Prof. Dele Layiwola early in the year finished his tenure as Director, Institute of African Studies of the University of Ibadan. A professor of performance art, Layiwola spoke with ANOTE AJELUOROU about his tenure, the objectives of the institute in synthesizing African indigenous knowledge and making it available for use. Specifically, he traced the origin of the institute as situating knowledge within the African context away from its European, colonial imprintWhat major highpoint characterised your tenure as director of the institute'We were able to accomplish a few things. We were able to upgrade and review our curriculum. We were also able to upgrade the environment such that we are now able to receive guests and hold international meetings here.What sort of knowledge dissemination does the institute engage in other than the traditional ones universities are known for'Well, you know that our universities are centres of knowledge. The tertiary institutions were founded by Europeans and Americans whose knowledge centres are based and are coordinated or contextualised in their own societies. So, most of the missionaries who came here founded these institutions from the viewpoint of their own backgrounds and their own individual societies and cultures. But in actual fact, it was President Kwameh Nkrumah of Ghana, who first muted the idea of African Studies in an African University. When the University of Legon was founded, he was the one who thought that knowledge ought to be indigenised and contextualised in the societies that produced them.He said that the knowledge systems that were brought to Ghana or Africa in general, had their roots in European cultures and that was why Africans had the books but they were not able to make any headway or breakthrough or were not inventive with the knowledge that they had acquired through Western education because the root and the philosophy of such education had its roots buried in Europe and America.So, he felt that an Institute of African Studies will seek to indigenise knowledge, will seek to impart and root the knowledge that had been transferred from Europe on an African soil and in an African culture. And that once you have done, the knowledge will become more meaningful; the inheritors will be more dynamic with it and it will also chart a future for them and for their own society.So, he founded the first Institute of African Studies on the continent at the University of Ghana, Legon. That was just some months before the one here at Ibadan was founded in1962. I think Nkrumah founded the one in Ghana in 1961. He funded it directly from the Presidency because he felt that the political leaders of the day must be interested in the town and gown interaction of the capital base of knowledge and the centres of governance. So, that is how he founded the Institute of African Studies in Ghana. We pretty well patterned the Institute of African Studies, here at the University of Ibadan after the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon.You said you just upgraded the curriculum of the institute. The impression people out there get is that universities do the same thing every year. What exactly do you mean when you say that you just reviewed the curriculum of the institute'We felt that what our predecessors taught might be suitable for the people of that time. The knowledge-base in Ibadan, for instance, especially as the first university on the continent, and to some extent in West Africa, (I mean, I know Forah Bay was there but the University of Ibadan is a pioneer institution in west Africa; I mean those single honours degrees of those days were meant to train persons who would take over from the colonial masters. They did not foresee the kind of complexities that our societies went through soon after independence, and which was tragic for Nigeria, which ultimately precipitated the Nigeria Civil War in 1967.If you read Prof. Wole Soyinka's Seasons of Anomy, you see the elite in that novel, the university graduates who took single honours degrees and got into public service. Also, if you read Prof. Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People and No Longer at Ease, you will see what I am trying to portray. That the students who were the product of the education we inherited from the colonial masters were not sufficiently grounded in their own societies. And there was that era when people asked, 'how can you have an Institute of African Studies in an African university'But after a while, those of them who used to argue like that capitulated and saw that truly there is a need to have an Institute of African Studies, which will indigenise knowledge and study the ramifications of knowledge-bases in Africa and contextualise them on the African soil and on the African predicament and the African condition. We only do postgraduate studies here. You will find the actual component of what we have here because here, we insist that whatever knowledge you are bringing from any of the faculties, and we are represented in all of the faculties, must have a basis and an implication for development in Africa or for the future of Africa. That is why you find that those components of humanities taught in the major departments have some major research base here, which is slanted towards Africa.For the average man on the street, what exactly does that mean'Now, let me illustrate it with a few examples. You will notice that the playwright, Prof. John Pepper Clarke started his career from here at the institute; he was a research fellow here. This is how he came up with the Ozidi Saga, a major research into the culture and folklore of his people, the Izon (Ijaw). If he had sat down at the English Department, he would not have been able to do that. Also, it's noteworthy to see that we have various units in this place. You have the unit that deals with Indigenous Knowledge Systems, which gets the names and the stories about herbs and can pass them onto the Biochemistry Department and his colleagues in Biochemistry in the College of Medicine for analysis and use. These are what our people believed in and this is what they think this one is used for.Now, what is the scientific basis of this' They are able to collaborate and bring out research in this area. That is what will make meaning to the original owners of the knowledge of the plant or herb, which he discovered. From here, and the stories and folklore around the herb or plant could find scientific component and application.Also, you find that in most of our performances (drama) here, there is research and practical performance, and they are predicated on the fact that if these performances are indigenous then they must be distinct from the plays of Shakespeare, of Shaw, or of Beckett. So, you find that our researches are largely based on things African and in Africa. I do know that every year people go to America in the name of going for African studies. Why must you go and study African literature in the United States' It doesn't make meaning; it's like standing logic on its head.In actual fact, a lot of the output of the researches that we have here we send to the departments for them to test. For that reason, we have an outlet called the Wednesday Seminar, and it is very popular. And you could come and give a paper irrespective of your faculty. We have every major faculty represented on our board so they can all come and see what we are doing and present papers. Some have been here to present a paper on lightening. You know the concept of lightening; it is believed among the Yoruba that Sango is the deity for electricity. Rainmakers sometimes say they want to link the traditional theory of rainmaking with the scientific component of it. We welcome them because research has no boundaries. We are happy to help people make a cultural meaning out of their lives and their studies.One would have thought that the Institute of African Studies would be looking more at the humanities...African medicine is taught here; so, too, are religion and belief systems. We have a herbarium or a laboratory for ethno-medicine. We have a museum here with a vast collection of artworks, which have their own prominence and can be looked at from the viewpoint of the society that produced them and the material art, how they produced were produced. There is no single way of looking at the world, how meaning is brought out of various societies. By simply inspecting an artwork from a given society, we can tell you quite a lot from the history of the artwork itself. We also have a laboratory in the sense of having a museum and a vast collection of artworks. We do have a Performance Unit, an Ethno-musicology Unit, a Folklore Unit, the unit that deals with linguistics and folklore. We also have a unit that deals with African and oral history and more recently we have a unit that deals with Conflict Studies.It sounds like a university within a university'Yeah, quite so; a university within a university!The white man would argue that the African man was never inventive in terms of technology since essentially, the continent is still far behind other continents in this regard. How does this institute react to that kind of view'Well, there are prejudices across cultures. Occasionally, too, our people have made such statements to the fact that the white man has no culture. Or that some foreigners are not cultured in the sense that every name we have has a meaning. Here, you don't name a man stone without reason. One line of a name may tell the whole history of a linage, where they are coming from, where they are going or why they are where they are.
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