Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking The African in African Art

This Review Forum, a new feature of the African Studies Review, is a space where leading scholars, representing a diversity of critical opinions, engage with a significant new book, followed by a response from the author. The constraints typical of a book review are still there—space is limited and the task of distilling broad and complex ideas into portable resonant essences is paramount. The great advantage of the forum is that it makes widely available to scholars a well-considered, lively, and multi-sided “first notice” of a book that will no doubt provide much food for thought across disciplines in many years to come. African art history is the immediate context of Rowland Abiodun’s energetic reaffirmation of the centrality of African languages to the understanding and explication of African cultural forms and practices. The significance of the issue cuts across disciplines in the study of Africa, especially in the current era, which provides almost irresistible temptations to find short cuts in the study of languages and cultures. When we are dealing with these living entities, language mastery remains an irreducible condition of understanding cultures in their broad practical, institutional, and ethical dimensions. This observation represents an abstraction of just one rich strand from the book reviewed here—there are many more, as the exchanges below make clear.

My gratitude goes to the author, Rowland Abiodun, for agreeing to participate in the forum. I am also grateful to the reviewers—Akinwumi Ogundiran, Grey Gundaker, and Adeleke Adeeko—for enthusiastically agreeing to participate and for their cogent engagements with Abiodun’s book. Finally, thanks to John Lemly and Richard Waller, the ASR book review editors, for helping us bring this forum to fruition.

Comments

What does it mean to seek and find “Africa” in African art studies? Why is it necessary? What would it take to accomplish this? Three generations of scholars of African art have implicitly offered answers to these questions, some more successfully than others. For the first time, we have a book that tackles these questions head-on by focusing on the Yoruba visual arts. Here, Rowland Abiodun deftly demonstrates the centrality of language and the epistemology of orature for a deep exploration of the meanings and meaningfulness in Yoruba visual arts. In nine chapters he offers richly textured and sometimes dense case studies to illustrate that Yoruba art is the material expression of oríkì—that affective invocation of the essence/character (ìwà) of a person, thing, or place. Abiodun’s indigenous theoretical framework and extensive discussion of Yoruba aphorisms, Ifá divination verses, and poetic citations provide new vistas of interpretation that refocus our imaginative gyrations toward a more coherent, contextual, and purposeful interpretation of several Yoruba art forms. The methodological rigor that his theoretical framework demands may unsettle some established scholars who are not versatile in Yoruba or any African language. But this is what it takes to decolonize the study of African art: scholars of African art must take the language and the practice of their subjects more seriously as sources of theorizing and interpretation.

Abiodun’s book is primarily about the philosophy of and the philosophy in Yoruba visual arts. It collapses not only the reified boundaries between visual and oral arts, but also those between philosophy and practice. This approach yields many novel insights. Let me cite a few examples. In chapter 4 the author presents the compelling interpretation that the horse imagery in Ifá divination objects has nothing to do with militarism. Rather, it refers to the compatibility of the itinerant nature of the Ifá priest as disseminator of knowledge and the essence of the horse for enhancing travel and movement. That is, just as horses served as a means of connecting spaces and diminishing distances, the itinerant Ifá priests connected...