USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: A question for Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

 Great thanks Cornelius.

Christianity did penetrate some of those countries, from what I recall of China and India, and possibly established a powerful presence in India, and English colonization of India lasted much longer than in Nigeria, but these external powers did not achieve in those places the degree of  abandonment of endogenous spiritual culture evident in Nigeria.

One of the reasons could be the ancient traditions of widespread writing and reading in those Asian cultures.

You cant successfully demonize ancestor veneration in Confucianism, a central Chinese philosophy, because an entire library of Confucisn texts exist, spanning centuries.

You cant successfully present negative images of Buddhism because its philosophical principles, its historical development and its creative penetration into various aspects of Indian, Chinese and Japanese culture, creating some of humanity's greatest achievements, is obvious, through texts explaining their logic and the logic of this development, enabling appreciation of the principles of Japanese gardening, Japanese haiku poetry, Zen Buddhist aesthetics in Chinese and Japanese art, in Japanese architecture and Chinese martial arts.

You cant successfully disparage Yoga, possibly India's greatest export, because of its rich textual foundations and  its immense practical value, evident even outside its religious contexts, the case being the same for Chinese and other Asian martial atts, which are better understood against the background of Asian philosophies and spiritualities.

At the headwaters of much of Asian thought is Hinduism, represented by an awesome textual tradition surpassing anything created by Christianity and perhaps even Islam, cultural creativities generating some of the world's greatest dance, architecture and visual arts, and even inspiring comparisons with scientific theory, as in Fritjof Capra's famous The Tao of Physics, unifying Asian philosophies in terms of a Hindu image and using this in developing a  dialogue with modern science. 

Tibetan Buddhism, recondite as it can be in its imagistic complexity and theoretical sophistication, is richly represented by great texts of theory, practice and individual histories, enabling the torch to be carried anywhere in the world. I learnt of all these spiritualities and read some of their classics while living in Benin-City up till  2002.

In that same Benin, when seeking for works on classical African spiritualities and frequenting practically every bookselling environment in the city, I did not see any book on Benin spirituality. My exposure to the work of Norma Rosen on Benin Olokun spirituality in the academic journal African Arts, to that of Iro Eweka on Olokun, to Joseph Nevadomsky on the Obas coronation ceremonies, Daryl Peavy on Oguega divination  and others occurred through my first readily available Internet access through studying in England, and more recently, through Osemwegie Ebohon's books which he gifted me, but which I doubt if he had published in those earlier years when we ere in Benin together. I also have Tam Fiofori's fine book on the Obas coronation ceremony bought from him in Nigeria. I also encountered a powerful work on the Obaship at a bookshop in Lagos which i intend to buy later on account of its less than cheap price. The same applies to Charles Gore's likely landmark book on Benin shrines.

To what degree has the situation changed since 2002?

Is there any book that sums up endogenous Benin spirituality with the same comprehensiveness and sensitivity to the Benin language as Bolaji Idowu's Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief, one of my most important books, and which I bought at Oba Market in Benin?

I would like to know about it.

Does any other endogenous Nigerian spirituality have such scholarly yet generally accessible books? What of  the equivalent of a Wole Soyinka innimitably  dramatizing  the imaginative power of Yoruba spirituality? Achebe and Christopher Okigbo have achieved something similar for Igbo thought but at less impactful level for various reasons,  including the relative slimness of their productions ,even though great works. When you add such a titan as Susanne Webger, one of the world's greatest spiritual writers, inimitable on Yoruba thought, the difference becomes clearer than ever.

But even the Yoruba textual achievement, great as it is, stretching from earlier periods to the Idowous, to Wande Abimbola's magnificent works on Ifa divination, to the more recent achievements of Akinwunmi Ogundiran on the history of Ypruba thought, to Toyn Falola's work in book after book exploring aspects of this system, to its explosion on the Internet, particularly social media, is yet a fraction of the Asian achievement in any of their spiritualities.

Happily, Nimi Wariboko, a master in the majestic presentation of Kalabari thought, has just published in Nigeria The Soul of Kalabari Culture, helping to bridge this  textual divide.

A good number of the best books on Nigerian spiritualities are published in the West, to which the scholars either migrated from Nigeria or where the Western researchers reside. These books are therefore hardly visible in Nigeria or expensive when visible.

I expect it is impossible to achieve a mass return to classical African spiritualties in Nigeria. The impact of Christianity and Islam is too strong, for various reasons, one of them again  being superior textualisation.

Anyone can pick up a Bible, almost anywhere, and read something for inspiration in it. In Southern Nigeria, access to varieties of Koranic translations in English is not so accessible but they also exist.

What books exist to read for inspiration even in the best textualized of Nigerian religions, classical Yoruba spiritualities?

Soyinka's Seven Signposts  seven stanza poem, published in Nigeria,  is pre-eminent but not well known. Akomolafe Wande has recently  brought out a series of  fa texts and accompanying meditations but the price would be prohibitive for many Nigerians. Another one he is working on promises inspiring texts from Ifa.

Wamde Abimbola's Ifa books are magnificent and Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa is cheap and readily available, but the inspirational  universe of such works is not as variegated as that of the Bible, for example, where the the soaring aspiration of the Psalms co exist with the homespun wisdom of Jesus parables, and the erotic force of the Song of Songs with Jesus ethical and spiritual teaching.

A similar ideational and expressive synthesis can be achieved in Nigerian sacred texts, but might have to be pursued through an elevation of creativity, bringing out the best texts, which also penetrate beyond doctrinal limitations, and perhaps amplifying them though recourse to artistic forms from their parent cultures, which communicate with a force different from written text.

A very different level of expressive force is achieved when one combines such visual symbols as Ghanaian Akan/Gyaman Adinkra, Nigerian Cross River and Cameroonian Nsibidi, Igbo Uli, Benin Olokun chalk art, Yoruba opon ifa symbols, in dialogue with visual texts.

Ultimately, textualities of Nigerian sacred cultures may best succeed within a pan-Nigerian and pan-African synthesis, as Ulli Beier achieved in African Poems, in which these spiritualites are presented as variants of the same system of thought and action, like the variants of Christianity.

We also need texts of people who live according to these spiritualities, inspiring emulation. Christianity and Buddhism are based on great exemplars. Muhammeds life is an inspirational template for multitudes. Saints are strategic for Hinduism and Catholic Christinity. Beyond such biogragies as that by the Ifa priest Yemi Elebuibon, and possibly by Ebohon, autobiography and  biography are still embryonic in classical Nigerian spiritualities.

Even when all that has been achieved  in terms of textulsation, the sheer social, educational, economic, political,  architectural  and artistic  impact of Christianity and Islam in Nigeria is so powerful that there can be no return  to the dominance, or even equality, of classical African spiritualities  unless perhaps a supreme calamity of some sort takes place to inspire that.

On Tuesday, 30 September 2025 at 23:47:48 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, 

With avid interest, for more than a decade now, we have followed your various peregrinations in the occult and allied subjects, mostly via Compcros , and right now, after your latest and in anticipation of Thursday's Webinar not on the theme Africanization of African Indigenous Religions, but on the theme " ReAfricanization of African Indigenous Religions" - slightly different from Re-Africanization of African Indigenous Religions, I'd like to ask you the following question which I have wanted to ask you almost every day over these many many years reading your discourses: 

The colonialists did not penetrate India, China , and Japan, with their Christianity (God forbid) and we are to suppose that is because these countries have very strong indigenous spiritual traditions, the bulwark of the resistance….

Given the smörgåsbord of religious traditions, not least of all the rich canopy of indigenous religious traditions in Nigeria , especially the indigenous religious traditions of pre-colonial Nigeria, how is it that Nigeria succumbed to that sort of mass conversion ( like the Khazars, the so called "Thirteenth Tribe") ?   

I understand that although it's a simple question you are going to give a longish answer.

I seem to remember Socrates was accused of introducing new gods

Al Islam has characterised pre-Islamic Arabia as the age of Jahiliyyah

BTW, do you foresee a cultural renaissance and a mass return to the roots in your neck of the woods in Nigeria ?

Ami Koita ( 1998) : Djiguy 

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/8a9f3391-1148-42b8-8b3b-cc438940ad35n%40googlegroups.com.