The Beginnings of an Enigma: Birth, Early Circumstances and Questions in Relation to Polymathic Scholar, Writer and Educational Entrepreneur Toyin Falola
Toyin Falola
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processess
and
Systems
He was born in a city where chaos bred order, where warlords created community out of a band of refugees, a city of ambition, where skill in arms defined status, Ibadan, the war camp become metropolis, the eventual constellation of an African efflorescence of knowledge in which the personage of tender limbs who came squealing into the world would later play a central role.
How did Toyin Omoyeni Falola, a man whose father died when he was five months old and who knew his mother only at the age of ten, become the creator of an unparalleled knowledge universe, an ocean of texts exploring almost every aspect of African life?
He does not seem to have grown up in an elite environment defined by books, written texts as a personal culture likely to have been still new in the Nigeria of his birth in 1953.
His description, in his memoir A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, of the compound where he grew up as a child, suggests a traditional environment, far from the culture of Western developed knowledge he would later embody so masterfully.
The one quality his early life demonstrates in relation to knowledge cultures was his exposure to the person and activities of Iya Lekuleja, the dealer in assorted spiritual and herbal goods who inadvertently became his mentor after a hilarious but turtous episode in which she was permitted by his guardians to put him through a gruelling ritual involving exposure to her nakedness in order to cure him of the possibility of being led astray by women, a mentorship that eventually led to exposure to arcane depths of Yoruba spirituality which the person whom the child became is still trying to come to terms with more than fifty years after as a relentless explorer of Yoruba spirituality and thought who is yet unable to unburden himself of the full scope of his knowledge, that knowledge touching the edges of the arcane and taboo, as this relationship is described in his two autobiographies A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth.
I am not aware of any account by him of his relatives who took him in and brought him up seeming to have represented the Western intellectual culture he later became an embodiment of even as he uses it in illuminating his Yoruba universe.
Was he largely self inspired or motivated by forces beyond individual personalities?
Falola would later go on to take part in the Agbekoya Revolt, in which Yoruba non-elite classes rebelled against taxation by British colonialists, mobilizing resources of Yoruba spirituality Falola inimitably describes in Counting the Tiger's Teeth, after the failure of which rebellion he returned to school.
More questions than answers as I try to understand this intriguing figure but questions are the kernel of knowledge, its driving force.
Of the large amount of text on him, including books, I am not aware of any that tries to trace his footsteps in detail from his Ibadan beginnings to the present, posing and exploring questions of motivation and trajectory in relation to Falola's motion across time and space in a ceaseless quest for ever expanding possibilities, the distillation of "So", the embodiment of the totality of possibilities, into "so", the structure of possibilities available to a person at a point in time, Nimi Wariboko's map of Kalabari thought on human potential, an idea unifying the correlations between classical West African thought on relationships between possiblity and actuality, fate and free will, the temporal and the timeless.
This effort at relentless distillation of vastness into concreteness,of expanding the boundaries of possibility, exemplifying the potential of each person in a manner unique to the person who distinctively achieves this, is a central reason to study the logic of the achievements of exceptional people.
"He has accomplished more than all the pioneering scholars of African history
put together", is how a Nigerian history scholar summed up Falola to me at a fateful meeting at the University of Cambridge's Institute of African Studies, some years after I first encountered Falola's name in the library of the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, in 2004, wondering why the same name kept recurring in books in different sections of the library, leading me to ask Akin Oyetade, my then lecturer at SOAS, the significance of this phenomenon, to which question he responded with a puzzled shrug as if to say " I am as baffled as you are".
That was 2004, relatively early, ironically, though decades into his publishing history, in the ever escalating climb up the ever steeper road of achievement the scholar and writer has created for himself, digging into almost every corner of the African experience and emerging with gems of knowledge in self authored,co- authored and edited books constituting a library of the latest state of knowledge in various disciplines even as his autobiographies and poetry constitute some of his most remarkable work, complemented by his interview series and essays, inimitably projecting African creatives and issues to the world.
Every person embodies a unique nucleus of creative possibility, the "ase" theory of Falola's native Yoruba defines human possibility, but what defines the intersection between such inward potential, external possibilities and eventual outcomes, is a question at the core of Yoruba thought in its explorations of relationships between human creativity and circumstantial structuring, a network of thought grappled with in various ways by different West African peoples, the similarities between their postulations contrasting with the more abstract c
notions of relationships between the ultimate, as a mirror of human potential and human actualizations in space and time represented by some classical Asian thought , these contrastive perspectives convergent, at various points with other ideas in Asian, Western and other bodies of knowledge in the quest to understand why the differing individual and group outcomes in the journey of life are what they are.
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