Yoruba Idealism

Logically buoyant and enthusiastically immersed in the calm strength of contentment, the first thing the author was contemplating to be his companion when he started ruminating upon Yoruba Idealism, Asedun Yoruba (my translation), many years ago, is a permanent and an ideal happiness, permanent nil a transient one. On finding his ideal happiness, he discovers that he was on the defensive as some of his friends said that Yoruba land and Divinity-Philosopher Orunmila and his noble consanguinities are so remote in antiquity that to think that they were versed in idealism would be too mythical. One of them came to the author’s study and on tossing himself negligently on the sofa crooned that the author’s uncommon research project was impressive but too bold and too ambitious. (For his friendly gesture in spoken and unspoken words, he let him comprehend that by simply flaying innovative ideas instead of being a precept is a relic of redundancy and complacency.)

Determined not to ignore his research project (or to oppose reason according to Steven Pinker) but to appreciate his organic and ideal happiness, he set out and formed an alliance with the brown study that opens his mind to capital ideas from the Book of Knowledge,as contained in Chapter Seven. During his brown study, he was emboldened by Annalisa Quinn’s words of support for Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016), which go thusly…“be proud of your heritage but don’t be defined by it.” Annalisa Quinn’s words were a spark in the nick of time. He was tempted to entertain the feeling of flaunting the success of his happiness. (Annalisa was short of saying she is proud of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) to which Yoruba Idealism belongs, under the pioneering ingenuity of Orunmila.)

Sooner than later, the author convinced his friends that his research is an ongoing global discussion about IKS, supported by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO’s) Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) which is making every effort for its inclusion in global climate and policy process, adding that LINKS is ensuring that the local and indigenous knowledge are included in contemporary education in order to understand our diverse humanity. As he set his wits to his project, he lets them understand that they should not take the wisdom and the knowledge of Divinity-Philosopher Orunmila for triviality.

Moreover, if nothing has descended from the abstract theory of epistemology, if nothing digitigrades from sublime to ridiculous, what is unknown that must be known, is worth knowing, if only for the heart that wills.

The comparative possession began after the author’s years of innocence and the period when he started to reminisce upon what folk philosopher Tai Bola (1898–1989) put him through. The comparative possession ultimately gave birth to The Birth of a Child in a Fishing Boat, his memoir, published in 2016.

The superlative possession commenced when he began to put spotlight on the twelve most influential divinity-philosophers who had contributed largely to the development of Yoruba land and have shaped the cultural history of the Yoruba people. At that point of the author’s research, his focus was on Divinity-Philosopher Orunmila, the humanist and cultivator of Yoruba idealism and the bequeather of Ifa-Ife Divination, the Body of Knowledge or the Book of Enlightenment, or the Miracle Book of Knowledge, as referenced and revealed in The Oral Traditions in Ile-Ife, published in 2010.

Divinity-philosopher Orunmila, apart from being the trail-blazer, the cultivator or the father of Yoruba idealism, could also be referred to as a linguist, an epistemologist and even a ventriloquist. But we might want to put those three departments or areas of knowledge properly rather than conveniently under our speculative philosophy, even if we know that he was a personage with exceptional propensities that made Yoruba land rise and become a nation driven by idealism cum naturalistic art movement. Due to his compassion and moral integrity, quid pro quo becomes an essential value of the Yoruba behavioral attitude.

This is a twenty-first-century new voice of approbation, and it is calling upon other downright, promising and dynamic voices to enter the book and the age of idealism and cultural spheres of Yoruba land, for it is the idealism, copulated with the folk philosophy, that has defined the humble beginning of the Yoruba people, liaising it with their autochthonous religion, while realism has defined the quintessence of their social behaviors.