SIR Toyin:
I certainly echo and re--echo Osagyefo Kwabena's brief but (in the description of the Indomitable Chief Obafemi Awolowo of blessed memory) SAGACIOUS words below, which are laced with our own rich Akan reality: indeed, that "when the lion tells you [that] you are strong, it is beyond mere evanescent praise-poem. It is the iron-clad reality"! That speaks well on behalf of the many Akans of Ghana on this Dialogue!
Above all, your entire eloquent end of year praise-song -- a philosophical dirge of sorts -- tends to bestow instantly and transparently an African ("Nobel") Peace Prize on Professor Julius O. Adekule, to make his Heaven-Going chances -- at the close of his life's virtual Journey -- most certain! What a great religious historicity, as you dutifully drew Cuba's, alas, "toothless old lion" (Comrade Fidel Castro) into the picture in the following brilliant rendition:
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2016 6:01 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: PROFESSOR JULIUS O. ADEKUNLE: A HUMANISTIC PERSONOLOGY--- A YULETIDE CELEBRATION
Great essay! The Akan of Ghana that say when the lion tells you that you are strong it is beyond a mere evanescent praise-poem. It is the iron-clad reality.
Kwabena Akurang-Parry
Sent: December 23, 2016 8:39 PM
To: dialogue; Yoruba Affairs
Cc: borgu
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - PROFESSOR JULIUS O. ADEKUNLE: A HUMANISTIC PERSONOLOGY--- A YULETIDE CELEBRATION
PROFESSOR JULIUS O. ADEKUNLE: A HUMANISTIC PERSONOLOGY
A YULETIDE CELEBRATION
By
Toyin Falola
December 23, 2016
My celebration for the closing year is for a tertiary hero with a bold sanctity marker, whose constant push towards perfection in mind and body is so extraordinarily unique that the fragrance of his daily practices travels across great distances. I have no other person in mind than Professor Julius Adekunle, the great historian of pre-colonial Nigeria with additonal forays to other lands, such as Rwanda, and also to multiple topics on our human condition, our never-changing conditionalities.
One should hesitate to promote the résumé of a career over that of character. A character résumé is far more significant, as this is the introduction we offer to family and friends who are not part of our fields and, in the end, that is what constitutes the bulk of this statement. In today's celebration, eulogy is not my core rendition as this is more of a reflection on personhood, as Professor Adekunle is still in our midst. However, thinking of him, I am fascinated by the notion of selfhood and personhood, and how, in this season of closing one year and opening another, we seek guidance from higher spiritual forces and models of beings like us. Therefore, the persona of the beings we see and the prosopon of beings we cannot see can certainly be combined to elevate us. In the 1970s, as I was drawn to all sorts of philosophies, perhaps suffering from the traumas of the late 1960s, I went far deeper into the knowledge of the 4th and 5th centuries AD, bypassing the immediate successors of Christ, and encountered such contentious debates as how to separate humans from God; how to unite God and humans; how to unite God and Christ; and how God Himself was fragmented into human form, like the Yoruba Orisa gods of Sango, Esu, Ogun, Obatala, Oya and many more, with each playing a different aspect of God, but always manifesting frailties that weaken them individually and collectively. And so, distinctions have continued to emerge and have marked the bodies of humans, along with angels, spirits, and the Holy Ghost. But irrespective of how you deploy the fragments, and the debates that are unleashed in one's own mind, Adekunle, as a person, contains the attributes of a human and of a spirit. And here, I am not speaking of his rights and privileges as a citizen of our beleaguered but still vibrant nation, but to what the Yoruba call omoluwabi, or that very brief sketch offered by Harry Frankfurt who speaks about us as a set of attributes that define not only our human concerns, including our desires, yet, also painfully, if I understood Frankfurt well enough, those of the problems we are unable to solve in our own lives, and what some will call the vices that destroy us will be handled after life.
In an Adekunle's personal identity, the secularism of his career merges with the spirituality and religiosity of his being. I am not sure if he, as an individual, does separate them, although what the students see in class may be different from what the congregants see in church and what observers see on the streets, a triple heritage of sorts. As much as we attempt to synchronize them, we may also not always be successful in our self presentations. Or, as we present each aspect with its different angle, we may either be affirmed, or even be misread, if not totally de-legitimized.
However, do bear in mind that one can only see Adekunle's body, but not always his mind; even if one sees his words as well! And supposing that he claims to have a soul, how do we understand this both in its materiality and immateriality, as both cannot be decoupled. I understand his being, which is why this is written in his honor, but not his consciousness which explains why this piece will, forever, remains limited and perhaps limiting. If his character résumé is embedded in religion, then within what methodological framework is a disconnection ever possible?
Adekunle's moral fortitude is grounded in a rich history of connections to Yoruba organic values, a modernist work ethic incubated by Dr. Tai Solarin at Molusi College, and his own choices of religiosity and frugality. His cogent and fervent impulses are towards the good, and his community agenda, fanning across multitudes in multiple spaces, is to transform lives; first as a parent; second as a missionary; and third as a teacher. His devotionals are drawn from constant readings, and his ideas and life, portrayed in observations, murals of morals, prints and sermons, decorum and demeanor, are forever present and abiding, communicating spirited spiritual equality that gets spread to those with the full senses to decipher.
His journeys are familiar to me because I know them so well, from Ijebu Igbo in the early 1970s; then to Ilorin, the city of Islam; to Ile-Ife and its 401 gods of which Adekunle chose none; to Ibadan, the heartland of politics; to Canada to receive more knowledge; then to the US for his daily bread; with detours in Liberia to reconnect with diaspora relations. His loyalty has always been consistent, which explains his enduring location at Monmouth University, where he has served with distinction since 1996. And I forgot Oyo, his adopted homeland, the city of diplomacy. This loyalty is not just to one location, but total fidelity to teaching, his primary labor since 1979; and to the best of my knowledge, he will remain in the classroom, permanently a teacher. His rewards are already stored in Heaven!
In a twist of irony, totally unexpected, I chose two years ago to revisit Igboho to look at the Igbo Oba (the "forest of the kings"), the final resting place of some Alaafin of the great Oyo Empire. Wandering around a meandering road, wondering about the historic past of this great people, I saw a man who looked very much like Julius—tall, lean, shining black, broad smiles. Lo and behold, it was his brother, in their family house, on a peaceful street, in a peaceful city defined by its greenness, rich food and people, and ancient history. Charmingly, they are a lovely people! The excitement led to photos, those images forever planted in my memory.
Yet, this memory came much later, after the man had been known, not discovered. He was part of that massive educational expansion of the late 1960s, tied to a definitive commitment to the linkages between education and mobility, the attempt, begun in the 1940s, to create a new discourse of progress in the wake of a receding colonial state. Presenting Adekunle is to offer the evolution of Nigeria after the Second World War, with a foundational discourse on the notions of welfarism, couched in the language of community empowerment, universal access to basic human rights, and the rise and use of Western education.
As Adekunle's initial groundings in modern education unfolded, they did so in tandem with devotional practices located in the church, but opening to larger ideas of communalities. I met him not long after the Nigerian Civil War had ended, and I detected in our early conversations the tumors and tremors of a rapidly changing political space. The reflections of the time before that war, now often presented in nostalgic idealized terms, were further transcended by Adekunle in the 1980s, as he rode the waves of the local to the national, and then to the global, as his immersion into new systems and surfaces consolidated earlier beliefs while explicitly recognizing the new ideas of color and race in the far-flung cold climate of Halifax.
The intellectual foray by Adekunle began by tackling the history of Borgu, the people and state that interacted greatly with Oyo, where he derived his initial research interest in the African empire. Unlike now, whereby you can have historians who conduct no interviews, and visit the archives in three months to write shallow history books, his field was a difficult one. For, we should be reminded, the study of the peripheries is difficult. The narratives of empire, by their nature, submerge those of the incorporated and the outliers. Alas! Those outside of the empire have alternative histories, grounded in their own pride and resistance, their own autonomy. It is this very autonomy that Adekunle clearly recognized and discovered, highlighted and exposed. His understanding of difference—of Borguness—enriches our understanding of identity. First reading the manuscript when I was invited by Dalhousie in 1993 as his PhD external examiner, it was clear to me then how he tackled the iterations of state formation, in its physical expansion, connected to a spiritual context. And from Borgu, Adekunle has moved on to considerations of the larger Nigerian project, developing themes on leadership, democracy, and ethnicity.
. . . I need to pause for a moment!
II
The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge,
For the ears of the wise seek it out (Prov 18.15)
It took me a while (actually an understatement as I mean many years) to realize that Adekunle has been writing another set of literature: prayer books. When I received the first one, I was stunned. I knew nothing of this side of his talent. I read it a long time ago, and as the one who has called me the most on telephone, I began to understand him more and more. He thinks in terms of freewill, that is, there is no need to impose any religious or spiritual order on anyone, as transgressions would bring punishment in due course. Even if God, so goes the belief, created each of us in His own image, He seems to have backed off to let each being manifest him/herself according to self-determined paradigms. He once counseled a rebellious young man as to his folly, a man who confused knowledge with wisdom, who saw the narrow and the wide roads and immediately chose the wide one that would, in the end, lead to perdition.
While I have been to Adekunle's house, I only stayed long enough to partake in his favorite food, amala, as we both come from the amala zone, but not long enough to see whether he collects white garments and red candles. I don't even know the denomination he belongs to, although he has told me of his church on numerous occasions. Guided by peace, seeking grace, he seems to me to be permanently conscious of avoiding sin. His religious books are not connected to pastorpreneurship, as he does not connect Jesus with wealth-seeking, the Siamese Twins that have damaged Pentecostalism in his home country.
Adekunle's notion of success is inner peace, the balance of mind and body. His house is unnoticeable on the street, as well as his car; and his words are not dreams of a fleet of cars, objects, and more objects. In his own guidance on the daily bread, predicated on his ritual sanctification, salvation is the end product of spirituality. I see no rush on his part to run to the book of Revelations, as there is no need for the trauma of end times. I have joked many times that he, as an elect of God, can make it to Heaven since, as I read from the Gospel of John, he has been born not just of the spirit, but of water, the living water, to be sure.
III
Adekunle has remained serene. He is strong and unbroken. Just passing the twilight of his parenting years, the serenity magnifies in greater affection for his family. You cannot see the Imam's mumbar if your eyesight is not good enough to see the Ka'aba for long. His ethics open the eyes to see much longer and wider, and, in seeing, he reaches a level of sophistication that is unscalable. His non-academic side may be harder to decode, but they seem connected with a prana anchored to a geist. In this, his Yorubaness in the world of ghosts and witches becomes aligned with his faith in a world of body and mind. His akasha, to borrow from my rudimentary encounter with Sanskrit, allows me to actually fully grasp his essence where soul and spirit combine, although not as spelled out by the famous Al Ghazali on mysticism.
Here, let me annoy Julius, our man of the moment, by saying that his ardent spirits, to use the alcoholic term that he will surely detest, are too high, and one shot can produce a devastating intoxication! In the letters and spirit of his own combinations, the realm of the mind and that of the spirit cannot always be separated, so there may even be no beginning nor an end to his consciousness. As I re-read his religious book that he sent to me, just at the time I was re-reading the Gospel of John, not to enhance my religiosity just to be clear, I now fully understand Adekunle's permutation along a spiritual theology that borrows from Matthew 28:19. And it also seems he follows Paul's admonition in Romans 14: 22, that whatever you believe about these things, keep between yourself and God. He did not tell me this or state so in his writings, but here is where a pneumatology is well laid out, where God Himself is the uniter of mind and soul, truth and love, purpose and principle. I have to ask him in the New Year, 2017, how he breaks things down, or how, at the minimum, he can create a holarchy that may accommodate my own panentheistic metaphysics.
That Adekunle is not dogmatic is too ordinary of a statement to come out of my mouth. For, he has never tried to convert me, not even once, only joking that God will take the excessive bottles of beer away from my never-closing mouth and forever expanding stomach, as the self-appointed President of the Nigerian Association of Pregnant Men. When he and his wife once stayed with us in Austin, they did their prayers separately, far away from the madding crowd. I have, in fact, seen his well-worn Bible, but I regret that I did not pay attention to the version that he carries about or its contents. I have become so wrong-headed to believe that there is no common Bible, as I am not sure that all the Nigerian evangelists and pastorpreneurs are reading the same Bible that I do. Alas! I read the Bible far more than my secularist commune will appreciate, but I don't see where it insists that the more I give the pastor, the greater my reward on earth or the stocks that I purchase for Heaven, instead of relying on God's amazing grace to enter His Kingdom. I guess that Adekunle and I may be reading the same Bible, and we may be united more as knowledgepreneurs than as biblepreneurs, for our understanding of sins and their consequences, I suspect, is not so totally different. His private doctrines and his theology are more to my right than to my left, which may be why he gets along with me, and I get along with him. Or perhaps, he is more rigorous with his own Ten Commandments, and his own God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, while in my own eclecticism, I run to other holy books with differential and deferential assumptions. And so, in my own infidelity, I invoke the Urdu couplet as introduced to me by Dr. Vivek Bahl, my Hindu guru:
Mein kasrat-e gunah se khush huN
Ke roz-e hashar kuchh to kat-e ga vaqt sawaalo javaab me.
I am happy with the abundance of my sins
So that on the day of reckoning at least some time will be spent in question and answer.
Adekunle does the opposite: the brutally-rigorous elimination of his own sins so that on the day of reckoning his wait time will be within seconds. I wont know his result! He takes seriously the advice in Hebrews 12:14 to follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see God. Motives may be pure, work may be pure, but other impurities are determined and measured by means that are totally hidden from me.
Yet, it is in hiding those measures from me that my imagination gets grafted onto my speculations while being shafted by my musings. What I don't know must be admitted, the candidemia that grows from the academia of each of us, a fungemia that need not produce insecurity but an admission of intellectual drainage. Thus, I can actually discharge myself while not taking to unimaginable flights. For, I see a man who seeks to acquire wisdom, with spells and saves as his collector's items. I am not always sure what he constantly invokes, as invocations are sometimes privatized in cluttered bedrooms and dedicated ritualized spaces, but I need not think too deeply to know the extensive nature of the binary conception of reality, that darkness is set against light, that whiteness and blackness may be irreconcilable differences, that Heaven and earth are apart, and that body and soul are temporarily conjoined friends that may not be intimate; and even more so that others and self are strangers who may be locked in conflicts. But in our routine encounters, I am dead certain that Adekunle operates within that ancient, eighteenth century conception of a celestial city, where brightness appears in a candidez, a force that unites all the binaries into one whole. A yeast of knowledge brews in this psychotolerant wholeness, a mental candida zemplinina, that takes you and me into Adekunle's mental frame that is impressively osmotolerant.
May be you now understand that we all can live together, as Adekunle preaches, that we can all actually be Africans and Christians with not much in common or that we do not see the world and reality in a singularity, only that in the orbit of a candidez, our fungaemia (no spelling error here!) does not create untreatable symptoms of violence and war. Yes, and I should be the first to affirm the differences between Adekunle and me, we hold steady and fast to our differing beliefs, but then held together in a candidez that is not fully spelled out.
I hope that in introducing this extraordinary man to you, I have not impregnated you with contradictory ideas to deliver a stillborn in September, wondering why nine months are inadequate for a baby to stay in one's womb. Ogbanje! Remember the aphoristic statement by Heraclitus that you cannot step into the same river twice, since the water that flows is never the same: we are forever dealing with the binaries of lives, the unity of opposites, the pull of past and present, the agonizing travails of continuity and change. The personhood of Adekunle may be constant, but that reality will forever be changing. Parmenidis and his Eleatic School of Philosophy may use Africa to validate themselves that we will never change, but we will (not we shall!) as we will have motion, as we have the personhood of one Adekunle and many more of them as our torch to give the light of guidance. Our time will change us, just as we will change our time, following Adekunle's footsteps and affirming one of Einstein's principles.
Writing on Adekunle, who went to a secularist school, then developed strong Christian visions and ethical principles, I need to contrast his multiple pasts with the ambiguous present in order to arrive at a conclusion about our collective future. I need to deal with his body and spirit, a disambiguation that cuts a man into pieces without praying to see blood.
A question is necessary here: are we not all made up of multiple pieces? Yes, even if you try cleverly to spirit away some elements on a Sunday, and to ferry them back on a Monday. Like Adekunle, you too can manifest the God and the sacred in you in 2017; and your social and political activities can be connected to a much larger humanistic conception whereby, as Confucianism teaches us, your moral values can have their anchorage in development and deities. Ultimately, there should be a new trinity that guides us all: Africa's development; humanistic liturgies; and the cultivation of ethics. This trinity is doable, as Confucius teaches us even long before Christ.
Let us pursue a trinity that combines the mind of scholarship with the soul of progress so that we all can manifest something of Adekunle and, in doing so, to be noted for the peace we bring to the world. As I conclude this short epiphany and exercise in ethical euphemism, I am also wondering if Cuba's former strong man, Fidel Castro, is trying to enter Heaven, just as all of us, including our beloved Professor Julius Adekunle, will try to do at the end of our lives' journeys! For, Adekunle lives the biblical injunction, that if it at all possible, as far as it depends on you and me, we should live at peace with everyone (Romans 12.18). Your paraklesis can look up unto God to minister to the monstrosities of the living.
Amen! Amen! Amen!
TF
| sites.utexas.edu The Yoruba Studies Review is a refereed biannual journal dedicated to the study of the experience of the Yoruba peoples and their descendants globally. The journal ... |
| www.toyinfalola.com dr toyin falola is the jacob and frances sanger mossiker chair profssor in the humanities and a distinguished teaching professor at the university of texas at austin. |
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