EDITOR'S LETTER TO THE WOLE SOYINKA SOCIETY DISCUSSION GROUP


Letter to the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo Discussion Group

wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com

googlemail.com

I had earlier drawn attention in this forum to what I have described as a breakthrough in Adinkra research. Adinkra is a system of graphic symbols created by the Akan of Ghana and developed in succeeding centuries to the present day. The symbols primarily represent social philosophy and metaphysical conceptions. They are used in both sacred and secular contexts, on clothing, in architecture and as variety of design roles beyond those. Google search would suggest that it is one of the most pervasive of African communication systems since it emerges in various countries and contexts in and outside Africa.

My earlier posts had presented claims by Kofi Abua-Iyen,a lecturer at the University of Legon to have developed a exploration of Adinkra symbolism that incorporates and extends significantly its symbolic potential. Certain paradoxes emerge, however, in relation to the information presented. Theses paradoxes relate to the question of the truth value of the email communication by myself. Theses questions emerge in the light of the understanding, emerging after the posting by me, that no information can be found on Kofi-Abua-Iyen and the magazine, Gye Nyame, where I had claimed I saw the information, is described as not existing in Ghana. What exists is a newspaper known as Gye Nyame Concord but not a Gye Nyame magazine.

As for Kofi Abua-Iyen’s book, since books no longer need exist in tactile form, but through electronic storage have moved closer to the primordial state of being of a book as a congruence of ideas, it might not be out of place to look for Kofi Abua-Iyen’s book in some form other than cold print. Hindu thought describes the primal sound through which the universe was created as reverberating throughout existence, sustaining and recreating it. Astronomers claim that they can detect echoes of the primal explosion through which the universe came into being. Camile-Griaule and Hampate respectively describe Dogon and Fulani conceptions of human speech as existing in relation to the primal world. These ideas suggest that sound, though non-tactile, is constitutive of material reality. Perhaps. This might indicate that the book which Kofi Abua-Iyen describes himself as having written might exist as the vibrations of sound from your voice when your waking dreams are at their purest, when you are not participating in the rat race represented by the conscription into the market economy, when you move beyond the veneration of intellectual power regardless of its moral value to a veneration of moral and spiritual genius, when you wonder why you are lost but had forgotten that you were lost. In short, when you are awake.

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