African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
2
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
Nommo Imploring Rain
Some of the most moving images of prayer for me are sculptures of Nommo from the art of the Dogon of Mali. They show a naked figure, hands outstretched, reaching towards the sky, the figure's streamlined body giving the entire gesture a sense of poignant force arising from total dedication of self to the upward focus represented by the body's thrust.
The last time I read the description of one of these figures at the site where I saw it, it stated, "Nommo, imploring rain." Really? Only rain? But as I compose this, I recall what John Mbiti writes about rain in classical African cultures:
rain is seen as the eternal and mystical link between past, present and future generations. …one of the most concrete and endless rhythms of nature: as it came, it comes and it will come [a] vital rhythm of creation [that knows no end, linking humanity] with the divine…a manifestation of the eternal, in the here and now [symbolizing humanity's ] contact with the blessings of time and eternity.[1]
What have these beautiful ideas got to do with Falola scholarship? Nommo implores rain, so one may call upon knowledge, in its varied manifestations, knowledge as a demonstration of human creativity, houses of knowledge whose corridors reverberate as rain, adapting Yoruba oriki chanter Sangowemi,[2] houses built by each person in explicit or implicit collaboration with others, configurations organized around varied ways of knowing, diverse subjects of enquiry.
Can these be unified, perhaps in infinity?
Forms of Infinity in Yoruba and Akan Thought
Infinity as an unending expansion of possibilities, as depicted by Ogundiran? Or infinity as deathlessness, as indicated by the Yoruba expression, "aiku pari iwa,"[3] "deathlessness consummates existence," or as a state beyond time and suffering, as Orisa philosopher Susanne Wenger puts it in Rolf Brockmann and Gerd Hötter's Adunni : A Portrait of Susanne Wenger?
Or in terms of the Akan Adinkra visual symbol Gye Nyame, enigmatic and abstract, perhaps suggesting the distance of identity, the ontological remoteness, between the divine subject the abstractions evoke and the total field of existence, a transcendence of being and cognitive possibility correlative with the Akan understanding of an ultimate creator, the eternal witness of existence, who subsumes the transformations of being into themself?
Within this context the universe is conceived in terms of a transformative process perceived in its totality only from a central point of consciousness which constitutes its origin, as expressed in the Twi proverb "Abode santann yi firi tete;obi nte ase a onim ahyease, na obi ntena ae nkosi ne awie, Gye Nyame" "This great panorama of creation dates back to time immemorial; no one lives who saw its beginning and no one will live to see its end, except Nyame."[4]
A tantalizing idea, which, with its elevated sweep and inspiring loftiness, may provoke aspirations to participate in such an intelligence, to the degree that the human mind is capable of that.
Epistemic Images
Philosophy enables us understand our time in thought, Falola thus references German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel,[5] incidentally evoking Hegel's project of comprehending the development of history in terms of patterns of human thought ( The Philosophy of History) and understanding the development of human cognitive potential in terms of patterns unifying reflective thought and cosmic development ( The Phenomenology of Mind and The History of Philosophy). A speculative aspiration, though yielding rich insights and profound social consequences.
The multi-perspectival windows of Ogundiran on Orisa as constellations of human experience multiplying into infinity and of Ulli Beier on these cosmological figures as windows for viewing the unity of reality from particular perspectives, partial insights subsumed in an ultimate harmony, the ecosystemic complexity and ungraspable breadth of the baobab, the calabash of totality, Falola's pluriversalistic modes of enquiry within multidisciplinary frameworks.
May these cognitive matrices be adaptable to another project that aspires to achieve what a commentator on the Greek philosopher Aristotle states the pioneering thinker had to concede after a lifetime laying foundations of thought in general, and in specific disciplines in particular, "the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being"?[6]
The Paradoxical Old Man: The Fulani Kaidara
A bent and dirty old man, clothes infested with lice, demands to see the king. The palace guards try to drive away the impudent figure but are stopped by the monarch, who invites the destitute person to his table. Amidst the convivial feast, the unlikely figure reveals to the king mysteries to which he had long sought answers in vain. The king tries to embrace him in joy, but the figure withdraws and departs, transformed into a creature of light who blasts off into space.
Kaidara, a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, the creator of the universe, assuming the form of a decrepit old man to test who is ready to learn what he has to offer, a knowledge that is reached only by discerning the real from the apparent, sensing the treasure hidden in the unlikely figure of the old man.
Kaidara, near yet distant, embodiment of the scope, the limits and the reach of human knowledge, terrestrial and cosmic, as Ahmadu Hampate Ba tells and explains this gripping story in Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.
I love the Kaidara image for its integration of the abstract and the concrete, the abstract idea of human cognitive possiblity and the concrete picture of a human being.
I am thrilled by its striking paradoxical conjunctions, between enfeebled old age and destitution, on one hand, and concealed divine majesty and power, on the other.
I find deeply memorable its fusing of human cognitive limitations, the circle of possible knowledge, ever expanding to an unknown scope even as it strains against circumscriptions at every stage of this advance, on one hand, and explosive, expansive opening to knowledge, on the other.
Even more compelling is the actualization of these ideas through a focus on human sensitivity and humility, within the dynamic image of a figure, moving from place to place, meeting different people in various circumstances, assessing them for their readiness for the cognitive illumination of a lifetime which he embodies, an image evoking the wonder of every moment of human existence, the nondescript and the wonderful, the ordinary and the sublime.
The Nakedness of Òrò : A Yoruba Theory of Discourse
"Kólóḿbó ni Òròń rìn, 'Òrò moves around naked,', but it is forbidden to see it with… naked eyes,"[7] the Yoruba expression goes, another image of the opportunity for insight about the wonderful in the midst of the everyday that I find compelling.
Òrò, the unified complex of potential for awareness and expression emerging from the creator of the cosmos and accessible to humanity, roams the world naked, its luminous empowerment accessible to all, but, like the blaze of fire whose intense white heat is dangerous to eyes gazing directly at it, Òrò may not be safely engaged with directly but only through the indirection of òwe, imaginative expressions which mediate this luminosity, as majestically elaborated by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
Òrò is more broadly understood as an issue under discussion, a point of reference, or more learnedly, as discourse. It is depicted, however, in the cosmogonic myth from which the description above comes, as representing cognitive and expressive potential in general. This cognitive and expressive capacity of humanity is itself grounded in the cognitive and expressive powers of the creator of the cosmos who created existence through these potencies and hurled them to Earth, where they became empowerments for humanity, enabling human cognitive and communicative capacity, from the mundane to the sublime.
At its core, this perspective suggests, human capacities for understanding and expression, even at their most mundane or lofty, from gossip to elevated thought, embody, deeply hidden under layers of thought and conventional expression, the force through which the universe was created, a core too potent for unmediated human encounter.
The cosmogonic roots of this image are resonant with the global complex of ideas correlating language and divine creativity.[8] The picture of Òrò moving around in a nakedness it is forbidden to see with naked eyes may further evoke human reliance on symbols to mediate the world. It may suggest the use of symbols, represented by òwe, to negotiate relationships with reality. These engagements are encapsulated within a sensitivity to the universe in general and human cognitive and expressive capacity in particular as embodying possibilities beyond the conventionally accessible, possibilities related to the core from which existence derives as an expression of ultimate meaning and value.
[1] African Religions and Philosophy, 1976,181.
[2] In Karin Baber's I Could Speak Until Tomorrow ( 1991, 17)
[3] Quoted by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language ( 2014, ),
[4] From my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos.
[5] "Nimi Wariboko in the World of Philosophy," The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, 2021, 3-20, 3.
[6] "Aristotle," Encyclopedia Britannica, edition unrecalled).
[7] Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, 31-2.
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