From Wizard to Cyborg
The Journey of Toyin Falola
Part 1
An Encounter and its Significance
The creator at the crucible
in his Lagos house
Picture taken by myself on November 29, 2025
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Abstract
On 29 November 2025 I visited Toyin Falola in his Lagos home. What began as a call to discuss an academic project became a confrontation with the outer limits of what one human life can contain and achieve.
This essay moves between lived observation, Falola's own accounts of his creative processes, spiritual and technological practices, and broader reflections on genius, indigenous epistemologies, and the emerging post-human condition. It concludes with a theory and practice of creativity developed in relation to the ideas the essay discusses.
Falola is presented not only as one of the most accomplished of scholars and writers but as a living experiment in a trans-cultural metaphysics and epistemology, an approach to learning and the outcomes of this approach, integrating relentless labour and intellectual work, trance-like creativity, and twenty-first-century medical technology.
The first part of the essay examines Falola's creative processes and their significance in relation to diverse cognitive cultures. The second part distills the insights of the first part in developing a theory and practice of creativity in relation to an exploration of the self.
This piece of writing is therefore part biography, part philosophical meditation, and part provocation: what becomes possible when a person refuses to choose between the library, the shrine, the laboratory, and the machine implanted in his own body, when the self becomes a ritual archive, a dynamic arcanum constituted by the convergence of such sites of knowledge?
To help me organize the range of ideas through which the essay is composed, I'm breaking it up into multiple parts for publishing on social media. On completing that, I'll publish the complete essay in a unified document.
1. The Encounter: Wine, Wizardry, and Wonder
He met me at the door of his home—elegant in simplicity, holding a bottle of wine. My quiet delight was immediate. Before me stood not only an indefatigable scholar and writer but a man whose inventiveness continually stretches the boundaries of the possible. Yet he is no ascetic but a person dedicated to a mission integrating and transcending the self while anchored in enjoying the fulfillments of life, appreciating grounded enjoyment while expressing a humanity that is both deep and expansive. I did not know, as we walked into his house, that my sense of what it means to be human—and to seek understanding from within the matrix of that humanity— was going to be extended by that visit.
Falola moving down the staircase at his Lagos house.
Picture by myself on 29th November 2025.
A painting of himself is behind him. His family pictures are on his right
He is known as a scholar and a writer, but in the classical Yoruba universe he might be recognized as an àjẹ́, a witch, or an oṣó, a wizard. How else, one view might hold, may one explain his oceanic, multifaceted creativity?
I looked round me on that long desired visit which I hoped would help me penetrate the depths of his power. Were those elegant bowls on his bookshelf, one point of view might imagine, containers of what is known in Yoruba as "oògùn", an occult or medicinal preparation?
Would aromas from those possibly juju pots, that stance could speculate, suffuse the room at midnight, finding their way to his nostrils, from where they would penetrate his brain, setting it ablaze with a fusion of knowledge and expressive power, the oceanic force manifesting as an unending river of essays, books and other scholarly projects?
Bowls on a bookshelf in Falola's Lagos house
Picture taken by myself on November 29, 2025
How else, except through such an arcane process, not accessible to the average person, such a point of view could suspect, could one explain his being able to gift me a book, the fifth written by him to have come out this year, a book on Babcock University, perhaps the first book published on a Nigerian higher institution?
1.1. Matrices of Creativity
Is this a wizardry of inward genius and sheer dedicated work or a wizardry of spiritually enabled powers, or one induced by stimulants, that line of thought could wonder?
What are the possible points of distinction between those categories?
Is genius doing something that is ordinarily impossible or beyond human capacity 90% of the time?
He works very hard. The sheer physical labour, mental creativity and technical effort through which he sustains his expressive inventiveness and his scholarly network of activities is enormous.
Whatever distinctive enablements a person may have, nothing can replace the effort of harnessing those resources.
Can one emulate him, constantly striving to maximize one's creative powers?
A round peg in a round hole. A person in the right place and time. A scholar and writer who spends his time doing what he does best and is rewarded for it in ways that inspire him to do more.
How can social and educational systems be created to help people express the best of themselves rather than the current hit or miss method of correlating passion and work in the midst of economic necessities?
"A person dedicated to a mission integrating and transcending the self while anchored in enjoying the fulfillments of life, appreciating grounded enjoyment while expressing a humanity that is both deep and expansive."
The luxuriance of culinary culture, igniting the senses in celebration of the glory of living, as suggested by Falola's writing and lifestyle in the midst of superlative scholarly and artistic creativity, in tandem with rich human connections, is suggested by this collage from pictures by Falola from his magnificent essay "Five Days with Victor Ekpuk at Akwa Ibom, Part 3", celebrating Ibibio cuisine, on the visit of his wife and himself to the artist Victor Ekpuk in Ekpuk's home state in Nigeria's Akwa Ibom in December 2025.
The visual beauty, beguiling scent and luxuriant taste of food, the lush delights of ogbono's tenderness as it flows loaded with the crunch of crayfish and the sparkle of soft pepper, the energising power of okro, these and more are the àṣẹ of food, the creative potential inherent to all beings, actualized in food through the alchemy of fire and the combinatorial wizardry of culinary witches, their own creative power unleashing the transformative force of the ingredients they combine to create something greater than each of them on its own, a process unleashed in the human body by ingesting that food to further sustain the self and catalyze its creative powers-the cycle of the àṣẹ of food, in tandem with that of the human being in a process of rejuvenation.
A celebration of relationships between the creative power of food and human creativity in terms of the Yoruba concept of àṣẹ, the creative force issuing from the creator of the universe, animating all forms in existence.
The celebration adapts the form of the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which celebrates each aspect of existence as an expression of Spirit.It is further inspired by the similarities between the Hindu philosophy of the cosmos as pervaded by a creative yet transcendent intelligence empowering all existents, enabling the spectrum of human experience from sensual pleasure to spiritual awareness, and the àṣẹ idea.
It is also a response to the referential scope of Falola's work through the inspiration of his essay on Ibibio cuisine, a response suggesting the possibilities of the àṣẹ concept as a unifying idea.
Schools of thought emphasizing the unity of body, mind and spirit recognise a conjunction between sensual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual pleasure and fulfillment. The richest demonstration of this orientation might be Hindu Tantra, which understands the cosmos as sustained by the creative pleasure of existence, the life blood of the Ultimate.
An iconic exponent of this dynamic is Abhinavagupta, celebrating the pleasure of scholarship, literature, philosophy and spirituality in 11th century Kashmir:
I have cleansed myself first by bathing fully in grammar;
I have collected the flowers of discerning wisdom that grow
on that wish-granting creeper of insightful imagination which
grows out of the roots of good reasoning, and worshipped the
Lord of my heart with them.
I have enjoyed the benefits of such beautiful great literature and
poetry as can be compared with liquor made out of the essence
of Ambrosia; and now, in the company of my beloved lady: discourse
on divine non-duality, I am going to repose.
( From Abhinavagupta's Īśvarapratyabhijñā VivritivimarŚinī, quoted in
Bettina Bäumer's "The Lord of the Heart: Abhinavagupta's Aesthetics
and Kashmir Śaivism", in Traversing the Heart Journeys of the Inter-religious Imagination, ed.Richard Kearney and Eileen Rizo-Patron, 2010, 220)
The intensity of mental pleasure is vivified through evocations of sensual pleasure, both pleasures dramatizing/embodying sat/chit/ananda, being, consciousness and bliss, in Sanskrit, the unity of the essence of being with consciousness that enables awareness of existence and the bliss eventuating from that awareness, bliss that is not only a human experience but is an actualization of the source of existence ( " Saccidānanda'', Wikipedia).
2. Roots of a Seeker: Ode Aje and the Vortex of Becoming
Who is Oloruntoyin Omoyeni Falola, the seeker in the forest of knowledge, investigator of hidden corners, explorer of possibilities others may see but not understand, one who perceives what is invisible to many even in daylight, creative possibilities through which the value of one day in the life of a Falola is multiplied into what would be the impact of a year, of years, of even a lifetime in the lives of others?
To try to answer that question let us begin from Ibadan, in a place called Ode Aje, the Plain of the Goddess of Wealth, as translated in a personal communication by Falola. Ibadan is a particularly storied city in Nigeria's Yorubaland, where diverse circles of history intersect, gifting the child who grew up there with a unique vantage point on the great forces shaping Yoruba history and Nigeria, the new country into which the Yoruba had been forced by British colonizers.
In Ode Aje, the youthful Oloruntoyin found himself at the centre of a vortex- the ancient lifeways represented by his beloved mentor Iya Lekuleja, aka Leku, herbal and magical adept ( in the memoirs A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth), and the tensions of massive change that drove the city of warriors to the centre of new economies of knowledge:
Today, I held my elegantly produced book, 402 pp. Yoruba Metaphysics...The book was inspired by just one neighborhood in Ibadan, Ode Aje. I have written four books based on this area, within walking distance to Agugu, Aremo, and Ojagbo. Four books: three memoirs and one academic-cultural activist book.
(Private email communication by Falola to a select group of people on 13th September, 2025. Quoted by permission of the author).
"Oke Adu to Orita Aperin through Ode Aje"
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings)
Image and caption source: Feedback at Oyo State Government . Accessed 14th December 2025.
Within this geographical and cultural nucleus is to be found the seed that became Toyin Falola, Jacob and Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the most prolific scholars and writers in the world, a powerful voice in every aspect of African Studies, creator of one of the most impactful of scholarly networks and perhaps the most remarkable one centred in the efforts of an individual, spanning publishing schemes, scholarly collaborations, conferences and interview series.
The Yoruba expression "okunrin meta", " three men in one" recognizes the possibility of a person demonstrating what would be conventionally understood as the capacities of three people or more.
How is that possible?
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/CACMz5znhS3gJM__aZiM-uJz3xr%3DLHO_F3vg0g89h8qaYdegTyQ%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment