Exploring Yoruba Across Time and Space: Toyin Falola’s Global Yoruba

Toyin Falola’s book Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks is a landmark in Yoruba Studies, and almost certainly going to become a permanent point of reference.

It is an epic book, unparalleled, to the best of my knowledge, in its breadth in exploring the natal, larger African and diasporic development of Yoruba history and culture, emphasizing the growth of Yoruba cosmology as a unifying force across both its native, larger African and trans-Atlantic developments.

Falola pours his decades of exploration of Yoruba life into this book and soars even beyond his earlier engagements with the subject. He does this in readily accessible prose, narratively sweet yet bristling with ideas, richly illustrated with images likely unavailable anywhere else, eloquent examples of classical Yoruba art and new art addressing Yoruba realities.

Elaborate but clearly delineated maps depict the spatial configurations created by the demographic reworkings through which Yoruba identities emerged and moved across space within what is now Nigeria, in relation to West African proximities.

Contemporary Yoruba spatial centres in relation to those of others in Nigeria; the spatial relationships between the central locations of the various Yoruba subgroups; the proximities between these subgroups and other Nigerian and West African peoples; the spatial dynamics of the old Oyo empire, an early centre of Yoruba identity formation and diffusion; the locations represented by the intra-Yoruba wars of the 19th century central to shaping what is now known as Yorubaland; the resulting emergence of new Yoruba states in that time; the trade routes from the interior to the coast strategic to economic and cultural transmission and reshapings; the current spatial centralizations of the Yoruba in postcolonial Nigeria in relation to other peoples within the boundaries created by the River Niger, the River Benue and the Atlantic Ocean, all these are thereby visualized in the diagrammatic shorthand compressing space and time in a manner facilitating a bird’s eye view of vastly spread situations and events.

A priceless guide emerges to the cultural and political adventure constituting Yoruba history across the world, from its natal origins to its trans-Atlantic incarnation.

Sumptuously produced in elegant coffee table format yet exquisitely scholarly. Profound in analysis and synthesis  yet enjoyably readable, accessible to a broad range of readers, requiring only close attention to grasp its more theoretical passages.

Does any other book operate at this level of almost encyclopedic range on the subject?

Global Yoruba enables access to knowledge one would have to read through the equivalent of a library in order to approach its breadth of knowledge, but even the sheer accumulation of such knowledge is nowhere near the synergistic mastery within narrative flow and reflective power the book demonstrates, a mighty rock in the flowing river of knowledge that is Yoruba Studies, shaped by and possibly shaping the ocean of existence that is Yoruba being and becoming.

The book is jargon free while being grounded in various theoretically sophisticated fields of knowledge, from decolonization theories to philosophies of space and place, exposing readers painlessly and enjoyably to those cognitive networks, as the very latest orientations in global scholarship, from Africa to the West to the Americas, are brought to bear on the subject, distilling decades of Falola’s own multidisciplinary research and publications, complemented by new knowledge and new theoretical positionings.

Structure

Global Yoruba is carefully and ingeniously structured, using various organizational strategies in creating fluid order, demonstrating seamless linkages over a vast, many-sided subject, evoking intellectual excitement and stimulating imaginative uplift from the beginning to the end of the narrative journey.

The rhapsodic and the architectonic, adapting German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s terms on the organization of knowledge, controlled passion and architectural order, imaginative radiance and intellectual structuring, combine, creating something strikingly beautiful in its parts and massively glorious in the complexly interlocking whole, realized in terms of an ultimately limpid beauty, clear and transparent.

Division into five, clearly signposted sections gives the work structural clarity, with the introduction of the idea of global Yoruba in the introduction operative across the text, ultimately summed up in its conclusion.

We are introduced to the formation of Yoruba society as a social order defined by correlative value and knowledge systems, eventually conjoined into a political and philosophical synthesis, the trans-Atlantic journey of these segments and their unifications across time and space, even to the Americas, being core to the book.

The beginnings of pan-Yoruba society in the social amalgamations of the Oyo empire, the destruction of this agglomeration by Islamic jihadists, the defeat of the jihadists by Ibadan and the eventual emergence of  Ibadan as the axis of Yoruba cultural ascendancy is powerfully narrated.

The cultivation of egalitarian values in  Ibadan’s beginnings as a war camp for refuge from intra-Yoruba wars is discussed. The transposition of those values from  a combination of military culture and an egalitarian governance model,  a transition shaped within the matrix of the colonial encounter and its aftermath, into sterling cultural capital feeding the entire nation Nigeria, created by Britain, an achievement the impact of which resonates to the present and the future, is examined.

The complication of Yoruba ideological space by the emergence and eventual dominance of Islam, Christianity, Western colonialism, Western education and Western forms of government, are discussed, in relation to the strategies of resistance and accommodation evident in Yorubaland to these seismic changes as Yoruba culture travelled to and thrived in the Americas through slavery, and later, voluntary migration.

The nature of modernity in the Yoruba context is examined, at the intersection of Western and traditional cultures as Western influence radically reshapes the polity, even as Yoruba artistic forms undergo mutation in relation to the expanded scope of possibility opened up by the transformative encounter with new ways of living.

Artists and cultural activists, genetically Yoruba and from beyond Yorubaland and even beyond Africa, politicians and political movements, are vividly depicted, individualistic and group demonstrations of struggles for self-actualization and communal projection within and in relation to Yoruba geographical, cultural and ideological space.

Contemporary Yoruba politics in Nigeria, Yoruba film, Yoruba music and Yoruba written literature in Nigeria,  Yoruba cultural politics in the Americas and  Yoruba spirituality across the world, are explored in building a picture of contemporary Yoruba identity within and beyond its homeland in what is now Nigeria, as the book sums up the emergence of Yorubaness as  an ethnic and genetic identity as well as an ideological and cultural matrix, manifest in various ways across the world.

Artistic Power

Global Yoruba contributes to enriching Yoruba culture and its study, not only through the book’s ideational synergies but also in constellating  works of art never before assembled for this purpose, some of them possibly created for this text.

The artistic dimension of the work is itself a sterling achievement, complementing the near encyclopedic scope of the gripping and ideationally ambitious narrative, scintillatingly crafted in striking prose readily accessible to the general reader yet beautiful in its rhythms.

Visual art strategically shapes the optical power of the text, amplifying its ideational projections and the pleasurable experience of assimilating knowledge within the multi-cognitive space constituted by the book, sensorially uplifting and intellectually stimulating.

The only comparable book known to me in unifying images and text on Yoruba culture and art at this level of volume is Rowland Abiodun,  Henry Drewal and John Pemberton III’s Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, an indispensable work in Yoruba arts and its philosophical contexts, its combination of glorious visuality and powerful text yet unequalled in Yoruba Studies, to the best of my knowledge, even by the very rich complementary book The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts , edited by the same team.

Global Yoruba, however, operates in terms of a more modern artistic register than those two other books, which are centred in great examples of classical Yoruba art. Global Yoruba also demonstrates modern adaptations of the classical tradition while introducing new artistic orientations to Yoruba culture, mainly using strikingly original drawings.

 Inclusion, Exclusion and Suggestive Force 

Global Yoruba is foundational for Yoruba Studies, exemplary in terms of what it discusses and how it engages them as well as suggestive of how to approach what it does not discuss.

Though the text richly explores Yoruba film and modern Yoruba music,  it does not examine such strategic Yoruba cultural forms as the history of Yoruba oral literature and Yoruba visual and performative arts outside film and modern Yoruba music, and Yoruba sciences, such as mathematics, significantly studied by such figures as Olu Longe and Aimee Dafon Segla.

Even though it does not discuss those subjects the book’s interpretive model can be fruitfully applied to the exploration of those fields.

Image and Text: Cultural Personalization

All the images, photographs of paintings, sculptures and drawings in Global Yoruba are either from Falola’s private collection, as they are described in the book, or, as I expect is the case with the drawings, specially commissioned for the book, thereby also belonging to Falola.

Why would an author choose to populate such a large text on an ethnic group, a book centred on its global demographic and cultural spread, with only artistic works belonging to him or freshly commissioned by himself, thereby uniquely stamping his own aesthetic sensitivities on the book?

This  orientation is amplified by the cover image which centres a painting of Falola in an iconic pose from the repertoire of classical Yoruba sculpture. He is flanked on one side by the Statue of Liberty, the famous sculpture symbolizing entry into the United States of America on account of its prominence on Ellis Island, New York, once the primary entry point for immigrants into the US, and therefore evoking the trans-Atlantic migrations of the Yoruba to the Americas strategic to the book’s exploration of Yoruba globalization.

On the other side, Falola is flanked by an image of Orunmila, the Yoruba Orisha tradition deity embodying divine wisdom, suggesting the spiritual and philosophical culture distilled from Yoruba civilization in its journey within the Yorubas and cognate peoples  and across the seas to new lands, an aspirational essence demonstrating reworking in new ways in varied circumstances.

At Falola’s feet is an image of a woman with the body of a fish as her lower half, and that of a human woman as her upper body, a mermaid, as understood in other cultures, and a mami-wata, as this figure is named in African pidgin English, holding a covered bowl in her hands. A covered bowl in Yoruba aesthetics may suggest something precious, protected by being thus covered. It may be a spiritual potency latent within the ritual preparation inside the bowl, making the bowl a kind of shrine. In association with mami-wata, it could suggest wealth, since  mami-wata  is associated with wealth, an idea further evoked by the cowries strewn around her figure and at Falola’s feet. Cowries passed from being used as currency in Africa to being employed as ritual objects.

As an entity believed to live in seas and rivers, the mami-wata represents the motif of intelligent life as transcending conventionally visible forms of existence exemplified by humans and other animals, extending to entities who are not normally visible but may be encountered in special situations, a globally emergent belief, particularly in terms of the mermaid motif depicted here, but which has sunk into folklore and fantasy in many cultures while it remains live in the animistic cultures of the kind represented by classical Yoruba thought.

The mami-wata not only evokes the multiplicity of obviously conscious species perceived to exist in an animistic cosmos, but also the aquatic element through which Yoruba migrants passed to the Americas as they were ferried in slave ships, holding their culture within them even within the dehumanizing economic and political system of slavery in which the fire of that culture sustained them in preserving and even reshaping their humanity.

At Falola’s bottom left is an oshe Shango, a statuette of the deity Shango, topped by a double headed axe, suggesting power evoked by the thunder and lightning to which Shango is related. ”…the twinned celts [ the double headed axe, suggest ]  power plus power … Shango squared [ representing ]  the inner spiritual reality of the priest with the power of Shango imbedded in the head and emanating from the top” observes Margaret Thompson Drewal.

”The entire surface of the oshe”, she continues, ”becomes [ in the ritual context, akin to]  a vast force field of lightning, energized with …patterns that radiate outward from the central shaft [ suggesting]  power serving protective as well as decorative functions” (  ‘’Art and Trance among Yoruba Shango Devotees’’, African Arts, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1986,  60-67+98-99; 60, 62, 66).

Falola is depicted as holding in his hands objects emblematizing royal power, in the archetypal style evident in classical Yoruba art, ancient Egyptian and classical Tibetan art.

In one hand he grasps what looks like an o̩fò̩ horn, an instrument believed in Yoruba spirituality to enhance the spiritual power of speech, enabling the speaker’s commands to magically come true. In the other hand, he holds what looks like a bag of  oògùn, as named in Yoruba, magical concoctions meant to restructure reality through the overriding power of spiritual  force.

Why would a scholar in the Western tradition in which Falola has been primarily educated, having achieved the acme of Western academic training, a PhD, as well as the height of professional academic advancement in that tradition, a professorship, and one employed in a 21st century Western university, in the United States, the University of Texas, representing a culture far removed from that of Yoruba spiritual culture, depict himself in terms more befitting for a Yoruba spiritual adept, complexifying the image through the evocation of the Statue of Liberty representing a world far from the Yoruba universe embodied by those icons?

The image collage evokes the transport to the US of the Yoruba spiritual universe depicted by its symbols in the visual tableau. Falola’s image at the centre of the visual composition suggests him as embodying those spiritual values in their transport to the New World.

To what degree does he actually embody those values and to what degree is his image simply representative of a reality he studies but which does not define him? Does his powerful meditation on the orisha Eshu in his essay ” Ritual Archives” suggest an actual contemplative practice in relation to the deity, complementing the more intellectual summation of his introduction to his edited book  Èsù : Yoruba God, Power, and the Imaginative Frontiers?

What is the implication, for these questions, of his deep exposure to the practice of Yoruba spirituality, as evidenced by his autobiographical account in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth, of his childhood relationship with Iya Lekuleja, an elderly female seller of assorted items for spiritual work, as well as being regarded as a preeminent spiritual figure herself?

As one of the most significant writers on Yoruba spirituality and philosophy, evidenced by the largely scholarly character of his writings, depicting Yoruba spirituality more in terms of analysis from an external standpoint rather than from within an internal, practitioner’s vantage, may the  Falola image  be seen as evocative of the transmutation of the traditional symbolism in terms of his own practice as a writer, scholar, public speaker and institutional organizer?

May the ọfọ horn be understood as evoking Falola’s mastery of the power of language in Yoruba and English, projecting expressions strategic to reworking thought worlds across the globe wherever Africa is studied?

May the oògùn bag suggest Falola’s creation and maintenance of systems of knowledge creation, integrating people and industrial processes, research networks and publishing systems, creating landscapes of knowledge about Africa, monuments of understanding contributing to illuminating the continent?

Dominating the visual tableau defining the cover of Global Yoruba are the light held up by the Statue of Liberty and the radiant white of Orunmila’s staff and form, the sense of illumination projected by both figures amplified by their towering height. Ideas of illumination, in terms of knowledge and freedom, are evoked by the synergy of these iconic forms, from the United States and Nigeria’s Yorubaland.

May Falola’s iconicized image at the centre of the visual framework  suggests the book on the cover of which the artistic configuration appears as his own dramatization of the intellectual possibilities of  Yoruba culture, his own textual actualization of a universe of values intimately related to him and which he identifies with in terms of a balance between identification and critical examination, an orientation developed at length in his Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemology?

The collage, however, goes beyond those purely rationalistic orientations, framing the central figure in mythic terms, as associated with the overwhelming force of Shango, radiant with the wisdom and power of Orunmila, the deity holding an  o̩fò̩ horn similar to that held by Falola, thereby suggesting a parallel of power between human and deity, a human figure identified with the aquatic mobility of mami-wata and her cabalash of mysterious endowments, in a scene awash with the wealth symbolized by cowries, and correlative with the torch of illumination projected by the symbol of liberty, all these fused in the slightly bearded figure with the short Yoruba style trousers, part of the cycle of Falola’s self iconicisation ongoing in the illustrations to various books of his.

Totalistic Yoruba History and Historiography Inspired by Yoruba Thought

The artistic dimension of Global Yoruba, taking further Falola’s pattern of using visual art, either drawings, paintings or photographs, at times uniquely created for particular texts, visualities particularly evident, among other texts,  in his The Toyin Falola Reader, in his In Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation and his Milestones in African Literature, suggests, not only the distance travelled in demonstrating the multi-dimensionality of Yoruba discourse, the degree to which this has been interactively engaged with in scholarship, but also the ground remaining to be traversed in creating a totalistic Yoruba history, something the scope of this ambitious work beckons towards.

Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba: A New History uniquely broke ground by historicizing Yoruba philosophy and spirituality on a large scale, exploring the situational logics across diverse times and places through which these cognitive orientations were developed, in relation to the breadth of the social contexts of the growth of Yoruba civilization from pre-history to the 19th century, if I recall his cut off time correctly.

Falola has taken up the historicising challenge initiated by Ogundiran, developing another conception of the development of the matrix of thought, action and creative forms constituting Yoruba civilization as both an ethnic identity and an ideological or even spiritual and philosophical configuration, demonstrating how “the arts of being Yoruba” to borrow the title of Adeleke Adeeko’s book, have become a near global phenomenon through physical and cultural migrations of Yoruba civilization across the world.

Falola and Ogundiran powerfully dramatize the significance of the development of philosophical and spiritual thought worlds in this process, with Ogundiran demonstrating how some examples of Yoruba visual art, such as Yoruba bead work and ile iri, the house of ori, focus these ideational developments, an achievement which, however, could be taken even further than Ogundiran has done, building on his inspiration.

Falola focuses on illustrating the expressions of ideas in terms of art, and discusses Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, in relation to Yoruba film, from the earlier periods represented by Hubert Ogunde to the contemporary work of Kunle Afolayan.

Film, Yoruba written literature and modern Yoruba music are, however,  the only art forms discussed in depth in the book, although visual art strategically shapes the visual power of the text.

In unifying philosophy, spirituality, art, economics and politics to the degree  they have done, Ogundiran and Falola suggest the possibility of totalistic Yoruba history, an achievement which, if my knowledge of the state of the field is adequate, still lies in the future.

What do I mean?

          Further Developing Yoruba Hermeneutics Epistemology of Imaginative  Forms in  Yoruba  Thought  Proverb Epistemology 

Ogundiran splendidly marshals an interpretation of the cognitive orientations of Yoruba thought as emerging from and shaping the scope of Yoruba social experience.

His project could be further taken forward, through a use of Yoruba hermeneutic strategies beyond his employment of proverbs which strikingly enliven his text.

His foregrounding of Yoruba history as an adventure in the intertwining of thought and action could be further advanced through, not only using Yoruba proverbs in vitalizing his narrative and exploring the significance of the events  he discusses, but through a discussion of the logic of the use of proverbs in Yoruba discourse, establishing the conventional understanding of proverbs as steeds of discourse, forms of discovery, excavation, recreation and transformation of thought  and expression, as described by the Yoruba expression ” owe lesin oro, toro ba sonu, owe la fin wa”, ” proverbs [condensed verbal imaginative forms requiring sensitive unravelling] are the steeds of discourse, when discourse is lost, when it goes astray, we use metaphorical expressions,  proverbs, in seeking it out”, but also in terms of metaphorical expressions as dramatizing the ontological unity of imaginative expression in Yoruba thought, ultimately projected through the mapping of the unfolding of being in space and time represented by the Yoruba literary genre, oriki, as discussed in Rowland Abiodun’s Yoruba Art and Language.            

Adapting Yoruba Philosophy and Spirituality and Related Thought on the Intersection of Possibilities

Yoruba hermeneutics may be further developed through adaptations of ideas of relationships between fate and free will, between individual creativity and circumstance in the construction of history represented by conceptions of “ori”, the self, represented by the head, and “ase”, pervasive and individualized creative power,  in Yoruba thought, as these juxtapositions are particularly fruitfully explored by such works as Abiodun, Drewal and Pemberton’s Yoruba:Nine Centuries and Adegboyega Oragun’s Destiny: The Unmanifested Being (1998), grounded in interviews with Yoruba babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa and the writings of Segun Gbadegesin, references exemplifying texts I know that examine the relationships between fate and free will in Yoruba thought.

Such examinations of relationships between context and outcome, environment and history are vital for historiography.

They are more fruitfully engaged, though,  through dialogue with varied responses to these subjects in geographically cognate thought to that of Yorubaland,  such as Igbo philosophy, which develops its own orientations to the same questions.

These investigations  may be further enriched through comparisons with a global choice of ideas on relationships between self and possibility, environment and outcomes, juxtapositions foundational to Yoruba thought on development in time and space, the subject of history.

       Yoruba Sciences

A discussion of science in Yoruba discourse from the past to the present is strategic for a totalistic history of the Yoruba, demonstrating how Yoruba people have related to the understanding and shaping of the universe in ways that can be empirically verified by people using the same tools, from mathematics to medicine, even though in those contexts,  scientific techniques, such as mathematics and the use of medicinal leaves, are likely to co exist with spirituality.

Falola’s books, however, collectively engage the entire range of Yoruba discourse, but like Global Yoruba, often do not address  science, to the best of my knowledge, except such an example as the discussion of Ifa mathematics in ”Ritual Archives”.

Science in Yoruba culture, however, is further represented by such texts as  Aimee Dafon Segla’s Yoruba Mathematics and his work on relationships between mathematics and cosmology in Yoruba thought, by Olu Longe’s  and others’ work on relationships between Ifa mathematics, as an information management system, and computer science, and by Yoruba psychiatric medicine, which pioneering psychiatric doctor Adeoye Lambo describes as influencing his innovations (Towards a Culturally Sensitive Psychiatry: Lessons from Adeoye Lambo, Alapa Odugbo, 2024), and Yoruba herbalogy, evident in terms of its relationship with spirituality in Pierre Verger’s monumental Ewe: The Uses of Plants in Yoruba Society. 

            Yoruba Oral and Written Literatures Within and Beyond  the  Yoruba Language 

Global Yoruba also does not discuss Yoruba oral literature, a field in which a good body of scholarly publications exists. Yet, Falola’s range of publications demonstrate his accomplishments in discussing Yoruba literature and his ability to engage it beyond his efforts so far, given his fluency in Yoruba and his publications on Nigerian literature, in particular, and African literature, in general.

Yoruba oral literature is foundational for the imaginative and expressive universe of Yoruba thought and arts. The identity imaging and historicising character of oriki, the philosophical, spiritual, and comedic thrusts of ese ifa, the naturistic celebrations of ijala, the musical pathos of ewi, the incantatory power of ofo, and more, are among demonstrations of the creative power of Yoruba arts at its best.

How did these genres emerge, develop and contribute to the development of Yoruba thought, influence other arts, such as the visual and the performative, and contribute to written literature within and beyond Yoruba culture?

I expect the scholarship exists to construct a relatively complete history of Yoruba literature, if one has not been done,  from the more speculative efforts necessary to historicizing the oral tradition to the evident history of the written tradition.

My very limited exposure to efforts to historicise the oral tradition, though without dating but focusing on processes of change in how ideas are constructed in the tradition is Karin Barber’s ”How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the “Orisa” (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 51, No. 3, 1981, 724-745).

Scholarship on the continuity between the oral and the writtentraditions is exemplified by Abiola Irele’s particularly rich essay  “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: Fagunwa, Tutuola and Soyinka” (The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981/1990), indicating a perception of Yoruba literature as extending beyond those writing in Yoruba, such as Daniel Fagunwa, but also to authors deeply inspired by Yoruba thought but writing in other languages, such as Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka’s works in various kinds of English. Fagunwa, Tutuola and Soyinka are discussed in Global Yoruba but outside the framework of their relationship to the oral tradition.

The Scribal Tradition in Yoruba Philosophy

I also don’t recall encountering in Global Yoruba a discussion of the scribal tradition in Yoruba philosophy. The scribal tradition in Yoruba philosophy is represented by texts that came into public visibility through writing, rather than the oral formulations represented by what I describe as the classical period.

Such scribal texts represent efforts to engage creatively with the oral tradition, rather than describing it, powerful and indispensable as that is, or strike out in new directions, while demonstrating significant affiliations with other thinkers in the tradition.

Examples of such creative reworkings include Segun Gbadegesin’s explorations of the logic of the concept of ”ori”, the self  ( in African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, ed. Lee Brown, 2004);  my own study of the interpretive possibilities of Ifa divinatory hermeneutics beyond Africana contexts, engaging Western autobiographical theory in relation to the letters and paintings of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh ( Reconfigurations, Vol.6,  2020),  and in relation to the philosophy of space, integrating the London Underground, Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and German philosopher Martin Heideggger (The Palgrave Handbook of Africa and the Changing Global Order, ed. Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba and Toyin Falola, 2022) and on the value of Yoruba philosophy for educational theory and practice( Yoruba Studies Review, Fall 2018); Wole Soyinka’s discussion of drama in relation to cosmology through the lens of African and particularly Yoruba discourse ( Myth, Literature and the African World, 1976) ; Richard Olusegun Babalola’s discussion of his vision and challenges with adapting classical Yoruba architectural thought and practice in a contemporary context (INTBAU, 2013) ; Toyin Falola’s individualistic adaptation of Eshu hermeneutics ( in ”Ritual Archives”, in The Toyin Falola Reader, ) Malcolm Allen’s description of the challenges of the British Psychoanalytic Society in terms of Eshu hermeneutics ( ”Renewal or Retreat? Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the Crossroads”, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Vol. 24, No. 1,  2010, 44–50; and Moyo Okediji’s efforts at expanding the mathematical scope of Ifa in relation to ideas of infinity, if I have understood him correctly, Rowland Abiodun’s creation of new concepts in Yoruba aesthetics (Yoruba Art and Language, 2014); Susanne Wenger’s exposition and rethinking of Yoruba Orisha cosmology, represented most forcefully by her A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland ( 1983); ( Akinsola Akiwowo’s work in developing sociological models from Yoruba oral literature and thought ( “Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry”, International Sociology, Volume 1, Issue 4, 1986), among the few works I am aware of. Akiwowo is one of the most important figures in the globalization of Yoruba thought on account of the international impact of his efforts, as demonstrated by the debates it inspired in sociology about developing sociological paradigms beyond Western thought.

Continuities Between Oral and Scribal Cultures in Yoruba Philosophy

But then, to what degree can Babatunde Lawal’s account of Yoruba aesthetics in ”Àwòrán: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art” (The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001, 498-526) , be described as a description of or a report on Yoruba aesthetics, rather than a reconstruction of that aesthetics shaped by his own creative selectivity in making sense of a broad range of material gathered from broad ranging field work?

Are his efforts at interpreting Ogboni symbolism of the number three and other Ogboni forms is not enriched by his combination of speculative creativity and concrete information? ( ”À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”, African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100).

To what degree is Akinwunmi Ogundiran’s recreation of the ideational matrices of Yoruba society a product of that society or an outcome of his own convergence of intellectual observation and imaginative creativity? ( The Yoruba: A New History)?

Rowland Abiodun’s integration of various ese ifa in constructing an expanded conception of ”oro”, discourse, is magnificent in its skillful use of oral sources, but is he not better understood as a creative thinker continuing the reworking of the oral tradition represented by the oral artists whose works he draws upon? ( Yoruba Art and Language).

      Parallels with Indian Philosophy: B.K. Matilal and Jornadon Ganeri

A helpful example in appreciating the historical and ideational continuity of what I describe as classical and post-classical Yoruba philosophies is the Indian tradition, in which contemporary thinkers may both describe and rethink the classical culture as well as develop new orientations, in dialogue with other traditions, at various degrees of relationship with the classical tradition.

This is exemplified by such figures as Bimal Krishna Matital, whose works range from exploring the ethical implications of ancient Indian religious classics ( Ethics and Epics, 2015), to a broad range of philosophical questions ( Mind, Language and World, 2015) and  Jornadon Ganeri, who has studied the epistemic implications of classical Indian texts ( The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of the Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology, 2013) while ranging widely over other aspects of philosophy ( such as  The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance, 2012, ”The first book to draw together the Indian philosophical tradition with current philosophical work on the self”).

          Histories of Indian Philosophy

This sensitivity to continuity in Indian philosophy is represented for the classical tradition by such works as  Surendranath Dasgupta’s A History of Indian Philosophy( 1922-1955) which traces intertextual developments from the most ancient texts across centuries of development in classical Indian thought.

Purushottama Bilimoria’s edited  History of Indian Philosophy (2017)  takes the story up to the present, in terms of the continuity between the classical and the post-classical traditions, showing how the tradition  is rooted in the most ancient texts and practices, presenting”the various streams of Indian philosophy in constant contact, as flowing in and out of each other as it were, for this truly reflects an aspect of Indian philosophy itself, which, to a certain extent, sets it apart from western philosophy. “-Arvind Sharma, Journal of Dharma Studies ( Quoted on Amazon). 

         Parallels with Western Philosophy

Histories of Western philosophy do not include such foundational religious texts as the Bible while those of India necessarily engage with such equivalents in Indian thought as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata, but an adequate grasp of the history of Western philosophy is impossible without an understanding of the influence of Christianity on that tradition, even amongst supposedly secular thinkers.

Martin Heidegger’s exploration of the nature of being may be better appreciated in relation to Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas’ exploration of the same subject while Aquinas and Heidegger are both indebted to the ancient Greek thinkers,  Aquinas needing to be understood at the intersection of Christian theology and its Biblical roots and ancient Greek thought.

Immanuel Kant’s deeply impactful Critique of Pure Reason can only be adequately appreciated against the context of Christian theology, its Biblical roots  and the influence of these religious strands on philosophy, influences to which he responds as he develops his own approach to the tension between faith and intellect, between spirituality, intellect and imagination that shapes his work.

G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophical project may be understood as an effort to intellectualize a central point of Christian faith, the belief in the spirit of God as shaping history, an idea Hegel adapted to a study of the relationship between the human mind and that spirit interpreted in relation to consciousness as underlying  the universe.

Ancient Greek thought, which, with the Judaic tradition, constitutes the other matrix for Western philosophy, is itself represented by the dialogue between intellect and faith, myth and logic, a dialogue from which ancient Greek philosophy emerged, as represented by Parmenides, particularly by the mythic framework of presentation of logical thinking as the quality humans share with gods (To Think Like God: Pythagoras and Parmenides:The Origins of Philosophy, Arnold Herman, 2004)   and Plato’s use of the dialogue between intellect and imagination.

Yoruba philosophy may also be understood in terms of a dialogue from ancient times to the present, in which old and new themes and forms of thought are continually engaged through rethinking, creating, consolidating, reworking and breaking new grounds.

Emphasizing such  a history, as it emerges in Yoruba thought within and beyond Yorubaland,  would advance the complementary theme of Global Yoruba, Yoruba being and becoming, existence and change across the world, as a process reflected in various cognitive forms, representing people trying to make meaning of existence at different points in space and time. What better way to demonstrate this than through the permutations of Yoruba thought as taken forward by various thinkers from the past to the present?

       Yoruba Visual and Performative Arts

Global Yoruba also does not discuss Yoruba visual and performative arts apart from Yoruba music and Yoruba film, even though the history of those genres is richly represented by various texts, making them strategic to the study of African arts.

                     Yoruba Visual Arts

Explorations of the history of Yoruba visual arts have become paradigmatic for the study of African arts from ancient times to the present, with particular names becoming prominent in the classical context, such as Olowe of Ise and Lagbayi ( The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives in African Arts, 1994, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal and John Pemberton III; Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989, ed. Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton II and Rowland Abiodun).

Other masters are recognizable by their styles and schools of expression, such as that of edan ogboni sculpture,  even when the creators may or may not be known, as evident with Babatunde Lawal’s study of edan ogboni style and picturing of two artists in that tradition (  ”À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”).

Artists such as Lamidi Fakeye and his children bridge the classical and post-classical periods in Yoruba sculpture and figures such as Moyo Okediji, Osi Auduand Susanne Wenger and her school project traditional conceptions in new terms.

Okediji depicts the odu ifa, the organizational categories of ifa, in terms of organic assemblages  (”Revisioning Odu Ifa:Abstraction to Concreteness: Earth to Earth: Moyo Okediji’s Odu Ifa Earth Series Installations”, 2013, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, Facebook) and in painting  and thread weaving, as well as visually exploring the geometric inscriptional possibilities of opon ifa, the divination platform and cosmological symbol of Ifa ( “Rethinking Ifa : From Classical to Post-Classical Geometries 1 : The Ifa Vectors of Moyo Okediji, 2021, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, Facebook).

Audu explores  conception of the self through geometric and other images,  moving from his grounding  in Yoruba philosophy, on which he has published an article on the Yoruba philosophy of the self (  Oxford Companion to the Mind, 2004) to more general considerations.

Wenger and her school have visualized Orisha cosmology in terms of sculptural  and architectural forms in unique styles reshaping the Oshun forest in Oshogbo ( the best introduction to their work known to me being  Ulli Beir’s The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, 1975 complemented by the magnificent presentation at the site of the Adunni Olorisa Trust Adunni Foundation ).

Demonstrating the various forms of globalization evidenced by Yoruba culture, Okediji and Audu were born in Nigeria, schooled there, and, with Okediji, already had a thriving art practice there,  and subsequently emigrated to the US, while Wenger was an Austrian, already established as an artist in Austria before visiting Nigeria with her German husband, Ulli Beier, the great cultural catalyst, and remained in Nigeria, working with culture bearers and artists in Yorubaland.

Yoruba Performative Arts

Yoruba performative arts beyond modern music and film  are also not discussed in Global Yoruba. These arts include theatrical forms which emerged from ritual, such as as the Alarinjo travelling theatre which evolved from the Egungun ancestral masquerade in the 16th century within the politics of the Oyo empire, undergoing creative transformation and diffusion into other Yoruba regions after the fall of the empire, thereafter becoming the inspiration or progenitor of Yoruba theatre and its influence on written drama and film making, with prominent figures in Yoruba theatre having been, among others,  Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola, developing their own innovations within the tradition ( “Aláàrìnjó” ( Wikipedia), Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju, ”From Alarinjo to Arugba : Continuities in Indigenous Nigerian Drama”, African Identities, 2013, Vol. 11, No.4, 395-406; ”Yoruba Theatre, Nigeria – A Study”, Classical Arts Universe; Biodun Jeyifo, The  Yoruba Popular Theatre of Nigeria, 1984).

Historical explorations of the development of ritual into theatre and the influence of these forms in other performative genres in the Yoruba diaspora may also be traced, as Robert Lima does for Cuba (“The Orisha Chango and Other African Deities in Cuba Drama, ” Latin American Theatre Review, 1990, 33-42).

A totalistic history of Yoruba civilization would therefore involve the exploration of the growth of philosophy, spirituality,   the visual, verbal and performative arts and the sciences in relation to the full range of social developments as they have unfolded in constituting that civilization across time and space.

Historiographies and Philosophies of History Inspired by Yoruba Thought

Such a history could also develop a philosophy of history or a historiographic methodology correlative with Yoruba thought, demonstrating the potential of Yoruba philosophy as a guide to exploring and influencing the complex of factors shaping experience across space and time.

Is that not one way of describing Ifa divination, the premier Yoruba knowledge system?

May what can be described as Falola’s illumination of temporal, spatial and ideological networks in exploring Yoruba history in Global Yoruba not be productively visualized through the symbols of Ifa hermeneutics?

Falola’s book narrates the vertical, temporal progression of Yoruba history, from the remote past to the present, within and beyond Yorubaland, across Africa and into the Americas.

Ifa divination symbolism is represented by the drawing of a vertical line on the opon ifa, the divination platform and cosmological symbol of Ifa.

Falola also explores what may be described as the horizontal dimension of time in Yoruba experience, specifically in its spirituality and philosophy, a horizontality cutting across the vertical, and representing the aspiration to both immerse oneself in the depths  of the immediacy of experience and transcend that immediacy through  entry into the trans-temporal or timeless, aspirations pursued through ritual, through music, through textual engagement, efforts both discussed by Falola and potently visualized through art of spiritual activity in Global Yoruba.

Ifa divination symbolism also involves the drawing of a horizontal line to intersect the vertical line on the opon ifa, preparatory to a divination session, as described in Abiodun, Pemberton and Drewal’s Yoruba: Nine Centuries.

Falola’s interpretive model is centred in the spatial diffusion of Yoruba culture from its natal origins to different parts of the world, possibilities developing varied ways of engaging relationships between being and becoming, time and eternity constituted by philosophy and spirituality.

The opon ifa operates in terms of the visual equivalent of such a principle of centrifugal motion, motion from a centre to a circumference, represented by the empty centre of the opon ifa surrounded by its circumference populated by diverse carved forms, that centre being the space where the divinatory symbols are configured when cast in divination, configurations generating responses to queries brought to the oracle.

The ultimate possibilities of Yoruba culture are discussed by Falola as embryonic within its original formulation, breaking open afresh in new constellations under the impulse of diverse circumstances, multifarious creativities orbiting the inspirational centre as radiations from an originating nexus.

What is the significance of such interpretive models, using visual symbolism in generating a breadth of ideas?

They help stimulate thought through the evocative power of images and concentrate and consolidate understanding through the integrative power of visual symbols, evoking a field of ideations through a single image.

In achieving these goals, they demonstrate the cognitive force of Yoruba thought, the achievements of past centuries resonating in the present and future in new formations, the central thesis of Falola’s book on the globalization of Yoruba existence, moving from geography and biology to ideology, traveling across space and time.