Scholarship as Concealed Autobiography : Reflections on Writing "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice”

Cover image:

"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".

Image and verbal text from “Nsibidi”  in Inscribing Meaning Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

                                                   Abstract

Reflecting on the roots of my cognitive journey in a view of education as a quest for ultimate meaning.

There are times  one writes a piece about an intellectual subject that is not presented as having a direct relationship with one's intimate personal history, but which, really, is a distillation from that history, an exemplar of Christopher Okigbo's summations on his poetic sequence Labyrinths, "the progression through 'Heavensgate' through 'Limits' through 'Distances' is like the telling of the beads on a rosary; except that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together on memory". 

In writing "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice" with particular reference to Nigeria,  ​on the invitation of  Adeshina Afolayan, to be published in the Yoruba Studies Review, I have been able, for the first time in decades, to articulate in a manner that begins to do justice to the inspirational essence of my educational aspirations, a vision burning in me since my mid to late teenage years, leading me then to forswear university education to the dismay of my family, in the name of educating myself.

 I saw  the educational system, in not being oriented towards assisting people  address what I understood and still perceive  as the fundamental questions of existence, "why do I exist?", "why am I here on earth ? ", "where am I coming from and where am I going?" and "how should I live, particularly in the light of these perplexities?", as therefore built on a flawed foundation inimical to the central logic of my existence as a human being, a view I still hold having eventually spent most of my life in the context of this  educational system in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Nigeria and England and working as an academic in Nigeria and as an Independent Scholar in relation to universities in England. 

A person on a journey who does not know why he is on the journey, where he is coming from and what his destination is, has no idea of the time of the termination of this journey or the ultimate rationale for this timing but only knows that the journey will end at a time unanticipated, and yet, aware of all these fundamental disenablements, proceeds to concentrate purely on the process of the journey, a journey  the purpose of which he does not know,  is how I have come to sum up what I see as the foundational metaphysical limitation of this educational structure, a structure representing a retreat from the religious dogmatism of the European Middle Ages into an unrealistic flight from the quest for ultimate meaning, this system having originated in Europe from where it spread globally.

My sister, much later, described my efforts to articulate my views in my teenage years as sounding "intelligent but meaningless", not surprising for a person three years younger than me, while I wonder what my conceptual range and expressive powers were then, having just completed secondary school and gone on to read books in my family's library that transformed my horizon forever, leading to contemplative practices that brought me into contact with a compelling force within  myself that oriented me away from the path expected of me as a middle class Nigerian, a child of teachers, values central to the society I was in, directing me towards questions of ultimate meaning, questions that seemed bizarre to people around me, questions unaccommodated by the educational system while the hunger for personal experiential engagement with the metaphysical issues those questions represented  was unaddressable by the managers of the religious cultures  in my immediate environment in Benin-City, Nigeria.

"Is he on drugs?", " Is there a woman involved?", "Are you sure your son is well mentally?", "Does he not need the attention of a psychiatrist?", "He might need to be seen by a spiritual specialist because it could be a spiritual problem, perhaps a spiritual attack", various people whom my mother took her perplexities about my inexplicable behaviour to would ask or recommend. I eventually consented to go to the university, and having immersed myself in extensive reading inspired by my philosophical and spiritual hunger, I had gained significant study skills enabling me  get high grades in the university entrance exams, but having got into the institution, I could not correlate the purpose and culture of the system with what burned within me as the goal of my life. 

Why spend time studying subjects that have little or no relationship with the question of my purpose on earth, using methods that have little connection with my individuality as a unique cognitive creature as all humans are unique, yet being forced, like everyone else, to squeeze oneself into a mould prepared by a few to accommodate everyone? I withdrew from the university on three occasions over a period of years, persuaded to return after each withdrawal but finding the place made little meaning, I left again, returning for the final time through the influence of a combination of force and persuasion. I eventually gained a lot from the system but at the price of a lot of pain and confusion arising from trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

What I needed was an individualised learning system that focused on my philosophical and spiritual quest as the central logic of my existence, the primary pursuit that made my life meaningful, and built, in relation to it,  other areas of study, such as the cultivation of skills in critical and imaginative  thinking and verbal and visual expression,  a system I am now developing.

 Responding to the breadth of my hungrily growing cognitive interests, such a system would explore as broad a range of subjects as possible,  examining various aspects of existence in their interrelationships as dynamisms crying out for understanding in terms of their role in relation to an overarching purpose, a purpose that might not necessarily be seen in the same way by everyone, the cosmos being too complex to be encapsulated in any definitive form by the human mind, as Jorge Luis Borges suggests in "Inferno, 1,32"​, the parable of the tiger and the writer to whom God revealed in dreams the meaning of their individual but correlative  existences within the tapestry of being, only  for them to wake up and forget the dreams, being left with nothing but a vague but potent sense of gaining and losing something of infinite value.

 "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's", declared the English social and philosophical rebel, the artist, poet and philosopher William Blake. I have tried variously to create my own systems of learning, as anyone who aspires to creativity would need to do,  surviving and partly thriving within the dominant educational system but constantly challenged by bottlenecks arising from the contradictions between social expectations and my daimon- a spirit that drives one but is not fully coextensive with one's mind, seeming to pursue its own orientations and goals through the vehicle constituted by one's existence, one's mind, body, and activities.

Gradually, however, light begins to shine into the tunnel of the long, often perplexing and painful journey as voices of solidarity sharing similar ideas and convictions randomly emerge, as one's struggles are validated, as one is able to express one's understanding of the struggle in a manner that speaks to the depths of the faith and vision one bears as constituting one's own essence, "the  orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission", as the concept of vocation is described by Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language.

Even more satisfying is that this formulation is being composed by building on a platform of ideas constructed by my immediate ethnic ancestors, my fellow Africans, people whose conceptions are in great need of study and sharing with the world.