A Salute to the Elephant

Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”

1
 Abstract

Inspired by the transition of humanities scholar Francis Abiola Irele on July

2, 2017, this essay explores his legacy. The enquiry frames his
achievements in terms of his oscillation between individual studies of
imaginative works and the exploration of imagination in general,
particularly the African imagination, as a cognitive style in the arts and in
the correlation of the arts and the sciences, advancing his projection of the
possibility of conjuncting Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology and modern
scientific cosmology in a synthesis contributing significantly to
restructuring dominant conceptions of the cosmos. These expositions are
complemented by images and accompanying texts demonstrating these
disciplinary convergences. These cognitive reworkings are contextualised
by a presentation of his efforts in academic organization and leadership.
The investigations are subsumed by a conjunction of his work and lines of
Ijala, Yoruba hunter’s poetry, saluting the overwhelming majesty and
power of the elephant. Irele’s accomplishments are thus depicted in terms
of a concentration of ideational and practical possibility rooted in a
particular milieu but the significance of which transcends and unifies time,
space and cultures.

The essay is organized to enable ready accessibility to its library of sources.

The rich links to various online platforms make it a Web linked survey of
the components through which it builds a universe of knowledge spanning
various disciplines, continents and cognitive cultures. In the choice of links,
from Amazon book pages at times enabling one read sections of a book,
along with rich customer reviews on those books, to academic essays, a
balance has been sought between ease of understanding, speed of access to
breadth of information and sophistication of engagement. All links here are
active as of the completion of most of the links on the 12th of September
2017.

2
 Salutation

I salute Daniel Izevbaye, Abiola Irele’s colleague at the Faculty of

Humanities, University of Ibadan, who brought to us at the Department of
English and Literature, University of Benin, Irele’s essay “In Praise of
Alienation”, the central Irele production referenced in this work, Izevbaye
acting in the spirit of a person conveying a treasure to a distant land, the
seed planted by the Izevbaye gift growing over the years to issue in the
growth represented by this creation.

It was the same Izevbaye, whom, when I approached him as a master critic,
a most admirable teacher and humane person, about how to train myself as
a critic, advised I should complement my literary studies with
investigations in another discipline, my first degree in literature being the
context in which I had met him, and to choose a critic I would like to
understudy. I did not know one of those critics would be Irele and the
complementary fields, now achieving equal centrality with literature in my
explorations, would be the visual arts, philosophy and spirituality, as
evident from this essay.

My colleagues and I in our third year class at that department of language

and letters in what is informally known as Uniben were privileged to have
with us one of the most notable critics of African literature, whose works
one could see almost everywhere in books on the field, Daniel Izevbaye,
granting us the privilege of his presence rather than take his sabbatical
abroad, which he could have readily done, given his eminence. The teaching
was spellbinding, the class always full to listen to the nondescript man
whom we first met as he strode onto the podium in an understated French
suit, far from the image of the professor we had conceived in our minds
3
after being told to expect a new professor, but whose splendid teaching
enchanted us. You might not remember me, but I recall you. On behalf of us
all in that class, I salute you.

I celebrate Steve Ogude, my teacher and eventually senior colleague in that

department, in whose library I encountered George Steiner’s Language and
Silence, igniting in me the flame of the kind of critic I would aspire to
become, in my own way.

I salute Ogo Ufuani, my teacher and later senior colleague and mentor at
the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin, who first
suggested to me the idea of Irele scholarship as a distinctive and admirable
activity to which one may aspire. This led to my discussing the idea of being
an Irele scholar with a former PhD student of Irele’s, who indicated the
challenge of following the speed and scope of Irele’s publication trajectory.

As to my personal debt to the humanity of Abiola Irele, I will discuss that in

another essay.

Brethren who have come ahead, masters of word and thought, ilIuminators
of the path of vision, I salute you.

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5
 Science and Art

Figure 1

Conjuncting Irele 1

Adinkra Symbiosis

Collage evoking musical rhythm through sequence of

artistic/mathematical Adinkra symbols from Ghana, as a
watercolour of Abiola Irele foregrounds the composition,
suggesting the maestro’s straddling of various fields,
including music and classical African thought, and the
possible conjunctions of the latter with modern science.

Collage : Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Irele portrait by John

Nyagah in Austin Bukenya’s “Prof Abiola Irele and the
Solemn Duties of the Literary Practitioner”. Adinkra
parchment from Pinterest. Other Adinkra symbols from
various online sites.

6
 Contents

Abstract 2

Salutation 3

Images and Text: Science and Art: Conjuncting Irele 1 : Figure 1: Adinkra
Symbiosis 5

A Magnificent Creature 7

An Unexpected Encounter 8

Image and Text: Science and Art: Images of Infinity 1:

Figure 2: Faulkes Gate House Medallions 9

Image and Text: Cosmos as Library, Library as Cosmos:

Figure 3 16

II

Following the Trail 18

Cosmic Force as Universal Concept 18

Cosmic Force in French, Francophone, Classical African and Asian

Thought 18

The Yoruba “Ase” and Igbo “Ike” as Conceptions of Cosmic

Force 19

The Igbo Deity Agwu in Relation to Ike 20

The Yoruba Deity Esu as Embodying the Creative and

Transformative Force of Ase and the Indian Divine
Personality Shakti in Relation to Cosmic Dynamism and
Transformative Power 21

Images and Text: Science and Art : Conjuncting Irele 2 : Figure 4:

Schrodinger’s Wave Function Equation and the Keys of Legba 27

Ch’i in Chinese Thought 22

7
 Aquatic Metaphors in Chinese, Indian and Negritude
Philosophies 23

The Dragon as Embodiment of the Power of Ch’i in Chinese

Thought 24

Ubiquity of Conceptions of Cosmic Force 24

Linear and Non-Linear Science in Relation to the Figure of Esu 25

Image and Text: Science and Art: Images of Infinity 2: Infinity

Sculpture by Dick Onians : Figure 5 26

Abstraction and Concreteness in Literature 30

Abstraction and Concreteness in the Visual Arts and its

Resonance in Science as Exemplified by the Spiral 31

Adinkra and Ekpe Art 40

The Tension Between Abstraction and Concreteness as Central

to Cognition and Expression 34

Abiola Irele’s Scholarship as Subsumed by the Cognitive

Modes of Abstraction and Concreteness 34

Image and Text: Science and Art: Images of Infinity 3: The Dragon/Serpent
as Scientific Metaphor: Figure 6 35

Conceptions of Universal Force in Relation to Isaac Newton’s

Integration of Diverse Cognitive Worlds in the Context of the
17th Century Scientific Revolution 37

Possibilities of Conjunction between Orisa Cosmology and

Science through Dialogue Between their Contrastive
Epistemologies and Metaphysics 39

Images and Text: Science and Art: Classical and Supersymmetric Adinkra:
Figures 7, 8 and 9 40

8
III

Ijala, Yoruba Hunter’s Poetry as a Cosmological Imperative and the

Achievement of Abiola Irele 46

Images and Text: Science and Art : Conjuncting Irele 3 : Figure 10:
Einstein’s Energy/Matter Equivalence Equation and the Transformative
Conjunctions of Legba 59

Image and Text: Science and Art: Images of Infinity 4: The Ekpuk/Nsibidi
Spiral: Figure 11 64

9
 I

A Magnificent Creature

“O elephant, huge as a hill, even in a crouching posture.

Demon who snaps tree branches into many pieces and moves
on to the forest farm.

My chant is a salute to the elephant.

Ajanaku who walks with a heavy thread.

O elephant, praisenamed Laaye, massive animal blackish

grey in complexion.

O elephant, who single-handed causes a tremor in a dense

tropical forest.

O elephant, whom one sees and points toward with all one’s
fingers.

O elephant, on whose bulk, majestic in motion

the egret has found a home in its journeys across the world.

The hunter’s boast at home is not repeated when he really

meets the elephant.

The hunter’s boast at home is not repeated before the elephant.

If you wish to know the elephant, the elephant who is a

veritable ferry-man…

O elephant, the vagrant par excellence.

O elephant, lord of the forest, respectfully called Oriiribobo.

O elephant whom the hunter at times sees face to face.

O elephant whom the hunter at other times sees from the rear”.

10
“When we see the elephant, we cannot be content with stating ‘I saw
something pass in a flash’.

We must declare we have seen the tamer of the forest”.

Selections from “Salute to the Elephant” by Odeniyi Apolebieji of Odeomu

in S. A. Babalola’s The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala. Last three lines
adapted from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The twelfth
and thirteenth lines, evoking the relationship between the egret and the
elephant, are my own additions.

An Unexpected Encounter

One night in 2015, taking a walk in Cambridge, England, I saw a barely

visible track, largely concealed by plants, and which I chose to investigate.
The narrow road led me to the back entrance of a building into which I
entered and explored. What I discovered turned out to be one of my
defining experiences with libraries across continents and academic
institutions. That building was the Betty and Gordon Moore Library, the
central science library of the University of Cambridge, that university being
one of the world’s greatest institutions in relation to the development of
science and technology.

What did I encounter in that library, particularly as my knowledge of

science is largely self-taught, my secondary school tutoring, the best I have
got to formal education in the subject, having pushed me away from rather
than drawn me to the field, so alien it seemed in that academic context?

What I stumbled upon was the building blocks of a philosophy of science in

relation to Orisa cosmology, a subset of Yoruba philosophy which itself may
be seen as best appreciated in its contextualization by the Yoruba origin Ifa
system of knowledge and divination as a strategy of navigating the
metaphysical and existential relationships between self and cosmos, a
framework in the philosophy of science first outlined by Abiola Irele in
“The African Scholar”. This ideational structure amounted to a broad vision
of the character of the universe, drawing from a depth of knowledge in the
sciences, unified by the figure of the deity Esu, the embodiment, in Orisa
thought, of relationships between modes of being and forms of knowledge,

11
I did not see any literature on Orisa or any African cosmology in that
library. What I encountered was a broad scope of primary texts on the

12
 Science and Art

Images of Infinity 1

Figure 2

The medallions at the Faulkes Gate House of the Centre for

Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, where the Betty
and Gordon Moore Library is located. The medallions were
created by John Robinson and depict two different but similar
versions of the Alexander polynomial, a type of knot discovered
in 1923 by J. W. Alexander, as described at the website of the
Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which is part
of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

The complex beauty of these constructions points to

intersections between sensory perception, in its grasp of
concrete reality, and imagination, in its development of
abstractions, as these connexions emerge in science and as they
may demonstrate both the aesthetic force represented by this
creation as well as suggest the beautifully complex order of the
thought and writing of a thinker like Abiola Irele, a cognitive
orientation ultimately pointing to the perennial aspiration to
grasp the totality of the complex interweaving of reality, such as
represented by Irele’s outlining of the possibility of integrating
Orisa cosmology and science in terms of relationships between
order and disorder, predictability and unpredictability, arriving
at the complex, non-linear synthesis suggested by these versions
of the Alexander polynomial.

The upper knot, discovered by S Kinoshita and H Terasaka and

the bottom knot, discovered by JH Conway, are abstractions
from the character of knots as intertwinings of strings. These
versions of knotting visualise strings that are not physically
existent because they have no open end from which to begin
tying, like the open ends of shoe laces or ropes. Within this
imaginative movement from concrete reality to abstraction, the
mathematicians have constructed a complex coil recognised as
demonstrating striking mathematical properties.

13
Along similar lines, Knot Theory, to which these artistic
mathematical creations belong, along with its applications in
other sciences, may study knots without reference to their
existence in physical reality or may explore them as expressed in
the physical world, as in the knotting and unknotting of DNA
strands, the movement of atmospheric particles in “complicated
knotted paths”, as described at the Mathematics and Knots
exhibition site of the University of Wales, Bangor, and the
hypothesis that “the constituents of matter itself are nothing
more than ultramicroscopic strings of energy coiled up in
particular configurations”, as John Casti sums up in Five More
Golden Rules: Knots, Codes, Chaos and Other Great Theories of
20th-Century Mathematics, “a very rich theory that may one day
give a unified description of the four fundamental forces of
nature, gravity, electro-magnetism, and strong and weak
interactions between particles”, in the words of the Mathematics
and Knots exhibition site.

The artist has enclosed the aerodynamic balance of each of the

knots, their sense of otherworldly configuration heightened by
their silver sheen, in a circle, thereby generating a sense of
ultimate completeness, of wholeness, of the totalizing
integration of strangely complex beauty, of freeplay represented
by the dynamism of the knots ensconced in a form evocative of
infinity. The complex rhythm of the knots and the
complementary dynamism of the circle are in turn subsumed by
a tetragon, the other geometric forms assuming the role of the
nucleus in its flaring balance as it stands poised in space, like a
star spanning craft pulsing with a precious core waiting to seed
new worlds with the complex germinative powers it holds in its
heart.

This mathematical form demonstrates a perception of complex

unity actualising a quantitative and an aesthetic force. The scope
of Irele’s scholarship, integrating breadth of ideation within
particular disciplines and across disciplines as well as his
delineation of conjunctions between science and Orisa
cosmology in a synthesis projecting a comprehensive
understanding of the cosmos, is suggestive of the lyrical
intertwining visible in this construct.
14
The beautiful complexity of Irele’s thought, projected through
the grandeur of his stylistic polish and the integrative scope of
his cognitive reach, suggests the aspiration to perceive
phenomena from a variety of perspectives, eventually opening
up to the infinity of possibilities suggested by the image of
Indra’s net from the Buddhist Avataṃsaka Sūtra, The Flower
Garland Scripture, a net stretching out infinitely in all directions,
at each node of the net a pearl that reflects all the other pearls in
the net, a reflection expanding into infinity, “the entire universe
[visible] not only in each pearl, but also in each reflection in
each pearl, and so [on] ad infinitum”.

This magnificent image, in the spirit represented by Irele’s Orisa

cosmology/science correlation in terms of relationships
between order and disorder, is the central metaphor of David
Mumford et al’s Indra's Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein. The book
builds on the work of Klein in seeking the unity of different
branches of mathematics through various forms of symmetry. It
explores his development of geometric expressions emerging
from interactions of spiral motions, creating regularity and
harmony, along with disorder and suggestions of chaos.

These occur in terms of “fractal’ complexity on every scale

from [the] very large to [the] very small”, in which variants of
the same shapes are repeated, creating individuality within
similarity., “symmetrical patterns in which more and more
[variations] cause shrinking so rapid that an infinite number of
tiles can be fitted into an enclosed finite area, clustering
together as they shrink down to infinite depth…a mathematical
set up of the same structures being repeated infinitely within
each other at ever diminishing scales”.

This result in projections of visual beauty and the “inner

aesthetics” represented by “a core of important and elegant
mathematical ideas”, a structural unfolding echoing “the ancient
Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s net, spontaneously creating
reflections within reflections, worlds without end”.

15
Inspired by Klein’s scientific magic, the book aspires to
”demonstrate the “beauty and fascination emerging from
exploring this God-given yet man-made universe which is
mathematics” [dramatizing the nature of the discipline] [as
an]“exploration of the patterns of the world, one which
thrives on play and surprise and beauty.”

Within this context, Klein builds “a remarkable synthesis, in

which ideas from the most diverse areas of mathematics
[reveal] startling connections”.

“Now, when all these studies reach the point of inter-

communion and connection with one another, and come to
be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, but not
till then, will the pursuit of them have a value for our
objects…”-Plato. Quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics in
Western Culture.

“The positive content of a science is a body of theory which

encompasses, organizes, relates, and illuminates a multitude
of seemingly disconnected facts in a coherent and consistent
fashion and which is capable of leading to new conclusions
about the physical world. The individual facts or experiments
are of little value in themselves. The value lies in the theory
that unites them. The distances of the planets from the sun
are details. The heliocentric theory [that the planets orbit the
sun] is knowledge of the first magnitude. Thus another of
Galileo’s [Galilei] innovations was to make the scientific
theory, the connective tissue among facts, a body of
mathematical laws deducible from a set of axiomatic ones.” -
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture.

Top picture by Aex Watson.

Bottom picture from website of Isaac Newton Institute of

Mathematical Sciences.

16
Esu’s personification of paradox being central to his dramatization of these
correlations.

I did not see any literature on Orisa or any African cosmology in that
library. What I met was a broad scope of primary texts on the different
scientific disciplines Irele drew upon in building his essay. Books at various
levels of cognitive accessibility on non-linear dynamics, the central idea
Irele referenced, complemented by others on perspectives on science by
various scientists, giving an individualistic frame to what would otherwise
be ideas without reference to the creativity of the individual minds that
made them possible, along with books on other topics I don’t recall now
since I have not been ready yet to pursue sustained research in that
library on the insights gained on that day.

What could be the value of a philosophy of science building upon Orisa

cosmology through a critical engagement with science as understood by
philosophers of science and by scientists themselves, these being the most
informed communities on a subject that defines the modern world but is
not always adequately grasped by people? Such a philosophy could achieve
something like Fritjof Capra did in his famous The Tao of Physics : An
Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism,
inspired by his perception of consonance between classical Asian
philosophies and spiritualties and modern science, mediated through the
figure of the Hindu deity Shiva.

Such an achievement through the lens of Orisa cosmology could also

facilitate further developments, akin to Capra taking forward his original
perceptions, expanding them into a world view that, in conjunction with
related perspectives, has gained a degree of mainstream acceptance. This is
demonstrated by his further writings and activities building on his original
insights from various angles, most of his books achieving publication in
various editions and languages, as stated by the Capra Wikipedia page.

One of his more recent books, The Systems View of Life (2014), was
published by the prestigious academic publisher Cambridge University
Press, as different from the first publication in 1975 of The Tao of Physics,
his first book in the field he has been central in pioneering, by the much
less prominent publisher, the then six year old independent venture,
Shambhala Publications. A good number of people have bought into his
vision, as represented by the success of his first book in the field which was
eventually published in 43 editions in 23 languages, according to the book’s
17
Wikipedia page, making his name synonymous with the field of
correlations between Asian thought and modern science. The impact of his
work is graphically dramatized by the presence on the grounds of CERN,
the Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva, donated to the
scientific institution by the Indian government, of a statue of Shiva, the
Hindu deity ideas about whom Capra elaborated on as paradigmatic for the
new perspectives on the cosmos represented by modern science, following
the much earlier very brief correlations of Shaivite iconography with
science by Ananda Coomaraswamy’s “The Dance of Shiva” in his Fourteen
Indian Essays, and by Carl Sagan in episode 10, "On the edge of eternity", of
the documentary Cosmos, the explanatory plague accompanying the statue
referencing the insights of Coomaraswamy and Capra. The public growth of
Capra’s vision is further concretized by the Center for Ecoliteracy, the
foundation he co-founded to foster the vision represented by these efforts
and by a host of pubic recognitions described on his website.

Capra was not the first to develop conjunctions between modern science
and Asian thought and the works of others have since followed his own
initial efforts, but his achievement has been the most prominent. A number
of correlations between Orisa cosmology and science do exist, but an
approach to the subject through Irele’s corpus of ideas from “The African
Scholar” to his work in Negritude, his writings on the African and
Caribbean imagination and on their philosophies, literature and music
provides a particularly rich ideational network which I am not aware of
anyone else exploring in relation to the correlation of science and Orisa
thought.

A project on conjunctions between Orisa cosmology and science inspired

by Irele’s work would gain from both the assenting and dissenting
responses to Capra’s work. An effort to address what a criticising author
perceives as its inadequacies is evident, for example, in Jonathan
Edelmann’s Hindu Theology and Biology : The Bhagavata Puarana and
Contemporary Theory, contextualising the role of a particular religious
worldview in exploring the contrastive and comparative character of
religion and science. A summative text in similar explorations across
religions, scientific disciplines and philosophical and theological fields is
the Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson edited The Oxford Handbook of
Science and Religion.

Thus, through a convergence of spirituality, myth, philosophy and science,

building upon but going beyond the distinctive metaphysics and
18
19
 Cosmos as Library, Library as Cosmos
Figure 3
. “ In that vision, I saw bound in one volume, all the pages
scattered throughout the universe. Existing things, their
qualities and the relationships between them I perceived as
one simple light”- Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy.
Image source:
The Betty & Gordon Moore Library

20
epistemologies of science and Orisa thought, one may demonstrate the
mutually illuminating power of these contrastive but ultimately correlative
systems, thereby enlarging the scope of ideational frameworks available on
the character of the cosmos.

The revelation that emerged that day in the Betty and Gordon Moore
Library was like Dion Fortune’s description, in her The Cosmic Doctrine, of
the inspirational influence of the archangel Metatron, representing the
highest level of manifestation on the Tree of Life, an image of the cosmos as
a tree by the Judaic originated school of Kabbalah, as being that of “a
blinding flash of illumination of remote spiritual truths”, enabling a grasp of
foundational templates of the structure and dynamism of existence and its
ultimate source.

It was not a trance experience, like another decisive engagement in a

library, the stunning 1989 encounter with the 19th century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant on the Sublime, at the University of Benin’s
Ugbowo library. So transported was I, so completely removed from the
three dimensional world by the swift impact of those passages,
reconfiguring the windows represented by my mind in a manner
undeniable yet beyond adequate understanding on account of my cognitive
limitations, that I returned to awareness of my environment wondering if I
was still occupying the same space as the other users of the library.

The ideas the Kantian passages project are so sophisticated and powerful I
can only recall them in their bare form, even after another, careful reading
years later, though the impression imprinted by their force remains
indelible in my deepest self, calling me over the years to return to such
mountaintops and encounter the greatest masters at the point beyond time
and space, “where the great roads go down” in the words of Fortune.

My experience at the Moore library, on the other hand, was closer to that
pictured by the Greek myth of Orpheus playing on his flute, the music so
enchanting the nearby stones moved closer to better listen to it, and,
standing on top of each other to catch the marvellous strains, inadvertently
built the wall of the great city of Thebes. As I moved from shelf to shelf in
that library, encountering and surveying wonderful science texts in fields
Irele had referenced largely in terms of their adaptation by French
philosophers, Irele being a professor of French, among other
professorships, the picture he had sketched in his essay began to grow

21
stone by stone in a manner that made clear the possibility of
accomplishment of a project along the lines he had outlined and how to
proceed with it.

So compelling was the encounter, I spent the night in the library,

assembling texts, building a bibliography and making notes. I later
misplaced the notes and bibliography in the unsteady circumstances I was
going through at the time and which had led, fortuitously, to my being on
the road that led me to the library on that fateful night, but the pattern of
ideas, images and emotions the experience created in me is so strong, I see
the library in my mind’s eye even as I write, and feel myself in it going
through the shelves in dazed wonder on that first encounter, that I don’t
expect I will have difficulty picking up again the specific trail in 20th-21st
century developments in science when I am ready.

II

Following the Trail

Cosmic Force as Universal Concept

In relation to exploring conjunctions between Orisa cosmology and science

suggested by Irele in "The African Scholar", I am proceeding, for now,
through essays investigating the same project from various angles.
Including writings composed before the Gordon Moore Library experience
described in part 2 of this essay, these works and the discussions some of
them have inspired on the various platforms they were published
constitute a map of my journey to the point represented by the present
investigation, a map I intend to present and discuss in another essay,
possibly titled “A Journey in Scholarship on Abiola Irele”.

With time, my understanding grows of relationships amongst Irele’s

theoretical writings, between his theoretical and his critical work and
between these and other bodies of knowledge. Central to this developing
awareness is a nascent insight into conjunctions between the vision of a
philosophy of science he outlines in “The African Scholar”, drawing
inspiration from the Yoruba orisa or deity Esu in projecting intersections of
22
myth and science, and his essay on Négritude metaphysics and
epistemology “What is Négritude?”.

Cosmic Force in French, Francophone, Classical African

And Asian Thought

“What is Négritude?” splendidly elaborates a conception of cosmic force

that is the philosophical movement’s development of a concept that unifies
classical African thought and relates it to cognitive streams outside Africa.
It's African expression was reinforced to Négritude thinkers by their
exposure to the earliest elaboration of this idea in print in relation to
African cosmologies in Placide Tempel’s Bantu Philosophy and later further
consolidated in scholarship on African ideations by such works as John
Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy.

This African philosophical influence on Négritude is part of a matrix of

ideas also constituted by the work of French philosophers Gaston
Bachelard and Henri Bergson. The idea of “élan vital”, “vital impetus” or “
vital force”, central to Bergson’s philosophy, is correlative with that of
cosmic force in the African and other contexts. Bergson's development of
this idea is an aspect of his investigation of aspects of consciousness
demonstrated by relations between "science and metaphysics, intelligence
and intuition", in the course of which he "makes…frequent use of images
and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which
(he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality", as described by the
Wikipedia essay on Bergson.

Bachelard is particularly rich in his explorations of cognitive styles in the

arts, architecture and science, his work facilitating the quest for
intersections between imagination and other epistemic strategies, as Roch
Smith's Gaston Bachelard : Philosopher of Science and Imagination argues.
This position, like that of Bergson, is thus key to Irele's invocation of
Bachelard in support of his own project in building conjunctions between
modern science and the imaginative character of the mythic forms
represented by Orisa cosmology.

23
The conceptions of these French philosophers “underlies much of [the]
epistemology and vision of the world” [of Leopold Sedar Senghor, chief
theoretician of Négritude], as Irele states in a February 2011 contribution
to a discussion on the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo group, a range of
influences, which, among others, is explored, among other writers, by Irele
in “What is Négritude?”, by Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s African Art as
Philosophy : Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Négritude, Donna Jones’ The
Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity and
summarised by Diagne in his essay on Négritude at the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the form in which it went live on Mon Feb 24,
2014, accessed by me as of this writing on 30th July 2017. The
Wikipedia essay on Negritude correlates these scholarly efforts:

After a long period of silence there has been a renaissance of

Negritude developed by scholars such as Souleymane Bachir
Diagne (Columbia), Donna Jones (Berkeley),and Cheikh
Thiam (Ohio State) who all continue the work of Abiola
Irele. Cheikh Thiam's book [Return to the Kingdom of
Childhood: Re-Envisioning the Legacy and Philosophical
Relevance of Negritude]is the only book-length study of
Negritude as philosophy. It develops Diagne's reading of
Negritude as a philosophy of art, and Jones' presentation of
Negritude asa lebensphilosophie.

The Yoruba “Ase” and Igbo “Ike” as Conceptions of Cosmic

Force

This perception of cosmic force is represented in Yoruba philosophy by the

concept of “ase”, as summed up, among other sources, by Henry John
Drewal et al’s Yoruba : Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought and in
Igbo thought by “ike”, as Chinua Achebe portrays it in “The Igbo World and
its Art”, reprinted in Emmanuel Eze's edited African Philosophy: An
Anthology, a pervasive power enabling being and becoming, existence and
change along with universality and individuality in consciousness.

Achebe’s compelling summation incidentally distills both the Igbo and

Yoruba perspectives:

24
 The Igbo world is an arena for the interplay of forces. It is a
dynamic world of movement and of flux. Igbo art, reflecting
this world view, is never tranquil but mobile and active,
even aggressive. Ike, energy, is the essence of all things
human, spiritual, animate and inanimate. Everything has its
own unique energy which must be acknowledged and given
its due. “Ike di na awaja na awaja’ is a common formulation
of this idea: ‘Power run in many channels”. [ The
complement of that saying] “Onye na nkie, onye na nkie”-
literally, ‘Everyone and his own”- is a social expression of
the same notion often employed as a convenient formula for
saluting en masse an assembly too large for individual
greetings.

The Igbo Deity Agwu in Relation to Ike

The Igbo alusi or deity Agwu, in embodying paradox, transformation and

cognitive mediation, particularly as a guide for diviners, qualities and
functions also associated with the Yoruba deity Esu, suggests Agwu may
be seen in terms of the creative and transformative character of cosmic
force referred to by Achebe, as Esu, as divine messenger and divinatory
explicator, is particularly associated with ase, the Yoruba concept of cosmic
force.

Esu's role as divinatory explicator is mapped, among others, by Henry

Louis Gates Jr in The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of African-American
Literary Criticism and his privileged association with ase described by
Bolaji Idowu in Olódùmarè : God in Yoruba Belief. Patrick Iroegbu's
"Introduction to Igbo Medicine : Igbo Healers and Agwu Deity in a
Therapeutic Society", Angulu Onwuejeogwu's Afa Symbolism and
Phenomenology in Nri Kingdom and Hegemony: An African Philosophy of
Social Action and John Anenechukwu Umeh's two volume After God is Dibia:
Igbo Cosmology, Divination & Sacred Science in Nigeria, present different
but ultimately correlative approaches to explicating the wealth of ideas
involved in the conception of Agwu.

Like Esu's central role within the Ifa system of knowledge and divination,
Agwu is associated particularly with dibia, the central traditional spiritual
specialists of Igboland, an association attested to by Umeh’s After God is
Dibia and by Iroegbu's "Igbo Medicine and Culture: The Concept of Dibia
and Dibia Representations in Igbo Society of Nigeria", and, most likely, by
25
his four part "Introduction to Igbo Medicine" and his Healing Insanity: A
Study of Igbo Medicine in Contemporary Nigeria.

John Mccall’s “Making Peace with Agwu”, his account of his mental state
just after his initiation into Igbo dibia, the central spiritual specialists of
Ndigbo, an initiation involving entering into a relationship with Agwu,
depicts qualities of cognitive liminality and mediation suggested by
descriptions of the character of Agwu, and, incidentally, of Esu:

… I felt an exhilaration that seemed to blossom from a

source more profound than mere intoxication. As I leaned
back, taking in the vastness of the night sky… I felt an
overwhelming sense of liberation in [ accepting the]
myriad… uncanny events I had experienced since my arrival
in Ohafia [the place in Igboland where the initiation was
held ] that had been chipping away at the ontological
foundations of my rational assumptions about reality. It was
not that these phenomena inspired a "belief in the certainty
of some sort of ‘Ohafia worldview.’ Rather, my frame of
mind was one of an enhanced uncertainty, and I realized
that it was this uncertainty itself that was in some sense
liberating.

The knowledge of the dibia takes for granted that human

experience is not reducible to known and predictable facts.
And in this the traditional doctor displays a wisdom deeper
than that of the positivist social scientist. The knowledge of
dibia resides not in formal "laws" but in a continual reading
of the shifting and negotiable relations between things.

This open ended mental state may be seen as complemented by the

description of Agwu as a great traveller in constant search for information
in journeys to distant lands, knowledge Agwu puts at the service of the
dibia, facilitating the diviner’s interpretation of messages in Igbo Afa
divination., as described by Onwuejeogwu in Afa Symbolism and
Phenomenology.

This cognitive orientation is facilitated by the members of Agwu’s

household who contribute to his endeavours through their distinctive
qualities. They are Ulili, the small forest rodent, known for pervasive
motion combined with cautious re-examination of his motions as he stops
26
27
 Science and Art

Figure 4

Conjuncting Irele 2

Schrodinger’s Wave Function Equation and the Keys of Legba

Collage evoking the opening of the doors to insight about the

structure and dynamism of the cosmos. In the foreground is the
baroque beauty, the arcane elegance, of Erwin Schrodinger's
famous wave function equation, representing scientific
understanding, in this instance, of the minutest constituent of
matter. Marianne Freiberger’s “Schrödinger's Equation — What is
It?” and “Schrödinger's Equation — What Does it Mean?”describes
the following symbol in the equation as depicting the tendency of
the most basic constituents of matter to behave as a wave. The
entire equation works out the processes through which this wave
function is actualised:

The Encyclopaedia Britannica article on waves clarifies the concept

of waves in physics. The reference to subatomic particles in the
article is drawn from Schrödinger’s and others’ works on the most
basic constituents of matter in quantum theory:

Wave, propagation of disturbances from place to place in a

regular and organized way. Most familiar are surface waves
that travel on water, but sound, light, and the motion of
subatomic particles all exhibit wavelike properties.

Marianne Freiberger’s “Schrödinger's Equation — What Does it

Mean?” expounds further on the wave concept at the minutest
levels of matter:
28
 In general the wave function doesn’t describe a physical
wave because it isn’t a function defined on physical
space. Rather, it’s defined on configuration space: it
takes as input all the possible configurations of
locations the particles [ the minutest constituents of
matter] could be in and it returns a value related to the
probability that you will find the particles in the given
configuration at the given time.

The description of the most elementary particles of matter in

terms of waves in Schrodinger’s theory, an aquatic image also
evident in Negritude and Chinese thought, suggests underlying
similarities between various ways of developing knowledge.
Further correlations between quantum mechanics and Irele’s
thought emerges in the paradoxes this theory represents.
Marianne Freiberger’s “Schrödinger's Equation — What Does it
Mean?” describes one of them:

The fact that you cannot always neatly separate the

wave function of a many-particle system into individual
components illustrates another weirdness of quantum
mechanics: that two particles that have once interacted,
so that the system they form is described by a single
wave function, can remain mysteriously linked even
when they have moved light years apart. This
mysterious connection is called quantum entanglement.
When something happens to one of the entangled
particles, a corresponding thing happens to its distant
partner, a phenomenon Einstein described as "spooky
action at a distance".

These most basic forms of matter are also understood as

capable of behaving both like a particle and a wave.

29
Quantum theory thus demonstrates a paradoxical unity of
contraries as constitutive of central aspects of reality, an
understanding that is echoed, in another epistemic context,
by the poem on the Yoruba Orisa cosmology deity Esu
referenced by Irele in "The African Scholar" as a primary
evocator of possibilities of convergence between Orisa
cosmology, in the figure of Esu, and modern science.

The keys in the image are from a website in which they are
used in representing the power of Papa Legba, the
counterpart of Esu in the African diaspora religion Voodoo,
as embodiment of the crossroads of existence uniting matter
and spirit, an attribution that may be extended to points of
convergence enabling transformative knowledge, the
intersection of the keys constituting the point of entry to new
universes of realization. These visual and symbolic
conjunctions are subsumed by the picture of Abiola Irele in
inward concentration, accessing the powerhouse of creative
work in the distillation of knowledge through reflection.

In its correlation of esoteric mathematics and resonant

spiritual symbolism, in tandem with the universally
evocative image of the human face in reflection, the latter
suggesting the sapience that marks the human person,
enabling plunging into ever greater depths of apprehension,
the collage may be seen as signifying penetration into arcane
knowledge, a matrix where the foundations of being is
cognised, integrating diverse forms of beauty and of logic.

Collage: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju. Schrodinger Wave

Function equation image from Pinterest. Legba keys from
Etsy. Irele picture from Patrick K Muana's Facebook account.
30
 to look back on his trail, thus evoking the need for similar pausing and
reflection on the past in human life. Another is Ulu Mbekwu, the tortoise,
his intelligence as demonstrated by his constant trickery and creative
subversion suggesting the complex possibilities of self-awareness, though
in negative terms framed by the delightful antics of the tortoise in folklore.
Finally, Udene, the vulture, who, flying high above the social terrain, can
"identify [people] who through their actions are polluted by 'social dirt’ ”,
as these agents are described by Angulu Onwuejeogwu in Afa Symbolism
and Phenomenology and summed up in my “The Amebo Principle In Chidi
Anthony Opara’s ‘I Dey Shake Head 3’ “.

The Yoruba Deity Esu as Embodying the Creative and

Transformative Force of Ase and the Indian Divine Personality
Shakti in Relation to Cosmic Dynamism and Transformative
Power

In Orisa cosmology, Esu is understood as the privileged carrier of ase, as

the mediator between forms of being and modes of knowledge, an enabler
of communication between humans and deities and opener of the roads of
Ifa, guide to decoding Ifa’s mysteries, its oracular insights, as described by
Bolaji Idowu in Olodumare and Henry Louis Gates Jr’s The Signifying
Monkey.

As may be distilled from the oriki Esu, “oriki” being a genre of Yoruba
poetry that salutes the “ori”, the essential being of a referent, anthologized
in Jack Mapanje and Landeg White’s edited Oral Poetry from Africa as “Es
hu,God of Fate” on which Irele centres his exposition in “The African
Scholar”, Esu is also perceived as the embodiment of the capacity for
transgression of the framework of natural law that enables reality as it is
conventionally understood and of the moral structure that empowers
social existence. law that enables reality as it is conventionally understood
and of the moral structure that empowers social existence.

He may therefore be seen as representing the connectivity between forms

of being that ensures the coherence of the cosmos and as intimately related
to the agreements on the character of right and wrong that define society, a
physical and social connectivity demonstrated by the pervasive penetration
of ase as it emanates from Olodumare, the ultimate creator.

31
He may also be understood in terms of the transcendence of the unity that
enables the consistency of the world as conventionally perceived, and as a
facilitator of insight into the complexity of justice, of good and evil, of right
and wrong, a power expedited by control of ase as the primary propellant
of creative capacity of any kind.

The ase and ike concepts as well as Esu’s embodiment of the power to
reshape conventional reality through control of ase, are similar to others
from other continents, such as the Indian image of Shakti, understood as
enabling the dynamism of the world of being and becoming, existence and
change, the power of Shakti, like that of Esu, facilitating transformation of
conventional reality, as described, among many sources, by Pandit Rajmani
Tigunait’s Sakti: The Power in Tantra: A Scholarly Approach, exploring three
classic texts in the field, Soundaryalahari, The Billowing Waves of the
Ocean of Beauty, Laksmidara’s commentary on the Soundaryalahari and
Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras.

Esu throws a stone today and hits a bird yesterday, sits on the skin of an
ant, turns right into wrong and wrong into right, feels constricted in the
veranda and the room but can stretch himself at last in a groundnut shell.
Transformed by a side glance from Shakti, a decrepit old man, totally
unattractive and unskilled in the arts of love, has women racing after him,
their garments bursting in their desperation, so declares the
Soundaryalahari.

Ch’i in Chinese Thought

Also correlative with these ideas is the Chinese concept Ch’i, “the pervasive
Vital Force that gives life to all things under Heaven”, a force both universal
and open to individualistic shaping and directing, expressed in painting, for
example, as “both the creative resources of the painter and the essential
vitality-spiritual, divine, and creative-that can be transmitted to a painting
and perceived by the spectator”, as summed up by Mai-mai Sze in The Way
of Chinese Painting: Its Ideas and Techniques, a goal reached through “the
balance and fusion between the impression received through the eyes and
the perceptions of the mind”’, Sze elaborates, quoting Tsung Ping’s
“Introduction to Landscape Painting”. Toshihiko Izutsu in Sufism and
Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts, elaborates on
the concept, describing the conventional rendition of chi’i as “all pervasive
32
vital energy” asa clumsy translation for this [word] which plays an
exceedingly important role in the history of Chinese thought. It is a ‘reality’,
proto-material and formless, which cannot be grasped by the senses. It is a
kind of vital force, a creative principle of all things; it pervades the whole
world, and being immanent in everything, molds it and makes it grow into
what it really is. Everything that has a form, animate or inanimate, has a
share in the ch’i.

The universal and yet individualistic enablement of this force is depicted in

terms of the dynamism and ubiquity, nourishing capacity and resilience,
persistence and aesthetic force of water, as described of this metaphor as
central to Chinese thought by Sara Allen in The Way of Water and the
Sprouts of Virtue.

Aquatic Metaphors in Chinese, Indian and Negritude

Philosophies

Correlative with the aquatic symbolism related to Ch’i is the depiction of

the creative power of Shakti in terms of Spanda, a central concept of the
Trika or Kashmir Shaivite school, “the subtle creative pulse of the
universe…waves in the ocean of consciousness [a] throb…pulse…
vibration…movement … an eternal spring, joyfully overflowing its inner
essence into manifestation and inspiration… into the dynamism of living
form”, as described at the site of the Spanda Foundation, building on
expositions beginning with the Spandakārikā by Vasugupta or Kallata. The
prime Negritude thinker, Leopold Sedar Senghor, projects a related
understanding of being, expounding his view of a unifying conception in
classical African thought, "Rhythm is the architecture of being, the internal
dynamics which gives it form, the system of waves which it sends out
towards Others”, as Irele sums up in “What is Negritude?”.

The Dragon as Embodiment of the Power of Ch’i in Chinese

Thought

As the privileged embodiment of a similar force in Orisa cosmology is Esu,

in Igbo philosophy Agwu, in Indian thought, Shakti, in Chinese thought, the
creative and destructive power and aerial mobility of the dragon is central
in emblematizing the pervasive potency of cosmic force. Embodiment of
change as a cosmic principle expressing the activity of transcendental
reality, “the dragon was described as being capable of extraordinary

33
transformations- ‘ at will reduced to the size of a silkworm, or swollen till it
fills the space of Heaven and Earth’ “, states Mai-mai Sze, quoting Kuan Tzu
in The Way of Chinese Painting.

Ubiquity of Conceptions of Cosmic Force

An earlier essay of mine, “Similarities : Cosmic Force in African, Chinese

and Newtonian Philosophies and the Fiction of P.Pullman and K.J. Parker”,
extends these observations about the contexts of expression of this idea to
fiction, literature being very effective in communicating ideas, including
philosophical conceptions. The following lines sum up the subject:

These conceptions, from different civilizations, originating

in different periods of time, and expressed in terms of
disciplines with different ontological presuppositions, such
as the relationships between truth and fiction, between
animate and inanimate forms of being, could be understood
as sharing more in common than differentiates them.

Taken collectively, these various conceptions include the

notion of a force that pervades the cosmos and is
describable in terms of imbuing various forms of matter,
human, plant, animal, geological and aquatic, among others,
with consciousness.

It is used as a summative description of human possibility,

in terms of the ability to create change as demonstrated in
human cognitive capacity and action, from intellectual
mentation to imagination and psychic perception.

All these characteristics do not emerge in all the examples I

have given. The notion of a cosmic force, however, unifies all
of them.

This understanding of relationships between all forms of

being is marked by conceptions of mobility and mediation,
understood in terms of transformation of forms of being
from one state to another and of human cognition as
traversing and integrating various ways of knowing and
realms of being.

34
 Recent research in animism, complexity theory and sacred
landscape, including Alfred Watkin's conception of ley lines
as patterns of energy running across landscape, could
provide further correlations and insights.

Linear and Non-Linear Science in Relation to the Figure of Esu

It is a related conception of fields of force in nature particularly embodied

by Esu and capable of enabling transformations of conventional reality that
Irele associates with non-linear science. Writing in “The African Scholar”,
he states:

I refer here to the revolutions…introduced by

developments in physics and biology and to the more recent
emergence of what is now referred to as nonlinear science.

It has become increasingly clear that nature is more

complex than was dreamt of by modern science in its
genesis, and that the positivist approach to knowledge by
which the scientific enterprise has been largely prosecuted
up to the present century is no longer capable of providing
an account in their full range and depth of the workings of
nature, of encompassing objective reality in its scope and
mystery.

The earlier self-assuredness typified by [pioneering English

philosopher Francis] Bacon about the possibilities of science
in unraveling the system of regularities that govern the
world has thus in our day not only been tempered by an
awareness of “the uncertainty principle” [a scientific
concept initiated by Wiener Heisenberg] but by a growing
attitude of perplexity about the reality of our world.

It is not without interest here to draw attention to the

analogy between the new scientific spirit as described by
[Gaston] Bachelard – with its progressive abandonment of
the reductive bent of an earlier age, and its greater attention
to complexity, systems of relations and fields of force – and
the profound intuition of the fundamentally unsettling

35
 nature of the world within those non-western modes of
apprehension that have been qualified as “mythical”….

As the noted French Africanist Georges Balandier has

pointed out, there has always been a recognition, made
explicit in ritual and avowed in the symbolic discourse of
non-industrial cultures and what he calls “sociétés de
tradition,” of the tension between the principles of order
and disorder, of stability and randomness, as a constitutive
factor of all reality, natural and social. It is this sense of a
duality in the world that is felt as marking life and
consciousness for which Yoruba society in particular has
found an embodiment in the person of the trickster god,
Eshu. And it is significant to observe the striking analogy
between the non-cartesian [ an allusion to French
philosopher Rene Descartes, a founding figure of modern
Western philosophy] mode of contemporary scientific
awareness represented by the extract from Bachelard I’ve
just quoted above and the “mythical” grasp of the reality of
the world as communicated in this passage from a Yoruba
praise poem (oriki) in celebration of Eshu:

Esu sleeps in the house

But the house is too small for him;
Esu sleeps on the front yard
But the yard is too constricting for him;
Esu sleeps in the palm-nut shell
Now he has enough room to stretch at large

Irele is extracting from the following poem:

Eshu turns right into wrong, wrong into right.

When he is angry, he hits a stone until it bleeds.
When he is angry, he sits on the skin of an ant.
When he is angry, he weeps tears of blood.
Eshu slept in the house –
But the house was too small for him:
Eshu slept on the verandah –
But the verandah was too small for him:

36
37
 Science and Art

Images of Infinity 2

Figure 5

Sculpture at the library of the Isaac Newton Institute of

Mathematical Sciences in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences
at the University of Cambridge, where the Betty and Gordon
Moore Library is located.

Description at institute website:

‘The Institute was kindly gifted a sculpture by artist Dick Onians

entitled Infinity in January 2012. It shows a single-sided surface,
such that if an ant were to walk along the length of the sculpture
it would return to its original starting point having traversed
both sides of the shape, but would not cross an edge. The
sculpture examines the endlessness of time, space, and
regeneration.”

38
Wole Soyinka in “Idanre” in Idanre and Other Poems, reflects
compellingly on the mathematical form the Möbius strip, a
structure named after one of its discoverers August
Ferdinand Möbius and identical with the Isaac Newton
Institute’s Infinity configuration. Soyinka evokes its
aesthetic and philosophical possibilities, focusing these
through the correlative image of the Ouroboros, the motif of
the snake swallowing its own tail, a symbol for eternity,
pictured in figure 6 in this essay, and the figure of the
Yoruba Orisa or deity Ogun. He does this in relation to the
world of myth to which Ogun belongs, a zone outside linear
time, in which archetypal action is repeated into infinity, a
template from which the human being may learn in
breaking the chains represented by negative archetypal
patterns evoked by the expression “the doom of repetition”:

Evolution of the self-devouring snake to spatials

New in symbol, banked loop of the ‘Mobius Strip’
And interlock of re-creative rings, one surface
Yet full comb of angles, uni-plane, yet sensuous with
Complexities of mind and motion.

Soyinka’s prose exposition elaborates on his poetic lines:

A mathe-magical ring, infinite in self-recreation into

independent but linked rings and therefore the freest
conceivable (to me) symbol of human or divine (e.g.
Yoruba, Olympian) relationships. A symbol of optimism
also, it gives the illusion of a kink in the circle and a
possible centrifugal escape from the eternal cycle of
karmas that has become the evil history of man. Only an
illusion but a poetic one, for the Mobius strip is a very
simple figure of aesthetic and scientific truths and
contradictions. In this sense, it is the symbol of Ogun in
particular, and an evolution from the tail devouring
snake which he sometimes hangs around his neck and
symbolises the doom of repetition.
39
 Eshu slept in a nut –
At last he could stretch himself!
Eshu walked through the groundnut farm.
The tuft of his hair was just visible:
If it had not been for his huge size,
He would not be visible at all.
Lying down, his head hits the roof:
Standing up, he cannot look into the cooking pot.
He throws a stone today
And kills a bird yesterday!

Correlative with the puzzling anthropomorphism of Esu is the creative and

transformative power, ase, he is understood as being a privileged
embodiment of, as expressed in the transformations the poem depicts him
as effecting, pointing, in a hyperbolic manner, to the possibilities
empowered by access to ase as a universal enablement available to
various forms of being.

Abstraction and Concreteness in Literature

These oscillations between abstract conception and concreteness of

imagistic representation in the depictions of cosmic force in Yoruba, Igbo,
Indian and Chinese thought suggest the perennial human need to move
between the abstract and the concrete. The elevated abstractions
demonstrated by ideas of cosmic force represent the drive to explore
meaning at a level transcending and yet illuminating the frameworks
defined by the material world as apprehended though sense perception.
Imagistic expressions of abstractions, such as images of Esu, Agwu, Shakti
and the dragon in Chinese thought demonstrate the value of engaging the
human being through the recognition of sense perception as their primary
means of knowing, even when dealing with rarefied ideas.

Referencing among others, George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez’ representative

text in the intersection of cognitive science and mathematics, Where
Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into
Being, Jorge Soto-Andrade in “Mathematics as the Art of Seeing the
Invisible” describes such expressive styles as the depiction of abstract
ideas in terms of images that make the “abstract and opaque” more

40
accessible by representing it in the form of the “more down to earth and
transparent”. Hence expressions evoking ideas through reference to the
various senses, particularly sight, remain vital to communicating concepts
in a way that contributes significantly to making them intelligible.

Abstraction and Concreteness in the Visual Arts and its

Resonance in Science as Exemplified by the Spiral

Reinforcing verbal depictions of abstract ideas in terms of images that

appeal to the senses is the use of a similar strategy in the visual arts, the
evocation of the transformative force of life associated with the spiral, a
visual expression suggestive of the cosmic force to which Esu, Agwu, Shakti
and the dragon are related.

The Spiral in Adinkra and Ekpe Art

Ron Eglash et al in “Adinkra Mathematics: A Study of Ethnocomputing in

Ghana”, variously adapted online, as with Gabriel Boakye in “Learning
Math and Science through Adinkra” and the website Adinkra Grapher:
Geometry and Computational Thinking from West Africa, demonstrate the
movement of increasing abstraction from the observation of the spiral as a
quality in nature, to its stylization in Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism to its
execution in scientific diagrams. This sequence is observable through
diachronic comparison of the relevant shapes even though the mainstream
scientific expression does not follow historically from the Adinkra
example. The Eglash team describes the spiral, particularly the logarithmic
or exponential spiral, as a central pattern of organic forms, as
demonstrated in the development of a “ram’s horns growing larger and
larger as it curves toward the head”.

Nigerian Cross River Ekpe esoteric order Nsibidi symbolism and Zulu
symbolism, the latter described by Mazisi Kunene in Anthem of the Decades,
among other examples across the world, also develop similar instances of
the imagistic power of abstract forms such as the spiral in suggesting the
dynamism and transformative power of life evident in the growth of
organic forms. In Nsibidi, as described at the site Inscribing Meaning :
Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, and visualised in figure 8 in this
essay, the spiral could signify the sun, journey and eternity, referents which
could be expanded to indicate the sun as the universal enabler of life and
representative of ideas of an ultimate creator, journey, as the movement
41
across time represented by human existence as facilitated by the energy of
the sun vitalizing nature and humanity, eternity, as the ultimate destination
that encompasses the scheme constituted by existence.

Depictions of spirals in African culture presented by Eglash and his

collaborators reach a climax in the logarithmic spiral of the Adinkra Gye
Nyame symbol, a visual form meaning “except Nyame”, the ultimate creator
in Akan thought. This verbal symbolism, as described by the Eglash team,
suggests “none except Nyame have the power of life”, and, as depicted at
the site of the Ghanaian Cultural Symbols Project and quoted in my essay
on Adinkra in the 2011 Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo edited The Oxford
Encyclopedia of African Thought , “this great panorama of creation dates
back to time immemorial; no one lives who saw its beginning and no one
will live to see its end, except Nyame,”, thereby projecting, as the Eglash
team’s commentary states, the idea of a sole invariant quality in the
creation and persistence of life. The Eglash team describes the design as
abstracting “the knuckles of a fist; the symbol for power” at the centre of
two spirals constituting two logarithmic curves. Thus “the curves at each
end do not represent any one particular organism”, “any one particular
living shape", rather, they are a general abstraction for life itself”. The “Gye
Nyame symbol [ being therefore] a generalization of log curves as
emblematic of life in general”.

The Eglash team’s interpretation links the motif of an invariant quality of

existence as manifest in the idea of an ultimate creator supervening over
the dynamism of the cosmos with the quest for invariance in science as a
central goal of the scientific quest to understand the regularities that define
the character of phenomena, in particular, and the cosmos, in general, as
coherent but dynamic forms, a grasp of the balance of structural stability
and change within that structure vital for humanity’s positioning of itself
within the cosmos:

Developing a general abstraction or "invariant property"

that fits all cases is fundamental to science. The idea that
logarithmic scaling or "power laws" characterize patterns in
biology is now widely accepted, although the reasons are
still an active area of research.

The contemporary scientific world view does not posit an ultimate creator
as the foundation of cosmic coherence and dynamism, but it searches for
foundations of existence that can be grasped by the ratiocinative intellect, a
42
transposition to the largely ratiocinative realm of an ultimate goal, that, in
the formative centuries of Western thought in ancient Greece and up till the
17th century Scientific Revolution, was still understood by some scientists,
from Aristotle to Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes, as
capable of pursuit through the integration of scientific ratiocination and
other forms of approach to knowledge, a multidisciplinary vision also
suggested by the artistic, philosophical, mathematical and spiritual
synthesis represented by such Adinkra symbols as Gye Nyame.

The Spiral in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order

The creative power of ase associated with Esu is also evoked in the
sculpting of spirals in the Edan Ogboni art of the Yoruba Ogboni institution,
as summed up by Babatunde Lawal in “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New
Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni”:

According to some informants, the spiral or concentric

circles motif signifies the spin of the small snail shell
(okoto) associated with the transformative power of Esu,
the divine messenger, and Olokun, the goddess of the
sea…

The spiral or concentric circles motif appears prominently

on many edan. Informants offered two different but related
interpretations for it. According to some, it represents
the spin (ranyinranyin) of the cone-shaped bottom of the
small snail shell (okoto), a children's toy associated with
increase, dynamic motion, and, by extension, with the
transformatory power of Esu, the divine messenger who
mediates between the Orisa and Ile[ Earth as a Goddess].
Others identify the motif with the motion of a whirlpool,
signifying the expansive power of Olokun, the goddess of
the sea and abundance, a metaphor for the rhythm of
life, and increase (iresi)

The cross-cultural resonance of the spiral suggests the ubiquity of concepts

of transformative procreative force, a force that enables the sustenance as
well as the transformations of reality associated with Esu and his Igbo,
Indian and Chinese affiliates in Agwu, Shakti and the dragon. The spiral
motif, therefore, may emblematize the conjunctions between Irele’s
exposition of cosmic force in relation to Négritude, the Yoruba concept of
43
ase, the Igbo ike, the Indian Shakti and the Chinese ch’i, indicating the
cross-cultural resonance of Irele’s invocation of the figure of Esu as
emblematic of conceptions of ontological and epistemic non-linearity
correlative with non-linear science.

The spiral, in this framework, could evoke, not only the regularities that
define the coherent development of life, but also the obverse of that
conventional coherence, complementing that symbol of obvious
structuration in life’s dynamism with what, from another context, would be
seen as chaos, but which represents the distinctive logic of the existence of
he who felt constricted in a veranda and the room but could at last stretch
himself in a groundnut shell, the one who throws a stone today and hits a
bird yesterday.

The Tension Between Abstraction and Concreteness as Central to

Cognition and Expression

Rowland Abiodun presents magnificently the tension in human thought

and expression between abstraction and concreteness, between the
aspiration to trans-material heights of cognition and the anchoring of this
aspiration in the sensual immediacy of human experience through images
that appeal to the senses, as this tension is dramatized in the Yoruba
concept “oro”. He describes oro as designating discourse as an expression
of cognitive powers through which the cosmos was created. He depicts it as
also active on earth as the human capacity for reflection as demonstrated in
various modes of expression.

Its pervasive character is portrayed in terms of its ceaseless motion across

time and space, blazing with naked intensity that makes it unsafe for the
human being to approach it directly. Engagement with this compelling but

44
45
 Science and Art

Images of Infinity 3

The Dragon/Serpent as Scientific Metaphor

Figure 6
Magnificent picture of mathematician Manjul Bhargava
describing how ancient Indian mathematicians used
numbers in relation to the image of a snake as mnemonic
devices for indicating musical rhythm.
The serpent swallowing its own tail in the bottom section of
the picture is an ancient image of cosmic unity, known as
the Uoroboros. It is used by astrophysicist Martin Rees in
his book Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the
Universe, in describing the unity of the cosmos in terms of
six numbers that define the constants that enable cosmic
structure and life.
The Ouroboros represents for Rees, the continuity
demonstrated by the inner space of atoms and the outer
world constituted by these atoms, with the human being
occupying a mid-point between the sub-microscopic and the
larger universe.
The dynamism actualized in the rendering of the serpent
and the vitality of the human figure in the picture above
constitute an accidental but powerful imagistic combination
evoking far reaching symbolic resonances.
An aspect of these resonances is the expression, in both
forms of existence imaged in the picture, the human being
and the snake, of related forms of dynamism expressing the
vitality of life, a force visualised in some schools of
Hinduism as a snake, its sinuous motion indicating the
vibrations of life force in the body as it energises both
physical capacity and cognitive power, the expression in the
human being of the cosmic force known as Shakti and also
called Kundalini, the serpent power.
46

Image source : Getty Images. Picture by Manjunath

Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
delicate power is best reached though “owe”, imaginative expressions that
filter its potency in ways that stimulate the mind even as they enable it bear
the weight of this force, inventive strategies of which verbal art is
paradigmatic, as he expounds in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the
African in African Art, a discussion I examine at some length in
“Manifestations at Cosmogenesis : Universal Implications of Three Yoruba
Cosmogonic Narratives”.

Abiola Irele’s Scholarship as Subsumed by the Cognitive Modes

of Abstraction and Concreteness

At the conjunction of abstraction and concreteness, the field of engagement

with various reflective and expressive strategies in trying to make meaning
of existence, Irele’s scholarship integrates the imaginative forms
represented by literature, music and the African imagination in general
with his exploration of the most abstract conceptions, such as ideas of
cosmic force in Négritude and ideas of non-linear dynamics in science,
ideas refracted though his deployment of the image of Esu, the paradoxical
conjunctur, so tall the tuft of hair on his head is barely visible above the
ground as he walks the path.

Conceptions of Universal Force in Relation to Isaac Newton’s

Integration of Diverse Cognitive Worlds in the Context of the
17th Century Scientific Revolution

May one not observe conjunctions between the Yoruba, Indian and Chinese
conceptions of cosmic force, efforts to unify existence in terms of an
abstract concept correlating matter and consciousness, with Isaac
Newton’s enigmatically compelling concluding passages from the "General
Scholium", the conclusion of his Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy, his working out of his own achievement in articulating a
unifying force in the universe, his theory of gravity?

Newton describes himself as establishing the validity of gravitational

theory through the critical methods he was central to developing as
defining modern science, but concludes by depicting a further vision
substantially beyond the scope of his gravitational theory. This further
perception, however, a vision of a force that pervades the material world,
enabling a broad range of physical activity in and beyond the human body,
47
he characterizes as representing a reach of speculative understanding
which the logical and experimental strategies of science were not yet
sufficiently developed to investigate :

And now we might add something concerning a certain

most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross
bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles
of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances,
and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to
greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the
neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected,
refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is
excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the
command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit,
mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves,
from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the
brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be
explain’d in few words, nor are we furnish’d with that
sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate
determination and demonstration of the laws by which this
electric and elastic spirit operates.

Newton’s delineation of cognitive limitations evident to him in the face of

possibilities of knowledge he could discern but which were beyond the
investigate capacities available in his time, and, ironically, inaccessible
even now, five centuries later, is preceded and framed by his movement
from working out his gravitational theory in terms of logical demonstration
and mathematical proof to discussing the difference between the
circumscription, in spite of their vastness of scope, represented by the
natural cosmic laws science investigates and the infinitude and ultimate
creative freedom embodied by God.

Newton, contrasting the qualities of space and time, the province of

cosmological physics, with the being of God as the source of those qualities
of the natural world, states:

This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets,

could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an
intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the
centers of other like systems, these, being form’d by the like
wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One;
48
 especially since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same
nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light
passes into all the other systems. And lest the systems of the
fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other
mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense
distances from one another.

This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world,
but as Lord over all...The supreme God is a Being eternal,
infinite, absolutely perfect...He is not eternity or infinity, but
is eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space; but he
endures and is present.

He endures forever and is everywhere present, and by

existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration
and space.

Simon Schaffer, reviewing Richard Westfall's Never at Rest : A Biography of

Isaac Newton, sums up Newton's scholarly project in its unity of what are
now known as philosophy and science but were one entity, Natural
Philosophy, in Newton's time: "Newton's notion of God's relation with
nature and the work he conducted on the construction of a full
cosmological account of that relation must be understood in terms of the
legitimate practices which could reveal God's action in nature to each
subject, and the ways in which these practices could then find a place in
society".

Newton thereby contextualises his work within the tradition of developing

unifying principles of nature through the use of both speculative thought
and linear logic in the aspiration to reach, approximate or glimpse an
aspect of the universality of understanding represented by a cosmic
intelligence, an aspiration that reaches back in Western thought to such
ancient Greek thinkers as Parmenides’ contribution to laying the
foundations of Western philosophy through his mythic and spiritual
explorations, Socrates and Plato conjoining spirituality, myth, speculation
and logic in seeking ultimate reality and Aristotle building on these and
other foundations in his intellectual search for a means to cognise the order
of the world as an expression of cosmic mind, and into Newton’s own time
by various scientists of the 17th century, such as Johannes Kepler and Rene
Descartes and in the 20th-21st century exemplified by, among others, Paul

49
Davies’ probing of the intersections between the quest for ultimate
meaning and modern science in such works as The Mind of God : The
Scientific Basis for a Rational World and his editing of Information and the
Nature of Reality : From Physics to Metaphysics.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics grounds such aspirations in an understanding of

human nature as marked by the desire to know, as demonstrated by “our
delight in the sense of sight which shows us the differences between
things”, a delight inspiring efforts to penetrate to the order underlying the
diversity of the universe, and for those amenable to identification with the
idea, enabling a participation in the divine mind that enables this cosmic
order, as Jonathan Lear expounds of the scope of the Aristotelian vision in
Aristotle : The Desire to Understand.

Newton’s capping of his achievements in laying the foundations of the

critical methods that define modern science by looking beyond those
procedures to perspectives that transcend them suggests the tension
between the different cognitive and faith cultures that motivated him, these
being Christianity, the eventually marginalised systems of Hermeticism
and alchemy and the transformation of these inspirations through
mathematical and experimental science, a confluence that constitutes the
matrix of his genius, as summed up by Richard Westfall’s superb
Encyclopaedia Britannica distillation of his Newton research expanded in
his Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton and the more recent Robb
Ilf’s Newton: A Very Short Introduction, among many other examples of
what has become core to Newton scholarship, as demonstrated by such
surveys of the expansion of Newton scholarship as Massimo Mazzoti's
"The Two Newtons and Beyond"and Margaret Osler's "The New Newtonian
Scholarship and the Fate of the Scientific Revolution", explorations building
upon the range of Newton papers represented by the ongoing online
publication of all Newton's work at the Newton Project.

The convergence of supposedly contrastive but actually complementary

cognitive styles in Newton’s creativity is a sterling example of the
multidisciplinary ferment that birthed the 17th century Scientific
Revolution in Europe, of which such works as Frances Yates’ Giordano
Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition have been pioneering in mapping the
combustion achieved through these multidisciplinary conjunctions and the
manner in which the eventual focus on particular methods of enquiry
within this mix of seemingly disparate cognitive styles and the correlative

50
circumscription of focus within a larger exploratory project enabled
modern science.

Possibilities of Conjunction between Orisa Cosmology and

Science through Dialogue Between their Contrastive
Epistemologies and Metaphysics

May Irele’s projections about possible relationships between myth and

science centred in inspiration from Orisa cosmology not assist in expanding
the possibilities suggested by these enquiries from the history of science?

At the core of the scientific project is mutual verifiability under similar or

identical conditions, meaning, anyone, anywhere, should be able to
examine and assess the validity of the postulations made by science using
the tools agreed upon by scientists as valid for that purpose, central to
these tools being quantification, measurement of the characteristics of
phenomena using mathematics, epistemic imperatives conferring a
scientific character on speculative and imaginative strategies contributory
to scientific knowledge. The movement towards mutual verifiability, with
quantification as a central tool of that goal, was critical in defining what is
now known as modern science, as different from the broader field of
Natural Philosophy and its predecessors in the study of the natural world
that gave birth to modern science.

Could contributions actualising Irele’s vision of possible relationships

between myth and science centred in inspiration from Orisa cosmology
emerge purely in the field of analogies, imaginative correlations between
science and myth as distinctive aspects of the cognitive orientations of
homo sapiens, in the context of acknowledgement of their general
commensurability as contrastive ways of knowing, recognising the
epistemic differences between both fields, without arguing for either field
contributing anything to the content of the other field?

Could these comparisons go beyond such non-transformative interactions

to contributing fundamentally to the knowledge content of either field, in
ways analogous perhaps to the use of computer simulations of natural
processes in the development of computing systems in the scientific field of

51
52
53
54
 Science and Art
Classical and Supersymmetric Adinkra
Figures 7, 8 and 9
"There are important examples in which theoretical physics
incorporates elegant motifs to represent mathematical
conceptions that are vastly simplified thereby… In this paper,
we introduce a graphical paradigm which shows some
promise in providing a new symbolic technology for usefully
re-conceptualizing problems in supersymmetric
representation theory.

The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple

verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human
traditions. The Asante people of West Africa have long been
accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known as
Adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose. With a nod to
this tradition, we christen our graphical symbols as
“Adinkras”.

-state Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux in “Adinkras: A Graphical

Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory”. In another paper,
with C.F. Doran etal, “A Counter-Example to a Putative Classificationof 1-
Dimensional,N-extended Supermultiplets” developing the same technique, in
reinforcement of this method, an assertion by Aristotle is quoted : “Thought is
impossible without an image”.
Faux and Gates describe their use of shapes in place of equations as
illuminating the connections between fermions and bosons, the fundamental
elements of the scientific theory of supersymmetry their work addresses,
describing the manipulation of these visual forms as more illuminating in this
context than equations. In “A Counter Example” it is declared “An Adinkra is
worth ten thousand equations”. This idea is illustrated by Tristan Hubsch in
“Building Blocks of Supersymmetry and Why Nature May Well Need Them”,
shown in figure 7, using later developments of more complex forms of the
symbols initially developed by Gates and Faux.
55
Beyond the work of Faux and Gates, Adinkra has been significantly examined for its
intrinsic mathematical significance and its possibilities in mathematics education, as
in Ron Eglash et al's “Adinkra Mathematics: A Study of Ethnocomputing in Ghana”.
The visual and epistemic similarities, shown in the image/text combinations
composed by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in the figures 5 and 6, between classical
Adinkra and the supersymmetric Adinkra of Faux and Gates, later named
Adinkrammatics, demonstrates possibilities of Adinkra as a stimulator of
mathematical thought even though Faux and Gates state in a personal communication
that their work is not derived from inspiration by classical Adinkra symbols.
The development of new Adinkra symbols in the mathematical physics of
supersymmetry by Faux, Gates and their collaborators, the exploration of the
mathematical character of classical Adinkra by Eglash and his co-workers, among
other investigators in the mathematics of classical Adinkra, represent growth in
understanding the significance of classical African creativity, particularly in terms of
science. They also advance appreciation of the role of the senses, specifically the
sense of sight to which these varied forms of Adinkra appeal to, as well as of pictorial
forms, which these Adinkra are, in the development and communication of scientific
knowledge, particularly in terms of the relationship between sensory perception and
cognitive abstraction in mathematics.
What may be the conjunction between these varied Adinkra projects and Irele’s
evocation of convergences between myth, particularly in Orisa cosmology, and
science? These projects all represent deployments of imagistic forms. The verbal
expressions of myth in Orisa cosmology stimulate visualisation associated with ideas.
The pictorial structures of classical and supersymmetric Adinkra use visual patterns
in communicating cognitive possibilities and operations.
Beyond these procedural correlations, supersymmetric Adinkra and Irele’s ideas of
Orisa/cosmology science alignments represent efforts to arrive at the fundamental
unifying structures of reality, entering into the task though different epistemic
gateways, though ultimately converging in analysis and organisation of ideas in
terms of the ratiocinative parameters of science.
Taking further the possibilities demonstrated by the Orisa/science confluence, it is
possible to integrate these intersections into an investigative structure exploring
existence through mythic, spiritual and philosophical perspectives, an
interdisciplinary research system developing dialogue between these cognitive
structures, engaging these various disciplines in terms of their distinctive epistemic
56
and metaphysical frameworks.
Natural Computing, that seeming to be the kind of transforming insight
Irele projects as possible for science through inspiration from Orisa
cosmology in relation to science?

A description of Natural Computing integrating definitions from the

Wikipedia essay on the subject, Lila Kari and Grzegorz Rozenberg's "The
Many Facets of Natural Computing" and the Natural Computing journal
suggests its link with the metaphoric, interdisciplinary thinking Irele
suggests in projecting the possibility of advancing of science by adapting
paradigms from Orisa cosmology:

Natural Computing refers to computational processes

observed in nature, and human-designed computing inspired
by nature, such as observing biological, ecological and
physical systems. Natural Computing includes attempting to
understand the world around us in terms of information
processing, extending even to the understanding of the
universe itself from the point of view of information
processing, an extreme example of which is the idea that
information is more fundamental than matter or energy.
Characteristic for human-designed computing inspired by
nature is the metaphorical use of concepts, principles and
mechanisms underlying natural systems.

In the moderate application of this style of thinking, computation may be

understood as a process expressed by both nature and human creations,
with the natural and the human made being perceived as related but
different demonstrations of the same or similar qualities. Along similar
lines, Orisa cosmology as Irele depicts it in relation to science could be
studied for ideas it can suggest for science, while noting that, as a mythic
and spiritual system it is different from science and that the creators of the
older, mythic system are not likely to have had in mind what is now
understood as scientific practice. Myth, in this context, could be
understood as a primordial style of thought, capable of infinitely yielding
fruit, enabling illuminative possibilities even in other disciplinary contexts
different from itself in basic goals and methods.

This approach could be examined in relation to various perspectives on

relationships between the Ifa system of knowledge, an aspect of Orisa
cosmology, and modern science, in the rich Facebook debate compiled as
"Ifa/Afa/Efa/ Fa, Science and Comparative Scholarship".
57
Whatever might be the ultimate possibilities of the enterprise adumbrated
by Irele, it takes forward the educational scheme physicist and philosopher
Erwin Schrodinger describes in Nature and the Greeks and Science and
Humanism as vital for fulfilling the scope of the human need for meaning.
Schrodinger argues for a balance between the quantitative study of nature
that defines science as well as the more speculative engagements with
reality represented by philosophy and spirituality. He urges the integration
of aspects of awareness beyond the province of the quantitative remit of
science while recognising the indispensability and ultimate
complementarity of both approaches to existence.

Kojo Arthur’s summations on classical Akan thought in Cloth As Metaphor:

Re(reading) the Adinkra Cloth Symbols of the Akan of Ghana, quoted at the
Facebook page of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems,
complements the Schrodinger perspective, depicting Adinkra as projecting
the understanding that:

Knowledge comes from various sources, including intuition,

revelation, authority, experience, observation, logical
reasoning, and experiments. As Minkus (1980, p. 185)
writes: “Extraordinary perception, divination, dreams, and
possession provide means of acquiring some knowledge of
spiritual reality and causality, although even then human
knowledge is limited and inadequate to penetrate the
mysteries of existence.” The Akan view reality as having
spiritual and non-spiritual dimensions, and thus to
understand and know reality requires the reliance on
multiple sources of knowledge. The various sources of
knowledge, as the Akan believe, are complementary and not
antagonistic in one’s attempts to discover and comprehend
reality.

58
 III

Ijala, Yoruba Hunter’s Poetry as a Cosmological Imperative

and the Achievement of Abiola Irele

One of Irele’s most remarkable pieces of writing presents Yoruba

philosophy of nature as dramatized in Ijala poetry, Yoruba poetry of
hunters, in his essay “ Tradition and the Yoruba Writer : D. O. Fagunwa,
Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka”. He depicts this poetry as portraying the
forest as a microcosm of the cosmos and the hunter as the embodiment of
the qualities vital for navigating the complex represented by existence, a
perspective related to Wole Soyinka’s summation of Ijala in Myth,
Literature and the African World, as “celebrating not only the deity[ Ogun,
the pathfinding patron of hunters] “but also animal and plant life, seeks to
capture the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of
man into the secrets of the universe".

Forest literature inspired by the animistic universe of classical African

literature and thought, like the works of D. O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola,
which Irele studied in terms of their grounding in Yoruba oral art and
thought and the much later Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which draws
from similar streams, may be appreciated in relation to the dramatization,
through imaginative encounters with the various, often fantastic denizens
of fictional forests, the pervasive force of ase as enabling material being
and its possibilities of association with consciousness across all forms of
being, from humans to animals, to inanimate forms such as trees to
ostensibly non-living phenomena such as rivers.

The conjunctions between these ideas and imaginative works with such
non-African, non-fictional accounts of relationships with vegetative nature
as the South American forest shamanism of Joan Halifax’ Shamanic Voices,
suggest the capacity of various conceptions of cosmic force, particularly
those from animist cultures, of illuminating accounts of human
identification with natural forms depicting communication between
various forms of being. Awo Falokun Fatunmbi, referencing the Yoruba
discipline Ifa in “Obatala:Ifa and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth”,
sums up a perception that is relevant for other animistic cultures:

The threads of [the] fabric “which binds the universe

together…are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness
which Ifa teaches exist in all things on all levels of being
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 [leading to the understanding] that it is the ability of forces
of nature to communicate with each other, and the ability of
humans to communicate with forces in nature that gives the
world a sense of spiritual unity.

Suggestive of Irele’s positioning of Esu in relation to complex patterns of

force in nature, Fatunmbi describes this idea of communication between
humans and forces of nature as “believed to be facilitated by the Spirit of
Esu, who is the Divine Messenger,” the “Divine Trickster [ who] is a
fundamental principle of the structure of reality”, as he elaborates in “Eṣu-
Elegba: Ifa and the Spirit of the Divine Messenger“.

The pioneering, foundational work on Ijala, Adeboye Babalola’s The

Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala, does not demonstrate such explicit
philosophical orientations, unless through extrapolation from the poetry,
perhaps, because, as stated in a personal communication by scholar of
Yoruba Akin Oyetade, the focus in those early days of scholarship in African
oral literature when the book was published was to establish the existence
of this literature in the first place, in contrast to the then perspective
expressed by some Western scholars that there was “no such mythical
beast as African literature” as Soyinka sums up in Myth. There might exist
later developments in Ijala scholarship, however, that foreground its
philosophical and spiritual significance but which I am not yet aware of.

One may pursue extrapolations from Babalola’s work on Ijala in relation to

the achievement of Irele, in order to concretise the scope of Irele’s
achievement in memorable images, as I do below in relation to selections
from “Salute to the Elephant” by Odeniyi Apolebieji of Odeomu in S. A.
Babalola’s The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala. Last three lines adapted
from Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. The eighth line,
evoking the relationship between the egret and the elephant, are my own
additions :

“O elephant, huge as a hill, even in a crouching posture”.

The Irele universe, the ideas dramatized by his many faceted intellectual
activity from the sixties to the present, from editorship of the journal Black
Orpheus to the editorship of Research in African Literatures and The
Savannah Review, from his landmark “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer” to
his scintillating “The African Scholar”, from the University of Ibadan to

60
University of Ghana to Harvard and Kwara State University, is like a
mountain, the peak of which imposes itself one one’s vision even from a far
distance, immense and majestically encompassing, inspiringly challenging
to circumnavigate as one reaches its base, its foundational forms, its
building blocks.

“O elephant, whom one sees and points towards with all one’s
fingers.”

One cannot not point to Irele with one finger, though he is one man. Can
identification of his person using one digit encompass his existence as
philosophical builder and expositor in the history of philosophy, music
scholar, literary and cultural critic, his work spanning Francophone and
Anglophone thought and literature, his range of reference, encompassing
the sciences and the humanities, his editorship of central journals in the
development of modern African scholarship, his work as pioneering
publisher of New Horn Press, his movements of perspective from “ In
Praise of Alienation”, his first inaugural at the University of Ibadan in 1982
to his second “ The African Scholar” circa 1991 at Ohio State University?

“O elephant, on whose bulk, majestic in motion

the egret has found a home in its journeys across the world.”

The egret feeds on the insects on the body of the elephant and takes
advantage of the movement of the much larger creature to nourish itself on
the small creatures the behemoth’s movements dislodge. Through such
relationships with animals in their dispersion across the world, the egret
has achieved a cosmopolitan, global spread. Along similar lines, sustained
engagement with Irele’s scholarship in its varying focus on different
subjects, it’s range of reference and ideational reach demonstrated by its
multidisciplinary and cross cultural networking and the excitement
inspired by its stylistic beauty and power, may facilitate a similar
development in the student of this corpus, a cognitive expansion that may
go even beyond the ideational, disciplinary and cultural geographies Irele
addressed, as one pushes farther and farther the implications of the
projects represented by his oeuvre.

61
62
 Science and Art

Figure 10

Conjuncting Irele 3

Einstein’s Energy/Matter Equivalence Equation

and the Transformative Conjunctions of Legba

Perhaps the world’s most famous equation, Albert Einstein's

matter/energy equivalence formulation, the concise beauty of
which is shown at top right, is a classic demonstration of the
mediation between modes of being the Yoruba origin Orisa
cosmology deity Esu, represented here by his Voodoo incarnation
Papa Legba, may be described as embodying.

Legba’s depiction in this painting may be seen as portraying him as

a dandy, represented by his stylish hat, and as a nonconformist, as
evoked by his unclothed torso, thus unifying contrastive
possibilities of social existence, distiller of the refinements of society
yet transcending its limitations, as he roams the possibilities of
being represented by the open field he traverses in the company of
his faithful dog, the hedge in the field dividing the space into two,
suggesting the various boundaries, ontological and perceptual,
Legba crosses and unifies.

63
 On the left is Legba’s supremely elegant veve, a visual symbol
used in inviting the presence of the loa, the spirits of Voodoo.
Its intersecting horizontal and vertical axes, symbolic of
various contrastive but complementary ontological
coordinates, is correlative with the equals sign in Eisenstein’s
equation indicating the unity of matter and energy in relation
to the speed of light, an incidental conjunction signalling the
character of Legba as embodiment of the crossroads or
intersections of being and becoming.

These visual evocations are juxtaposed with a picture of

Abiola Irele, man of the world and cosmopolitan scholar,
connoisseur of fine wines and singer of both Italian opera and
Nigerian popular music, philosopher and critic of the arts,
academic organizer and weaver of multidisciplinary
symmetries, master of various languages enabling crossing
cultural boundaries, in the spirit of Legba’s globally
comprehensive multilingualism.

Collage: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

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“ The hunter’s boast at home is not repeated when he really
meets the elephant.
The hunter’s boast at home is not repeated before the elephant”.

Great thanks to Professor Ogo Ufuani, my teacher and later senior

colleague at the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin,
for first suggesting to me the idea of Irele scholarship as a distinctive and
admirable activity to which one may aspire. This led to my discussing the
idea of being an Irele scholar with a former PhD student of Irele’s, who
indicated the challenge of following the speed and scope of Irele’s
publication trajectory.

Mapping and immersing oneself in Irele Studies, literature by and about

Irele, is a challenging but exhilarating task, opening vistas into broad zones
of knowledge within and beyond the thrust block afforded by his work,
propelled by identification with his inimitable intelligence.

Such a mapping involves a range of methods of accounting for his

achievements. These involve a chronological listing of his work. It also
includes a description of this creative output in terms of types of
publication, from journal and book editorials to stand alone articles and
essay collections to public addresses and PhD, M.A. and undergraduate
dissertations and other writings among others emerging from the course of
his academic degrees. It is also represented by descriptions of the
configuration of his publications in terms of subject matter, from music
criticism to literary criticism to philosophy, to cultural, aesthetic and
literary theory, among others. It encompasses the drawing of a picture of
the conceptual and perspectival relationships between his writings and
between these writings and his range of activities as editor, publisher,
teacher, academic administrator and more.

What is the centre of this construct?

How do its radiations emerge in relation to this core?

What are the ideational and other implications emerging in consonance

with this structure?

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In studying Irele, I aspire to contextualise him in relation to the
development of civilisation, focusing on emergents at the intersections of
the arts and the sciences. In thus structuring the horizon of understanding
represented by my conception of Irele scholarship, one’s activity can be
described in terms of various avian metaphors, representing the mental
flight evoked by the motion of birds above the earth and the landscape
surveyed from the resulting perspective.

In this study, one may be akin to a bird poised in mid-air, studying Irele in
relation to the current configuration of knowledge in various disciplines,
investigating those ideas and issues considered most relevant at the
present time within those contexts, observing already highlighted
relationships or developing new ones.

In this exploration, one may also be like a bird in flight, studying Irele in
relation to the growth of knowledge in various fields, observing the
developing relationships between ideas in particular fields and in relation
to expansions in other fields.

In these investigations, one could resemble a cormorant, studying Irele in

relation to simply following where one’s interests lead, pursuing one’s
enthusiasms rather than being guided by issues and questions posed by
others, reorganizing disciplines around one’s own research interests and
their associated enquiries, like a bird picking bits and pieces to make a
nest composed of various contrastive but ultimately complementary
forms, complementing this variety by pursuing depth of understanding
through sustained attention to any one of those bits that interest one most,
the variegated nest enabling capacity to make unusual and therefore
interesting and possibly profound connections.

The cormorant surveying the terrain in its flight, its attention caught by an
element of particular interest, positions itself in mid-air, focusing on that
element or pursues gradually developing interests emerging from the flows
and counter flows of engaging with various enthusiasms, a bird flying on
high studying the flow of the river and the movement of fish from river to
river, noting the patterns of fish migration over the years.

“If you wish to know the elephant, the elephant who is a

veritable ferry-man”

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Language is vehicle and creator of meaning, the ferry as well as the
passenger of the ferry and the river on which ferry and passenger are in
action. Irele is an ultimate master of the unity of form and content in
language, his expository prose uniquely magnificent in the word cathedrals
he weaves, universes of ideation singing through the cognitive muscularity
of epistemic play.

“O elephant, the vagrant par excellence”.

The inter-continental scope of Irele’s career is both expressive of his global

significance and a demonstration of his work as a victim of the shift in
power represented by the negative transformation of the fortunes of
African countries after the earlier decades following independence. The
foundations of his scholarship were laid while he was as the University of
Ibadan after his PhD at the University of Paris, a luminary among classical
figures in the study of African and Caribbean literature and culture, such as
Wole Soyinka, Isidore Okpewho, and adding then University of Ife, Biodun
Jeyifo, a constellation that included pioneers in African philosophy such as
Peter Bodunrin and in African historiography, Kenneth Dike, a stellar
period in Nigerian university history which Irele portrays and laments its
non-continuity in “The African Scholar”.

Irele’s leaving Ibadan to Ohio State University in the US after a long career
centred in working in African universities was done in the spirit of a person
fleeing from institutional inadequacy, the promise of the earlier years of
effervescence having collapsed in the political and economic upheavals
demonstrating the growing pains of African nations, truncating the dream
of a pan-African scholarly powerhouse which people like Irele represented
with his mastery of French and English and his working at various times at
the Universities of Ibadan and Ghana.

He eventually returned to Nigeria after moving to Harvard from Ohio and

contributed in strategic ways to Kwara State University, starting the
journal The Savannah Review, his presence institutionalized in that
university by the founding there of the Irele School of Theory and Criticism
and its annual seminars, and the donation to the university of his massive
and many splendoured library.

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He informed me recently by email that he had returned to Harvard and I
was moved by his reversal of his earlier stated vision of the need to retire
home after a particular point in time abroad, particularly on account of
what he described in a personal communication as the challenging
environment of Nigeria, the difference between the mountaintop
represented by Harvard and the foothills emblematised by his return to his
ancestral nation.

I replied requesting to know why he had made this relocation about which I
did not know whether to be happy for him or sad for Nigeria. I wondered
why he did not respond even as my email account became full and could
take no more messages, as I planned to free the box for more activity and
contact him, then came the news that the hunter had gone home.

“Demon who snaps tree branches into many pieces and moves
on to the forest farm”.

Irele’s work can be divided into the two broad and interrelated areas of
criticism and theory. He is a magnificent expositor of both the imaginative
strategies of the writers he explores as of the ideational universes they
draw from and those which they construct. He is rich on the context of
African philosophy and a major expositor of Négritude philosophy and
literature and very memorable on Yoruba philosophy. He is a thinker in the
relationship between literature and styles of cognition, particularly in
relation to Africa, the latter demonstrated most graphically by his later
book The African Imagination. Irele’s example demonstrates the trajectory
of some of the greatest scholars, engaging both the branches represented
by individual cognitive and artistic explorations and the forest constituted
by the teeming world of ideas in which these braNches sprout on colossal
trees, forests the expansion of which they point to as yet embryonic
possibilities.

“O elephant whom the hunter at times sees face to face.

O elephant whom the hunter at other times sees from the rear.”

Irele is one of those who laid the foundations in the study of African and
Caribbean literature and culture, and whose work, in spite of the attention
it has received so far, needs to be more broadly and deeply engaged with
for the elucidation of its internal power and its capacity to illuminate other
bodies of knowledge. Just like those who study African literature today
and tomorrow and even other non-African literatures and cultures into
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69
 Science and Art

Images of Infinity 4

The Ekpuk/Nsibidi Spiral

Figure 8

“Good Morning, Sunrise (detail)

Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria
2001
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the artist

Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and

graphic symbols. His drawings, paintings and digital images
are abuzz with language. The artist employs invented script
as well as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi to
create richly textured works. In this painting, the spiral is an
nsibidi sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and
eternity. Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks,
cool blues and whites contributes to the overall sense of
animation”.

Text and image source : “Nsibidi” at the website Inscribing

Meaning : Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art .

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which his influence has penetrated are swimming in waters influenced by
Irele’s explorations, so, in studies to come in various fields of knowledge,

Irele’s influence rising to greater heights will constitute platforms of

discourse that contribute to the shaping of what might be new disciplines,
an influence appreciated from its rearward, indirect power, by those who
drink of Irele waters without knowing it and those who drink directly, who
eat at the same table with the master, in direct face to face dialogue with
him in the world of subtle and complex reflection, of expression limpid like
gold being smelted in fire, of striving for knowledge that reaches out to
embrace the cosmos from a vantage point at a particular cultural location.

“O elephant, who single-handed causes a tremor in a dense

tropical forest.”

The creature encountered by Abababalona at the river where all animals

come to drink in the Nigerian folktale named after the hero, and which I
learnt about from my mother Jhalobia Ojemu, was so massive the various
flying creatures living on its body would rise periodically into the air,
blocking out the sun. "…beyond are the stars, and beyond them more stars,
and beyond and beyond …to depths beyond depths, where the great
galaxies float like clouds…scattering out from one common point to the
ultimate edges of time and distance. …many lives…the beginning and the
end, and all that goes between…in their birth and growing [ Is] it chance or
purpose that makes a path for all life in time and space [?]”- from “Twig” by
Gordon Dickson. Irele’s ideational configurations are the seeds of
knowledge that populate the forest. The life in the arboreal vastness that
grows from the seeds. The vibrations of delight running through the
interconnections as they unravel to the mind’s eye.

“My chant is a salute to the elephant.

Ajanaku who walks with a heavy thread.
O elephant, praisenamed Laaye, massive animal blackish grey in
complexion”.

In the spirit of creative irreverence that characterises the literature of the

Ifa system, the divine progenitor of the system, Orunmila, the Witness to
Creation, embodiment of all knowledge of human potential from their
seeds at the beginning of time, is known as the little man with a head full of
wisdom, the small black man of Igeti hill.

71
At my first and only meeting with Irele, at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London in 2004, he struck me as looking like a farmer,
though a comfortable one, not what I expected an academic to look like
and certainly not one of his accomplishment and acclaim. There are
pictures online of Irele formally dressed in a sharp suit and various first-
hand accounts indicating a more suave, younger Irele, a connoisseur of fine
wines, proficient in singing operatic lines in Italian, an accomplished man
of the world, but the impression I got from him on that day, corroborated
by other images of him on the Internet, reflect distance between his stature
and his projection of status, perhaps a personality emerging with time in
terms of an ironic relationship with the world, a reprioritisation.

“The sage, indeed, wears clothes of coarse cloth, but carries within precious
jade” states Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, as translated by
Toshihiko Izutsu in Sufism and Taoism. Such an individual, as understood in
the symbolism of classical Chinese painting, is like a pine tree, its sinuous
sturdiness making it evocative of a person of “high principles whose
manner reveals an inner power”, like a young dragon coiled in a deep
gorge, suggesting concealed creative potential discreetly held in reserve, as
portrayed by Mai-mai Sze in The Way of Chinese Painting.

“O elephant, lord of the forest, respectfully called Oriiribobo.

When we see the elephant, we cannot be content with stating ‘I saw

something pass in a flash’.

We must declare we have seen the tamer of the forest.”

Master who revealed to us what we really are

who opened our eyes incomparably to the patrimony from our ancestors
the reverberations through which we may shape present and future.

Thinker astride civilizations.

Son of Setilu of Ifa,

Setilu, originator of the 256 storehouses of knowledge,
Setilu, creator of magnificent networks of cognition,
grandson of Olowontuyeye, the ancestor of the myriad living things.

Francis Abiola Irele!

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Poised in the sky of thought like a swarm of bees.

If it were possible to defeat the grim reaper, we would have done so for
your sake.

Remember us
vouchsafe guidance from your new home to us,
who,
in the words of the Kuba celebration of transition to the beyond,
still walk the “goat’s earth” as you “touch God’s sky”,
as one of those whose “touches are often felt, whose wisdoms come
suddenly to the mind when the wisest have shaken their heads and uttered
‘it cannot be done’ “, as your friend put it in that work on the journey most
mysterious where one may more clearly discern what we have all been
struggling to understand using the broken tools of our logic and
intelligence.

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