On the Need for Synergy Between Scholars and Practitioners in Classical African Spiritualities and Particularly Yoruba Orisha Spirituality
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
On Facebook I keep encountering aspirationally literate Ifa and Yoruba Orisha spirituality enthusiasts who are Yoruba and are not acquainted with the work of such landmark scholars in the field as Wande Abimbola, talk less Rowland Abiodun or Akinsola Akiwowo, or Olabiyi Yai or the role of the then University of Ife as a centre of African studies up till the 90s.
Some of them try to argue for the pre-eminence of practitioners over scholars in Yoruba spirituality, particularly privileging the highly prestigious and highly trained babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa.
I used to be startled by this development until I appreciated that these people and myself were approaching the same tradition from different angles.
I interacted with babalawo in Benin-City, where I became an adult, but Benin-City is not Yorubaland, where babalawo and other Yoruba spirituality practitioners would be easier to find.
Ironically, in Benin of the 80s, I encountered more books about Yoruba spirituality than I did about Benin spirituality, a disparity demonstrating the diversity in levels of scholarship and writing generally about those two cultures and their spiritualities.
Being a person whose approach to spirituality is grounded in the cerebral, I relied heavily on reading about Yoruba spirituality as a point of entry into classical African spiritualities.
I would have gained a lot from Benin spirituality if I had taken advantage of its then very vibrant physical presence in Benin, but I had no mediator in the form of printed texts to introduce me to its symbolism, values and logic, as I had with the magnificent works of Bolaji Idowu, Wande Abimbola, Wole Soyinka, Ulli Beier and Susanne Wenger, perennial landmarks in the field of Yoruba thought, masterpieces luminous even within world spirituality, from Hinduism to Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam and Western esotericism, a significant number of the classics of which I was also introduced to in the then relatively rich bookselling culture of Benin up till the early 2000s when I left there.
Hence I'm shocked when enthusiasts of Yoruba spirituality who are themselves Yoruba, unlike me, and live in Yorubaland, are not acquainted with these classics of Yoruba spirituality and dont appreciate their significance or have challenges with appreciating them.
But, I've been asking myself- how will they get these books and what is the degree of penetration of the scribal culture of Yoruba spirituality into the practice of the spirituality in Yorubaland?
Book writing persists among Yoruba spirituality practitioners but to what degree, and how aware are these people of the range and longevity of their own scribal tradition?
I found Wande Abimbola's Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa, after years of longing, in the University of Ibadan bookshop in 2017, but how many of the Orisha spirituality practitioners in Yorubaland appreciate the centrality of such a book, and Abimbola's work in general, to their tradition?
Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World, an unparalleled summit of African and Yoruba thought is not likely to be marketed again in Nigeria by its publisher, Cambridge University Press.
The same Press' The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger by Ulli Beier, a uniquely powerful work of Yoruba spirituality and arts, is likely to be out of print and not easy to get.
I got my copy at Oba market in Benin in the 90s perhaps and saw another secured behind glass as a special book requiring extra protection at an Oxfam bookshop in Cambridge about the mid 2000s.
Wenger's other books on Yoruba spirituality and art which I bought at select bookshops in Lagos before the early 2000s, are not readily seen but I dont know if they are sold in Oshogbo which she was central to developing into a global tourist destination.
Her most powerful book, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, I ordered from a specialist bookshop in Germany while I was in England in the early to mid 2000s but the price may have gone up astronomically.
The people on Facebook I am interacting with and whose lack of exposure to such climatic points of Yoruba spirituality textual discourse do not have the same kind of access I have had to these texts.
Compounding the situation is the fact that a good degree of the best work in Yoruba spirituality and philosophy is in academic journals and books, often published in the West, written by Yoruba, African and Western scholars, such as the foundational and definitive Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, by Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal and John Pemberton III, and Olabiyi Yai's inimitable and indispensable review of that book in the journal African Arts; the works of Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal mapping the field of Yoruba aesthetics, written while they were at then Unife but published in the West; Abiodun's 2014 book, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, integrating his life's work, published by Cambridge UP, but the second edition of which he is working on publishing in Nigeria; Akinwumi Ogundiran's landmark The Yoruba: A New History, published a few years ago by Indiana Universities Press, and more.
Soyinka's seven stanza poem summing up Yoruba Orisha cosmology, the best short summation of that cosmology known to me, was first published by Spectrum in Nigeria and has been reissued by Bookcraft in Nigeria in a superb illustrated volume, but how well known is that poem, which equals in sublimity the work of such a mystical poet as St.John of the Cross, one of the greatest of Christian poets and one of the best from Spain?
Akiwowo's glorious work in Yoruba sociology is published in Western sociology journals where Akiwowo and his interlocutors chewed over the significance of his work on Yoruba sociological thought.
Yai's publications in Yoruba aesthetics remain ensconced in such strategic journals as Research in African Literatures.
These academic journal materials can now be accessed through such prate sites as Zlib but one has first to know about them before being thereby inspired to look for them.
A similar point goes for the book on Yai recently published in Nigeria which is thereby relatively readily accessible but which one has first to be informed about before seeking.
Toyin Falola is a more recent scholar whose work is very powerful in the field, his Eshu Yoruba God, Power and Imaginative Frontiers, and his essay ''Ritual Archives'' along with his book Decolonizing African Knowledge and his two autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth, being pillars of new developments in the scribal exploration of Yoruba thought but they are more often than not published in the West, although his A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is published by Bookraft in Nigeria, same for Soyinka's Ake, also rich in Yoruba cultural insights.
Without exposure to texts of such foundational significance, how can the practitioners of Yoruba spirituality in Yorubaland achieve understanding of the scope of their tradition beyond its foundational oral base, a base no loger adequate to support the tradition in the opportunities and challenges it encounters as the world moves on in time and space?
Without knowledge of such climatic achievements of their own culture, how can they respond adequately to the marginalization of their spirituality in the very Yorubaland that is its origin, a marginalization highlighted by the open aggression of Ilorin Muslims, at all levels of the social hierarchy, to Orisha spirituality?
The Ilorin Muslims, from the Emir downward, described Orisha spirituality as idolatry that should be restricted to private observance and excluded from public visibility, followed with threats and molestation of members of the Orisha spirituality community.
On Facebook the question was asked of the Orisha spirituality practitioners-, where are your texts? What do you stand for? Can you point to any one in high office, in government or other public capacity who openly identifies with your tradition, as the Ilorin Muslims pitted Islam against Orisha spirituality while another angle argued that Orisha spirituality has no intrinsic relationship with Yoruba culture.
I was shocked to find very little reference to Orisha spirituality in Ijebu Ode when i was there earlier this year, the landscape being defined particularly by mosques and to a lesser degree, churches
Such challenges cannot be adequately addressed without developing a vigorous scribal culture and such a culture is greatly facilitated by taking into account the existing scribal achievements of the tradition.
A lot is visible online but can't replace the organised force represented by such books and articles as those I have referenced here, which constitute classics of the field, equatable with some of the greatest works of world spiritualities.
Scribal culture and scholarship are skills. They are not the same as oral culture and orature, which are another set of
skills.
The scholar may or may not be a practitioner of the spirituality they study.
Both cultures, the lived practice and the scholarly, are critical, particularly in the struggle for the survival, growth and recognition of Orisha spirituality in Yorubaland.
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