Towards a Biography of Polymathic Scholar, Writer and Educational Entrepreneur Toyin Falola
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Questions
How did the polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola become one of the most prolifically wide ranging figures in the world of scholarship?
What are the roots of his dynamism, reflected in his spatial motion from his native Ibadan to the then University of Ife to the University of Texas, eventually crossing between Africa and the US on various academic initiatives, survivor of a stroke in his seventies but moving on from there, continuing the climb up the road of creativity, a road becoming ever steeper according to his own self created standards as he enters in his seventh decade into a sequence of works expanding his range of reference beyond his previous decades of productivity?
Challenges
Falola exemplifies the culture of maximizing opportunities for creative action.
Along those lines, it would be a shame if the life story of such a figure remains untold by others in its details while he is alive, leaving the storytelling task to himself alone, as represented by his two published autobiographies and a third one coming out this year even as he plans or is working on others.
Request
I would appreciate all suggestions and all contributions.
I want to hear from Falola, from those who like him and who don't like him, from his admirers and his critics and from those who combine both qualities.
I am interested in scholarly analysis as well as gossip beceause the latter demonstrates attitudes that need to be sifted to appreciate the various shades of how a person is seen.
Motivation
What are my motives?
Curiosity and ambition.
Curiosity about a great scholar and writer and ambition to tell a story of a phenomenon almost larger than life but which is unfolding before one's very eyes.
I am not convinced that negative views, whether factual or false, about Falola can diminish his gargantuan stature, thus I am not interested in hagiographic writing, centred on unrelenting celebration of a person.
I want to strive to see the person as what E.M. Forster called a rounded character, an individual's demonstration of the totality of what it is to be human, demonstrating the tensions of humanhood, between elevated and unelevated behaviour, at the crossroads of being and becoming.
Inspirational Theories
What are my inspiring theoretical guidelines, the ideas that shape my understanding of how a human life could be understood?
I am inspired by oriki, the Yoruba oral poetic form, which may be described as tracking the scope of an entity's existence as a complex of qualities at the intersection of self and society within the matrix of time and space, a description inspired by Rowland Abiodun's Oriki theory in his Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.
I am also motivated by the nexus of African theories of the self, from the Yoruba "ori" to the Igbo "chi" to the Benin/Edo "ehi" to the Kalabari "so" and the Akan "kra" on the nature of the self as embodying a unique constellation of possibilities at the intersection of fate and free will, mortality and immortality, the terrestrial and contingent in contrast to and complementarity with the ultimate, grounded in the creator of the universe, a conjunction of possibilities perceptible in terms of the "calabash" of totality, the intersection of possiblity and circumference from which each moment is born (Shloma Rosenberg, Mystic Curio), an image of sphericality suggestive of infinity and endless depth which yet grounds all possibility, integrating the immediate and the universal, the temporal and the timeless, as Mazisi Kunene depicts the idea of Zulu epistemology, theory of knowledge, in his Anthem of the Decades, incidentally distilling Africa wide symbolism of the calabash, and its correlates beyond Africa, an everyday object of infinite evocative value.
"The sun, journey and eternity", is how the Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi symbolism of the spiral as depicted by artist Victor Ekpuk is described ("Inscribing Meaning'', Smithsonian) conjunctive with the spiral as evocative of the coiling and uncoiling forms of reptiles, adapted to suggest the unity of existence, in Igbo Uli art (Robin Sanders, The Magnificent Uli Women of Nigeria).
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/CAGBtzfMuafRqF-82pd8%3DFJ9uCcv%3DsBSW1%2B8n55SEbsfo_f2EUw%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment