Reflections on the Yoruba Past: Toyin Falola on Isaac Delano

Abstract

Toyin Falola remains one of the most illuminating voices with remarkable efforts to reposition the continent of Africa on the appropriate place on the global map. He has provided sufficient evidence that he deserves the accolades he attracts from contemporaries and admirers. More than many of his contemporaries, Toyin Falola continues to demonstrate that knowledge production from Africa is sustainable if past events are interrogated accordingly. In very many ways, he displays quality content that gives him the sort of image he has built for Africans generally, and himself particularly in the world of intellectualism. The debate about the essentialism of African knowledge economy, especially the Yoruba culture, is centuries old, and frozen in its condition. It became prominently popular from the beginning of African’s contact with Europeans and Arabs, and this, ever since then, has attracted deepened engagement by African scholars whose primary intention was to defend their cultural legacy.
 Understanding that the proliferation of such desecrating rhetoric that Africans are a people without history by Eurocentric scholars like Trevor Roper and David Hume was a consummate attempt to undermine their existence, and then justify their expansionist agenda, makes African scholars of various disciplines to stand in defense of their history, hence decolonization process in pre- and post-independence era. Apparently, it was Edward Said who asserts that, “domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial facts of human society. But in today’s global setting they are also interpretable as having something to do with imperialism, its history, its new forms.”1 It thus seems that the generations that witnessed such unmistakable assault on their cultural heritage were not ready to accept it in good faith, and this provoked 1 Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p.19. 270 Wale Oyedeji corresponding resistance from them. They however reacted intellectually. It was in the spirit of reacting defensively that the first, second and third generations of historians emerged. Their sudden increase in the production of intelligent materials sent such a strong signal to the West so much that the world was compelled to change their erroneous misconception about Africa and Africans. As such, scholars like Samuel Johnson, Isaac Delano, Kenneth Dike, Bala Usman, Obaro Ikime, Bolanle Awe and a host of others took up the challenge of setting the record straight.
 The trend continues in that fashion even in postcolonial environment. For one thing, it birthed the Ibadan School of History, an intellectual society that achieved beautiful and daunting results in their quest for African cultural redemption. Many contemporary scholars consider the efforts of these pioneer intellectuals purposely because their works provide sufficient background to understanding African cultures and values, its steady evolution and travails. As such, in this writing, I intend to consider the greatness of Yoruba culture, a people in West Africa, visa-a-vie their precolonial undertaking and their colonial experience. Leaning on the works of Isaac Delano, this work will look into the Yoruba past to reflect on the culture, philosophy, ideology, epistemology and ontology of the people, with a view to educating the general public on the inexhaustible items of their knowledge economy and productions. Falola has done exponentially well to relate to us the seemingly beautiful body of works produced by Isaac Delano in journals, newspapers, periodicals, personal records among many other things. All these are indications that ingenuity cannot be covered by the web of power because while power is transient, ingenuity that persists is not.