U: What kind of naming ceremony would you have
had? Was it like the Yoruba one, where you give the baby various things to taste
- kolanut to teach him that life can be bitter, pepper to teach him that life
can hurt and honey to teach him that sweetness always follows pain in life?
S: It would have been similar; only some of the
items would have been different. For example, in Benin we can hardly do anything
without coconut or snails. Snails are for peace. The snail moves slowly. It
is soft. It doesn't fight, it doesn't harm. And when you break the shell there
is that beautiful blue water. The snail is harmony. There used to be plenty
of snails in Benin. In the olden days, when you cooked food and the meat was
not enough, you would just go behind the house and pick a dozen snails. They
would be everywhere. But today they have gone. The Binis buy snails from the
Yoruba.
U: So you were not given any Edo names?
S: No, my brothers were given Edo names. By that
time there was a nostalgia to go back to Benin. All my father's grandchildren
were given Edo names. All of them. At that time he would have loved to go home,
because he was not fully accepted in Igbara-Oke. He reminded them of the ‚colonial'
rule of Benin. There was an incident that nearly forced my father to leave the
town. My brother went to Government College Ibadan and during the first term,
when he was asked, he said that he was a Benin boy. The people in Igbara-Oke
got angry and said: "Why should he call himself a Benin Boy? Was he not born
and bred in Igbara-Oke and was not his father born here also?"
U: I gather that your parents were both
Christians.
S: Yes, they were Anglicans. My father was
baptized
in 1912, my mother in 1915, just before they got married. In fact you could
say that Igbara-oke was a Christian town.
U: That means, I suppose, that you grew up without
knowing anything about Yoruba religion.
S: Since my grandfather
had come from Benin we had Olokun in our compound and all the traditional dances
were still being performed for him. And the worshippers of the other Orishas
would come and celebrate with us. For us children it was very, very interesting;
and in the evening, when nobody was watching, we would imitate them. We would
dramatize the ritual with all the songs and dances. But my father was always
worrying us not to go and watch the ‚pagan' ceremonies. As Christians we were
supposed to stay clear of all that. to him it was like worshipping the devil.
We would be sneaking out whenever there was an Orisha ceremony somewhere, but
when we came home we would deny we had been there. One morning during our prayer
session my father said to us that he had warned us several times not to worship
Orisha, but we had refused to listen to him. He was not going to warn us anymore.
But we would have to remember that on the day of judgment, God and the devil
would pick their children among all the human beings. Then some of us would
say that we were the children of God, but the devil would say: "No, you are
mine." Then there would be an argument. God would say: "They are my children"
and the devil would say: "They belong to me." And then the devil would have
to prove his case. Then my father said: "Do you know that each time you are
watching the Olorisha the devil is there with his camera, taking the picture
of all the worshippers ... and on judgment day, when there is an argument,
all the devil will have to do is to bring out his pictures. When they have identified
you on the photographs, you will be asked: was it a ceremony for God or for
the devil? And you will have to answer: it was for the devil." From that day
on, we never went to see the Orisha dancers again, and for years after that
I was so afraid. And at night I wondered how I could recapture those Photographs
from the devil, because although I had stopped going to the ceremonies - what
of the pictures he had taken before?
U: Did you go to school in Igbara-Oke?
S: Yes, I finished my primary school - Standard
VI. Than I went to Ile-Ife to what was known as a ‚Girls School'. It was only
a two years course, but it was so intensive that you could come out with a Class
IV certificate. In those days the full secondary schoool was six years. But
you could leave with a Class IV certificate and find a job fairly easily. Or
you could go back to school and work for your Class VI. I went on to Ilesha
to the Women Training College. It had been set up by the British, when they
were on their way out of Nigeria. It was wholly financed by the British government
and thirteen out of fifteen teachers were British. Every single thing we used
in that school was imported from Britain: biros, paper - everything. Even our
uniforms. I trained as a teacher and began to teach first at Ogotun then later
at Ibadan.
U: But your teaching career didn't last that long.
When did you go to university?
S: I went to Moscow in 1963.
U: You went to Moscow to study philosophy?
S: No, no. My husband got a scholarship and I went
with him. I wanted to study economics, but at first I had to do a year of preparatory
classes. Mainly Russian language, but also some other subjects. But after one
year my husband decided to leave the Soviet Union, so I never had a chance to
do the proper course.
U: Why didn't he like it? Was it the life style?
The politics?
S: He found the language too hard. He wasn't a
language man. As for me I could pick it up quickly.
U: What was life like in Moscow on campus? Did
you have Russian friends?
S: We lived in what they called Cheriomushky: a
whole house full of foreign students. Maybe I was biased coming from a completely
free country, but I found everything terribly regimented. You could not, for
instance, freely listen to the BBC. If you wanted to visit somebody, you had
to deposit your passport with the porter of the house. You had to tell him which
room you were going to and whom you were going to see. They recorded the time
you entered and the time you left. Another fundamental problem was food. Rice
was a rare commodity. Sometimes you saw people queuing in front of a supermarket.
They told you that rice was going to be sold. After Queuing for three of four
hours, somebody would come out of the shop and say: "What are you waiting for?"
We said: "We are waiting for rice." Then he would say: "But I don't have rice!"
and everybody would go away without saying anything. In 1964 I went to the Studienkolleg
in Cologne while my husband went to the United States to continue his studies.
I didn't have A levels so I couldn't enter a German university straight. I had
to do another preparatory year. It was more or less like what I had to do in
Moscow, except that this time I studies German. I did well, but I didn't enter
a German university, where I had been offered a full scholarship in philology;
I went to the US instead. But after three months I decided to return home, because
all my children were at home. I already had three children then. I had made
sure I gained admission to the University of Lagos, before I returned home.
U: You went on a long Odyssee abroad, that in the
end didn't get you anywhere. But I suppose that it was all to the good: if you
had stuck it out overseas and completed one of those courses you would never
have become a philosopher.
S: That's right. And when I returned home I was
still not thinking about Philosophy. I had been admitted for a BA Education
an my main subject was to be English. But in those days the University was very
relaxed about things: as long as you had a letter of admission you could go
around and shop for subjects. You could do anything, as long as the Department
was willing to have you. I did not really want to get back into school teaching.
I first decided to do English, but some of the students said to me: "Madam,
you better be careful. Because if you want to do English you may never end up
with a degree from this university." I said: "Why?" They said that Wole Soyinka
was their teacher and he had passed only two students that year! So I ran away.
I didn't want to waste my time, because I already had three children. I was
looking around for subjects I could do. I had O levels in history and geography
and I needed a third subject. Philosophy was the only department that was willing
to take me, because they were the only ones who had no prerequisites. The system
was that after the first year you dropped one subject and carried on with two.
Then you did ‚Combined Honors' in the remaining two subjects. Or, if you did
very well in one subject, you could even end up with ‚Single Honors'. I had
intended to drop philosophy. But at the end of the first year my worst subject
was history. I discovered that I didn't have the retentive memory that an historian
needs. So I dropped history and decided I would try to aim at ‚Single
Honors'
in geography. If you could score more than 60 % in one subject, you would be
allowed to do ‚Single Honors' in it. At the end of the second year I qualified
to do geography, but I also qualified to do philosophy. I got 62 % in geography
and 64 % in philosophy. It was difficult for me to make a choice: geography
was willing to take me. At that stage I had already discovered my love for philosophy,
but the problem was, that they had only three lecturers and the professor said
they couldn't accept a ‚Single Honors' student until they got another lecturer.
But the new member of staff wasn't expected for some months. So I decided I
was going to run two ‚Single Honors' courses concurrently. I went to geography
and I went to philosophy. But as soon as the fourth lecturer arrived in the
Philosophy Department I dropped geography. I became very embarrassing, because
the geography professor said: "She is my student!"
U: So you got into philosophy almost by accident.
Or was it Esu blocking all the other roads on which you attempted to travel
- until you hit upon the right one? What finally attracted you to philosophy?
S: It was my nature. I found it so easy. I wasn't
good at learning facts. But I could look at critical issues. I could take a
sentence and pull it to pieces. So I was at home. I was comfortable ...
U: What kind of philosophy did they teach you at
the University of Lagos? I suppose it wasn't African philosophy.
S: No, no. The first year we did Greek philosophy:
starting with Thales and down to Plato and Aristotle. The second year we did
British philosophy: Hume, Locke, Hubes - all of them. In the final year we did
British philosophy again with the one exception our English head could not ignore:
Immanuel Kant Hat was the only German philosopher we studied. came out top
of the class: second class Upper Division-Which was thee best you could hope
for in any honors subject those days.
S: It was Dr Danquah who first got me interested
in African Philosophy. But he was on that Egyptology thing, trying to trace the
origin of African philosophy to Egyptian religion.
U: Another Detour!
S: Yes. Although his father had written The Concept
Of God, he had not actually stressed that point. The grand old man was not interested
in proving to the west ,that Thales had borrowed the concept of god or mathematics
or whatever from Egypt.
U: It still fashionable. Cheikh Anta Diop and so
many others still claim that there was a west African civilization from which
the Greeks derived their ideas.
S: Yes, but I had a feeling right from the start:
if
it is true that the Greeks came and stole African Philosophy-what happened to
the Africans? You can steal my ideas, but you cant steal the brain from my
head. Forget
the borrowings. I do not mind what they took. But do we have anything left today-which
I can show? So my first concern was to find records of Yoruba thought. I went
to the Yoruba Department and asked them wether I could have access to records
of Yoruba thought before colonialism. There was an Egba poet called Sobo
Arobiodu. I had heard of him even as a small girl. My father had been quoting his poems and
his proverbs. I was so excited to find that Prof S. A. BaBalola and Moses Lijadu
had recorded him and that I could listen to this material. But I was so
disappointed
to discover that he had been a Christian! He was talking about Jesus! He was a
hardly a Yoruba thinker! But the Yoruba Department told me they had no other
records predating him. So I decided to look into Ifa oracle Texts.
U: Now tell me one thing: are you still the only
one trying to establish Yoruba thought as a philosophy? Are there others now
working in this field or do you still come up against a lot opposition?
S: There are now quite a number of lecturers and
students who wants to establish African philosophy. But the fundamental difference
is :what basis for the basis for their claims? If you look at my book
"Witchcraft, Reincarnation
and the God-head, "my claims are based on what people are saying in the
street. How
they describe a witch or what reincarnation means to them-for example Christian
ideas have influenced peoples thinking people are not even aware of such influences.
Dr Sophie Oluwole is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
at the University of Lagos {Nigeria}. She is currently National President of the
Nigerian Philosophical Society. She is the editor of "Imodooye"-a journal of Yoruba
philosophy. In 1993 Dr. Oluwole was visiting lecturer at
the the University of Bayreuth under the auspices of a special research program
{"SFB214"-Identity in Africa}.
This is an excerpt of an interview Dr Oluwole had
with Ulli Bier at the Iwalewa House,University of Bayreuth.
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