Roots, Routes and Roofs

Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence

of
Personal and Cosmic History
Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”

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 Abstract
A statement of ultimate cognitive purpose, of vocation as described by
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language as
“the orientation of a person’s life and work in terms of their ultimate sense
of mission”, inspired by reading The Toyin Falola Reader, particularly by his
motif of “roots, routes and roofs” as defining the unity of African
civilisations across time and space and their ideological and experiential
continuities with the African diaspora.
The essay correlates individual and cosmic history under the inspiration of
the idea that all forms of being are unified by common roots, routes and
roofs, an idea adapted from Toyin Falola’s development of this tripartite
motif.
The main verbal text is complemented by images of Ghanaian
Akan/Gyaman Adinkra symbols and other African and non-African art,
interpreted in accompanying verbal text.
This artistic complement operates in the spirit of Falola’s advocacy in the
“Ritual Archives” essay in the same book, for African art, and, I would
extrapolate, art in general. On account of what I understand as the capacity
of art to subsume and catalyse awareness, Falola projects it as a source of
ideas even beyond the context of discourse about art. He argues for the
potential of African art in stimulating the development of theoretical
formulations of universal value in various disciplines within and beyond
the African context. This orientation is a move towards a pluriversality of
thought, of multiple, coexisting illuminators of both the local condition
from which they are drawn, and with suitable qualifications, of the human
condition in general, as Falola describes this vision in “Pluriversalism”,
another essay in the Reader.

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 “I will look”, said Frodo, and he climbed on the pedestal and bent over
the dark water. At once the Mirror cleared and he saw a twilit land.
Mountains loomed dark in the distance against a pale sky. A long grey
road wound back out of sight. Far away a figure came slowly down the
road, faint and small at first, but growing larger and clearer as it
approached.
…
The vision now changed. … many swift scenes followed that Frodo in
some way knew to be parts of a great history in which he had become
involved”.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Part 1 : The Fellowship of the Ring, Book
One, chapter vii, “The Mirror of Galadriel”. London: HarperCollins,
1999.477.
My encounter with the temporal sweep and ideational scope of The Toyin
Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and
Epistemologies (Austin: Pan African University Press, 2018), reminds me of
Frodo’s encounter with the magical Mirror of Galadriel.
The Reader’s cognitive range and expressive force, in its focus on social and
intellectual history, though without entering into metaphysical speculation,
also inspires me to appreciate the book’s historical and ideational breadth
as weaving a thread in a cosmic tapestry integrating Africa and its place in
world history, a conjunction of possibilities in which I am implicated as an
African, and thus a citizen of the world and inhabitant of the cosmos.
Toyin Falola's motif, roots, routes and roofs, characterizing the unity of
African civilizations in the Reader, provokes me to ask the following
questions at the intersection of the African experience with my own life as
an African, a human being and a denizen of the cosmos:
What are our roots as citizens of the cosmos? What are the routes of our
cosmic journey? What is the roof that defines us as forms of existence?

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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
Adinkra

“The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is

perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions. The Asante people of West
Africa have long been accustomed to using simple yet elegant motifs known
as Adinkra symbols, to serve just this purpose. With a nod to this tradition,
we christen our graphical symbols as ‘Adinkras.’"
“James Gates and Michael Faux, “Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for
Supersymmetric Representation Theory”. Phys.Rev. D71 (2005) 065002.
Accessed on 21/04/2018 on arXiv.

The Adinkra Symbol Adinkrahene

The concentric circles motif, from the Yoruba origin opon ifa to the Indian
origin Hindu Sri Yantra, connote ideas of cosmological and
epistemological inclusion and expansion at the broadest scales. Along
similar lines, each of the three white or black circles of Adinkrahene may
suggest the known, the universe, represented by the celestial bodies in
their revolutions through space and time, the knower, the human mind
and its cognitive processes and the conjunction of mind and cosmos
through human awareness, as described in “The Knower and the Known”
at my blog Adinkrahene, https://adinkraheneone.blogspot.com.ng/.
Related interpretations are developed at
http://www.adinkrasymbols.org/adinkrahene/ and
https://sites.google.com/site/wisdom2008/adinkrahene in terms of
Adinkrahene as suggesting expanding 4 wave motion. All sites accessed
9/4/18.
The inspirational Falola passage:
The record of civilizations in Africa suggests [Africans] have deep roots
in the commonalities of ideas and institutions that once united the
majority of our people. Our history tells us [ : ] our routes and paths
lead to crossroads and junctions, movements, and interactions of
peoples, goods, and ideas. Our spaces reveal that we are covered by big
roofs that shape our perceptions and realities. In combination, our
roots, routes, and roofs show ideas of unity, commonality, and
interaction. It is these ideas and what they mean that form the basis of
this chapter [chapter 25, p. 806].
This passage is superb in the evocative force of its imagery, pregnant and
precise, primal and lucid. “Roots” call up ideas of organic depth represented
by soil and the dynamism enabled by life, dramatized by roots, questing,
variegatedly structured forms searching in a darkness that is rich with
value as they seek food in the earth.
“Routes” is one of the richest pictures of the human propensity for motion,
both concrete and abstract, physical and non-physical, pedestrian,
mechanical, mental or spiritual, an image operating by recalling motion
from one point to another, motion that takes place within space and thus
within a period of time, thus combining a primary image of space with a
secondary, implied evocation of time, space and time being the two
fundamental structurations of physical reality, the framework and
enablement of terrestrial existence, graphically dramatized in humanity’s
migratory motion across the globe from its African homeland, carrying the
cultural seeds that have become the roofs unifying humanity in its cultural
march.
“Roofs” is a primal visualisation representing the human movement from
the life of other animals in the wild to that of the creature who shapes tools
at such a level of complexity that the earth is transformed thereby. Roofs
are fundamental to the shelter represented by houses, a principal
technology of humanisation. This word picture is thus superb for
suggesting overarching ideas and practices that define a group, sustaining
its existence.

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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
The Adinkra Symbol Nkotimsefo Puaa

This symbol is particularly powerful in evoking dynamic motion. J.B. Danquah in The Akan
Concept of God from where the image comes on page 137 of the 1968 edition, describes it as a hair
style connoting the deferential status of the attendants of the Akan Queen Mother. Even though
this design is not so presented by Danquah, like other African hairstyles, it may be interpreted in
cosmological terms, as I demonstrate of other African female hairstyles in “African Hairstyles and
the Cosmological Imagination” Part 1 and Part 2.
Such interpretive possibilities are particularly germane in relation to the symbolism of the head
as both the biological centre of the body, the locus of awareness, and, in the Yoruba conception,
analogue of the invisible, immortal self or ori , counterpart of the Akan kra, that embodies the
ultimate potential of the self, as elaborated on in relation to Yoruba philosophy by Babatunde
Lawal in “The Hermeneutics of the Head and Hairstyles Among the Yoruba” and at my blog Gele
and Gelede : Beauty and Power, correlating Gelede, a Yoruba female centred form of performance
and masking art, and women’s headgear known as gele in terms of Yoruba philosophy of the
metaphysics of the human head, and in relation to Akan thought by various sources I integrate in
my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos.

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Even though Nkotimsefo Puaa is not described as evoking epistemic or cosmological
values, it can be so adapted, its dramatization of recreative motion correlatable with
this essay’s conjunctions between individual cognitive progression and cosmic
development. Its spiral arms simultaneously spinning forward and backward may
suggest cycles of cosmic emergence from and withdrawal into an origin at the ends of
successive cosmic cycles, an ancient Indian as well as African and modern scientific
cosmological idea.
Abhinavagupta develops the Indian idea in terms of conceptions of consciousness in
his Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, which I interpret in “Unifying Empirical and
Mythic Thought: Human Consciousness and the Twelve Kalis in Hinduism”, adapting
the explanations of a number of sources, particularly Ajit Mookerjee’s Kali: The
Feminine Force and Kanti Chandra Pandey’s Abhinavagupta : An Historical and
Philosophical Study.
Nyornuwfia Agorsor expounds similar conceptions emerging from
“Efa/Afa/Ifa/Fa/Teme/Morfiala/Lumina”, what she identifies as a group of esoteric
African schools of thought, in relation to her Cosmos series of paintings at her
Facebook page, images and verbal text I have built into a website Journey through the
Cosmos. Roger Penrose also develops a modern scientific conception of recurrent
cycles of cosmic emergence and dissolution in Cycles of Time.
Such an idea may be related to the human mind contemplating its own roots in self-
consciousness, expanding to integrate the world beyond itself and withdrawing into
its ground in self-consciousness, subsuming in embryo the full scope of human
awareness in a recurrent cyclic progression.

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A fundamental interest of mine is the investigation of ideas along the lines
depicted by Masizi Kunene on Zulu cosmology in Anthem of the Decades
(London: Heinemann, 1981):
The ultimate authority that emanates from the Creator ensures a fulfilment
for each species in accordance with its overall cosmic purpose.
Such a purpose cannot be grasped or defined, not even by the daughter
of God, Nomkhubulwane [ ...goddess of balance, embodying the balance
of the ultimate creative purpose as both physical and spiritual,
symbolized by one manifestation of her as a half-forest and half–field, a
“division that balances the two different but related worlds”, xv]. [Even
then] Only the Creator knows the true direction of creation.”
…
Several truths converge to express a variation of the ultimate truth.
There is no absolute truth, only a working hypothesis ( xvii).
In exploring the question of whether or not a cosmic purpose exists and
the role of each possibility of existence in such a purpose, I find Falola’s
roots, routes and roofs formulation inspiring in characterising the
dynamism in unity of African development. It also facilitates
understanding, not only of the African context but also of the cosmic
framework in which the African dynamic is enfolded.
“Roots, routes and roofs” take my mind to the idea of the birth of the
cosmos from an explosion, a root in time expanding to routes through
space and time taken by the emergence of these basic structuring realities
and the matter, energy and eventually consciousness that developed from
or through this primal conflagration, this triple formulation of matter,
energy and consciousness being one understanding of the foundational
constituents of existence, an ideational roof through which all possibilities
of being may be integrated.
In learning about cosmic and terrestrial evolutionary processes, in
exploring various expressions of the possibilities of being, from mental
facts to social facts to artefacts, a tripartite division of human existence
also defined by Falola, in page 808 of the Reader, I am interested in unity
within difference, of individuality within universality, of the whole and its
constituents, of each and all possibilities of existence, everything and its

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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
The Adinkra Symbol Dwennimmen

Dwennimmen visualizes rotational and bilateral symmetry projected by the

balance between the spiral formation of four antiphonally positioned rams
horns, integrated by a diamond shaped structural matrix, at the centre of two
axes which simultaneously separate and unify the motions of the horns. The
rotation of the horns around a central point, their forms replicated in four
repetitive constructions, amplify their dominant image of balanced force,
dramatizing the poise represented by the equilibrium of dynamism and
concentration, motion and focus symbolised by Dwennimmen.
This description of the symmetry of Dwennimmen is adapted from my
forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos, the relevant section itself building on Mary
Harris’ discussion of the mathematics of Adinkra in “Symmetry and
Dissymmetry in Mathematics Education: One View from England”. Leonardo,
Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in
Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. (1990), pp. 215-223. p. 222 and 223.

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own, to adapt Chinua Achebe’s quote of an Igbo expression in “The Igbo
World and its Art”.
As the cosmos proceeds through the continuous expansion of matter
described as generated by the force of the primal explosion that brought it
into existence, as forms on earth and beyond earth undergo change
through vast spans of time, I progress with them in the continual
expansion of knowledge, of engaging with and reformulating ideas, seeking
to pierce to the point where roots of mind and matter, the pulse of life and
the motive force of existence, intertwine in the rich earth of the ultimate, a
cognitive unfolding that progresses alongside the slow dissolution of the
body as it moves towards confinement in soil, lifeless food for worms,
even as the spark that animated it flees to an unknown but much
speculated destination.
While still possessing the enablement of body and brain, I seek the infinite
through the finite, trying to transcend the limitations of body and mind by
penetrating to being in its essence, questing for the consummation of
existence in deathlessness, deathlessness understood in terms of
expansion of consciousness rather than as immortality of the body.
I thus explore the question of the coexistence of the individual self and the
universal Self and the possibility of conjunction between them. I move
beyond the disjunctions between my physical minisculity on a planet and
the seeming spatial endlessness within which this planet is nestled as a
speck in space. One’s time on earth is less than a second in cosmic time.
The revolutions of the sun enable and witness the coexisting voluntary
quest for eternity and the involuntary journey towards cessation of
physical existence compelled by the laws of progressive dissolution built
into nature.
The passages above weave together decades of my cognitive history,
evoking the various points in time and space where I encountered those
ideas which have deeply shaped me.
“Aiku pari iwa”, a Yoruba expression which may be translated as
“deathlessness consummates or completes existence”, from Rowland
Abiodun’s “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,” later
integrated into his Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African
Art, arguing for a concentration in African arts studies on African
aesthetics, exemplified in the essay by Yoruba philosophy. The Indian
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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
Obiora Udechukwu’s Our Journey

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Katha- Upanishad on the discipline leading to unity of self and ultimate
reality. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s meditations on time,
space and infinity from his Critique of Practical Reason. The description of
the Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi spiral symbol as evoking the sun, journey
and eternity, values resonating with Nigerian-US artist Victor Ekpuk’s
deployment of colour in recreating this form, as described at the website of
the Inscribing Meaning : Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art
exhibition at the Smithsonian.
All these ideas are subsumed in my identification with my mentor, Jetsun
Milarepa, the 12th century Tibetan Buddhist poet and hermit inspired,
through the mediation of his guru, Marpa the Translator, by the example of
the Buddha, the Indian philosopher whose quest for ultimate meaning also
triggered my own quest, as Milarepa is depicted in Evan Wentz’s edited
Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa and Garma Chang’s edited The Hundred
Thousand Songs of Milarepa. From time to time, I imagine myself as Mila, as
he is fondly known, withdrawn into his cave, seeking, through exploring
the conjunction of individual and cosmic mind, what British-American
writer T.S. Eliot describes in Four Quartets as “the still point of the turning
world”, an ancient aspiration inflaming my own struggle to reconcile the
demands of a social universe centred in acceptance of metaphysically
inadequate values with a quest straining towards penetrating to the roots
of why we exist at all.
Roots, routes and roofs.
Movement inheres in a variety of phenomena: in the shapes of plants,
roots, bones and stones. Even the Zulu home captures the sweeping
movement of the winds.
The correlation between movement and life translates itself
dramatically in the first movements of a growing seed. As the shell is
broken, the locked movements that encapsulate the seed explode in
several directions. The life force which directs the seed to each stage of
actualization contains within it both temporal and universal qualities.
Some of these are corrective, that is, they restore balance after each
point of degeneration and regeneration. (Kunene, Anthem, xxix).
The symbolism of movement is extended to animals in which it is
expressed par excellence. These include animals like the ram, whose
twisted horns are expressive of the locked or ‘knotted’ movements, or
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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Europe
and its
North American, Australian and African Diaspora
Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night

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the sacred snake (inyandezulu - the bundle of heaven) whose multiple
movements are often conceived in thousands. (Anthem, xxviii).
This symbolism from Zulu thought is complemented by the Nigerian
Igbo Uli and Cross River Nsibidi motif of the spiral, which, according to
Robin Sanders in The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria, evokes unity,
the circle of life and the coiled bodies of reptiles such as the python, the
“majestic body and sinuous movements” [of which] encode
"knowledge of the sacred feminine-Ala” as summed up by Sylvester
Okwunodu Ogbechie in “Ndidi Dike : New Beginnings".
These Zulu and Igbo images of cosmic motion resonate with Obiora
Udechukwu’s sonorous painterly visualization of cosmological
progression, Our Journey, inspired by Uli symbolism of the spiral. The
painting projects an unfolding spiral traversing and unifying space,
space constituted by an expansive kaleidoscope of colour and abstract
figuration, evoking solar systems and galaxies, suggesting the efforts
of the mind to construct islands of order, of understanding, within the
tantalising infinity of the unknown, the compelling power of these
receding cognitive vistas evoked by the sheer beauty of the
composition, awash with sublime colour contrasts, luminous
disjunctive complementarities defining the undulations of strangely
beautiful shapes, a work also resonant with the Dutch-French artist
Vincent van Gogh's painting The Starry Night, depicting a landscape
alive with a force sweeping across the celestial and terrestrial worlds in
a spiral motion of which Udechukwu's adaptation of Nsibidi and Uli
spiral symbolism testifies to its universal hold on the imagination as
Starry Night portrays the stars, trees and houses unified in a cosmic
loom, a symphony composed of the positioning of humanity between
celestial and terrestrial nature (Adapted from my essay “Manifestations
at Cosmogenesis : The Three Awo Before Time, the Descent of Ọrọ and
Asuwa and the Splitting of Oyigiyigi: Universal Implications of Three
Yoruba Cosmogonic Narratives”. Academia.edu, Scribd(PDF) Facebook,
Part I and Part 2).
“Each experience and level of consciousness, each enrichment of the
cosmos, is evolving towards the Great and Ultimate Consciousness
(uNaphakade –Mother of Eternal Movements), a timelessness that is of
the Creator but not the Creator”( Kunene, Anthem, xxx).
An inspiring ide
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 Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
The Nsibidi/Ekpuk Spiral

“I declare this spiral is my symbol, that this winding, gyring, spiring, treadmill of a curve is my
totemic and ancestral circle, the integration of my past, present and future, their intersection
with that of my ancestors and co-travellers from Africa and the larger human, terrestrial and
cosmic family, that Soyinka and Irele, Falola and Oguibe, Fortune and Abhinavagupta, initiators
into African universes, image explorers, Western and Indian masters of esoteric thought, have
travelled there””
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju adapting William Butler Yeats’ “Blood and the Moon”
“Good Morning, Sunrise (detail)
Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria
2001
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the artist
Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and graphic symbols. His drawings,
paintings and digital images are abuzz with language. The artist employs invented script as well
as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi to create richly textured works. In this
painting, the spiral is an nsibidi sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity.
Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the
overall sense of animation”.
15 Meaning Writing and Graphic Systems in
Image and verbal text from “Nsibidi” in Inscribing
African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
 Cover Image
Roofs of Knowledge
Routes of Understanding Across and Beyond Africa and its Diaspora
The Adinkra Symbol of Epa as an Interdimensional Interface

“A hitherto secret ritual and contemplative tool used by the Adinkrahen esoteric
society in Kumasi, Ghana. A perspective on its significance describes each tip of
the two quadrilaterals as representing a vertex, an interdimensional interface. It is
rumoured that this device was used by Asamfo Anokye, who, with Osei Tutu I, was
one of the founders of the Asante nation, in effecting his disappearance from
Asante.
Within this perspective, the space between the two quadrilaterals is a non-
dimensional space into which the would be inter-dimensional voyager projects
themselves mentally. The consequent alignment of the coordinates of
consciousness with the points of each quadrilateral, simultaneous with the
positioning within the null space of the centre between the quadrilaterals, leads to
a cancelling out of what the Akan understood as Nsanmo, the state of being that
makes possible perceivable existence.
The design is understood by the uninitiated as Epa, an Adinkra symbol
representing captivity. Its is perceived as a stylised depiction of a pair of
handcuffs. The initiate, however, understands that captivity not to represent only
material bondage but any form of bondage that prevents the complete
actualisation of the self, the fulfillment of the full potential of the human person as
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realised in the intersection between the material self and the kra, the inner self
that predates birth and outlives death.
The Twi proverb related to this symbol, quoted at the unattributed “ Adinkra -
Cultural Symbols of the Asante People” essay as “Onii a n epa da wo nsa no, ne
akowa ne wo " , “You are the slave of him whose handcuffs you wear", suggests, to
the initiate not bondage over physical faculties, but a captivity of the ignorance
that traps the individual in the artificial constructions of values that often
constitute human society.
To the initiate, the symbol of captivity also embodies the conception of freedom
from captivity. The aerodynamic styling of the design evokes ideas of flight, of
unfettered freedom, yet directed by disciplined intelligence.
The use of this symbol went hand in hand with sophisticated mathematical
procedures through which the initiate calculated relative positions in relation to
the dimensional interfaces through which they travelled. These ideas suggest
relationships with Riemannian non-Euclidean geometry which contradicts the
classical Euclidean conception that parallel lines can never meet. On the other
hand, the quantitative values of this Adinkra symbol are meant to aid in
constructing, within an accuracy of 1. 00000 , the points of intersection of the
lines that, moving in parallel progression, converge at points that constitute the
constellation of particular inter-dimensional coordinates.
Contrary, therefore, to the exoteric understanding of Epa as symbolizing captivity,
is the esoteric perception of that surface meaning as a blind created by the
Adinkrahen to conceal its true function as an inter- inter-dimensional vehicle
which works through transformations of consciousness, facilitating a split second
conjunction between human consciousness and the coordinates that constitute
the framework of the universe.
I tend to give credence to this view because my experience with the symbol
suggests that its consistent contemplation could lead to a dissociation of
consciousness, creating a space between the boundaries of dream, vision and
ordinary alertness, enabling a participation in modes of being that are otherwise
sensed but not experienced directly.
Some would describe these attributions of symbolic value as ideas invented by
this writer. I leave those sceptics to their conclusions”.
Speculative writing from my forthcoming Adinkra Cosmos: An Exploration of
Being through Meditations on the Adinkra Symbol Kuntunkantan.

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