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Saturday, October 31, 2026
Final Reminder!: The Toyin Falola Interviews: A Panel Discussion on Polygamy
USA Africa Dialogue Series - TF Music Playlist For October 2026
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Adebayo Ajadi
Assistant Brand Manager,
Toyin Falola Network
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Assessing A Poet Who Subscribes To Alternative Literature Canon With Canon Metrics
By Felo ai
Prompt: Is it appropriate to assess a poet who subscribes to alternative literature canon tendencies with canon metrics?
Response: Assessing a poet who subscribes to alternative literary canon tendencies with canon metrics is fundamentally problematic, as it applies a measuring rod designed for one set of values to work created under a different set of principles.
The term "canon" itself derives from a Greek root meaning "measuring rod," and canonical texts represent the standard against which individual works are measured
When a poet explicitly rejects that standard, using it as the benchmark for evaluation creates a category error.
The Nature of Canon Metrics:
The literary canon functions as a reference set for what is officially recognized as literature, and it is subsequently used in the evaluation of other works.
This means canon metrics are not neutral tools; they encode specific assumptions about what constitutes literary quality, significance, and value.
These assumptions have historically prioritized works by established authors from the Western literary tradition, such as Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dante.
Critics of the traditional canon argue that it is "tired, dusty, over-analysed, dull, and mostly white and male".
Alternative canon tendencies often emerge precisely as a response to these limitations, seeking to elevate marginalized voices, experimental forms, or traditions that the mainstream canon has excluded or undervalued.
The Mismatch of Evaluation Frameworks:
When a poet subscribes to alternative canon tendencies, they are typically operating within a different evaluative framework. For example, a poet drawing on Sappho's lyric tradition of homoerotic imagery and personal emotion is working within a lineage that values intimacy and subjective experience, not the epic, "macho masculine war central" tradition of Homer.
Applying Homeric or Shakespearean metrics to such work would miss its central virtues.
This mismatch is not merely a matter of taste but of methodology. The canon is "an echo chamber of influence" that "promotes or erases different voices within a society".
A poet who deliberately positions themselves outside that echo chamber is making a claim that the chamber's standards are inadequate. Judging their work by those standards would be akin to measuring a poem's success by its adherence to a tradition the poet has explicitly rejected.
The Case for Contextual Assessment:
A more appropriate approach would
assess the poet's work within its own chosen tradition and stated intentions. This does not mean abandoning all standards of quality, but rather recognizing that different literary traditions may have different criteria for excellence.
The canon itself is "subject to continual reassessment and revision, reflecting changes in cultural priorities and collective tastes", which suggests that evaluation frameworks are not fixed but evolve alongside the literature they assess.
Modern poets who engage with the canon often do so through dialogue, subversion, or reworking—as seen in Patience Agbabi's retelling of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Terrance Hayes's experimentation with Shakespearean sonnets.
These poets are not simply rejecting the canon but actively negotiating with it, and their work is best understood through that negotiation rather than through static canonical metrics.
Conclusion:
It is not appropriate to assess a poet who subscribes to alternative canon tendencies with canon metrics. The canon is a specific evaluative framework with particular historical and cultural biases, and applying it to work created in opposition to or outside of that framework produces distorted judgments.
A fair assessment requires understanding the poet's own tradition, intentions, and the alternative standards they embrace. While the canon can serve as one point of reference, it should not be the sole or primary metric for evaluating poets who have deliberately positioned themselves against it.
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Friday, October 30, 2026
Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Philosophy
how could AI achieve this-accessing his library
Over the next five years, as AI accesses
Muazzam’s library, a lot will be revealed about knowledge and
alternative futures.
Muazzam’s library, a lot will be revealed about knowledge and
alternative futures.
On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 8:56 PM Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovadepojuifa@gmail.com> wrote:
wonderful. could we have the title of this book, its price and how to buy it?
On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 8:44 PM Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:
Ibrahim Muazzam and the Quest for Philosophical Understanding
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy, Daily Trust, 30th October 2026
Last Saturday, I was the book reviewer for a book presented in a
festschrift organised by CITAD in honour of my good friend, Ibrahim
Muazzam. It was in recognition of his fifty years of scholarship,
research, documentation, teaching, writing and reflections about life,
society and human organisation. If everybody calls him Malam, it is
because that is what he is, a teacher. I was particularly glad to
notice many articles published over the past few weeks by many of his
former students thanking him for the intellectual guidance and
inspiration he gave them as their Malam.
It is appropriate that the focus of the book is the quest for
philosophical understanding as Ibrahim Muazzam is indeed a
philosopher. This means he is a critical thinker who has spent his
life in the systematic, rational, and critical study of fundamental
questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and
language. The word, as we all know comes from the ancient Greek
philosophia, meaning the "love of wisdom". Rather than gathering basic
facts or running scientific lab experiments, philosophy investigates
the underlying meanings, concepts, and assumptions behind how we live,
think, and understand the world.
Muazzam has also been a documentarist with great respect for words,
texts and their significance. He has a massive library and has lived a
life of collecting sources of data before artificial intelligence
emerged to redefine human existence on the basis of the power of
access to big data and unleashing the massive strength and
capabilities locked therein. Over the next five years, as AI accesses
Muazzam’s library, a lot will be revealed about knowledge and
alternative futures.
Unlike Muazzam, I am not a philosopher. I am a simple and mundane
political scientist and the editors, Y.Z, Ya’u and Murtala Muhammad
have no business asking me to review this book. At the end I accepted
the task because my qualification is that I am his classmate who might
present some insights into the background that produced Muazzam.
I met Ibrahim Muazzam in January 1973 as students at the School of
Basic Studies (BASICO) of Ahmadu Bello University. We were 18-years
old and had two assets, a solid secondary school education and had
blank minds that were ready to learn. In our time, being Basico meant
having great ambition – to understand the world and change it into a
better one. We were that arrogant and we needed to be. It was a great
beginning and we had the teachers to guide us. We had a great teacher
of World Contemporary History, Paul Claugh, who was in his twenties,
rode a powerful motor bike and taught us that our mission of changing
the world would only happen if we understood it. He analysed the
post-industrial world by tracing the three industrial revolutions that
had transformed the globe into a single system of exploitation based
on control systems over human beings, natural resources and Nations.
Imperialism is real he argued but it is also contested and he trained
us on the imperative of contesting, conquering and transforming the
system.
We had Dr Bill and above all John Haynes the poet who taught us to
love words and introduced us to their mysteries, During the day, we
learnt poetry in class. In the evenings, we re-assembled and he taught
us how to write poems. His philosophy was simple, we must understand
the word, voice; and we ourselves must have voice and articulate it.
In 2006, John Haynes won the Costa Poetry Award in the United Kingdom
for his book length poem – Letter to Patience. God bless Patience, she
ran a beer parlour in Samaru village where we congregated to explore
what the workers thought about the voices being articulated. Malam
Muazzam would refuse to follow us to Patience but would demand I brief
him about the discussions there.
And then then the turning point came. We gained membership into STAR
(Social Theory and African Reality), a Marxist-Leninist Study group
initially established by Peter Waterman where we learnt the
theoretical basis for the praxis that would lead to the revolution. It
was STAR that was transformed into the Movement for Progress Nigeria
(MPN) when we decided that we will start the world revolution by
launching the Nigerian one. We had the ambition and belief, we learnt
the theoretical tools and we were set to change the world as
teenagers. Two voices in SBS moved us towards political science. One
was the young lecturer Mr Jacobs, later renaming himself as Prof A. T.
Gana who was inspirational in painting the beauty of political science
as a discipline. The other was Mrs Amusa, a young Afro-American who
introduced us to Malcolm X and his radical ideas.
After our Basico beginnings, Muazzam and I then moved to the
Department of Government in 1974 to study political science. Our first
move was to demand from the patriarch of the Department, Rev. Fr.
(Professor) James O’Connell that Senate must immediately change the
name of the department from government to political science. He
refused saying the word politics would irritate the military who would
not want to employ a specialist in politics. We fought him saying our
ambition was not government jobs but overthrowing the government. We
harassed him by writing articles criticizing his poster article – “The
inevitability of Instability in Nigeria” pointing out that he was the
current incarnation of the colonial divide and rule tactics we were
combating. Father O’Connell ran into troubles on two fronts. In his
personal life, he fell in love with a colleague in the Faculty,
married and had to leave the priesthood of the Catholic Church. On the
political from, Murtala Mohammed came into power in 1975 and our prof
was given 24-hour deadline to leave the country and the department he
had led since 1967. The Department of Government then became Political
Science.
Muazzam’s love for philosophy was deepened by our political philosophy
teacher, Ayuba Kadzai. The young and restless philosopher trained in
the Chicago School introduced us to the approach of architectonic
philosophy. It refers to the systematic classification of human
knowledge and the art of building a unified, coherent philosophical
system. Derived from the Greek word architekton (master builder),
architectonics treats philosophy not as a collection of isolated
ideas, but as a structured edifice where every part fit together
logically. It seeks to map out how different branches of knowledge,
science, and morality relate to and support one another. Muazzam and I
were less convinced about Ayuba’s obsession to transform Nigeria into
a great power as if that status was a higher order than building
cadres for the revolution which was in our view the fastest route to
great power status with the people rather than against the people. May
the souls of our teachers rest in perfect peace.
The final point about the Ahmadu Bello University of our time was the
strong ideological position not to have a department of philosophy.
The position was that philosophy is not an ordinary discipline you
learn in a department. It is about architectonics and is integral to
all disciplines. That is why PhD as a terminal degree is a doctorate
in philosophy. What ABU taught us is that the acquisition of knowledge
must be purpose driven but also based on strong ethics. Knowledge must
always go beyond self-interest and aggrandizement. That what we do
with knowledge must flow from the output of our knowledge which
reveals domination and exploitation of our continent by capitalism and
its system of imperialism. There is no surprise when purpose emerged
as the liberation, the emancipation of our people and our resources.
These fundamentals have not changed.
The book, the Quest for Philosophical Understanding: Essays in Honour
of Malam Ibrahim Muazzam has 23 chapters spread into six sections and
342 pages. It is a labour of love for the honouree Ibrahim Muazzam
from friends, colleagues, former students and mentees. It is the sign
that his long-life commitment to critical thinking has produced
fruits.
Section one is on the foundations and frameworks of philosophy and has
six chapters. It looks at the value of philosophy which guides us in
knowing the types of questions we should pose so that our critical
thinking could develop. Philosophy is about human conduct towards
others, what is right, what is wrong and the norms and values that
define society. Western philosophy is based on the Cartesian notion
of personhood in which reason is embedded in individuals who have
personal autonomy and freewill. African philosophy on the other hand
blurs the distinction between the individual and society.
The five chapters in section two, the issue of philosophical
approaches to governance and society is addressed. Nigeria and indeed
Africa needs to pose the question of why we have recurrence in the
emergence of poor leadership. Good governance has become a rare
phenomenon on the continent. There has been no clear approach to
develop a philosophy of governance which means we do not have a basis
for the establishment of responsible and legitimate governance
systems. In addition, many feel they are marginalised from governance
and the imperative of developing an inclusive system is yet to be
addressed.
Section three has four chapters on the philosophies of security, peace
and inclusion. The classic position is that the state has
responsibility for the provision of security. Perspectives however
differ on what security means, and for whom. There is also a wide gap
between narrowly or broadly defined approaches to what security is.
What is security has remained a persistent question.
In section four, four authors address the epistemology of knowledge
systems in Africa. An African system of epistemology known as
Igwebuike is presented and analysed. It is based on solidarity and
complementary within the society and could be viewed as part of the
process of decolonising Africa’s theory of knowledge. Feminist
epistemology and theories of power offering a gendered perspective are
also presented. There is also a presentation of the intellectual
history of Malam Amina Kano, a radical leader who advocated for the
promotion of people’s power and the emancipation of the masses,
talakawa.
The three chapters in section five present philosophical reflections
on leadership and ethics. It is proposed that the Nelson Mandela model
of leadership recruitment provides enough elements for a philosophy
of leadership in Africa. There is a path to follow in improving our
leadership selection system.
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim
Senior Fellow
Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja
Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Andrew Bobby Tuley's post:The Ultimate Historical Gaslight: When Empire Puts a Black Face on White Supremacy
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - President Bola Tinubu has travelled to Makkah, Saudi Arabia , to perform Umrah and to pray for the country's peace and unity
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Line, the Sign, and the Seeing Self : An Uli–Nsibidi Hermeneutic for Art, Life, and the Wider World by ChatGPT. Directed by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The Line, the Sign, and the Seeing Self
An Uli–Nsibidi Hermeneutic for Art, Life, and the Wider World
ChatGPT
Directed by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
This essay follows from another essay ''Struggling with Theory Between the Human Mind and Artificial Intelligence 1: From Inherited Signs to New Instruments of Thought: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Create Theory? Uli, Nsibidi and an Experiment in Theory Development with Artificial Intelligence: What Possibilities for Toyin Falola Studies? News and Reflections from the Toyin Falola Studies Review 3'' (USAAfrica Dialogues Series) which explored the possibility and implications of delegating the creation of theory to AI.
This essay actualizes that possibility.It presents the directive, the prompt given to ChatGPT and the response of Chat to that prompt. The essay that follows this will use these ideas in illuminating a week in the intellectual life of the polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola.
Directive to ChatGPT
Read the following essays and develop a hermeneutic system from them conjuncting Nsibidi and Uli, a system that can be used in interpreting a broad range of phenomena beyond those artistic systems and within and beyond the cultures in which they are traditionally active. illustrate your response richly with examples of Uli and Nsibidi from various sources as well as from the work of Chiagoziem Orji and Victor Ekpuk whose work is discussed in the essays
1.Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism
2.Uli Philosophy and Mysticism
3.Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2
4.Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, ''My God Affirms, When I Agree": Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji Part 1
Response by ChatGPT
Abstract
Your essays suggest a way to bring Uli and Nsibidi into dialogue as two related practices of making meaning. Uli directs attention to the movement of a line, its relation to open space, and its power to draw an essence from a visible form.
Nsibidi directs attention to the sign as an event within a network of people, places, permissions, and possible meanings. Chiagoziem Orji’s inscribed self-portraits and Victor Ekpuk’s transformation of Nsibidi into a personal visual language show how these practices can be extended without treating either tradition as a fixed dictionary.
I propose a line–sign–situation hermeneutic: first observe a phenomenon’s contours, then ask how its elements acquire meaning through their relations, and finally examine who can perceive, make, interpret, or act upon those meanings.
The method can illuminate artworks, landscapes, institutions, personal experience, and intellectual histories. Its claims must remain proportionate to the evidence: a resemblance between forms can begin an interpretation, but cannot establish a shared cultural meaning by itself.
1. The Starting Insight: A Line Can Disclose; A Sign Can Connect
In Uli Philosophy and Mysticism, you describe classical Uli as an art developed by Igbo women in painting bodies and walls. Your proposed philosophy begins with the line’s movement through space: it shapes a form while making the surrounding emptiness active. Your story of Nkechi Odaro’s vision is a myth you construct for philosophical exploration, rather than a documented account of Uli’s historical origin. That distinction matters, because the story gives your new system imaginative freedom while the historical practice keeps it answerable to its makers. [1]
Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2 makes the interpretive ambition clearer. Drawing on Obiora Udechukwu’s account of seeking a subject’s distinguishing essence through line, you extend Uli from a visual practice into a way of asking what is central to a thing and how eye, mind, and hand might discover it. The essay also places that inquiry in conversation with Igbo thought about chi, with other African ideas of inward vision, and with Chinese aesthetics. These are comparisons you develop, rather than claims that the traditions say the same thing. [2]
Your Nsibidi/Ekpuk project adds a different question. It asks what happens when a graphic form has meanings distributed unequally among viewers, makers, and those entitled to interpret it. You propose attending to Ekpe’s esoteric knowledge and to Ekpuk’s artistic transformation of Nsibidi while seeking meanings that can speak beyond their initial setting. That creates a productive tension: how can an image invite a new viewer without pretending to disclose everything it contains? [3]
The conjunction is this: Uli asks us to follow the formation of meaning; Nsibidi asks us to investigate its circulation. One sensitizes us to contour, rhythm, and interval. The other sensitizes us to inscription, context, and access.
2. Four Visual Encounters
Uli: The Line and the Space it Leaves Open
Your reading of Obiora Udechukwu’s Our Journey follows its spiral as an unfolding path, associated in the essay with the royal python and with movement through individual and cosmic life. This yields a useful first rule: read a path as a path before assigning it a destination. Ask where the eye enters, where it is drawn, and how the spaces beside the line change its course. Your discussion of Joseph Eze’s Contemporary Uli Series No. 4: Udude (Spider) offers another pattern: face, tendrils, and web become a way to question a person’s place among other forms of life. These are your philosophical readings of named works, rather than universal definitions of their motifs. View the works and discussion in Uli Philosophy and Mysticism. [1]
Your second Uli essay provides a particularly concrete example: the classical Uli painter Martina Okafor working on a wall. The painter, circular field, smaller marks, and unpainted surface show that the “work” is more than the final motif. It includes a person making decisions at the scale of her body and her wall. View the image and your interpretation in Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2. [2]
Nsibidi: A Sign Made through Many Hands
Ukara cloth, Hood Museum of Art; collection of Eli Bentor
The white forms stand within an indigo field. Their spacing and repetition are visible to any viewer, while the significance of particular requested signs depends on further context. The Hood Museum explains that an Ekpe member may request designs, while Ezillo makers determine their arrangement and produce the cloth through stitching and dyeing. Making, possessing, and knowing are distinct relations to one object. [4]
An Ezillo maker preparing a grid, photograph by Eli Bentor, reproduced by the Hood Museum of Art.
Here the grid precedes the signs. It is part of their conditions of appearance: it allocates space, makes repetition possible, and affects how separate marks will be seen together. The photograph is a reminder that interpreting a sign also means examining the process and social relationships that put it there. [4]
Orji: The Self as the Surface of Inquiry
Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, “Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe,” reproduced in your Part 1 essay.
Your account describes a photograph combined with digital inscription: a calabash poised above the head, with lines extending across the face and toward the eyes. The photograph establishes an identifiable person; the drawn network asks the viewer to consider capacities and relations that a photograph alone cannot display. In your reading, the calabash evokes chi as a source of consciousness and creativity, while the work stages an encounter between personal assent, possibility, and divine affirmation. The claim about chi is an interpretation of this work within your essay, not a meaning to impose on every vessel or Uli inspired line. [5]
Ekpuk: The Head as a Field of Signs
Victor Ekpuk, Matriarch 2 (2022)
Image courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery, via Princeton University Art Museum.
Its head takes shape through an accumulation of marks. A viewer can first encounter a face, then begin to see its surface as a dense field of inscription. Ekpuk explains that he returns to heads because they carry identity, consciousness, and memory; he also describes Nsibidi as a point of departure for his art. His contemporary marks should therefore be read as his developed visual language, without assuming that each one is a traditional Nsibidi character with a fixed translation. [6]
Victor Ekpuk, Mask Series 2 (2018), via Princeton University Art Museum
Compare its concentrated head form with Orji’s photographic face. Orji visibly inscribes a particular self; Ekpuk builds a face through abstraction. In each, the head can be read as a site where seeing, remembering, and becoming meet. That is a comparative proposal, supported by their compositions and by the artists’ accounts, rather than a claim that the two works share a single symbolic code. [5, 6]
3. The Line–Sign–Situation Hermeneutic
The system can be practiced through seven questions. Each question has an artistic origin and a wider use.
Question |
Artistic prompt |
Application beyond art |
1. What is the surface? |
Is the mark on skin, wall, cloth, paper, or a photograph? |
Identify the material setting of an event: a street, screen, institution, or body. |
2. Where does the line lead? |
Follow direction, bend, interruption, and return. |
Trace how an idea, action, or resource moves through time. |
3. What does the interval do? |
Attend to blank areas, pauses, and distances between marks. |
Ask what is absent, delayed, unsaid, or deliberately left open. |
4. What becomes a sign? |
Determine which marks function through repetition, convention, or association. |
Identify the gestures, terms, or events that people treat as meaningful. |
5. Who knows which meaning? |
Distinguish the maker’s, commissioner’s, initiate’s, artist’s, and viewer’s positions. |
Examine expertise, authority, restricted knowledge, and competing accounts. |
6. What changes across contexts? |
Compare a motif on a wall, an ukara cloth, and a contemporary canvas without merging their meanings. |
Track how a practice changes when it travels between communities or media. |
7. What can the reading responsibly claim? |
Separate visible observation, documented meaning, and speculative interpretation. |
State both the evidence for an interpretation and where its reach ends. |
The questions work as a sequence, but a reader may return to an earlier one. A newly identified maker may change what the surface means; a previously unnoticed gap may change where a line appears to lead.
The Method’s Central Discipline: Three Levels of Assertion
A flexible hermeneutic needs a firm account of evidence:
1. Description: “The white designs repeat across the indigo cloth.”
2. Contextual interpretation: “The Hood Museum identifies the cloth as ukara and explains how requested Nsibidi designs are produced for Ekpe use.”
3. New theoretical proposal: “The division between those who request, make, wear, and interpret the cloth offers a way to study how knowledge circulates in other institutions.”
All three can be valuable. Keeping them distinct lets the third become ambitious without passing itself off as the second. The Hood Museum’s account makes this especially necessary: it says that the Ezillo makers can create the designs without knowing the meanings attributed to them by Ekpe users. [4]
4. How the System Travels
A City Drain after Heavy Rain
An Uli informed reading would trace the water’s lines: its expected channel, the point of obstruction, the paths it cuts through streets and homes, and the intervals between rainfalls when damage persists unseen. A Nsibidi informed reading would ask what each visible mark signifies to whom: a flooded doorway to a resident, a blocked channel to an engineer, a maintenance record to an agency. The situation question then asks whose observation leads to action.
This does not claim that a drain contains Uli or Nsibidi symbols. It uses lessons drawn from the arts to make relationships, broken pathways, and unequal authority easier to perceive.
An Intellectual Life or a Field of Study
For Toyin Falola Studies, the Uli question is how one line of inquiry curves into another: an encounter with a person becomes a book, an event becomes an archive, an archive becomes a fresh question. The Nsibidi question is how a book, lecture, photograph, or remembered conversation becomes a sign with different force for its author, participants, readers, and later interpreters. Orji adds the position of the interpreting self: where does the scholar’s own assent, perception, and creativity enter the network?
The method therefore invites a study of influence with several kinds of evidence, rather than a single sweeping declaration that every activity expresses the same essence.
A Tree
Begin with observable form: roots, trunk, branches, leaf veins, shadows, and the openings between them. Then study relations: soil, light, water, insects, birds, people, and the histories attached to that tree. If a community names it sacred, that testimony changes the interpretation; a visitor’s private sense of sacredness belongs to a different level of assertion. The line guides observation, the sign invites inquiry into shared meanings, and the situation locates both observer and tree.
5. What Orji and Ekpuk Contribute to the Conjunction
Orji and Ekpuk prevent the proposed system from becoming a formal exercise in lines and shapes. In Orji’s self-portrait, the marked surface is a person presenting herself. The movement from anya, the eye, toward wider questions of light and perception can be explored through the image’s drawn relation between vessel, face, and sight—but a precise account of how your “From ‘Anya’ to ‘Anyawu’” essay develops that movement requires its text. I could not reliably retrieve the linked Part 2 page, so I have not attributed a detailed argument to it. [5]
In Ekpuk’s work, the signs likewise have a living author. He recalls encountering Nsibidi during masquerade events and later choosing it as a resource for his practice. He describes his concern with the expressive dominance of line and with making an image say more through concentrated means. His account also complicates any simple account of Ekpe as exclusively male, pointing to women’s roles in its lore and community life. His testimony calls for attention to who speaks about a tradition and from what experience, alongside attention to the image itself. [6]
Conclusion: An Open Form of Disciplined Seeing
The proposed Uli–Nsibidi hermeneutic begins wherever something takes form. It follows a line, studies the space around it, asks when a mark becomes a sign, and locates the people whose actions give that sign force. Orji brings the perceiving and creative self into view. Ekpuk demonstrates how an inherited system can become the point of departure for a new one.
Its broadest question is simple: How does a form become meaningful, and for whom? Asked carefully, that question can move from a painted wall or ritual cloth to a self-portrait, a flooded street, a scholarly archive, or a tree—while allowing each to retain its own history.
Sources
[1] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Uli Philosophy and Mysticism.
[2] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Uli Philosophy and Mysticism 2: Inspirational Sources and Creative Processes.
[3] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism
[4] Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Ukara: Ritual Cloth of the Ekpe Secret Society. March 1, 2015. Source of the ukara cloth and Ezillo maker images.
[5] Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe, “My God Affirms, When I Agree”: Chi, Creativity, and Cosmic Nexus in the Art and Thought of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, Part 1. July 7, 2026. Source of the Orji image reproduced here.
[6] Princeton University Art Museum. Conversation: Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage. Interview by Annabelle Priestley, October 16, 2023. Source of Matriarch 2 and Mask Series 2; artworks © Victor Ekpuk.
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