Stockholm
Sweden.
20th October 2022
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Many thanks for your heartbreaking response.
Paradoxically, it is simultaneously so inspiring to know that someone like you is not alone in saying what you say and feeling what you feel about this abject situation from which only God and a national/nationwide mass movement, a massive, concerted, consciousness-raising rally and cry to our Politicians and wannabe great Leaders of Nigeria should be able to remedy.
What are Messrs Tinubu and Atiku doing about it?
You must have seen Peter Obi being interviewed on BBC's Focus on Africa, gesticulating wildly like a Francophone African graduate from the École de Paris, but not a word from him, about education. I was not impressed. Always, it has to be education first - that's why Tai Solarin was worthy of the Right Livelihood Award.
In Sierra Leone, Maada Bio got a lot of wind in his sails when he announced - in his SLPP Manifesto back then, the importance that he was going to give to education, with an emphasis on that old SLPP dream: " the education of the girl child !"
How far they have come since announcing those intentions is another matter altogether; as the poet put it, "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley"
As we watch in wonder at the success of China, Singapore, Malaysia, the rest of Asia and the Indian subcontinent (India and Pakistan) what's most puzzling now, as we observe the chaos and total disarray as evidenced by the perennial teachers' strikes in our Nigeria - and the dilapidated state of the University campus of a great university in need of renovation, refurbishment and maintenance - what is equally painful to acknowledge is is that it's not as if there are no successful antecedents and precedents to follow. So, why don't they? Is it that the will to do so, to get the nation on the rails to success has taken a leave of absence?
And what success there is, is relentlessly being exported as finished and partly finished sometimes as polished products otherwise being mourned as the brain- drain, at which movers and shakes throw up their hands and their heads in despair and tell us that the drain is irreversible, unless, to begin with, the opportunity is made a democratic right and entitlement for everybody in the country - and that is the democratic ideal that wannabe presidents of Nigeria should be adumbrating, when given the freedom and the opportunity to do so, even as guests in a BBC studio or at home in Onitsha
Sixty-two years after declaring the sovereign Independence of the potentially great nation of Nigeria, up to this point, after the beams of light from e.g. the late great Chief Obafemi Awolowo's implementation of a successful education policy during his brief period as Premier of the Western Region, and some other stellar efforts in the oil boom years by e.g. Ambrose Alli who as governor of the then Bendel State devoted 50% of the state budget to education - and these policies are still reaping dividends.
Since then, the dreadful, deliberate neglect of education - as the engine, the sine qua non of any future national development - is a crying shame. But let not the disheartened surrender to despair - we could start at ground zero grassroots level with the pedagogy of the oppressed. ( I set off to Nigeria in 1981, armed by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau
With good leadership ( at the top) the education revolution will kick start at kindergarten…
With regard to donations for your projects, you are aware that apart from some generous, do-good philanthropists, there are also various bodies that you could turn to for institutional help - far above the mighty widow's mite
--On Thursday, 20 October 2022 at 12:14:37 UTC+2 ovdepoju wrote:Great thanks, Cornelius.
Please allow me to respond in two parts, first sharing observations about the OAU campus then addressing the specifics of your response.My experience of the campus is akin to stumbling into a space that constellates all one's deeply held wishes which one did not know how to fulfill.I pray OAU is again able to fulfill its promise, as up till 1990, it was a global hub of scholarship, a place where such people as Karin Barber came all the way from the UK to study, becoming great scholars. Which had Soyinka, Jeyifo and other luminaries in African Studies.Oduduwa Hall, rising gloriously at the culmination of the magnificent road from the main gate to the main campus, is badly in need of paint. An air conditioner in obvious need of repair is visible on its majestic front. This grand space, however, is fronted by three carefully kept mounds, on the smoothly mown grass of which can be seen aesthetically powerful trees, ancient and exquisite.Amplifying the grandeur of the Hall is the massive hill at its back, hill and hall combining to generate a sense of loftiest aspiration, of human positioning within nature, the fragile, two legged creature who is yet able to adapt to nature and adapt nature to his will.Having been welcomed by this glorious balance of natural space and built space, what do the students encounter? What are their living conditions?The stories I hear about OAU student hostels are not inspiring. The few glimpses I seem to have had of some of these hostels did not suggest encouragement, although one of the men using bikes in transporting people on the campus showed me superb new structures behind Central Market which he described as hostels built by the Ooni of Ife, with others in preparation.With reference to the hostels built by the school, a current student says the students are not ready to pay meaningful rent for the hostels, meaning there is no money to maintain them. Another view is that the lack of water and other amenities discourages the students from paying proper rent.Still another angle comes from the story, from February this year, of Heritage Ajibola, a student in a private hostel who fell into a badly constructed septic tank covered with a plank, and died after an hour of immersion before she was rescued, in spite of the large sums paid by the hostel residents, according to the OAU student union president.What kind of university is that, in which a student falls into a septic tank? What kind of barbaric zone is that in which a septic tank is covered with planks? Is such barbarism evident of the hostel or of the university? Can barbarism exist amidst beauty and other virtues?
What does this incident suggest about mutuality of responsibility between private interests operating on campus and the university, of oversight by the university in relation to such private ventures, particularly those addressing student needs?Another report on the same story adds "The students had on October 1, 2021, staged a mass protest against alleged negligence on the part of the management of the institution's health centre, which led to the death of a final year student of the Department of Foreign Languages, Aisha Adesina.''I'm also informed by both a student and an academic-the latter giving me a ride in his car on his way to fetch water in that car- of problems with water in the staff quarters, as I saw a tanker belonging to the university delivering water to a house in those quarters. One eye witness report stating that there is no water in the entire staff quarters except Road 20. Can that be true?I have heard that the same water problem bedevils the students' hostels, making the toilets a nightmare. In the light of the evident problems with water in the living quarters of those who teach the students, such hearsay needs examination.What may be concealed behind the amazing beauty of the OAU landscape? How may the imbalance between possibility and actuality in such an environment be addressed?Magnificent spaces, but at times despoiled by waste. A superb grove of trees, powerfully evocative against the sky, but fronted by a large, rusty, damaged and overflowing waste bin. Resplendent vegetation, but in some cases used as dumping grounds for refuse, in some cases, as a matter of official expedience, while in another instance, in another wonderful section of landscape, a sign starkly proclaims that no refuse may be dumped there.Such painful inconsistencies mark that glorious landscape, suggesting a clear awareness of how to care for it, marred, perhaps, by policy inconsistencies and by sheer unavailablity of resources, as evident from the aged fire fighting trucks of the university's fire service, the fire service being an impressive enablement but the look of the trucks suggesting financial struggles.Clearly, a place constructed with a vision of global standing in mind, but in obvious decline. After going into exile in the US from another famous university, in Uganda, Makere, Ali Mazrui declared in one of his books, ''Makere, you were built for the ages. You must wait for the ages to rebuild you.''A significant number of Rowland Abiodun's pivotal papers, foundational and yet Everest-like in their quality at the intersection of visual and verbal art, philosophy and spirituality, were written while he was an OAU academic. Those papers are not likely to have been written in another kind of environment, representing the nexus of access to centres of traditional knowledge and a fructifying academic milieu created by the likes of Akinsola Akiwowo, Wande Abimbola and Pierre Verger, pioneers and summiters in Yoruba Studies.''Akiwowo and I would stroll back and forth between his house and mine, discussing until the early hours of the morning,'' Abiodun states in a private communication, such fruitful inteactions blossoming in texts exemplified by two particularly great papers by each of them, Akiwowo on sociology of knowledge and Abiodun on mythic metaphors.How likely are you to stroll and chat leisurely if you are worrying about how to get water for the day?I am here writing beautiful things about the campus but I am insulated from its challenges. I have hot and cold water in my air-conditioned, hostel/hotel room. There is almost always electricity. But im paying good money for these services.How can such confort become the norm in this glorious learning landscape?thankstoyinOn Wed, 19 Oct 2022 at 22:44, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
Kudos! You did it once again. Congratulations!
Not kid kidding!
In this instance, more in line with Wordsworthian Pantheism and less like the mystical rascal William Blake in wonderment, you transported some of us, all the way to Ile- Ife - as a result of which I was sure I would remain as a kind of permanent home-coming and now it's a romantic and sentimental nostalgia, a somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience,
Up till today, in this people's world, since the university is the place where among other things you learn to socialise, my only regret is that, unlike Herr Dan Strehl, I did not go to Ife at about the same time, where he was taught by W. Soyinka among others, but took off with Better Half, to Legon instead.
However, I really don't complain because of a host of mostly Ghanaian, American and Canadian friends, Mustapha Tettey Addy, Thomas Annan, Frafra brothers Dollar & Attah and the crew at Nima, exiled Sierra Leonean Major Sandy Jumu ( who else would lend me his car?) fellow Saro man Samuel Oju King and his band the Echoes based in Kumasi, and fellow students such as John Collins (now Prof John Collins) , Terry & Ann Smutylo, Rudy & Thelma Silas, Kwatei Jones Quartey, Cyprian Lamar Rowe, Roberta Turner, lecturers such as Albert van Dantzig, Jeff Holden, Francis Abiola Irele, Joe & Adrianne Seaward, Jean Love, were really interesting, as was Victor Le Vine, Gerald Moore, Jawa Apronti, Jack Goody, and for beauty, there was Kumasi, Koforidua and the Aburi Gardens. All the preceding personal is more of my scattered notes, recollections that pop up from time to time, part " spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings ", part "emotions recollected in tranquillity" ( smile) a manus in process…
Opened wide
eyes of astonishment -
the one-timeness of this photo
and yr description not captured
and frozen in time by a still photograph
of an object of desire, a micro-universe
a living, live, undulating mound of beauty-
full big body booty on the roll, in motion on yon
Arunachala hill which Sri Ramana Maharshi
made his permanent abode.
How far is Ile-Ife from Ibadan
"Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold-flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun." ?
Light upon light - just as you heard Jesus say
" You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven"
So, here and now, wherever you may be, I ask you
How far Is Ibadan from ancestral Abeokuta,
the fabled city under a stone?
And how far is Mons Capitolinus, the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome,
from the Campus of the Obafemi Awolowo University?
On Wednesday, 19 October 2022 at 10:20:53 UTC+2 ovdepoju wrote:Ecosystemic Microverses at the Campus of the Obafemi Awolowo UniversityIle-Ife.png?part=0.1&view=1)
An Encounter with AmazementOluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in wide eyed wonderat thenaturalistic magnificence of the OAU Campus
What would people think if a child smiled instead of crying on being born? Why is it believed that crying must be the first reaction of every child, crying because of removal from the womb universe in which it has existed for months? What if the child becomes sensitive instead to its entry into broader possibilities, into a more expansive flow of air, more expansive spaces, and starts smiling?
I became like one such child on encountering the OAU campus. My experience suggests what Jaideva Singh describes as the Yoga of Amazement, the title of his translation of the idiosyncratic classic of Hindu Tantra, the Vijnana Bhairava, in which a person is enjoined to practice approaches of sensitizing oneself to oneself and the relationship between oneself and one's environment, taking time to be alert to the most minute of perceptions, so that the glory of being alive may be awakened and entry into the splendour underlying existence may be touched.
On coming out of where I'm staying on the campus, I understand myself to be at work by the very act of stepping out into the open air. The landscape calls to me to recognise its glory, evident in moving through every inch of space.
On waking, I've also begun work, as is my style even before this sojourn at OAU. At work because contemplation begins from waking, inspiring sensitivity to the emergence into the moment of awakening as entry into ''morning yet on creation day,'' as Chinua Achebe references an image from Igbo folklore in his essay collection of that title.
Lungs vitalizing, mind alert, limbs dynamizing, indicating that the miraculous creature on terra firma, rising from absence to the wonder of existence, is once again awake, mind roving, hungry to exercise its powers, a journeyer across creativities in which, he, a representative of his species, is called upon every second to justify his existence by transforming that existence into something beyond what is given by nature, beginning from alertness to its own being and the cosmos enabling that being, represented by air and earth, enabling breathing and moving within space.
This essay is about the intensification of this experience of wonder through a surprise encounter with a unique concentration of this environmental force, a micro space inspiring the idea of an ecosystemic microverse.
Photo by myself
Camera: iPhone 6s
Image edited on Photos app of an HP laptop
Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''The concept of an ecosystemic microverse is an idea I have developed to describe an aspect of the landscape of the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.It represents the evocative powers some of the natural forms on the campus have for me, associative capacities deriving from their design by human beings or from their naturally occurring character, or both. This may emerge from the design strategy of constructing or enabling sections of landscape which are partly or physically separated from the larger landscape in which they belong but which may share characteristics of this bigger space. It may also occur in relation to other kinds of spaces.This idea was stimulated by my encounter with a wonderful section of the university campus partially hidden from view on the left side of the road leading from Central Market, a relatively short space beginning after a junction there and culminating in Polaris Bank.Walking from the market, and getting close to Oduduwa Hall, I saw to my left a superb site of mounds and undulating spaces covered in delicately beautiful grass, trees prominent within it, like sentinels guarding a zone of covert beauty.Moving further on, I observed an entire landscape was hidden from view from the road by trees whose leaves concealed a richly vegetative world, partly visible from a gap in the screen. Stepping under a branch at this gap, I found myself in a universe of bird sound, amplifying my enclosure in an almost primeval cosmos, far removed in character from the paved road a few feet outside and from the commercial activity and building construction taking place on the other side of the asphalt.''The morning stars threw down their spears and the angels of God shouted for joy,'' this combination of lines from the Bible and English poet William Blake's depictions of a celestial event evokes for me the sense of wonder I experienced as I stepped from one world into another in penetrating that space.A place so uniquely exquisite, so atmospherically potent, so delightful in it's spatial and arboreal varieties, a zone secluded and pristine, evoking for me the beginning of time, it would require a master nature photographer, with the best kind of cameras, to adequately evoke the atmospheric force of this space.
Something similar applies to the atmospherics of various micro-spaces, as sections of the OAU landscape may be called. This is exemplified by the ambience generated by particular stretches of heavily wooded space, spatial relationships between trees generating unique atmospheres.
These are all the more striking in evoking forest space as they overlook the technological identity represented by the often smoothly tarred central highway of the campus and the vehicles speeding on it, conveying people between the main gate and the university's academic, residential and commercial centres, homo sapiens in its fervent motion in space and time, watched by their older brethren, the trees, whose lives are measured in larger cycles of time within smaller spans of space.
In my encounter with the primeval space I discovered near Oduduwa Hall on the OAU campus, I marvelled at the good fortune of those who might be using the building overlooking this wonder, but the building looked derelict, infrastructural maintenance being a challenge on the campus, its condition making me wonder if the building was in use.
My mind went to the ardent cultivation of such superb secluded micro spaces, but perhaps without the sheer lushness of this one, at the University of Cambridge. Such enclosed locations, Fellows' Gardens as they are called in Cambridge colleges as known to me, are reserved for distinguished scholars, fellows of the colleges, yet here was a glory such as this, open to everyone, even I, a passerby.What a microverse of possibility, I thought, a universe secluded from the sprawling magnificence of the campus, different in scale from its majestic trees and the hills dominating the skyline, the hills a guardian race of giants, immobile in sentinel duty, watchful through aeons of time.This sheltered region, so different from those hills and the glorious trees on the landscape, dramatises the balance of intimacy and grandeur represented by the OAU campus, a balance central to nature's spectrum of possibilities.
The immediate inspiration for the concept of an ecosystemic microverse is my encounter with the OAU garden. The more distant motivation for the idea is Ghanaian artist and philosopher Owusu-Ankomah's Microcron image, in which the idea of multiverses, multiple universes, is projected through a circular sequence of multicolored circles, the Microcron, its circular rhythms suggesting an infinity of possibilities.It is such infinities the OAU landscape evokes for me, the sense of an expansion into ultimacy, possibilities endlessly unfolding, as the sound of crickets constellate into a core of vibration in my mind as I rise from sleep, a sonic dynamism akin to the intense oscillation of creative powers from which the universe emerged at the beginning of time, cricket music being a constant accompaniment at Kufoniyi hostel, my residence on the campus, an acoustic lyricism purest at night, resonant in the darkness, as with the lights out, I am immersed in this fraternity of sound, my insect brethren expressing their own nature in their own universe as I am doing in mine, a biological creature expanding its capabilities through technology, the laptop on which I am writing.The concept of an ecosystemic microverse is also embodied for me by other trees and natural spaces I have encountered on the campus and in the city of Ife that fascinate me with their dramatisation of multifarious possibilities.Such trees and environments are further emblematized for me by a mound in front of Oduduwa Hall in the OAU campus, a domed elevation on the left as one approaches that hall from the main gate, a place on which a tortoise and a crocodile, mythic figures in some African oral literatures, are poised like entities from a mythic tableau, enacting a cosmogonic encounter.Two of the three trees on this mound are shaped, not only by the single vertical thrust of trees in general, but by the combination of this upward motion with twisted strands, at times coalescing into knots, almost making two trees in one, as the twisting fibres wrap themselves in sinuous dexterity round the trunk of the tree, a dynamic conglomeration rising from the roots sunk in earth, as smaller plants and other existents congregate at the base of the tree, culminating in a creative cacophony, a symmetrical network of leaves and branches crowning the entire ensemble.
''Dew, pour lightly, pour lightlydew, pour heavily, pour heavily, so you may pour lightly,thus were myriads of existence poured upon the Earthuniting on Earth activated by purpose''as runs my imperfect memory of ''Ayajo Asuwada,'' a beautiful Yoruba poem in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry,'' dramatizing ecosystemic and social unity through an account of the creation of the world.This memory is evoked by the renditions, for me, in these living tree sculptures and landscapes, of the multiculturally occurring image of the Tree of Life, rising from the fecundative synthesis of soil, of nourishment from the earth and nutrients from the sun, as the tree generates its own means of living, evocative of roots of cosmic essence from which all possibilities are awakened and reawakened, multifarious potential suggested by a tree's multiple branches, myriad actualizations dramatized by the unfolding of existence as narratives of dynamism in space and time, an idea derived from what may be called The Tree of Odu, an image of Ifa, a Yoruba knowledge system, as depicted in Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.I did not take any pictures on that day of my fateful discovery of the primal microverse, one way of naming the enchanted space I stumbled upon, leading me to construct the idea of an ecosystemic microverse. The battery of my phone, my only photographic equipment, was flat after earlier prolonged photography.I returned the next day and took pictures. In the process, however, I realized that a primary approach to that place is contemplative attention, cultivating an immersive relationship in which I would be opened to the spirit of the place, its identity as a blend of the visual, the acoustic and the atmospheric.Such attunement, facilitated by looking and listening in stillness, assimilating the atmosphere through my senses and mind in a quiet intensity of embodied power, drinking the place in with the totality of my being, as the space seems to seeps in through my pores as its air circulates in my lungs, would sensitize me to its unique actualization of relationships between animal and plant life, of the webs of being formed by connections between growing things, and its evocation, in my presence there, of the the human quest for the secrets of the universe, adapting Wole Soyinka's summation, in Myth, Literature and the African World, of Ijala, a primary Yoruba poetic form.I also became aware that the unique visual power of this place and its distinctive atmospheric identity were perhaps beyond the capacity of my skill and photographic equipment to capture. It embodies an individualistic constellation of qualities of which the most sensitive harmony of experience, technical and artistic methods and technology would be required to enable its sharing with an audience through an image.Should I hire a professional photographer? Would the person be attuned to photographing landscape? Is the task at stake not beyond the simpler issue of the quality of one's camera or one's capacities photographing other contexts beyond landscape? Should I take this as an opportunity for self development as a picturer of natural spaces and forms, the way the French Impressionists groomed themselves in painting the character of landscape at it appeared at different times of the day, this place becoming my place of sojourn at various times of the cycle from sunrise to sunset, experiencing its shifting identity as it metamorphoses between pre-dawn, dawn, midday, dusk and night?In my exposure so far to nature photography, I have encountered only one book in which the photography is able to adequately dramatize these subtle potencies in nature, Janet and Colin Bord's Mysterious Britain, it's matchless black and white photography projecting an atmospheric resonance that I have not seen colour photography, in all it's lushness, as able to capture.
This essay has no images even though I took a good number of pictures I would like to show. How do I choose between this visual wealth, how compose the images in sequence? Perhaps better to let the ideas come to life first, and the images follow at a more restful time, when the surging force of ideations inspired by that discovery of the primal space has stabilized into a quiet flow.Donation RequestGreat thanks to all donors who have enabled my stay at Ife and those who have provided logistical guidance and moral support. Futher donations would be appreciated to enable further stay at Ife and proceeding to Benin-City, to sudy its great culture of sacred trees, groves and forests, particularly within urban space.--
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