Justification of Purpose

This work is inspired by the need to contribute to the development of the study of traditional African systems of thought beyond what this author identifies as the descriptive and analytical stages of scholarship. We do this through the erection and application of a theoretical framework that goes beyond the descriptive and analytical foci which currently dominates studies of traditional African thought.

Most studies of traditional African thought consist in descriptions and analysis of the ideational structures they demonstrate, as well as, in some cases, of an analysis of the relationship of these structures to the cognitive and social organisation of the societies to which they are endogenous. Most of the studies make no effort to examine the significance of these systems to social formations and cultural productions that go beyond the host societies of these systems. The study of these systems of thought, however, has certainly gone beyond their classification as curiosities representing the infancy of the human race. Significant advances have been made in demonstrating their ideational sophistication and explanatory power, but these analytical advances are often limited to restricting these systems to tools of knowledge that can explain only those realities they were originally created to explicate or to which they have been explicitly related by modern forms of discourse2. Examples of such intracultural study include interpreting Ifa, for example, as a means of elucidating critical principles embodied in Yoruba visual art or relating it to the work of the Yoruba writer Wole Soyinka, who makes the mythology of the system central to his work3.

2 Classic examples of the best explications of traditional African system of thought in terms of the intracultural analyses described here are M. Fortes and G. Dieterlen (ed). African Systems of Thought (London : Oxford U.P. for the International African Institute, 1965 and Daryll Forde (ed) African Worlds : Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social values of African Peoples (Oxford : James Currey: LIT, 1999).
3Among the best examples of those works that examine Ifa in relation to the critical principles of tradional Yoruba visual art are Rowland Abiodun “Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation based on Oral Traditions”in Yoruba Oral Tradition:Selections from the Papers Presented at the Seminar on Yoruba Oral Tradition, ed. Wande Abimbola (Ile-Ife :Department of African Languages and Literatures, University of If.e, 1975)pp.421-469;Rowland Abiodun, ‘Riding the Horse of Praise: The Mounted Figure in Ifa Divination Sculpture’ in Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. John Pemberton 111(London:Smithsonian,2000)p.182-192.Olabisi Babalola Yai, ‘In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of Tradition and “Creativity” in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space’ in The Yoruba Artist, ed. R. Abiodun, H.J. Drewal, and J.Pemberton111(Washington D.C:Smithsonian,1994)pp.107-15; H.J. Drewal ,John Mason and Pravina Shukla, Beads, Body, and Soul : Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe( Los Angeles : UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998)Almost all of Soyinka’s work represents a transmutation of traditional Yoruba myth, the central repository of which is Ifa. His oeuvre spans a number of genres. In the essay, his representative work is Myth,Literature and the African World(Cambridge : Cambridge U.P., 1976)where he elucidates the mythopoesis that he elaborates in various forms throughout his career. The poetic works that ere most representative of his achievement are Idanre and Other Poems (London : Methuen, 1967) an early work in which he develops the myth of the Yoruba Orisa or deity Ogun in terms of an exploration of the significance of traditional Yoruba thought to perennial aspects of the human experience and A Shuttle in the Crypt (London : Rex Collings: Eyre Methuen, 1972) and the concluding poem of The Credo of Being and Nothingness ( Ibadan : Spectrum Books in association with Safari Books, 1991) in which the mythic essence of his work is distilled to realise a framework of imagery and thought that evokes with great power the communicative essence he realizes through the traditional Yoruba world view he consistently explores. His autobiographical The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka(London : Rex Collings Ltd, 1972) represents another distillation of the cosmic and mythic orientation of his aesthetic within the framework of contemporary experience. His novel The Interpreters (London : Heinemann, 1970) tries to interpret the life of the metropolis of Lagos and its inhabitants in relation to of traditional Yoruba myth. Soyinka’s greatest artistic achievement is in drama, which makes it difficult to single out one or two representative works but his early work A Dance in the Forests (Oxford;Oxford U.P, 1963) suggests the range of his artistic aspirations while the later works of Madmen and Specialists (London : Methuen, 1971) The Road (London : Oxford U.P., 1965) and Death and the King’s Horseman (London : Eyre Methuen, 1975) exemplify the peaks of his dramatic appropriation of the traditional Yoruba world view.