EDITOR'S LETTER TO THE WOLE SOYINKA SOCIETY DISCUSSION GROUP





Letter to the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo Discussion Group

wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com

16 Nov 2007

18:45

googlemail.com

In response to my drawing attention to the claims about a breakthrough in Adinkra research announced by Kofi Abua-Iyen ,a specialist in the ideational values of visual culture at the University of Legon in Ghana, in his book Adinkra as Integrative Hermeneutic which the author claims integrates Classical African systems of thought, as well as broad range of cognitive systems in different cultures in term of the Akan symbols of Adinkra, some correspondents have expressed their perplexity at not finding any information about Kofi Abua-Iyen at the University of Legon or any information about his book from any source.

Some, writing from Ghana, claim that the intellectual magazine, Gye Nyame, which I wrote I got the information about Abua-Iyen's book from, does not exist in Ghana.

I appreciate their perplexity but I wonder if the wrong questions are not being asked by these enquirers, and a change of approach needed in order to clarify the situation.

Has Kofi Abua-Iyen perhaps been a past member of staff of the university and a mistake is being made about temporal order in relation to his membership?

Could he perhaps be a potential or future member of staff? Perhaps his appointment is being considered and the reporter took its ratification for granted and described the appointment as substantive.

I really would not know. I have simply presented the information as it has been available to me. And I have learnt that the fact that something is not obviously true does not imply that is not true. Perhaps it is true, but in a manner different from conventional understanding would have it.

Along those lines, since the first question is about the existence of Kofi Abua-Iyen as a member of staff of the University of Legon, one could ask, "What ,really, is the University of Legon?"

One needs to establish the mode of being of a phenomenon, its intrinsic ontological status, as far as that is possible, along with its classification in relation to other phenomena, in order to ascertain what could belong to that phenomenon.

Is the university identical with the complex of physical structures that bears its name?

Is it correlative with the human beings who work in the buildings that bear that name?

Would it remain the University of Legon if either the physical structure did not exist or if it did exist and the workers and students normally gathered to work and study inside it as members of the university were not present?

Could the university exist without the administrative and social structures constituted by its workers and students?

Could these social structures exist without the physical existence of the students and workers?

Must we have physically embodied beings in order to have relational structures consisting in interactions between conscious entities, and the resultant sharing of ideas that is central to a scholarly community?

Could the university exist as the raison d'etre, the purpose for being that would normally bring its students and staff together in relation to the particular sense of direction represented by that university?

Can the university exist as an idea, an idea not realised in or represented by any particular physical structure, an idea not embodied by any group of people who constitute its workers and its students?

Can it exist as a pure, unembodied idea, an aspiration, a vision, a wish, an ideal?

Perhaps Kofi Abua-Iyen could be understood as existing as a member of the community represented by the University of Legon but not in the sense in which the notion of membership of a corporate community is normally understood.

Ali Mazrui dedicates a book to Makerere University, Uganda, along the following lines "You were built for the ages, but you must wait for the ages to rebuild you".

K. A. Busia in African Worlds describes the Classical conceptions of the Ashanti, a subgroup of the Akan, as including an understanding of the human person in which an aspect of the individual derives from a communal fellowship ultimately anchored in a non-human but [ ]materially realised mode of being.

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