On completing my BA in Nigeria, I vowed I would not study in the West.
I was determined to contributing to breaking the West's epistemic and institutional dominance by pursuing my scholarly dreams from inside Nigeria, reaching a global audience from my native country.
I struggled agst stifling politics in the university where I worked, eventually setting up a research centre and public library using my own books, along with writing books to sell to students, without compulsion on the students arising from my position of authority.
In the midst of these efforts, challenged however by close people around me who could not see why I should not rent out my family's four room flat rather than use it as a research centre and public library, I got the opportunity to study in England, which I gladly took, as against my earlier vision, because I wanted to be free of the limitations I could now see at the university where I was an academic, a place I had earlier been blindingly happy to be admitted into what I had seen as its magnificent core of knowledge seekers, on account of the superb grooming I had received as a student from almost all of them, only to find out that the quest to work together in developing new knowledge was imperiled by various factors.
In the land of educational quest to which I migrated, I gradually learnt the true nature of a university, the social and economic systems that facilitate a thriving knowledge culture, and saw people easily living a life that you would need to be rich to live in Nigeria.
I also came to better understand the wealth of my native land, ancient forms of knowledge glowing with the need to be studied, the sacred tree network of great Benin, the complex symbol system of Cross River Nsibidi, one of the richest in the world and deeply hidden, in spite of the various PhD theses and other works on it, the explorations of hidden realities by the secretive Ogboni, the exquisite orhue, Benin Olokun chalk art, briefly drawn on the ground as a transient nexus of spirit and matter, metaphysical, spiritual and artistic treasures I had glimpsed in Benin, without grasping their significance though slightly touched by their complex sense of great import, the immense knowledge range and cognitive penetration of Yoruba Ifa, Benin Oguega and Igbo Afa, bottomless wells of knowing of which only the surface have as yet been revealed, ranging to other African communities- Zulu epistemology and mysticism, as ravishingly described by Mazisi Kunene in Anthem of the Decades, and many more...
Having seen how people organised themselves in the single minded search for knowledge, I better understood the value of the mines of knowledge back home, mines the significance of which I had earlier thought I adequately understood, mines calling for infrastructures of exploration for their discernment.
May the Gods of knowledge grant us to plunge into and reveal these wondrous depths.
toyin
May the Gods of
On Sun, 8 Mar 2020 at 17:38, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
superb, deeply sobering summationOn Sun, 8 Mar 2020 at 15:28, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:'Migration is driven by search for talent maximization'
https://thenationonlineng.net/migration-is-driven-by-search-for-talent-maximization/
Sent from my iPhone
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