Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì

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.

Keywords:

• Ọlábíyìí Yáì (Olabiyi Yai)
• Afriphonic languages
• metonymy
• intellectual decolonization
• linguistic turn
• Yorùbá metalanguge
• oríki
• ẹ̀yà
• ẹ̀ya
• ìtàn
• oral literature

Gbẹ́nàgbẹ́nà ṣe tirẹ̀ tán; ó ku ti gbẹ́nugbẹ́nu.

(The carving artist is done carving; the remaining lot concerns the mouth carver.)

— Olabiyi Yai, “Tradition and the Yorùbá Artist” (English translation mine)

The independence generation

The passing on 5 December 2020, of Professor Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì (1939–2020)¹ instigated the writing of this article, although the reflections call as much attention to the work of a distinct cohort of scholars in African humanities that Anthonia Kalu named as “age-grade Irele,” (34) after the late Francis Abiola Irele (1936–2017). World War II circumscribed their birth and full bore colonization oversaw their formative years. But as they were being tutored in colonial schooling systems, anticolonial agitations and wars of independence raged around them. I am calling them the Independence Generation because they reached maturity, many of them having gained westernized university training, around independence early in the 1960s. This may have proved to be a flag-only independence in less than just a decade, but when these eyewitnesses to formal freedom stepped forth into scholarly careers, decolonization was tangible and their faith in the need to fully realize what we may call freedom dividend was firm.

Expanding on the legacy of predecessors like Leopold Senghor and Jomo Kenyatta who had exited from direct activism into political office, the Independence Generation of scholars strived to render legible hitherto obfuscated features of African intellectual self-understanding. They concentrated on undoing colonization’s thought infrastructure and labored hard at proving the validity of the human experience in the African context. Scientists and engineers among them compiled taxonomies of African plants and animals, created pharmacopeia, and studied etiologies of ailments common in the tropics. More than one Independence Generation psychiatrist attempted to formulate meta-psychologies useful for clinical practices.² Writers, philosophers, cultural and literary theorists, historians, only became better known than the scientists largely because impactful studies in the humanities could be sustained in libraries and classrooms at a cost far lower than that needed to meet the resource heavy provisions of up to date laboratories, equipment, and other research tools. Distortions created by broken economies not long after independence exacerbated the difficulties.

The Independence Generation scholars were not unaware that their self-sufficiency project is dependent on colonization. How can they not know that their work builds on pioneer “us-too” library of evidence started by the inter-war, “organic,” scholars of Christianized, but curious, clergy, colonialist ethnographers, adventurous teachers in remote schools, enthusiastic, city based—mostly coastal—newspaper editors, and leisured elites of the new professions that serviced colonization. But the paradox of this “enunciatory position,” to use Olakunle George’s phrasing, did not paralyze the Independence Generation. For them, the critique of self-knowing and self-discovery was a problematic to which protocols of reason, particularly those construable as enhancing freedom, must be applied. They believed that academic work matters. In the humanities, discovering and systematizing world views derived from (or viewed as most amenable to) African environments, especially languages, was a primary task.

Like all classifications, the Independence Generation is a heuristic aggregation that consists of many sub-groups: nationalist, free trade, economists; non aligned-middle-of-the-road-let-events-follow-their-course historicists; ethnophilosophers; pure philosophers; and a wide variety of marxists. Yáì belonged in the “linguistic turn” group of scholars who pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics. The “linguistic turn” scholars made axiomatic, and rendered foundational, the position that Afriphonic languages are repositories of second order thinking.³

Ọlábíyìí Yáì, Yorùbá/Beninois linguist, literary theorist, university professor and administrator in Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, and the United States, is one of the most recent of that generation to join the company of the people of the under-earth. He was born to first generation Christian parents. His grandfather was a babaláwo, professional diviner, that is, one of the trained custodians of highly valued strategies of knowledge making, curation, and disclosure in the community. This was the background from which Yáì was recruited, like a good many others, into Western formal education around World War II. He was schooled in French at selective institutions, first at Sabe, his birthplace, and subsequently further and further away in Porto Novo, Dakar, and Paris. Yáì spent his last working years as a diplomat, serving as lead delegate of the Republic of Benin to UNESCO. During his tenure at UNESCO, he was elected Chair of the Executive Council. The schematic interpretation presented below about the most resonant features of Yáì’s bibliography is part of an initial installment in a critical account of institutions of discovery in post-1945 African humanities.⁴

Phenomenology of the oral poem

Most literary and cultural critics generate interpretations of specific texts by applying “theory.” Olabiyi Yáì abstracts textuation principles on the basis of Yorùbá meta-critical language. He rarely writes about discrete texts. When he does, it is usually in the context of a philological analysis of Yorùbá related terms in early European travelogues, or in word lists and compilations in Spanish and Portuguese. It is not possible to not notice that philology, for Yáì, holds a main key to philosophy in the African context. The bibliography indicates as well that oral poems and narratives are Yáì’s preferred forms. Not one full commentary on novels or drama exists in his record.

Meta-textual concerns are the most salient in a Yáì commentary: oríkì (panegyric) as the basis of history and historiography; chanting occasion as the basis of poetic rhythm; dispersion as the foundation of ethnonymy and toponymy. Yet, he is not a formalist. Intermittent references to Yorùbá worldview do come up. However, Yáì does not assert a worldview prior to analysis but derives the possibility from connotations of Yorùbá second-order terms. Yáì does not hesitate to generalize about beings in the world (animal, human, or other) from the Yorùbá/African experience, typically in language. Claims made in myths that the universe began to take form at Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is not to be questioned but analyzed for the insights the stories allow regarding the nature of settlements and migrations. For Yáì, the local and the global, the performed poem and the written poem, the inscribed text and the read text, each of which has (or is given) a Yorùbá name, are intertwined but not indistinguishable. Following this line of thinking, Yáì binds intertextuality to considerations of selection (taste) and mass appeal. As he argues that the distinct in the performed (be it oracular, play-filled, or profane) not be collapsed into the inscribed (divinatory, scriptural, aesthetic, testamentary), or the spectacular into the read, he also stresses the similarities of the pleasures and burden that each manifests in African reality. A true thought independence project does not rest in cataloguing Yorùbá toponyms but searches for, and analyzes, the ideas of space and spatialization they express. In the Yáì record, every Yorùbá particular implicates some sense of the universal.

`Ẹya (metonymy) and `Ẹyà (taxonomy)

Metonymy performs more than the function of a title phrase in Yáì’s record. But his usage is not exactly the one taught in literary appreciation classes as the use of a part of an object, thought, or behavior, to signify the whole with which convention associates it. Yáì’s metonymy approximates in English the Yorùbá language ẹ̀ya (fragments of a recognizable other; differentiation) and ẹ̀yà (sorted assemblage). Within the family of Yorùbá terms used for denoting the production of play-filled performances and, as well, terms of describing dispersions of people, wholes (ìdì; odindi) consist of otherwise discrete components and units (ẹyọ). Even if the incompleteness of the grouping classified as a whole (ìdì), is not explicitly acknowledged, the unsaid inference pervades usage; nothing is so completely whole as to not be able to use further augmentation. A whole that is bereft of the potential for ẹ̀ya (differentiation), or lacks the potential to belong to an ẹ̀yà (sorted similars), will degenerate, be incapable of reproduction, reciprocation, supplementation, and, in consequence, sustenance. If such entities that cannot relate to sustaining others were humans, they are bound to die a permanent death. In application, Yáì’s metonymy (ẹ̀ya, ẹ̀yà) theory of the literary, cultural, and social text encourages the questioning of handed down grounds of classification and boundary setting, whether in ethno-national configurations in politics, genre classification in literary and cultural studies, sects in religions, or even genders in sociology.⁵

The analysis of Yorùbá language taxonomic principles leads Yai to his hypothesis that àṣà (traditions, cultures) are contraptions (we may even say techniques or styles) of selecting and organizing dispersions (ẹ̀ya, ẹ̀yà). As Yáì proposes it, àṣà (traditions) are metonymic selections and bits (ẹ̀ya) reconstituted from dispersed parts of other aggregations (ẹ̀ya and ẹ̀yà). So long as such àṣà (traditions) are amenable to ìtàn (accounts of coming-to-be), choosing to not tie them to the metonymic faculty misconstrues them. In Yáì’s words, the set of “behaviors, deeds, and habits” nameable as àṣà (culture or tradition) in a particular society” has been subjected to a historical process of deliberate choice” and can thus” be described as a tradition that is permanently open to innovation informed by preceding phases in the process” (“Tradition and the Yoruba Artist” 34). That is, àṣà (culture or tradition) is constrained, on one side, by impersonal, generally unmotivated grammatical limits and, on the other side, by interest bound, aleatory, selections and combinations, fusing and separating, borrowing and lending.

How then should we account for disruptive formations? Yáì denotes the innovation that is not yet absorbed into “earlier elements of the process” as aṣa (the irreverent) and not àṣà titun (novel formation). The proffered term implies that aṣa (the irreverent) is not yet recognizable to “process” authorities (of style, ethics, lawfulness, or other common good terms). To differentiate norm friendly innovations from those yet to be sorted into existing “wholes,” Yáì turns to predication patterns in Yorùbá language: “informed departure from tradition is expressed through the verb dá: to break, to split, to create, to depart. Thus dá àṣà means to innovate, to create a new style, literally, ‘to split or break the tradition.’ A potter or sculptor may thus have her own àṣà, as could a lineage or just a workshop of sculptors” (34). But unruly creations do not circulate unhindered. Hence, aṣa (irreverent) innovations are marked as irregular even at the level of grammar and not predicated with a transitive verb. Instead, they are hitched to compound terms of ethical propriety, as in hu ìwà aṣa (act irreverently [literally, act unacceptably]). In the Yáì system, an individual can dá àṣà (break/create in relation to the recognized tradition) but not dá aṣa (break/create imprudently). In contrast, one can hùwà aṣa (act or behave irreverently). Creating in accordance with the norm, Yai seems to be saying, produces original, possibly patentable, inventions (dá àṣà), whereas the norm contravening creation circulates on the fringes of the proper and may require more refinement to fit under the law.

Orality and literacy? No, thank you

Given the above, it is surprising that Yáì ignored the orality to literacy paradigm that unified for a significant while longue durée histories of African verbal arts. Yáì wrote with the conviction that orality is orality, and literacy is literacy. Literacy, he noted, is the orphan that goes looking for the parent it creates as orality: “it is written literature that has constituted oral literature as its ‘ontological other’,” transcribing and breaking it into literate types, and, in the end, investing itself with disproportionate agency (“African Oral Poetry Criticism” 5). He argues on more than one occasion that the “scriptocentrism” of orality to literacy evolutionary histories of consciousness forecloses what is discoverable and knowable about aspects of the oral side. The most important factors of differentiation and classification in Yorùbá oral types, for example, are occasion and delivery/presentation modes. Some types are chanted (sun), others are declaimed (ké), while evocation and provocation (kíkì and pípè) determine the nature of others. The difference between chanted ìjálá and declaimed ìyẹ̀rẹ̀ cannot be rendered alphabetically and cannot be read. Written literature is àtojúdénú (from the gaze to the mind). Being simultaneously àtẹnudẹ́nu (mouth to mouth) and à-tẹnu-tójú-tétí-dénú (from the mouth, gaze, and ear to the mind), routes of oral poetry apprehension are far more varied. Because the full implications of these fundamental differences do not receive the analytical rigor due to them, Yáì believed, the orality to literacy model starts with a resolution instead of identifying a critique. How, for example, can one speak of rhythm in transcribed Yorùbá oral poetry as ìgbésẹ̀ ewì (orderly leg moving) when the material in front of the reader contains nothing to move the foot? The tenor of this question explains Yáì’s view that the orality to literacy historiography rests “on doxa and not on episteme” (“The Path is Open” 8)

Bringing the metonymic faculty to bear on the question, as Yáì did, moves the focus of understanding towards the epistemic in that critics are encouraged to sort out first the characteristic nature of their terms. Thus, in order to write a history of thought modes, art objects, and performance types, the scholar has to ascertain the nature of historicality, objects, and performance types, within the studied society. In Yorùbá spheres, for example, history—as discrete compositions and as a technique of reflection—is oríkì. The term that translates near literally as apical definition in English, and performs better the task for which Yáì recruits it, is often collapsed into one of its evocative functions and rendered as praise poetry in literary and cultural criticism: “For thousands of years, ‘peoples’, ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘nations’ circulated, from a starting point towards new horizons, becoming enriched or impoverished through new ties and contacts; each new experience being an added value, the entirety forming an incomplete chain, come to terms with at each link, which can be artistically translated in various ways. This experience of history-diaspora is what the Yorùbá call oríkì. The concept is also found in other African languages” (“Authenticity and Diaspora” 192).⁶

Oríkì-history complex

As Yáì presents it, oríkì’s principle of accounting is transitive and driven by reciprocity. Within the oríkì mode of history, migration (ìtànkálẹ̀) acknowleges the right of the part (ẹ̀ya) to move away. Since the opportunity to return subsists, the relationship of responsibilty to the veering off point is not severed. Also reserved is the capability to become part of another set of sorted similars (ẹ̀ya) which, by definition, can not be wholly other, or be fully self-present, since its constitutive members are estranged from other points of departure.⁷ At the level of discourse, Yáì notes, the knowledge of the spread (ìtànkálẹ̀), being inseparably bound to ìtàn (constituted narratives of becoming), morphologically and pragmatically, shows oríkì sensibility of history to be an enterprise of relating parts in their multiple directions. The burden of characterizing events faithfully, while aware of the indulgences that metonymic thinking affords, presses heavily on the oríkì historian.

The oríkì-history problematic, one could argue, combines for Yáì the phenomenology of oral poetry, the untranslatability of meta-language, and the essentially centrifugal character of tradition (àṣà). It is clear in Yáì’s writing that participating in a language/speech community—whether as scholars, as priests, or as citizens—commits individuals to some non-negotiable responsibilities because intelligible speech is rule bound. Making language a terrain of meta-criticism cannot be justly seen as mere academicism. The historical anomaly in 20th century African societies is that the production of second order knowledge in contemporary institutions seems to willfully dismiss the obvious or, to speak proverbially, misdiagnose leprosy and treat it as if it were a topical skin rash. To the detriment of all, Africanists have denied Afriphonic meta-language its due criticalness to the thought ecology. In Yáì’s writing, scrupulously free of unreflective ethnocentrism or irredentism, language does more than make present (by reporting or translating) what has been done somewhere else at another time. Societies persist in unavoidably language-constituted, creations.

In the metonymy inflected (yíya, yíyà) environments of Yoruboid West Africa that are presented in Yáì’s works, essential porosity defines historical, intercommunal, exchanges, and this community making principle of practice continued even among the violently displaced and enslaved in Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad. Unlike the globalist, “conquest of space,” ambitions of late capitalism, metonymy driven Yoruboid relations embed deep time considerations. Not too long ago, Olisa (roughly of the Bini and west Niger Igbo in Nigeria), Òrìṣà (Yorùbá, further west of the Niger) and Lisa (in Fon, Aja, Gun, and Gbe communities still further west and north) were related but different from one another. Ṣàngó and Ọya used to be as Nupe as they were Yorùbá. Yemòwó, Òrìṣà’s consort in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, appeared in Fon-Aja communities as Mawu (see “Yoruba Religion and Globalization”). Today, intransitive monotheism has transgendered and dehumanized that figure as completely male. These details, for Yáì, establish facts of cultural osmosis. At the level of methodology, the turn towards language helps establish patterns of cultural traffics. At the second-order level of knowing, the linguistic turn facilitates a systematic understanding of cultural rationale. Without the linguistic turn towards both Afriphonic and Europhonic tongues, the complex and continuous recreation of the world in their true dimensions in, and as, ìtàn (form-bound accounts of becoming), ẹ̀ya (fragment), ẹ̀yà (genre, type), and oríkì (apical definition) might elude the scholar.

The metonymic faculty that Yáì advocates grants room for thinking regionality without territoriality, interregionality without globalism. After all, he argued, “a North exists within the South which is so fascinated by new technologies that it becomes even more distanced from its heritage, unfortunately retaining that which is not the best of the North’s heritage. There also exists a South within the North, essentially composed of elements from the diaspora of the South, that does not always have the means to access its own heritage, through the intermediary of new information and communication technologies” (“Authenticity and Diaspora” 195–196). In practice, it means that systematic analyses of metonymy could embolden students of global African societies to take advantage of oríkì-history concept for correcting insufficiently self-aware glorifications of the present and the contemporary.

The oríkì-history complex articulates a Yoruboid metaphysics of open-endedness. Such is the case because an epithetic homage of the homage genre, a praise formula of praise formulations, adulates oríkì as “àkììkì tán,” or, in plain English, defining boundlessnes. (“In Praise of Metonymy” 30) It should be clear by now that Yáì does not take meta-commentaries lightly. In this instance, he insists that “àkììkì tán” (boundlessness) is meta-oríkì, oríkì of oríkì (definition of definition). In the context of art criticism, Yáì extends the implications of boundlessness to the shape that researh and discovery might take were art historians to construe discrete pieces of art work as oríkì materialized. In the least, the idea of the object as a self-standing, demarcated creation, tethered to a singular genius, defined by juristic legalism that pays no regard to the irreducibly cooperative character of invention may become not so universally tenable. In the positive dimension, oríkì might make art history more holistic in that accounts of becoming of the object will be related to its essentially multiple collocations, each with its own oríkì: materials (wood, ore [pure and alloyed]), instruments, places of production (smiths, workshops, university departments, shrines, altars, museums, galleries), critical schools (ethnography, anthropology, divination, specific communes), evocative purposes serviced (festivals, commissions, rituals). Because nothing that exists socially can persist independent of oríkì-history accounts of being and becoming that are attached to them, art objects will assume diasporic shapes at all points of creation and use. The separation of the traditional from the modern, similar to the orality to literacy order of things, may finally be overcome. The result, according to Yáì, will not be the “historian’s history,” the one defined by “an undue inflation of politics.”

Freedom house of language

The linguistic turn still leaves a lot unexplained about conditions of possibility of recognizable traditions, be it àṣà (dominant tradition), aṣa (irreverent, peripheral tradition), ìtàn (accounts of becoming), and oríkì (accounts of being), each a form of implementing the ẹ̀ya/ẹ̀yà (metonymy) dynamics. In other words, the path of analysis that Yáì’s work opens needs augmenting. One could insist that the very wide latitude he grants to synchrony curbs the irreverent (aṣa) tradition’s fecund unruliness, and that it is in the nature of all emergent practices to seek a habitable location within hegemonic constellations. To speak more directly, there is something repressive in placing aṣa (the irreverent) outside of the mainstream in the way Yáì does.

A handy illustration could be found in the reception of Ọládẹ̀jọ Òkédìjí’s Rẹ́rẹ́ Rún, the innovative, “scriptocentric,” play that defied the style and preoccupations of the then ruling traveling theater tradition in Yorùbá. Reading Òkédìjí (1930–2019), the artist (gbẹ́nàgbẹ́nà), with Yáì, the critic (gbẹ́nugbẹ́nu), both of whom at some point lived in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, one in professorial quarters on the university campus, and the other in the city, a conflict appears. In his introduction to the first print edition of the play, Òkédìjí reported that:

Òwe ni mo fi eré onítàn yìí pa, òwe náà sì jẹ́ ògédé ẹnà fífọ̀. Mó tètè ṣàlàyé yìí nítorí pé lẹ́hìn tí àwọn aṣeré ORI OLOKUN ṣe eré náà ní Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Ìbàdàn, àti Èkó, ogunlọ́gọ̀ àwọn olùwòran ló kọ̀wé sí mi (àwọn mìíràn tilẹ̀ bẹ̀ mí wò) làti bèèrè lọ́wọ́ mi pé ní ìlú wo ni ọba àti àwọn ìjòyè ti le lágbárá àtimáa-ti-ènìyàn-mọ́lé láyée náírà àti kọ́bọ̀ yìí, tí ọlọ́pàá ń bẹ lóde, tí kóòtu sì wà ní gbogbo àdúgbò. Ìdáhùn mi ni pé ẹnà ni mo fọ̀. Ohun tó sì jẹ́ kí n fẹnà ni pé pẹ̀lẹ́ lákọ, ó lábo. Ní tòótọ́, bí ojú bá ń ṣepin, ojú náà ni à á fi í hàn, kó lè mọ̀ pé òun ń ṣọ̀bùn. Ṣùgbọ́n ẹni tí yóò sọ pé ìyáa báálẹ lájẹ̀ẹ́, yóò mà mọ̀ ọ́n sọ o, kò sì ní sọ ọ́ láàrin ọjà. Bí bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́, wọ́n ó ti igi bọ ẹnu rẹ̀ pọ̀ngàlà pọngala tó fi sọ irú ọ̀rọ̀ bẹ́ẹ̀ jádé, yó sì tẹ́ sí i ni.” (vi; emphasis added)

[I have made a proverb of this play; and the proverb is a complete cipher. This explanation is being made because after the ORI OLOKUN players performed the play in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Ìbàdàn, and Lagos, many spectators wrote (some even called) to ask me in what country does kings and chiefs possess the authority to lock people up in this age of naira and kobo, when law enforcement officers abound, and courts are in every corner. The reason I have spoken in ciphers is that even pleasantries do bear attitudes. Ideally, if the eye discharges pus, it is to the same eye we show it, so that it will know of its dirty habits. But, the person who will say that the chief's mother is a witch must exercise discretion and will not announce it in the marketplace. Else, the shapeless mouth that proclaims such words will be spiked.]

Rẹ́rẹ́ Rún brings a scripted, full length play, structured into acts and scenes, to the formal, delimited, pit theatre, a non-traditional performance space. The text dramatizes how a monarchy-in-council broke a labor strike by sponsoring a swindler to trick the union leader’s wife to gamble and lose the workers’ funds. The discredited leader’s subsequent mental collapse is depicted in mangled, but still recognizable, proverbial expressions. Interpreted with Yáì’s terms, Òkédìjí’s discerning public asked him to explain the recognizably aṣa (irreverent) performance he placed before them. The introduction admits also that the play’s experimentations bear life threatening consequences for agents of unruly utterances like the labor leader. Contrary to Yáì, it may be said that the boundary lines between àṣà and aṣa in Òkédìjí’s play inculpate far more than violations of speech decorum.

Yáì could respond by directing readers to Òkédìjí’s description of what I have represented above as irreverent (aṣa) forms. He might say that the underlying creative mood of Òkédìjí’s play is transitive, and that the playwright succeeds because his audience responds to him in an intelligible critical language in which he too replies them. Òkédìjí, a Yáì-friendly reading would further note, refers to his production as “òwe” (proverb in colloquial English but wrapped concealment in Yorùbá oríkì-history view of the arts).⁸ It should also be important that the playwright does not describe his work as eré ládojúde (that which culminates in abject resolution), the term that later became the standard reference for tragedy in Yorùbá critical language,⁹ but as eré onítàn (a played [acted] manner of dissemination [story]). Following Yáì, it could be considered important that a large number of forms and effects could be concealed in the capacious folds of the proverb (òwe). That, Yai might say, is the basis of intelligibility in the author’s declaration that the enactments in Rẹ́rẹ́ Rún produce ògèdé ẹnà fífọ̀ (complete ciphers). According to I.O. Delano’s Atumo Ede Yorùbá, the only Yorùbá-Yorùbá dictionary ever compiled, ẹnà means” èdè tí a yí padà kí ó má le yé ẹlòmíràn tí kò mọ awo ìyípadà náà” (an utterance cast in secret form to deny comprehension to individuals not initiated into the knowledge of the key code). In other words, Òkédìjí the artist accomplishes his irreverent evocation and/or provocation in recognizable speech forms. The play’s dissident (aṣa) politics does not become one with the dissemination (àṣà) of its effective, discreet, form.

Conclusion

In the overall Yáì project, language constitutes a world of which it is also a part. Language in use, and viewed as as oríkì accounts of being, holds in taxonomy (ẹ̀yà) our understanding of types (ẹ̀ya) and their relations. Language use also traces (ya and yà) evocations that bind. Were a skeptical interlocutor to ask Yáì, what difference do these terms make, he could be imagined answering in Yorùbá, kò síbi tí a kìí dáná alẹ́, ọbẹ̀ ló dùn yàtọ̀ síra wọn (dinner is served in all lands, the tastes of dishes, though, make the difference). He will probably add something in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, to the effect that even when the field belongs to the kinship, individual members know the extent of their allotted fields. The arts, for Yáì, encapsulate that ineradicable factor of being human better than any other social activity: “Art is an invitation to infinite metonymy, difference, and departure, and not a summation for sameness and imitation” (“In Praise of Metonymy” 35). He once asked in the monograph edition of “The Path is Open”: “If our current disquisitions on African oral literatures were translated into African languages, how would African oral poets assess them? How would our discourses in European languages, or indeed, in African languages, on their performances be categorized within their epistemic compass?” (25) These questions show the linguistic turn approach to critical studies to be iterating a genuine search for thought independence and a commitment to thoroughgoing decolonization.

This article started by placing Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Yáì in the Independence Generation of African scholars. It will conclude by returning to the group. To the Independence Generation, the need for thought rehabilitation after formal colonization ended was more than a polemic or platitude. For example, Yáì and his colleagues at the then University of Ife’s Department of African Languages and Literatures, as well as the African Studies humanities faculty at large, fought and won the battle to teach all classes, and also to have students fulfill all research writing requirements for all Yorùbá degree programs, up to the doctorate, in Yorùbá language. Notable among those in the vanguard of accomplishing this “linguistic turn” project for which resources had to be created almost from the scratch are: Akínṣọlá Akìwọwọ (1922–2014), Wándé Abímbọ́lá (b. 1932), Ọlásopé Oyèláràn (b. 1938), Akínwùmí Ìṣọ̀là (1939–2018), Rowland Abíọ́dún (b. 1941), and Bádé Àjùwọ̀n (d. 2019). The first graduate of the PhD program under that radical “linguistic turn” pedagogy is Akíntúndé Akínyẹmí, currently Professor and Chair, Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Florida. Akínyẹmí first went to Florida as Yáì’s successor in Yorùbá Studies when the latter moved to UNESCO. One other concrete evidence of the restorative commitment of the expanded 1930s generation will be found in how Yáì and Wole Soyinka, working their high governmental connections, including individuals with whom they do not see eye to eye on virtually everything else, spearheaded a failed plot to retrieve, secure, and return to Nigeria, the Ori Olokun bronze head, the crown jewel, as it were, of Yorùbá classical fine arts. The attempt failed because they had bad information.¹⁰ (The Òkédìjí play discussed above was premiered on 25 August 1973, at the University of Ife by Ori Olokun Theatre, a group named after the bronze head that is still held in custody by the British Museum.)

The expansive interpretation of Yáì’s work attempted here is meant in part to call attention to the need for contemporary scholars to self-reflect about the limits of decolonization. Yáì knew that bringing to the university “oral” poets who still had to return to their other, some might say “real,” occupations at the end of the day does not level the knowledge production grounds of the postcolonial university. Yáì’s acknowledging that the “oral” poets lack the facility to operate within the ecology of values—his words are “Gutenberg Galaxy” (“Issues in Oral Poetry” 101) and “unproblematic Homerization” (The Path is Open” 29)—that surround the postcolonial university should alert us to the practical limits of what is possible. Yáì, we must note, edited a Yorùbá-English translation glossary and not a Yorùbá monolingual dictionary.

Yáì did not tie himself in centers and peripheries probably because decentering is meaningful only in environments for which centering is an important organizing concept. Within the Yáì critique, òde or orílé (roughly, head quarters or capital) necessarily consists of ẹ̀yà (types) and is filled with ẹ̀ya (sheered parts). The critical question is not about whether people or ideas spread (tànkálẹ̀). The main issue is that the dispersals need not be deviations. In other words, theorists of foundational metissage might actually be more African, Yoruboid specifically, than they know. Since language is not something that thought can sidestep, scholars of African worlds may have to pay attention to the (meta)-language of self-conception spoken in their communities of studies in order to be able to create and draw (ya, yà) connections. For Yáì, every instance of language use is usually in accordance with a metalanguage. For that reason, the non-colonial need not be non-native.

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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.

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 50^th 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.