Classics in Ogboni Studies : Babatunde Lawal, Philosopher of Ogboni
Babatunde Lawal surrounded by great works of Yoruba art, his field of study
Abstract
An exploration of the insights of the work of art historian, art critic and art theorist Babatunde Lawal on the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in relation to developing a comprehensive grasp of Ogboni philosophy, intrinsic to the order and in its integration within Yoruba thought.
Philosopher of Ogboni
Babatunde Lawal may be described as a philosopher of Ogboni on account of his dramatization of Ogboni vision, through poetry of expression, analytical depth, ideational range and artistic sensitivity, projecting a passion that lifts to the mind's eye the glory of his subject.
Babatunde Lawal may be described as a philosopher of Ogboni on account of his dramatization of Ogboni vision, through poetry of expression, analytical depth, ideational range and artistic sensitivity, projecting a passion that lifts to the mind's eye the glory of his subject.
Representative examples of his scholarly work may also be seen as demonstrating an inter-relationality, a coherence of subjects and of perspectives on those subjects, suggesting an Ogboni vision, even though he is not known as an Ogboni initiate.
Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó" 's Compelling Exposition of the Unity of Ogboni Philosophy, Spirituality and Art
Lawal's “À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni,” was published in African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100.
This essay is the most comprehensive on Ogboni known to me, surveying the fundamentals of Ogboni thought and its relationship to Ogboni art in the context of Ogboni history.
Lawal is magnificent on Ogboni philosophy, in terms of its conceptual exposition and the unraveling of the projection of these ideas through Ogboni art.
The poetry, imaginative range and lofty moral vision demonstrated by Ogboni in what might be described as its most mature form at the acme of Yoruba political, judicial, philosophical and spiritual synthesis is magnificently demonstrated by Lawal in an essay enriched with superb images of the art whose harmony of expressive power and ideational projection he explores.
He masterfully projects the character of Ogboni as a spirituality and philosophy centred in the feminine, as it foregrounds the masculine and feminine polarities that define human existence as a manifestation of the feminine principle represented by Earth as universally nurturing mother.
The Unity of Representative Examples of Babatunde Lawal's Scholarly Work as Suggesting an Ogboni Vision
"À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó" is correlative with Lawal's book on Yoruba female centred spirituality, The Gelede Spectacle: Art, Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture, where he argues for the correlation of all female deities in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology as expressions of Earth.
These conjunctions further resonate with another remarkable essay of his, "Èjìwàpò: The Dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture", where the centrality of the binary principle and its manifestation in a unifying trad is developed at length, with superb pictures.
This essay may be seen as microcosmic of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality as a whole, binary and triadic concepts being also central to Ogboni, that being one of the examples he gives in this essay, while demonstrating the ramification of these ideas in other centres of Yoruba thought, as in the Ifa system of knowledge.
"Orilonise : The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles Among the Yoruba" is another essay in which Lawal can be seen as exploring Yoruba philosophy and spirituality's grounding in the intersection between the material and spiritual universes, an intersection that defines Ogboni, although Ogboni does not feature explicitly in this essay, from what I recall.
Another priceless essay by Lawal, conjunctive with Ogboni thought, though Ogboni is not discussed in it, is "Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art," where he explores ideas of imaginative fashioning in Yoruba thought, with reference to the transformation of what is seen by the eyes and recreated by the artist into art, a creative form further reworked by the perception of the viewer.
He presents the scope of sensory and particularly visual perception in Yoruba thought, ranging from corporeal perception, immediate sensory apprehension, to the reworking of sense data through critical reflection and imagination, among other conventional cognitive processes, to unconventional modes of perception.
He thus depicts Yoruba epistemology as developing the idea of penetration beyond the conventionally perceptible to unconventional awareness, the unconventional ranging from extra sensory perception to trance and witchcraft, although he does not elaborate on these tantalizing epistemic categories, nor explain the controversial conception of witchcraft in Yoruba thought.
"Àwòrán" aligns superbly with the Earth centred, materially grounded but extra-material orientation of Ogboni thought in dramatizing the emphasis in Yoruba thought of a dynamic between the material world and possibilities of being beyond the material, between Earth and its biological enablements and possibilities beyond these.
These oscillations are emblematised by the recurrent motif in Yoruba Ifa literature of a journey between orun, the world of ultimate origins and the material universe represented by aye, Earth, a journey described by Ogboni elder Kolawole Ositola in Margaret Thompson Drewal's Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play Agency, as central to Ogboni lifestyle as an inter-generational quest for knowledge, truth and justice, a journey between orun and aye that may be perceived in metaphorical terms as an oscillation between the ultimate and the contingent, between the material and the spiritual.
In "Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics," Lawal explores the dialectic of divine and human creativity in Yoruba thought emblematised by myths of divine shaping of the human being in Yoruba cosmology in contrast to the belief co-existing in this cosmology, that deities are shaped by humans, represented in the expression "Bi eniyan ko si, orisa ko si", "No humanity, no orisa [deities]" thereby incidentally evoking the Ogboni expression, "Earth existed before the orisa and the Ogboni cult before kingship," as quoted by Peter Morton-Williams in "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo."
Lawal concludes, in keeping with Wole Soyinka's summation on the same expression in The Credo of Being and Nothingness, Soyinka's response being that "Orisa reveals destiny as-Self destination."
Lawal states that, in this context, the human creation of deity is an "act of self-reflexion [that] not only constitutes the orisa into a sort of superhuman Other, an extension of the metaphysical self, but also provides a basis for involving them in the ethics, aesthetics, poetics and politics of human existence".
This perspective may be fruitfully compared with the Ogboni projection of human creativity within a symbol matrix where human creativity is placed within a network of symbols including Olodumare, the ultimate creator and Ile, Earth, as described in Dennis Williams' "The Iconology of the Yoruba Edan Ogboni".
Within this configuration, the human being is symbolized by charcoal from cooking fires, suggesting human discovery of fire in transforming food from a raw to an edible state, representing the adaptation and transformation of nature that defines human civilization, a recreative process that may be extended to humanity's relationship with ideas of spirit and deity.
In "Orí: The Significance of the Head in Yoruba Sculpture", Lawal explores the recreative activity of art as representative of the dialogue between the self, as a biologically and socially shaped entity, and the self as an entity that transcends biology, society and mortality, as understood in Yoruba thought.
He examines the scope of the idea of the human person as shaper of being at the nexus of contrastive but complementary aspects of the self, a perspective resonant with Morton-Williams' description of Ogboni thought as centred in the shaping capacity of humanity even within the cosmos of deities:
The senior grade of Ogboni will collectively know all that pertains to the orisa cults. They will also have been active participants in them and many will have gone deeply into their esoterica. The ritual of the orisa ceases to captivate the most thoughtful of them … through their experience, age, and closeness to death they have transcended the ordinary orisa 'truth '-the conceptions expressed through the cults-leaving only Earth as the absolute certainty in their future.
In discussions of Yoruba religion, contemplative Ogboni men will often introduce such phrases as ' I know that everything must have its cause ', meaning that whatever the orisa do for mankind is a consequence of human action; implicit is a denial of the ordinary man's conviction that there is an element of irresponsibility or of chance in events; implicit also is the awareness that Elegbara, the Trickster deity, cannot lead a man into misfortune unless he himself or an enemy provokes the event.
(Peter Morton-Williams, "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo, " Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 30, No. 4.1960. 362-374.373).
To what degree is such a perception an aspect of Ogboni ethos in general and in relation to changes in Ogboni since the decades when this article was published?
Whatever might be the response to this question, this style of thinking suggests an approach to the nexus of humanity, Earth and deity generated by Ogboni thought.
Links to Download Some of Lawal’s Works
Babatunde Lawal Page on Semantic Scholar Document Archive Site
An Invitation to Donate to this Project
You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in Ogboni Studies, consolidating the subject and providing foundations for the unified study of African esoteric systems, bodies of thought and action defined by secrecy in the exploration of knowledge.
Click here to donate.
Comments