--Sir:
After the age of 75, which I am not sure I will get to, I will write a memoir on the subject below. A year after my PhD, I took over the editorship of ODU: A Journal of West African Studies, which I edited till 1990. With Taiwo and others, we established the Ife Humanities Society.
But….
TF
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, July 28, 2022 at 4:35 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - #WitsGraduation - Keynote by Professor Molefi Kete Asante | Honorary Doctorate in Literature by Wits - YouTubeTaiwo has been a decolonizing scholar well before the term achieved its current momentum. Along with other achievements, such as his work on African modernities, on how colonialism disrupted African modernization and why Africa must modernize, and African knowledge systems generally, he is one of the interlocutors and perpetuators of the legacy of Akinsola Akiwowo, a pioneer of what would now be called decolonizing sociology, a movement to which Taiwo contributed, with his rich co-written essay creatively and critically engaging Akiwowo, and recently successfully spearheading a special issue of a scholarly journal on Akiwowo's work.
Taiwo's scholarship may be understood in relation to Paulin Hountondji's trajectory from African Philosophy: Myth and Reality to the edited Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, exploring conditions for developing African centred knowledge within a matrix that goes beyond Africa and of Anthony Appiah's progression from In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture to Thinking it Through to Cosmopolitanism, as an African sensitive African scholar who is yet self-consciously deeply implicated in the Western cognitive matrix, of Abiola Irele in ''In Praise of Alienation'' and ''The African Scholar'' and Chinua Achebe's ''The African Writer and the English Language,'' texts thinking through the question of African authenticity as a historical process undergoing change in the context of various forces rather than a definitive identity, orientations that may be juxtaposed with Toyin Falola's trajectory from ''Pluriversalism'' and ''Ritual Archives'' to Decolonizing African Knowledge:Autoethnography and African Epistemologies in the struggle of the African scholar between various understandings of African authenticity within contrastive but ultimately complementary pulls of various knowledge universes.
Taiwo is a scion of what may be called the Ife School of Scholarship and Creativity, a multidisciplinary constellation of scholars and artists, including Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Akinsola Akiwowo, Karin Barber, Moyo Okediji, Pierre Verger, Akinwunmi Ogundiran, Ulli Beier, Toyin Falola, Victor Ekpuk, Wande Abimbola, Rowland Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal and others, across different generations of University of Ife associates, who through studying or/and working at the university up till the 80s , and perhaps the 90s, particularly in relation to its Institute of African Studies, were strategic to the constitution of crucial aspects of what is now known globally as African Studies and African oriented, African inspired creativity, resonating across the world.
They are pioneers, among other achievements, in the growth of the sub-field of Yoruba Studies as an example of what would now be called the decolonizing process, complementing, in the Nigerian SW axis, the eminence of the University of Ibadan in the development of the Ibadan school of History, centring African agency in the study of African history, along with other achievements of the University of Ibadan nexus, such as the work of Abiola Irele in African philosophies and literatures and Isidore Okpewho on African oral literature, among others, developments complementing the University of Zaria arts revolution by Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Yusuf Grillo and others, in centring arts education and creativity in Nigerian environment and thought and the dispersal of the Zaria achievement across across Nigeria, fertilising the academic study of art across the nation, exemplified by Uche Okeke taking the animating ideology of the Zaria school, his theory of Natural Synthesis, to Nsukka, where it was catalytic for the artistic and intellectual achievements of the Nsukka Art school, represented by Obiora Udechukwu, Olu Oguibe, among other artists, scholars and writers, a fermentative effect reverberating to this day through Nsukka art graduates around the world.
From his earliest publications to the present, Taiwo's scholarly trajectory has arisen from this Africa centred matrix, distilling ideas and perspectives carried by artists and writers as they travel around the world, planting them in new soul, Taiwo's consistency of commitment and resilient passion suggesting a vocation fundamental to the logic of his existence, where one's scholarship and the totality of one's life are unified. His faculty page mission statement eloquently describes his mission and scholar and teacher along such lines.
I have not read his new book, only a number of reactions to it, but I get the impression that the title is meant to be provocative and evocative, hence its written on the book cover asAgainstDecolonization:Taking African Agency Seriously, the strike through inAgainstsuggesting both inclusion and exclusion of the idea, thus reading Decolonization:Taking African Agency Seriously, suggesting its a text on decolonization as a means of taking African agency seriously but possibly against a particular orientation to this process, in the spirit, perhaps of Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, which I understand as critiquing particular approaches to scientific methodology, advancing what may be described as a different, more fluid approach to doing science than the perspectives he critiques, rather than arguing that the idea of systematisation and process central to methdology has no place in science.
Taiwo's book seems to be a critique of a particular approach to decolonization, rather than a denunciation of the decolonization mission, in the spirit perhaps, of the differences between Soyinka's work and his understanding of Negritude, a difference of perhaps questionable significance, and between Molefi Asante's approach to Africa centred creativity and other approaches.
All doing the same or similar things, from different perspectives.
Apologies for what might look like a lecture. I've been thinking of Taiwo for some time, slowly following his work and those of the creatives I understand as his closer fellow travelers, and this conversation stimulated me to put these thoughts together.
thanks
toyin
toyin
On Wed, 27 Jul 2022 at 22:57, 'ugwuanyi Lawrence' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
A huge and hearty congratulations to Professor Molefi Kete Asante- the defiant voice and leader of Afrocentricity.
I think the beautiful thing about this award is that it is coming at the same time when Olufemi Taiwo has birthed another strange masquerade through a publication called- Against Decolonisation. What is majorly available to the public now is a review of the book but it gives some very possible valid account of the book- that it is against intellectual decolonisation!
The Igbos say "ebe onye bi ka ona awachi"-people defend where they call home. Perhaps Africa has merely become a house, not a home for some Africans for no justifiable reason!
In a typical festive period -when masquerades perform at the village square in some parts of Igbo area -you get a beautiful masquerade performing and an ugly masquerade with sticks pushing spectators as well.
Taiwo has just been shortlisted for nomination -as one of the 50 top leading thinkers by the Uk based Prospect Magazine for his work-Against Decolonisation!
But the question that waits Taiwo and those who applaud the work is- who he is leading; and to where?
Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi,Ph.D
Professor of African Philosophy & Thought
University of Abuja,Nigeria
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