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Abstract
This article interpretes highlights of the intellectual legacies of Ọlábíyìí Yáì (1939–2020), Beninois/Yorùbá, linguist and literary theorist, as revealing expressions of the autonomy strivings of the first generation of university based African scholars in the westernized academy. The “linguistic turn” group of scholars to which Yáì belonged pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics. They made axiomatic, and rendered foundational, the position that Afriphonic languages are repositories of second order thinking.
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Notes
1 While the spelling of the full names here follows current practices in Yorùbá orthography, the diacritical marks are not used in many of the publications, and the first name is often written as Olabiyi.
2 Referring to just southern Nigeria, the more popularly known scientists include Sanya Onabamiro (virology), Adeoye Lambo (psychiatry), Omotoye Olorode (botany), Olumbe Basir (biochemistry), Muyiwa Awe (physics), Chike Obi (mathematics) and, preceding them, Eni Njoku (botany).
3 Within the Yorùbá/Nigerian post-independence academic sphere (and its diasporas) in which Yáì operated, we can list among the notable “linguistic turn” scholars Ayo Bambose (linguistics), Wande Abimbola (literature and religion), and Oyin Ogunba (dramatic arts). Away from Nigeria, Kwesi Wiredu (philosophy) is another prominent thinker. Across the continent, the group usually described as “ethnophilosophers” will belong in the “linguistic turn” community.
4 As this article is being written in December 2020, a revision of the legacy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a larger than life member of the Independence Generation, and his collaborators at the University of Nairobi, is being carried out on newspaper pages in Kenya. See https://nation.africa/kenya/henry-indangasi-469688 for a list of the discussions instigated by Henry Indangasi’s comments on the 50th anniversary of the founding of University of Nairobi’s Department of Literature.
5 Yáì is acknowledged explicitly in Adéẹ̀kọ́’s Arts of Being Yorùbá. Further evidence of the validity of the Yáì-esque critique lives in analysis of religion by Olupona, and genders by Oyěwùmí (chapters 4–7), although Yáì is not discussed in either text.
6 Karin Barber’s famous literary-anthropological study, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow, which started as a doctoral dissertation written for the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the then University of Ife in Nigeria, when “linguistic turn” scholars held sway, exemplifies the Yáì approach to studying an oral poetry genre.
7 For studies that illustrate this view, see Apter or Verran.
8 See Introduction to Owomoyela, Yoruba Proverbs; and also second chapter of Adéẹ̀kọ́, Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism.
9 See Bámgbóṣé, Yorùbá Metalanguage (Èdè-Ìperí Yorùbá). Volume 1. p. 51
10 See part 4 of Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́
Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of the African Literature Association. He is Humanities Distinguished Professor at the Department of English and Interim Chair of African American & African Studies at The Ohio State University.