The Beauty of Classical Fulani Spirituality, Philosophy and Literature as Realized in Ahmadou Hampate Ba's Kaydara
.Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The Fulani are also associated with nomadic cattle grazing on account of their decades long practice of that culture.
But, different from Islam, the Fulani have a great spiritual and philosophical culture which might not be well known in the English speaking world.
The Fulani have developed a powerful cosmogony, an account of the creation of the universe, a cosmology, a perspective on the structure and dynamism of the cosmos, and a mystical culture, a method of direct interaction with the creator of the universe, that are purely original, independent of Islam, constituting a striking contribution to human spiritual and philosophical achievement.
Complementing these fundamental cosmological orientations is a narrative tradition exploring and expanding various aspects of the intersection between the Fulani imaginative universe and their larger cosmology.
The most important expositor of this subject accessible in English, though in translation, known to me, is Ahmadou Hampate Ba, reading Iyalla-Amadi and Elechi Amadi's translation of whose book Kaydara, rendered as Kaydara: The Mysterious Journey, has inspired my writing this piece.
This is the more poetically rich of the two translations of this book I have engaged with, the other being Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali, translated by Daniel Whitman with notes by Lillian Kesteloot.
The story is remarkable for its original weaving of motifs- central images and ideas- recurrent in world literature- the mysterious and wise old man and the quest in relation to wealth and/or wisdom.
The story creates a twist in which these two are attained in unanticipated ways, ways that reinforce the centrality of mystery in the cosmology behind the story.
Kaydara: The Mysterious Journey, by Ahmadou Hampate Ba, translated by Iyalla-Amadi and Elechi Amadi.Published by HEBN Ibadan.
Available from Sunshine Booksellers Ibadan for 2,000 naira.
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