What is Yorùbá Metaphysics? Or, How Not to Write about Yorùbá Culture. A Review Essay on Toyin Falola’s Yorùbá Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality

Abstract

In this essay, I will be interrogating yet another contribution to the unraveling of Yorùbá cultural and philosophical underpinning. Toyin Falola’s Yorùbá Metaphysics promised to add another deep layer of sociocultural and philosophical understanding of how the Yoruba perceive their reality. This is a fundamental endeavor, and one that could only be undertaken by a scholar that is well-grounded in such a cultural understanding. Toyin Falola is eminently qualified not just as an African historian but a humanities scholar whose Africanist credentials are not in doubt. Beyond his African historical scholarship, Falola’s commitment to the humanities, and especially Africa’s cultural studies, speaks to an Africanist ideological sensibility that is both recuperative and reconstructive. Yorùbá Metaphysics, out of a range of many other intellectual offerings, is best reckoned with as another component of an enduring cultural project that is meant to make Yorùbá cultural achievements—from politics to philosophy—even more visible and grounded within the global academic consciousness. And this is all the more so given the rampaging extent of the coloniality of knowledge.      

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