Akin Ogundiran: The Historian and Archaeologist of Yoruba-Atlantic becomes Chancellor Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
I am pleased to share the good news that Professor Akin Ogundiran has been named Chancellor's Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This distinguished title is a university-wide honor reserved for a full professor who has attained outstanding scholarly achievement in a professional field, and excelled in interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service in more than one department or college. He is the third professor in the university's history to attain this distinguished rank— https://provost.uncc.edu/news/
2019-10-28/ogundiran-receives- chancellors-professor- designation Professor Ogundiran has always been as exceptional as he was promising. He was a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University where he bagged BA in Archaeology (First Class Honors) in 1988. This is where and when our interactions began, and that was where we sensed he was a student who would be greater than his teachers. We are proud of him, as one of the best students produced by Ife. He earned his M.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Ibadan in 1990. Ten years later, he received his doctorate in archaeology from Boston University. Within eight years, he became a professor of History and a major pillar in African Studies. In my book, The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity and Globalization, I devoted Chapter 10 to his oeuvre, stating in one of the key paragraphs that:
In connecting West Africa to the Atlantic economy, Ogundiran is pointing to what could be characterized as the metabolic rift between supply and demand; African economies were on the supply side of the global division of labor that compelled them to produce for the Atlantic economy and, at the same time, to consume products from external sources. This division of labor, and the productive mechanism unleashed by the demand side, ultimately had implications for all aspects of institutions. Ogundiran has to grapple not only with the meaning of local history, but also with the definition of the world in which the local is situated against the background of rapidly changing events. And if, as he treats the local, he engages in issues around production and trade—as all his objects indicate—he is forced to engage in the understanding of how society relates to nature: that is, how humans ultimately relate to their environments, using and destroying them at the same time, and sometimes renewing them as well.
Ogundiran's career span ranged from journalism to the academics. He taught at three universities between 1989 and 1993: Ambrose Alli University (then Bendel State University), Delta State University, and the University of Benin, in their respective Departments of History. He also had a stint as a news editor and journalist at the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State, both in the radio and television divisions. After his doctoral degree, he accepted the appointment of Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University in 2001 where he earned tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor within five years. He also served as Director of the African New World Studies. He moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2008 as Chair of the Africana Studies Department and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology + History.
As a distinguished scholar, Ogundiran has devoted his career to working at the intersections of many disciplines: history, archaeology, folklore, geography, ethnography, and geochemistry. His collaboration with many experts has made this possible. He has particularly used his transdisciplinary training and interests to explore many aspects of Yoruba history from the 12th century to the present. He launched several archaeology projects from the central Yoruba and Edo regions to the Yoruba northwest to answer questions on regional interactions, the birth of societies, and the impacts of globalization on social formations, as well as the sociology and political economy of Yoruba cities, kingdoms, and empires. As a result of these studies, he developed the first and only comprehensive chronological framework for Yoruba history, covering more than a thousand years. He also made the stunning discovery of an ancient town buried under the canopies of Osun Grove, a Nigerian national monument of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Two years ago, he led the archaeological team that identified the ancient city of Bara where the remains of the past Alaafin of Oyo were buried between ca. 1615 and 1830. This last discovery is part of his long-term research on the archaeology and history of the Oyo Empire.
A tireless fieldworker, he has described himself as an archaeologist who is interested in local history in order to have a better understanding of global history. He said, "Much of what we know today about world history and the place of Africa in it must be revised based on the original research that we archaeologists are doing. Every day, we bring something new to the historical archive that challenges popular knowledge of the past." He has been a strong advocate that the model of history education that Africa inherited from Europe must be set aside for a new interdisciplinary method. In an influential keynote address that he delivered in 2011 at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, he called for a new curriculum of history that will include archaeologists, historians, and other scholars, from sociology to philosophy and art history. According to him:
We will need to return to the kind of eclectic methodologies that the late Professor Saburi Biobaku and his collaborators outlined in Sources of Yoruba History nearly 40 years ago... We need in our departments of history, not only people who can use the colonial archives to write colonial-era history, but also archaeologists, historical linguists, historical anthropologists, art historians, ethnographers, etc., who can interdisciplinarily interrogate our precolonial history. I say, for any university in Nigeria to be a major player as a fountain of consciousness, we must pull down the walls that separate history and archaeology. As long as these walls exist, we will continue to copy Western historiography, and Western archaeology. Let us pull down this wall that divides our labor into miniscule fragments, and liberate ourselves from the silos of colonial construction of history. It is time to reconfigure a new humanistic curriculum that will enable us to develop a liberating paradigm of culture and history.
Ogundiran has his boots on the ground, not only in the field but also in the classroom. His passion to mentor a new generation of scholars in interdisciplinary studies of history and archaeology led to his appointment as a Visiting Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Ibadan where he mentors graduate students in field research methods and social theories. He is also an External Examiner in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania for archaeology postgraduate studies, and a Gaduate Supervisor of African History at The University of Bonn, Germany. He has also held a visiting appointment at the University of Cambridge and has been selected to serve on the advisory committee of the Shanghai Archaeology Forum in China.
Ogundiran's scholarship extends to the diapora where he has explored the impacts of modernity, capitalism, and the slave trade on the creation of Africa's Atlantic culture, cultural continuities between Africa and the Americas, and the trajectories of Yoruba cultural legacies in the Atlantic world. Ogundiran's research has been supported by several institutions including the Carnegie Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Boston Humanities Foundation, and American Philosophical Society. He was also a National Humanities Fellow and a University of Cambridge Yip Fellow. His work has been anthologized in multiple entries including the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. In July 2014, he delivered the high profile keynote address at the Joint 14th Congress of the Pan-African Archaeological Association of Prehistory and Related Studies and 22nd Biennial Meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, titled "Collapsing Boundaries: A Continental Vision for African Archaeology."
Ogundiran is an author/editor/co-editor of several publications including Archaeology and History in Ilare District, Nigeria (Cambridge Monograph in African Archaeology, 2002), Precolonial Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola (African World Press, 2005), Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (Indiana University Press, 2014) which received a Choice Outstanding award. His articles, reviews, and essays have also appeared in African Archaeological Review, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, Journal of African Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, American Historical Review, Journal of World Prehistory, International Journal of African Historical Studies, International Journal of Cultural Property, Current Anthropology, African Studies Review, English Historical Review, Economic Anthropology, and History in Africa, among others.
He is a highly-respected scholar among his colleagues. Commenting on his transdisciplinary scholarship, Nancy Gutierrez, dean of UNC Charlotte's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences said: "The impact of Professor Ogundiran's research stems from the themes of human society and behavior that he explores through archaeology, history, and geography. These characteristics make Professor Ogundiran's research truly transcendent, not just across academic disciplines, but also through the entire human experience." Provost Joan Lorden, the provost and chief academic officer at UNC Charlotte also describes Ogundiran as "an internationally recognized scholar whose contributions to the university and to the highly interdisciplinary fields of Africana studies, anthropology, history, and the arts define what it means to be a Chancellor's Professor." Ogundira is currently the editor of African Archaeological Review and was a co-founder of Yoruba Studies Review.
As an academic administrator, Ogundiran served for twelve consecutive years in the position of a program director and department chair respectively (2006-2018). Under his leadership, the Department of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte tripled its undergraduate enrollment in the major, added more than 20 new courses to the curriculum, developed an Africana honors program, launched African language courses in Swahili and Yoruba, created a concentration in health and environment within the Africana Studies major, and launched the graduate certificate in Africana Studies. He also created a university and community-linked annual lecture titled Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Lecture, named after the founding chair of the department. He initiated and collaborated with the College of Arts and Architecture to launch the annual Africana Artist-in-Residence program. He also developed a wide range of community partnership projects that promote Africana knowledge systems, history, and culture in the Greater Charlotte area. His community partnership works in Miami and Charlotte have earned him accolades and honors such as a letter of commendation from former Congressman Mel Watt and a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for Community Service.
Ogundiran enjoys reminding everyone about his Ibadan roots. He is particularly fond of his early childhood in the inner city of Ibadan, in Ojagbo-Aremo-Ode-Aje axis. He recalled his childhood in a recent interview:
It was a cosmopolitan environment, with a diversity of interests – Muslims, Christians, Orisa devotees, etc. Very early on, I realized that the elders around me paid attention to history, stories, things, and places in the way they solved problems, negotiated differences, managed conflicts, and organized towards a common goal. This was the background that shaped my unconscious orientation. Maybe, my interest in the study of history began with immersion into that kind of environment. https://africa.wisc.edu/
africa-in-our-lives-akin- ogundiran/ It turns out that our natal compound is the same: Ojagbo, at Ibadan. Let me recite, in his praise, the collective city praise poem, as recently modified and rendered by Iya'Badan, to save for another moment of glory, that of our compound where we worship Sango, the god of thunder:
Ibadan mesi ogo, n'ile Oluyole.
Ilu Ogunmola, olodogbo keri loju ogun.
Ilu Ibikunle alagbala jaya-jaya.
Ilu Ajayi, o gbori efon se filafila.
Ilu Latosa, Aare-ona kakanfo.
Ibadan omo ajoro sun.
Omo a je igbin yoo, fi ikarahun fo ri mu.
Ibadan maja-maja bii tojo kin-in-ni, eyi too ja aladuugbo gbogbo logun,
Ibadan ki ba ni s'ore ai mu ni lo s'ogun.
Ibadan Kure!
Ibadan beere ki o too wo o,
Ni bi olè gbe n jare olohun.
B'Ibadan ti n gbonile bee lo n gba ajoji.
Eleyele lomi ti teru-tomo 'Layipo n mu.
Asejire lomi abumu-buwe nile Ibadan.
A ki waye ka maa larun kan lara, ija igboro larun Ibadan.
What about the translation? Let me give the task to Akin, Baba 'Beji, our distinguished and
famous historian and archaeologist. This is his first assignment in this new position!
If his Ibadan upbringing prompted his interest in the study of history and archaeology, then Ogundiran has long expanded his provincial roots from Ibadan across the Atlantic and deposited knowledge in archives around the globe. As he assumes this new title, we can only wish him many decades of outstanding scholarly achievements, community engagements, and global impact. Akin has used his intellect and brilliance to become my senior. I bow to this great man.
Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA
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