Exploring Intersections of African Discourses: Celebrating Olabiyi Yai, Scholar Extraordinaire of African Arts and Philosophies

Professor Olabiyi Babalola Yai in his role as Benin's Permanent Delegate to UNESCO

Abstract

A brief survey of the achievement of Ọlabiyi Babalola Yai in exploring multidisciplinary networks of African systems of thought and expression in the humanities. The overview is followed by selections from his work mapping central ideas he has developed and evoking the flavour of his style of expression. The essay is interspersed with images displaying various activities of Yai’s and the intersection of his professional and social worlds. 

This is part of my project exploring the intrinsic and universal significance of Yoruba aesthetics, the study of beauty and of art as developed in Yoruba thought,  as represented by the work of Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal, an investigation that has led me to Olabiyi Yai, whose work is exemplary for studies in the interrelations of African and verbal arts and philosophies, and directly influential to such investigations in Yoruba arts and philosophies and to Abiodun's creativity.  

Ọlabiyi Babalọla Yai’s Creation of a Unique Ideational, Analytical and Expressive Identity

In every field of knowledge, there exist certain creatives, engagement with whose work is indispensable to experiencing the finest fruits, the ripest distillations represented by that field.

That is the case with the work of Ọlabiyi Babalọla Yai, scholar extraordinaire in African oral and written literatures, African philosophy, African arts and Yoruba Studies, who writes in English and French, the latter the official language of his native Benin.

I have read three of his essays closely and looked through one, preparatory to close reading. One of these is a relatively short book review of about two pages while the other two I read closely are longer essays but not big. The last one, which I looked through, is a longer essay.

Having had the privilege of reading the shorter ones and coming back to them after years of first encounter with them and rereading them in relation to the longer essay, in the light of developments in Yoruba Arts Studies across decades, I am able to better understand the conceptual map Yai is plotting and recognize his work as one of the most powerful in the field, in spite of the fact that I have read only four of his publications.

Yai’s Contribution on African Epistemologies in the Context of Intercultural Dialogue

His great scholarly contribution in what I have read of his work so far is that of exploring the epistemic foundations, the structures constituting how knowledge is developed, applied and referenced in classical African contexts and the relative value of the various ways in which this knowledge may be transmitted to other situations represented by different social circumstances, other languages and approaches to organizing and applying knowledge.

These explorations are carried out in relation to the African experience in general, on the continent and in the Diaspora, integrating African oral and written literatures and visual arts, philosophy and the study of art, bringing these fields into a particularly rich and influential concentration on studies in classical Yoruba aesthetics.

The analytical power of his analyses is so high, his stylistic creativity and polish so acute and his breadth of knowledge so deftly interwoven into these critical strategies, that his best work is never dated, will always stand as a demonstration of the scholar as thinker and artist, flying across landscapes of possibility configured into a majestic image of a person embodying the very best of classical African cultures and a richly critical integration of the Western tradition, an ideal cognitivist, a seeker and demonstrator of knowledge in its various intellectual and other forms, including the imagination and beyond.

From the Orality/Writing Interface in Scholarship on Dahomey to

Aesthetics in Yoruba Thought

On Melville and Frances Herskovits’ Dahomean Narrative

Foundational to his scholarly architecture in my exposure to his work so far is his “The Path Is Open: The Legacy of Melville and Frances Herskovits in African Oral Narrative Analysis,” published in Research in African Literatures , 1999, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 1-16, with a version including subheadings published in 1999 as a foreword to Dahomean Narrative by Melville and Frances Herskovits, by Northwestern University Press, with Yai’s essay also made available on the university’s website.

It’s a fantastic essay in its sweep of ideas and the relaxed beauty of his powerful analyses, situating an examination of the tension between classical African cognitive systems and their translation into Western languages within a study of the methods of the Herskovits, Western anthropologists studying Dahomean oral literature, as Yai also examines the varied impacts of their work on the global scholarly community and on Dahomeans whose classical literature made the work possible.

On Aesthetics in Yoruba Arts

The questions posed and the perspectives developed on the study of classical African cognitive systems represented by Dahomean oral literature in that essay are projected in a manner that illuminates the study of classical Yoruba art in Yai’s review of Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III, Rowland Abiodun and Allen Wardwell's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989, in African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 1., 1992, pp. 20+22+24+26+29.

In that review, he salutes the gargantuan achievement of the authors in their breadth of assemblage, coherence of organization and depth of analysis of the constellation of classical Yoruba civilization around the axis of philosophy, spirituality and the arts.

While doing this in brief but incisive analyses covering every section of the book, he also presents his own distinctive orientation on the subjects the book covers.

From Orí to Oríkì to Ìtàn

Two of these are his interpretation of the Yoruba philosophical term orí and the disciplinary designation, ìtàn.

His descriptions of these ideas are the most powerful known to me, particularly in relation to my varied reading about the Yoruba origin theory of consciousness, orí.

His presentation of orí is made up of about twelve lines yet it sums up an essence of the concept represented by the dynamism of the self understood as progressing through various terrestrial and post-terrestrial contexts.

Yai describes this sensitivity to the dynamism of individuals and societies as central to conceptions of history prominent in Yoruba thought.

He also expounds on this perception of dynamism, of open-ended development the potential of which cannot be fully anticipated, as dramatized by approaches to art, to the life of the artist and the lives of various Yoruba communities.

He understands these orientations as projected through the open-ended character of oríkì, a Yoruba expressive style in verbal and visual arts which celebrates and invokes the origins and expression of an entity.

This summation attempts to integrate ideas Yai has introduced and developed from various angles in the review as well as in his ''In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition' and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space'' in Research in African Literatures , 1993, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1993, pp. 29-37 and ''Tradition and the Yoruba Artist'', in African Arts, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, pp. 32-35+93.

''In Praise of Metonymy,'' also published in Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III’s edited The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, 1994, 107-115, a number of chapters of which definitely reflect or suggest the influence of his article, is perhaps his most influential publication.

It is marked by creative exuberance, an ease of engagement with tantalizing ideas revealed in rich analyses.

It is shaped by memorably beautiful and elevating conceptions celebrating the scope of human cognitive ability as developed in the classical Yoruba context, projected through a superb exploration of the ideational and imaginative range of the Yoruba language.

The combination of critical mastery demonstrated by the article within an almost playful creativity implies the mapping of ideas in a way that invites further exploration in terms of entire research programs.

The article builds an image of classical Yoruba cognitive cultures that is both historically grounded and visionary, projecting an unarticulated yet eloquent call to actualize this verbal reconstruction in contemporary experience.

The constellation of ideas Yai develops in these works have been very influential in Yoruba Arts Studies as represented by their use by different scholars and particularly in some of the most important books in the field, which develop various aspects of these perspectives.

The Impact of Yai’s Work as Suggested by its Relationship with that of Rowland Abiodun on Aesthetics in Yoruba Thought

Yai’s work is strategic for depth of appreciation, for example, of the project represented by the landmark publication Rowland Abiodun’s 2014 Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, an effort to concretize and extend the achievement of Abiodun and his ideological collaborators in exploring and foregrounding the perspectives of classical African artists and art critics on their own art.

This achievement demonstrates the indispensability of these discourses for the study of artistic forms created in the light of these endogenous perspectives. These ideational cultures are thus brought into dialogue in the global context generated by written cultures as different from the oral traditions of the classical African societies.

Underlying this struggle is the subject of the philosophical, reflective and systemic character of classical African thought/s, its explicatory capacity in relation to African and non-African contexts as an enterprise both local to its cultural origins and relevant within the wider human context as part of humanity’s investigations of it’s existence, a subject on which Yai presents a trenchantly argued position in relation to various schools of African philosophy in his “Theory and Practice in African Philosophy: The Poverty of Speculative Philosophy,” in Second Order: An African Journal of Philosophy, Vol.VI. No2. 1977, pp.3-20 and in another essay with a similar title “Théoríe et Pratique en Philosophie Africaine : Misère de la Philosophie Spéculative (Critique de P. Hountondji, M. Towa et autres) in Présence Africaine , 4e Trimestre 1978, Nouvelle série, No. 108, pp. 65-91.

Abiodun may have adapted from Yai the analytical tools with which to expand his work of decades in demonstrating the symbiosis of classical Yoruba cultural forms represented by the visual and performative arts, oral literatures and aesthetics, synthesizing this in Yoruba Art and Language in terms of an interpretation of oríkì derived from thinkers in the oral, classical tradition but developed by Yai in his richly exploratory ''In Praise of Metonymy.''

Abiodun may be described as integrating the functionality of the unity of visual, performative and verbal arts in oríkì which the classical thinkers introduced him to with the structural and metaphysical possibilities evoked by Yai in relation to oríkì structure.

Abiodun unifies these interpretive streams with his earlier explorations of similar ideas represented by òrò, primordial, divine cognition and human discourse, and òwe, imaginative expression in the visual and verbal arts, as Abiodun interprets these Yoruba terms.

Trying to understand these ideational expansions in Abiodun’s work brought me back to Yai.

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Yai in various roles, as celebrator of African artistic cultures, centre image, as demonstrated by the Yoruba Gelede mask in the right, background, and as then UNESCO chairperson of the executive council, shown in the other images, during his 2009 tour of the 900-year-old Preah Vihear temple, a world heritage site in Cambodia, examining damage at the site from a clash with Thailand.

In the background is a magnificent work by Yoruba sculptor Olowe of Ise, evoking Yoruba culture to which Yai is particularly profoundly dedicated.

It also suggests a vision to which Yai is committed as a global universalist, as evident from his interviews, his work with UNESCO and his writings, the need for the community of nations to work together in sustaining the calabash of terrestrial existence, as the figures in the sculpture hold up the calabash, a form evocative of cosmic totality in Yoruba iconography.

Cambodia images from CAAI News Media .

Representative Quotes from Yai Sequenced and Slightly Edited to Indicate the Coherence they Suggest Across Various Essays, with Subheadings by Myself

Learning from Endogenous African Thought About How to

Understand and Discuss African Arts

For our discourses on African oral literatures [and arts] to legitimately claim scientificity, they should be rigorously subjected to and pass a test of reversibility.

In other words, the central question is: If our current disquisitions on African oral literatures [and arts] were to be translated into African languages, how would African oral poets [and their visual and performance artists and their critics] assess them? How would our discourses in European languages-or indeed in African languages-On their performances be categorízed within their epistemic compass?

Would African oral artists and their critics regard a book of African oral literature criticism as criticism? More specifically, did Fon informants regard [ the Herskovits] as critics? Would Fon oral critics like Yesi establish a parallel between their work and status and [ the Herskovits’ book] Dahomean Narrative and the Herskovitses, respectively? In a word, are we regarded as critics by the African oral artists?

As students of Yoruba art history from citadels of Western fora of production of knowledge on others, we cannot hope to do justice to Yoruba art and art history unless we are prepared to re-examine, question, and indeed abandon certain attitudes, assumptions, and concepts of our various disciplines, however foundational they may appear to us, and consequently take seriously indigenous discourses on art and art history.

Oríkì as Foundational Aesthetic Strategy in Yoruba Thought

When approaching Yoruba art, an attitude and intellectual disposition or orientation that would be more congenial or consonant with Yoruba traditions of scholarship would be to consider each individual Yoruba artwork and the entire corpus as oríkì, an unfinished and generative art enterprise.

Making oríkì a tutelary goddess of Yoruba art history studies enjoins us to pay more attention to the history dimension of the discipline's title. This in turn entails that we familiarize ourselves with Yoruba concepts of history and be conversant with the language and metalanguage of Yoruba art history.

For a Yoruba intellectual, oríkì as a concept and a discursive practice is inseparable from the concept and discursive practice of ìtàn. Indeed it can be argued that both are members of a constellation of basic Yoruba concepts without the elucidation of which it is almost impossible to understand any aspect of Yoruba cultures.

Orí as Formative Theory of Consciousness

Another fundamental concept is orí, the spiritual essence sited in the inner head (orí inu). Orí is essence, attribute, and quintessence; it is the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond.

In a culture where orí, the principle of individuality, is as central as to be a deity that informs and shapes the worldview and behavior of persons, it is simply "natural" that the privileged idiom of artistic expression, indeed, the mode of existence of art, should be through constant departure.

Àrè and the Ideal of Perpetual Dynamism between Possibilities

The ideal artist in Yoruba tradition is an àrè. No etymology of the word has been attempted, but the most plausible one would derive it from the verb re, which means to depart.

Lagbayi, the Yoruba transcendental sculptor, lived as an àrè. An àrè is an itinerant, a permanent stranger precisely because he or she can be permanent nowhere.

Àrès are itinerant individuals, wanderers, permanent strangers … They always seek to depart from current states of affairs. They go about (re) and bifurcate or pass (ya) constantly in life. And when they are unable to bifurcate in the physical and geographical sense of the word, they will endeavor to do so from sculpture, even if only to become a better artist. Hence the àrè will be an Osun priestess (as was Abatan), a diviner-healer (like Ayo), or a Gelede elder (like Duga).

Artists are at their best when they are literally "not at home." This is the deep meaning of the oríkì phrase of the transcendental sculptor Lagbayi: Okosanmijulélo(Oko san mi ju ilé lo: I am better off on the farm than in the hometown).

Ordinary citizens and even titled people are called Ilèsanmi (I am better off in my hometown). This personal name, which like many Yoruba names begins a proverb, is the equivalent of the Western saying "Charity begins at home."

But Lagbayi is no ordinary citizen, and an ordinary proverb will not suffice to portray his personality. Hence Lagbayi, and by implication all good artists, turn the proverb upside down: he is better off when he departs from the walls of his hometown.

For these artists "charity begins abroad": "Oko san mi ju ilé lo." Here oko, "farm," stands as a metaphor for that which is novel, not ordinary, far from home; it is contrasted with ilé, "home," a metaphor for the daily, the familiar, the given.

In the Yoruba world view, oko is the antonym of ilé. In terms of artistic practice and discourse, the best way to recognize reality and engage it is to depart from it.

Any entity or reality worth respecting is approached from this point of view. Thus the essence of art is universal bifurcation.

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“Prof Olabiyi Babalola Yai received a befitting 80th Birthday Celebration yesterday at Calavi, Benin Republic. Family, colleagues, friends and well wishers from all over the world paid golden tribute to his immense contributions to language, culture and knowledge at home and abroad.”

Image and text from Tunde Kelani Mainframe Productions’s Facebook post of June 30, 2019 · Filmmaker Tunde Kelani is shown at bottom right.

Ìtàn and the Multidimensional Dialectic of Expansion and Illumination

Being an àrè is therefore being an individual exponent of ìtàn.

Ìtàn is often translated as "history," "story," or "myth." This is a notoríously incomplete and unsuccessful translation, for the verb tàn (from which the noun ìtàn is derived) means to irradiate, to illuminate, to spread, to relate, to investigate.

The concept of ìtàn therefore encompasses history, geography, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics [ making it a ] multidirectional and multidisciplinary concept.

Etymologically ìtàn is a noun derived from the verb tàn. Tàn means to spread, reach, to open up, to illuminate, to shine.

The verb tàn and the derivative noun ìtàn are polysemic and integrate at least three fundamental dimensions:

1. The chronological dimension through which human generations and their beings, deeds, and values are related.

2. The territorial or geographical dimension through which history is viewed as expansion (but not necessarily with the imperial connotation which has nowadays become the stigma of that concept in the English language) of individuals, lineages, races beyond their original cradle.

In that sense it is important to observe that the Yoruba have always conceived of their history as diaspora. The concept and reality of diaspora, viewed and perceived in certain cultures (Greek, Jewish) as either necessity or lamented accident is rationalized in Yorubaland as the normal or natural order of things historical.

3. The third dimension of ìtàn has paradoxically and tragically been neglected by most Yoruba historians. This is the discursive and reflexive dimension of the concept. Tàn means to illuminate, to enlighten, to discern, to disentangle. Tàn is therefore to discourse profoundly on the two dimensions mentioned earlier.

The noun ìtàn for this dimension always requires the active verb Pa. Pa ìtàn (pìtàn in contracted form) is often trivially and somewhat inadequately translated into English as "to tell a story."

Pa is also used for such nouns as èkùró (kernel) obì (kola nut) = to separate the two lobes of the kola nut; èyin, ọmọ (egg), to hatch; òwe (proverb); àlọ(riddle, parable).

Pìtàn therefore means to produce such a discourse that could constitute the Ariadne thread [ allusion to Greek mythological figure representing a thread as a guide out of a complex situation] out of the human historical labyrinth, history being equated with a maze or a riddle.

Pa ìtàn is to "de-riddle" history, to shed light on human existence through time and space. No wonder then if Òrúnmìlà, the Yoruba deity of wisdom, knowledge, and divination, is called Opìtàn ilẹ Ifẹ. (He who deriddles ìtàn, i.e., unravels history throughout Ifẹ territory).

Ìwà and the Quest for the Essence of Being and of Beings

Yoruba aesthetics [is] encapsulated in the celebrated phrase ìwà l’ èwá, variously translated as "Character is beauty," "Existence is beauty," "Immortality is perfect existence," and "Essential nature is beauty."

All these equally valid translations point to the same direction: the role or essence (ìwà) of art in Yoruba culture is to create beauty by activating and making sensible the noumenal solidarity of the various facets and dimensions of the world, the individual, the society, and the supernatural, which are and must be made to be seen/sensed/heard as tributaries of the same big river.

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Yai, left, with scholar of Yoruba language and culture Adeleke Adeeko, right.

“With Professor Olabiyi Yai. Grad school mentor. Only person I know who can move with utmost ease from Beethoven's symphony to Fọ́yánmu's poetry in one sentence.”

Image and text from August 30, 2013 Facebook post by Adeleke Adeeko.

The Gbenagbena and the Gbenugbenu: The Sculptor in

Wood and Metal and the Sculptor in Words

At the symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last February (1999) in association with its exhibition "Master Hand: Individuality and Creativity among Yoruba Sculptors," I opened my presentation with an iba, or homage, which in the Yoruba tradition is the indispensable overture to any orally performed intellectual discourse. To me there was no worthier iba for this occasion than the following proverb:

Gbenagbena se tire tan

O ku ti gbenugbenu.

Here ends the work of the sculptor

Let the critic start his own.

This is a metacritical proverb, almost always ritually proffered by a sculptor after the completion of a work to satisfaction.

It underscores the complementarity and the dialectic between sculptor and art historian, between artist and critic, between first- and second-order creativity.

The saying suggests that the work of the artist and that of his critic at once precede and follow each other in an unending cycle. But we are also faced with the predicament of translation.

I glossed the Yoruba word gbenugbenu as "critic," but am fully aware that this translation does not exhaust the range and depth of meaning of the Yoruba term.

A gbenugbenu is not a critic in the usual English sense. Literally the term refers to "one who carves with one's mouth (voice)"-a sculptor of words.

While in the Western tradition the function of critics is viewed as radically different from that of artists, in the tradition of the Yoruba, gbenugbenus by necessity are artists.

Theirs is no ordinary discourse in ordinary language. As wordsmiths, their duty is to continue the work of the sculptors by other means. The public expects them to orally perform a text that at once reflects the sculpture and departs from it.

Such a work is artistically marked. It is a monument, not just a document. In Western philosophical parlance it is first- and second-order discourses artistically interwoven. Invariably this orally performed text is an oríkì of both the work of art and the person who produced it, for they are indissolubly linked.

Under normal circumstances my presentation at the "Master Hand" symposium would have been performed as a collective oríkì of Olowe, Bamgboye, Abatan, Adigbologe, Fagbite, Esubiyi... But I lack the ohun iyo, the "sweet or salted voice," that is a sine qua non of Yoruba poetry performance, particularly when the subjects of the oríkì are such distinguished artists.

Agemo and Odo Laye: The Chameleon and the River of Life

Drewal's "Art and Ethos of the Ijebu" (chap. 5 of Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,) is a masterpiece in the analysis of the art- thought interface in an African culture.

The uniqueness of Ijebuland as a crossroads is brilliantly discussed. This situation stimulated Ijebuland to borrow creatively from Ife, Benin, Owo, and Ijo, and to forge a distinctive artistic and philosophical identity.

Here Drewal rightly invokes the agemo (chameleon) symbolism, so crucial to an understanding of the Ijebu world view. Agemo's essence (iwa) is to be able to change while being the same, to augment its own iwa by borrowing from others.

Indeed agemo could borrow from and therefore disempower death itself, as is indicated in the saying "Arikuyan bi agemo." To confirm Drewal's perceptive analysis, one may add that the agemo ethos has transcended Ijebuland and has indeed become an ideology in many parts of Yorubaland where the secret name or strong name of agemo is ajeegun (He who makes the medicine efficient). Agemo thus has become an essential ingredient of the ase [transformative force] of spells, prayers, and medicines.

Theirs [Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought] is a great book, and they rightly lay claim to no comprehensiveness, conscious as they are that the Yoruba define life as a river: Odo laye. Who can comprehend a river?

Scholar and teacher, everywhere and always, from the classroom to UNESCO.

Picture by Francois Guillot from Getty Images.