Akinwumi Ogundiran's Methodology in The Yoruba: A New History and Falola's in Global Yoruba as a Guide for the Study of African, Global and Cosmic Histories and Cultures: A Few Words
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Abstract
A very brief exploration of the possibilities of the historiographic methods and thought of Akinwunmi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola for the study of history beyond Yoruba peoples and cultures to other African, global and even cosmic contexts.
Rereading Ogundiran's The Yoruba: A New History after Falola's Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks
I have just finished my latest reading of the introduction and first chapter of Akinwunmi Ogundiran's The Yoruba:A New History, densely powerful documents.
I have returned to Ogundiran's book in order to reinforce and expand what I am gaining from studying Toyin Falola's Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks.
Ogundiran's text represents my first encounter, in relation to Yoruba history, with the strategies employed by himself, and later Falola, in writing history.
Anticipating a Cognitive Expansion and Constellation
I aspire to explore both works, in relation to other powerfully stimulating texts in Yoruba, and possibly African Studies, and perhaps other fields, so as to move closer to the illumination I sense rising over the horizon for me, the sun of understanding blazing as its grandeur is slowly revealed, its circularity unifying centre and circumference as the whole is permeated by light, akin to the constellation of knowledge that the work of the two masters helps trigger or stimulate, the power of Ogundiran's and Falola's books helping constellate my years of quest and beyond, into the unforeseably unfolding future, in Yoruba Studies, African Studies and the human experience in general.
Human History as a Demonstration of Efforts to Make Meaning of Existence
Ogundiran is developing or demonstrating in that book an approach to history as a study in how people make sense of their existence in relation to their material and human environments, natural and social, in a dialogue between the internal world of the self and the external worlds of nature and society, that summation being my interpretation of Ogundiran's project in terms of my own priorities.
Adapting Ogundiran's Historiographic Methods to the Study of African, Global and Cosmic Histories
"Why not adapt his methods or the inspiration one gains from his strategies, as one develops one's own approaches, in going beyond Yoruba history to the histories of other African peoples, from the cultural and geographical neighbours of the Yoruba to those farther afield and from those to others, as one moves towards a history of Africa, the world and the cosmos?" I am moved to think.
But Ogundiran's project is centred on the interactions between people and their experiences, therefore grounded in subjects who are self conscious and reflexive, thus able to distinguish, to a degree, between inner and outer stimuli.
On Consciousness in Relation to the Cosmos
Can the cosmos as understood in scientific cosmology, the only cosmology that most people can verify its accuracy, perform those actions? Is the cosmos conscious, talk less being self conscious?
As attractive as I find claims of the cosmos as being conscious and moving towards an ultimate goal, in which perhaps all occurrences, experiences and awareness within its armbit will be integrated and consummated, an experience that may be partially anticipated by the human mind reaching such a level of awareness even if only for a short time, as described in one kind of account of what is called cosmic consciousness, a view represented, in diverse ways, by Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine, Vera Stanley Alder's Initiation of the World and the work of Teilhard de Chardin, I am not able to understand that conception of cosmos as no more than speculation, even though I perceive claims of factual accounts of cosmic consciousness to be actual experiences of the human mind reaching a synergistic grasp of the cosmos, without my holding an opinion as to whether the cosmos is itself conscious.
From Yoruba History to Cosmic History
How did one get from Yoruba history to cosmic history?
How come these two seemingly very dissimilar units of knowledge are being thought of in the same context?
Soyinka, Ogundiran, Falola on Yoruba History in Making Sense of Existence
I entered into the study of Yoruba culture through an exploration of human encounter with the cosmos as this is expressed in the origins of drama in ritual, particularly as demonstrated in the Yoruba context, in Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World.
I was led to that book by my passion for understanding how people make sense of existence and had been introduced to such efforts from Asia and Europe but not Africa until I came across books like Soyinka's.
So, from the beginning of my entry into Yoruba Studies, I have been implicated in a variant of Ogundiran's project, a project Falola is aligned with in expanding more tentative yet deeply pregnant readings like Ogundiran's in terms of an expansive examination of Yoruba engagement with being, becoming and ultimacy across various religions and as evoked by art.
Across the works of these writers the same question resonates, shaping their diverse explorations of society and individuality within space and time-how do people make sense of existence within the framework of their terrestrial experience and its cosmic context, as demonstrated by the totality of their lives, from social organization to cultural forms, from the arts to the sciences, politics to economics, war to peace, the entire spectrum of human activity being understandable as an effort to make existence meaningful, building on survival and moving beyond simply living, as this stance may be expanded in ways that resonate with Austrian philosopher Viktor Frankl's description of humanity's primary goals in Man's Search for Meaning?
Hence, its not difficult to understand Yoruba philosophy and spiritually-which is one of the central foci of Ogundiran's and Falola's works-in terms of circles of meaning expanding outward from the local to the global, from the global to the cosmic and back to the global and the local, a centripetal and centrifugal rhythm of exploration.
Yoruba Ifa Poem "Ayajo Asuwada" on Terrestrial, Celestial and Divine Unities
After all, Yoruba Ifa literature does this quite well, as in the poem "Ayajo Asuwada", on celestial, terrestrial and social unity as expressing"asuwa", the quality of togetherness falling like dew from the source of existence as the ultimate creator manifested the universe at the beginning of time, a poem discussed in relation to sociological theory by Akinsola Akiwowo in "Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry" and by Solagbade Popoola in terms of relationships between ethics and cosmology in Ifa.
Without subscribing to the ultimate thesis of divine creation represented by that poem, one could enjoy its sweeping and yet detailed picture of the constituents of the Earth, from the hair on a human head to the grass comprising the savannah to fish in the sea to individuals making up human societies, as agglomerations shaping the coherence of the material and social universe, a synergy ultimately emanating from the unity between the divine cosmos and the human world.
These unities are depicted as occuring within the context of the relationship between individuality, represented by the concept of "ori" and the unity dramatized by asuwa.
From "Ayajo Asuwada" to Scientific Cosmology
One may reflect on the cosmic contexts of those aspects of this image of unity represented by the material cosmos, aspects of the universe verifiable by everyone, as different from accounts of divine existence and its conjunction with humanity and the universe, which are more matters of imagination, of faith and of subjective encounters, variables which are not open to ready verification by others.
One may reflect on the coherence of the material cosmos within the celestial configurations enabling the universe as we know it and enabling life on Earth, as represented, for example, by scientific cosmologists Martin Rees' Just Six Numbers, on the numerical significance of the cosmological constants that facilitate the existence of life on Earth.
Reflection on these enabling conditions could lead to thinking about what was, what is and what may be- how did the cosmos come into being, how is it developing and what is its ultimate developmental destination?
What is the relationship between cosmos, Earth and consciousness, represented by the human being exploring the cosmos through thought and action?
So, the philosopher in Yoruba thought may move from such philosophical ideas in engaging the cosmos, and from the cosmos to the details of terrestrial experience and the human sphere.
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