Toyin Falola and African Episte-Mologies by, Karim Abdul Bangura (review)

Anthropology professor Emmanuel D. Babatunde, educated at the University of Oxford, is an intellectual giant who has described Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies, a book by Abdul Karim Bangura, professor of research methodology and public policy at Howard University, as a fantastic publication, dealing with an extraordinary compeer, a publication that offers compelling insights into the connections among indigenous African cultures and Western-derived methodologies and epistemologies. Babatunde, chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, is one of “four experts with a great deal of knowledge on the nexus among Yoruba, Christianity, and Islam and quite familiar with Falola’s work [who] were interviewed” for this book (p. 69).

Commenting on the quality of Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies, Babatunde underscores in the book’s blurb that in plumbing the essence of Falola’s scholarship, Bangura displays a unique analytical approach, which will surely generate critical appreciation for a long time to come. This is coupled with an overview by Bridget Teboh, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, who adds comments to the effect that Bangura in this book has shifted the focus of scholarly study of Falola away from history to science and metaphysics, and has thereby grounded Falola in an alternative epistemology and laid a critical foundation on Falola, described by Teboh as one of the most prolific and talented African scholars of our time. It is therefore not surprising that Falola today serves as the 2015 elected president of the African Studies Association of the United States.

In essence, readers are prodded by the publishers to understand that there is an originality about Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies that hinges on the clarity with which familiar but unconnected facts about Falola’s writings are marshaled into a simpler and multidisciplinarily analytical unity. In tandem, Bangura writes unequivocally that his publication “examines the contributions of Toyin Falola to the field of African Studies since 1960[,] providing readers with the opportunity to review his work and introducing theoretical and methodological approaches for assessing his scholarship” (introduction, p. 1).

The book has twelve brilliant chapters, sorted into three parts: “Africa in the Configurations of Knowledge,” “The Yoruba in the Configurations of Knowledge,” and “The Value of Knowledge: Policies and Politics.” Within these parts, the chapters shine light on what theorists may summarize as Falolaism, adding to earlier ideological and philosophical African contextual epistemologies of such postindependent African icons as Kwame Nkrumah and his Nkrumahism, Julius K. Nyerere and his African socialism-cum-Ujamaaism, Jomo Kenyatta and his anthropological plodding in the classic Facing Mount Kenya, Kenneth Kaunda and the yearning expressed in Zambia Shall Be Free, and Sekou Toure and his clarion call in Africa on the Move.

As a methodologist himself, Bangura utilizes the conclusion to this book, “An Interpretive Overview” (pp. 235–40), to offer what he calls an interpretive overview of Falola’s work, adding: “As I have tried to argue, he [Falola] presents history in the way the academy defines it and then moves beyond it in making culture the very core of his analysis and … [connecting] scholarship to the practical politics of advancing the black agenda of development and integration” (p. 235). Bangura concludes: “In sum, what unifies the 12 chapters in this book can appear rather singularly focused, as they clearly show that Falola merits the label of a stalwart in the Black Intellectual renaissance. And given his [sic] effervescence of his work, we can expect more from him in the years to come” (p. 240). Most certainly, Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies can benefit Africanists, students of philosophy and metaphysics, and general readers interested in probing into African epistemology.