THE 2025 Toyin Falola Conference (TOFAC) will take place from the 1st to the 3rd of July at Osun State University in Osogbo, Nigeria.
It will be difficult to find a more symbolically charged environment resonating with the conference theme ‘’African Cultural Creativity And Innovations”.
Osogbo was the place where a marvelously fruitful experiment in African creativity took place. The great Austrian artist and superlative theologian of Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality Susanne Wenger, in collaboration with Osogbo indigenes, such as Adebisi Akanji and Segun Gbadamosi, largely untrained in art but guided by her, constructed, in the Osun forest, a forest through which runs a river identified with the goddess Osun, embodiment of feminine physical beauty and spiritual power, a network of sculptures and architectural forms composing a visual microcosm of Orisa cosmology, its perspective on the cosmos, as understood by Wenger and her collaborators. She also wrote books about this work that constitute masterpieces of spiritual thought comparable to the most significant of such offerings anywhere, in time or space.
The cosmographic sculptural and architectural network created at the Osun forest is thus an initiative enabled by Nigerians, without whom an achievement on such a massive scale would have been impossible, but the initiating force of which was provided by Wenger, inspired by the confluence between Orisa cosmology and its dramatization through the inspirational force of the sacred forest, its atmosphere and evocative forms suggesting the integration of the universe within natural space and the opening of natural space into the cosmos, a strategic insight of classical African thought uniquely dramatized through the sculptural and architectural complex of the Osun forest projecting this universal conception through the forms of Orisa cosmology.
How can uniquely African achievement be more greatly actualized by Africans in Africa, by non-Africans in Africa, by Africans and non-Africans collaborating in Africa, by those who become Africans through immersion, such as Wenger, how can such achievements be nurtured in Africa and carried abroad or constructed abroad and brought to Africa to flourish?
Those are the kinds of questions that could be inspired by holding a conference with the theme of ”African Cultural Creativity and Innovations” in Osogbo, where Wenger, her then husband Ulli Beier, who brought her to Nigeria, and his later wife Georgina Beier, with other people in such other Yoruba cultural centres such as Ibadan and Ile Ife, initiated culturally catalytic innovations, from which such fruits as the Osogbo Art School emerged, of whom Twins Seven Seven and Nike Okundaye-Davies have been luminaries.
In a world in which learning is increasingly democratised, the local and the global existing in swift communication, how may native soils better yield fruit through intrinsic explorations, at times in dialogue with extrinsic creativities?
The conference is in honour of Toyin Falola, an African writer and scholar who gained his cognitive and professional formation in Nigeria before emigrating to the United States, while his zone of research and exploration remains Africa, as he continually physically journeys between his current location and various points in his mother continent, intrinsically enmeshed in its academic landscape and institutions.
What are the implications of such a demonstration of the global village ethos within the triumphs and the paradoxes of scholarship strategic to a continent in its inspiration and subjects, yet conducted elsewhere, in the centres of former colonising powers that reshaped Africa and its knowledge systems in ways both creative and destructive, the scholar and writer working in enabling conditions that may not have been gained if the creative individual had remained in his former academic base in Nigeria?
So many questions to explore, as one moves from Falola’s enchanting autobiographies to his writings on African creatives and non-Africans working on Africa, to engagements with various African cultural, social, economic and cultural productions, in alignment with the universe of African and African inspired creativity, framed by the Osogbo matrix.