
Falola's achievement, as known to me, is centred in the creation and sustenance of academic systems and the generation of books exploring, in an uncompromisingly rigorous manner, every aspect of the African condition as it can be understood through the humanities and the social sciences, in the present, and to some degree, across history.
That kind of mission profile is different from the more publicly appreciatable contexts of a Soyinka, even though, as I observed in going through the SOAS, University of London library as far back as 2005, a time now far behind the later acceleration of his publication speed, Falola's work seems ubiquitous in scholarship on Africa.
Front line scholarship, as different from literature, that penetrates the public mind, is rare, examples being the achievements of Newton and Einstein, which most people grasp in general terms without understanding the intricate, highly specialized details.
Another level of scholarship is provided by scholars presenting their ideas in ways readily appreciated by the public. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a very successful text along such lines.
I am not aware of such texts by Falola, Falola being a dedicate of what may be seen as the core character of academic writing as the configuration of knowledge at the core of an understanding of existence as seen through particular disciplines and their interrelations, rather than an effort to filter this understanding to the public, that being a task for another level of work.
Falola has also published poetry but the text is massive and in hardback, the last I knew, a format not readily accessible to the general public nor lending itself to casual reading and easy portability, key qualities for print book appeal. He has also published two autobiographies but I doubt if their visibility has reached that of his scholarly works.
Soyinka is known to most Nigerians through his activism not for his richer writings and Falola is not an activist in the publicity attracting mould of Soyinka.
Falola is not likely to hold up a radio station, he has not been involved in trying to stop sales of arms to parties in conflicts within Nigeria nor has he been held by the government for treason, he has not been involved in verbal battles with various governments nor written denunciations of particular political figures, neither has he taken part in public demonstrations in Nigeria, nor is he associated with government programs and publicity attracting interactions with government figures, nor is he known for making striking and widely broadcast public remarks on contentious issues in Nigerian politics, these being a summation of Soyinka's profile as a social activist, the role in which he is best known in Nigeria, although he is also recognized as a famous writer, but the number of those who have read the works that define his right to global acclaim being questionable.
Falola, on the other hand, is also an activist, but an educational activist, not in the form of making public pronouncements on Nigerian education or in any government enabled or broadly publicized philanthropic capacity, although he also engages in philanthropy, but as a creator of scholarly networks that provide opportunities for scholars on Africa within and beyond Africa to reconfigure knowledge about the continent, and similar to but different from Soyinka's pursuit of a similar vision, an advocate for making African centred knowledge more truly so in its epistemology and institutional integration and a demonstrator of strategies for achieving this, a vision and mode of operation that requires institutional and inter-personal sensitivities different from the Soyinka mould, which might be more individualistic in operation, although Soyinka is also a philanthropist and has aided African writers in ways that proved strategic for their careers, Soyina's orientation also being less oriented than Falola's to systems creation and sustenance, although Soyinka has also been an editor of the journal Transition and a director of the International Theater Institute in Paris, along with other institutional engagements.
Soyinka is able to take adequate advantage of the opportunities created by institutions, while allowing himself significant flexibility in relationships with them. Falola, in contrast, is both a successful intra-institutional worker and a creator of institutions.
Except for his autobiographical works, which I saw in Glendora Bookshop at Ikeja City Mall, Falola is an ultimate highbrow writer in a manner that even Soyinka is not. Soyinka's most powerful writings, except a for a few, are more challenging to understand than those of Falola, who writes simply but luminously. But, except from his occasional speeches presented in Nigerian newspapers and perhaps his addresses at public functions, and his scholarly and poetic celebrations of people on the groups he runs, his approach to publication seems to me to be hard core Ivory Tower.
Until the recent decision to place the Yoruba Studies Review which he founded on open access publication, I am not aware of any work by Falola freely accessible on any platform or on sale in the first or second hand book markets in Lagos or the cities I lived in in England, from London to Cambridge, although the Lagos book market is weak, and the capacity to acquire even second hand books published elsewhere, as most Falola's book are, is low, and the English book market is not always adequately oriented to books published outside Britain. Beyond online sales, one way of accessing ready accessibility of books is through the character of second hand book markets which do a lot to reduce book prices and thereby increase accessibility. I don't know about the visibility of his work to the non-academic public in the US.
Falola might largely engage in the kind of publication strategy I observed at Cambridge University Press and which a good number of academic presses do, with some exceptions like the more varied strategy of Oxford UP, focusing on or publishing only high end academic texts aimed at the academic market, as reflected in content, production character and cost. A Cambridge UP representative informed me that their books are directed at libraries, not individuals, hence the extremely high research, writing and production values and cost.
Falola has his own vision along similar lines in aiming, at times, for monumentality of content and at times of production, like throwing a big stone into a river, making big ripples that travel a far distance.
Publishing companies, particularly trade publishers, have ways of working round the tension between such uncompromising standards and mass market access. One approach is through cheap paperback editions, as Cambridge UP has done with Soyinka's particularly uncompromising text, Myth, Literature and the African World, as part of their relatively cheap Canto series making readily accessible powerful scholarship to a broad audience.
Another approach is the work of mediators who make a diverse and richly interconnected corpus such as that of Falola accessible to the general public, a system vital for understanding Soyinka's core of uncompromising texts and evident in the endless stream of secondary explications of the work of Western scholars coming out of the Western publishing industry, ranging from such a large, specialized tome as Cambridge UP's Richard Westfall's years in the making Isaac Newton biography, Never at Rest : A Life of Isaac Newton and the Isaac Newton book in the Oxford UP Very Short Introductions series, both texts at different ends of the spectrum in terms of cost in first hand sale, although I was able to get the big Westfall cheaply second hand in superb condition in Cambridge, and a text midway between both in terms of volume and cost, Cambridge UP's Westfall on Newton in their Canto series.
Scholarship ideally works best through various layers of activity from primary development of ideas to various levels of explication of those ideas and ranges of public accessibility. Abdul Karim Bangura and other writers in academic publishing explicate Falola's ideas in the strict academic context, through academic publishers. Tunji Olaopa and others are doing a beautiful job with introducing Falola to the general Nigerian public through newspaper writings and others like Sonya Osa have discussed his work in formal online locations while I have been doing my bit through social media, Facebook and Google and Yahoo groups, and the academic document archive academia.edu.
The journey continues.
toyin
On Sat, 5 Jan 2019 at 12:59, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
Assensoh was presenting Falola's view of the nature of a living legend to which he added Falola as one such legend.
Chidi was responding to the definition of a living legend attributed to Falola.Even though I see IBK as mistaken in seeing Chidi as trying to deny Falola's stature, I like the idea of comparing Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka suggested by this exchange bcs such comparisons facilitate understanding of the character of human possibility in the institutional contexts that enable and project human achievement.Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka are both great writers and scholars, with an international range of visibility as well as of migratory motion between Africa and the West, geographic mobilities also vital to their work.Soyinka is better known beacuse of his political activism, the penetration of some of his works to school curricula, their literary character enabling their general appreciation, and the visibility of his achievement beyond Nigeria, enabled by the combination of a focus on literature, complemented by his scholarship and the publishing strategies he has employed.Falola's achievement, as known to me, is centred in the creation and sustenance of academic systems and the generation of books exploring, in an uncompromisingly rigorous manner, every aspect of the African condition as it can be understood through the humanities and the social sciences, in the present, and to some degree, across history.That kind of mission profile is different from the more publicly appreciatable contexts of a Soyinka, even though, as I observed in going through the SOAS, University of London library as far back as 2005, a time now far behind the later acceleration of his publication speed, Falola's work seems ubiquitous in scholarship on Africa.Front line scholarship, as different from literature, that penetrates the public mind, is rare, examples being the achievements of Newton and Einstein, which most people grasp in general terms without understanding the intricate, highly specialized details.Another level of scholarship is provided by scholars presenting their ideas in ways readily appreciated by the public. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a very successful text along such lines.I am not aware of such texts by Falola, Falola being a dedicate of the core character of academic writing as the configuration of knowledge at the core of an understanding of existence as seen through particular disciplines and their interrelations, rather than an effort to filter this understanding to the pubic, that being a task for another level of work.Falola has also published poetry but the text is massive and in hardback, the last I knew, a format not readily accessible to the general public nor lending itself to casual reading and easy portability, key qualities for print book appeal. He has also published two autobiographies but I doubt if their visibility has reached that of his scholarly works.Soyinka is known to most Nigerians through his activism not for his richer writings and Falola is not an activist in the publicity attracting mould of Soyinka.Faloa is not likely to hold up a radio station, he has not been involved in trying to stop sales of arms to parties in conflicts within Nigeria nor has he been held by the government for treason, he has not been involved in verbal battles with various governments nor written denunciations of particular political figures, neither has he taken part in public demonstrations in Nigeria, nor is he associated with government programs and publicity attracting interactions with government figures, nor is he known for making striking and widely broadcast public remarks on contentious issues in Nigerian politics, these being a summation of Soyinka's profile as a social activist, the role in which he is best known in Nigeria, although he is also recognized as a famous writer, but the number of those who have read the works that define his right to global acclaim being questionable.Falola, on the other hand, is also an activist, but an educational activist, not in the form of making public pronouncements on Nigerian education or in any government enabled or broadly publicized philanthropic capacity, although he also engages in philanthropy, but as a creator of scholarly networks that provide opportunities for scholars on Africa within and beyond Africa to reconfigure knowledge about the continent, a strategy that requires the kind of institutional and inter-personal sensitivities different from the Soyinka mould, which might be more individualistic in operation, although Soyinka is also a philanthropist and has aided African writers in ways that proved strategic for their careers, and less oriented to systems creation and sustenance, although Soyinka has also been an editor of Transition and a director of the International Theater Institute in Paris, along with other institutional engagements.Soyinka is able to take adequate advantage of the opportunities created by institutions, while allowing himself significant flexibility in relationships with them. Falola, in contrast, is both a successful intra-institutional worker and a creator of institutions.Except for his autobiographical works, which I saw in Glendora Bookshop at Ikeja City Mall, Falola is an ultimate highbrow writer in a manner that even Soyinka is not. Soyinka's most powerful writings, except a for a a few, are more challenging to understand than those of Falola, who writes simply but luminously. But, except from his occasional speeches presented in Nigerian newspapers and perhaps his addresses at public functions, and his scholarly and poetic celebrations of people on the groups he runs, his approach to publication seems to me to be hard core Ivory Tower.Until the recent decision to place the Yoruba Studies Review which he founded on open access publication, I am not aware of any work by Falola freely accessible on any platform or on sale in the first or second hand book markets in Lagos or the cities I lived in in England, from London to Cambridge, although the Lagos book market is weak, and the capacity to acquire even second hand books published elsewhere, as most Falola's book are, is low, and the English book market is not always adequately oriented to books published outside Britain. Beyond online sales, one way of accessing ready accessibility of books is through the character of second hand book markets which do a lot to reduce book prices and thereby increase accessibility. I don't know about the visibility of his work to the non-academic public in the US.Falola might largely engage in the kind of publication strategy I observed at Cambridge University Press and which a good number of academic presses do, with some exceptions like the more varied strategy of Oxford UP, focusing on or publishing only high end academic texts aimed at the academic market, as reflected in content, production character and cost. A Cambridge UP representative informed me that their books are directed at libraries, not individuals, hence the extremely high research, writing and production values and cost.Falola has his own vision along similar lines in aiming, at times, for monumentality of content and at times of production, like throwing a big stone into a river, making big ripples that travel a far distance.Publishing companies, particularly trade publishers, have ways of working round the tension between such uncompromising standards and mass market access. One approach is through cheap paperback editions, as Cambridge UP has done with Soyinka's particularly uncompromising text, Myth, Literature and the African World, as part of their relatively cheap Canto series making readily accessible powerful scholarship to a broad audience.Another approach is the work of mediators who make a diverse and richly interconnected corpus such as that of Falola accessible to the general public, a system vital for understanding Soyinka's core of uncompromising texts and evident in the endless stream of secondary explications of the work of Western scholars coming out of the Western publishing industry, ranging from such a large, specialized tome as Cambridge UP's Richard Westfall's years in the making Isaac Newton biography, Never at Rest : The Life of Isaac Newton and the Isaac Newton book in the Oxford UP Very Short Introductions series, both texts at different ends of the spectrum in terms of cost in first hand sale, although I was able to get the big Westfall cheaply second hand in superb condition in Cambridge, and a text midway between both in terms of volume and cost, Cambridge UP's Westfall on Newton in their Canto series.Scholarship ideally works best through various layers of activity from primary development of ideas to various levels of explication of those ideas and ranges of public accessibility. Abdul Karim Bangura and other writers in academic publishing explicate Falola's ideas in the strict academic context, through academic publishers. Tunji Olaopa and others are doing a beautiful job with introducing Falola to the general Nigerian public through newspaper writings and others like Sonya Osa have discussed his work in formal online locations while I have been doing my bit through social media, Facebook and Google and Yahoo groups, and the academic document archive academia.edu.The journey continues.toyinOn Fri, 4 Jan 2019 at 18:59, Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:IBK,
Why would an asinine and skewed viewpoint merit a response from you?
At least I share something, what do you share? Moreover, you have been begging me to edit your "poems" and help share them on the platforms I know. You even recommended me to a female Senegalese friend of yours. I have evidences that you admire my poetry, the evidences are also available on the archives of this forum, but that is not the issue now.
You have your viewpoint on the subject, I have mine, but unfortunately you, a lawyer, is of the opinion that mine must tally with yours, no sir! It does not work that way.
By the way, do you have to write partly in Greek?
CAO.
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