Fractal Complexity in Mwalimutoyinfalola Sa Mouth Sweeter Than Salt: Apluridisciplinary
Fractal Complexity in MwalimuToyinFalola’sA Mouth Sweeter than Salt: APluridisciplinary Exploration of Cultural Power
Abdul Karim Bangura
Abstract
While my extensive search yielded 48 scholarly citations and more than half a dozen scholarly book reviews on MwalimuToyinFalola’sA Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2005), no systematic analysis has been done on the text, even though such potential exists. This study is an attempt to fill this gap. Specifically, I employ the mathematical concept of Fractal Dimension and Complexity Theory to explore the idea of spectrum progressing from more orderly to less orderly or to pure disorder in terms of cultural power in the text. This called for the utilization of the Pluridisciplianry approach that helped me to mix linguistics and mathematical approaches—more precisely, Linguistic Presupposition and Fractal Methodology. The results generated after the MATLAB computer runs suggest that the combination of negative and positive feedback loops, which form the basis of several African knowledge systems, also form a key mechanism of general self-organizing systems of cultural power discussed in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir.
Introduction
MwalimuToyinFalola in his A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir (2005) redefines the autobiographical genre altogether. He weaves together personal, historical and communal tales, coupled with political and cultural developments during the era immediately preceding and followingNigeria’s independence, to provide a unique and enduring picture of the Yoruba in the mid-20th Century. This was a time of hope and great expectations for the emerging new country. What appears in this literary memoir of this period is a narrative pregnant with proverbs that are more like axioms, poetry, song and humor.
Even though the chapters in this memoir stand out independently, Falola skillfully makes them flow together easily as a portrait of a narrator in his space and time. Falola presents more than just a story of his childhood experiences; rather, he narrates the riches of Yoruba culture and community—its history, traditions, pleasures, mysteries, household settings, contours of power, travails, and transmutations. Also evident in this memoir is that growing up in Ibadan, the second largest city in Africa, and being a quite observant youngster beginning at the age of ten, Falola was able to fully comprehend early in his life the vast social arrangements of the community. This experience would later provide him with the fortitude to conduct some of the most extensive oral interviews in Yoruba historical research.
A Mouth Sweeter than Salt has been cited in at least48 scholarly sources andover half a dozen scholarly book reviewshave been written on it. Yet, no systematic analysis has been done on the text, even though such potential exists. This essayseeks to fill this gap. I employ the mathematical concept of Fractal Dimension and Complexity Theory to explore the idea of spectrum progressing from more orderly to less orderly or to pure disorder in the textin terms of cultural power, used here in Ann Swindler’s sense—i.e. how “actors use culture in creative ways to forward their own interests in a system of unequal power, but the effect of that struggle is to reproduce the basic structure of the system” (Swindler, 1995:30). This called for the utilization of the Pluridisciplianry approach that helped me to mix linguistics and mathematical approaches: more precisely, Linguistic Presupposition and Fractal Methodology. Before discussing all of these aspects and the results generated from the MATLAB computer runs, it makes sense to briefly examine a sample of the existing works on the bookto give the reader a sense of what previous scholars thought about it.
A Review of a Sample of the Book Reviews
As I stated earlier, Falola’sA Mouth Sweeter than Salt has been cited in at least 48 scholarly sources. As I also mentioned,more than half a dozen scholarly book reviewshave been written on it. The following is a look ata sample of the book reviews in the chronological order in which they were published.
Jan Vansina (2005) argues that Falola’s memoir is unconventional for this type of genre, for it is more delightful than that. According to him, the autobiography is a “cornucopia of stories told with the salt of irony and the mouth of wisdom” of a master storyteller. Since the memoir recreates people and things past, he says that it is not just literature to be enjoyed solely for its own sake, as it is a literary masterwork. Despite its deceiving appearance,he insists, the autobiography is definitely “an African memoir: a memoir about growing up in Ibadan and gradually discovering the world, a memoir of the social history of the city of Ibadan between 1953 and 1966, and above all a memoir about the acquisition of identity.” The main plot, posits Vansina, is about the metamorphoses Falola graduallyunderwent to emerge as a Yoruba teenager.
According to J. Charles Taylor (2006), in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola introduces images geared toward revealing the growing impact that foreign cultures would have on the Africa of his childhood. Falola does this, says Taylor, by illustrating the experiences of his early life with images of contrast and duality, thereby crafting a memoir effectively revealing the confluence of multiple heritages in the emerging Africa of the mid-20th Century. Taylor points out that Falola examines Western colonialism’s effect on Independent Africa by writing about this historical interaction from his own perspective. Taylor adds that as Falola relates his story as a youth struggling to create a sense of purpose in his life, he applies his sense of “existential wanderlust” to a space and time that is uncommon to many other memoirs: i.e. post-colonial Africa. Thus, Taylor posits, Falola’s autobiography serves as a memoir not only of a young African, but also of a young and “deflowered” continent being raped by Western entrepreneurs pushing for economic advantage.
For Ikhide R. Ikheloa (2008), Falola’s autobiography is an evocative narrative of his childhood in Yorubaland and a navigation of a mystical labyrinth of a world that will never exist. The closest book with richness and depth that he could remember, according to Ikheloa, is Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood. But, as Ikheloa insists, Falola’s autobiography is not so much a memoir but a “rollicking history lesson told by Falola with all his might.” If he were a dictator, opines Ikheloa, he would decree that every African must buy and read the book. As Ikheloa adds colorfully, “Falola employs a folksy narrative richly spiced with Yoruba parables and sayings; the audience is seated stitched to seats, rapt in attention…His narrative weaves in some metaphysics and playful hints of Soyinka-esque ruminations emerge.”
Annie Gagiano (2008)points out that while Falola narrates his own childhood experience, he at the same time evokes the birth and early growth of a brilliantly perceptive historian. She observes that Falola’s autobiography is a history of a beloved and influential city, Ibadan, and almost incidentally a history of Nigeria’s economic and political transition, as he shifts from an inner-city location to the city’s outskirts as a boy, and the closer connection with “peri-urban” village life in the primarily Yoruba city of Ibadan which allows a gradual expansion and deepening comprehension of familial and regional cultural practices and personages at the time when colonial rule was coming to an end and Nigeria was establishing its Independence. She notes that exhibited in the young Falola’s fascinated gaze and unforgettably recorded in his maturity are both hybrid and powerful, persistent cultural and spiritual practices. Consequently, she adds, each chapter in Falola’s memoir “moves from observation to mediation, the first considering the importance and the many different meanings of ‘Time and Season.’”
According to Matthew M. Heaton (2008), in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola describes his environment and adventures growing up in Ibadan during the 1950s and 1960s—a time when British colonial dominance was waning and Nigeria was establishing an independent government. Heaton argues that although the autobiography is subtitledAn African Memoir, it is more than a childhood remembered; it is a childhood pondered. He points out thatthe ideas conveyed in the memoir hinged upon what Falola had developed in the years since the events described in the text took place. In order to do this, according to Heaton, Falola had to layer approaches from several academic disciplines in order to communicate broadly, yet in a compartmentalized manner, the environment in which he grew up. As a result, adds Heaton, Falola paints a vivid portrait of the complicated interplay between tradition and modernity in post-colonial Nigeria through the process of a youth trying to acculturate himself into a rapidly changing society.
And finally, for FriederikeKnabe (2011), A Mouth Sweeter than Salt is a rich and innovative memoir that combines Falola’s personal experiences during that time with events in his community and Nigeria as whole. She notes that the memoir provides the reader with a vivid insight into the complex society and its intricate traditions, particularly those of the Yoruba culture. She states that Falola writes with an easy accessible style, often addressing the reader directly, and demonstrates his narrative skill and ability to impart local events with gracefulness and humor. She posits that by interweaving sayings into his narrative, Falola demonstrates how the use of proverbs, idioms and traditional imagery has remained part of everyday discourse. While the chapters stand as independent stories or essays, she adds, they flow together easily as a portrait of a person in his space and time.
Indeed, the preceding reviews shed a great deal of light on Falola’sautobiography. But as I stated earlier, none of them is systematic in its analysis of the text; by doing so, the present essay seeks to fill this gap.
Research Methodology
The major challenge for me was how to transform the linguistic pragmatic or deep-level meanings in Falola’s literary text for mathematical modeling. As I stated earlier, this called for the utilization of a pluridisciplianry approach that helped me to mix linguistics and mathematical approaches: more precisely, Linguistic Presupposition and Fractal Methodology. Before analyzing the results generated after the MATLAB computer runs, it makes sense to begin with brief descriptions of Pluridiciplinary Methodology, Linguistic Presupposition as the unit of analysis, and Fractal Methodology. The following subsections are descriptions of these techniques.
Pluridiciplinary Methodology
Pluridisciplinary Methodology can be generally defined as the systematic utilization of two or more disciplines or branches of learning to investigate a phenomenon, thereby in turn contributing to those disciplines. Noting that Cheikh Anta Diop had called on African-centered researchers to become pluridisciplinarians, Clyde Ahmed Winters (1998) states that a pluridisciplinary specialist is a person who is qualified to employ more than one discipline—for example, history, linguistics, etc.—when researching aspects of African history and Africology in general.
The history of the Pluridisciplinary Methodology can be traced back to the mid-1950s with the works of Cheikh Anta Diop and Jean Vercoutter. The approach was concretized by Alain Anselin and Clyde Ahmad Winters in the 1980s and early 1990s. A brief history of this development with brief backgrounds of these four pioneers is retold in the rest of this section.
G. Mokhtar in his book, Ancient Civilizations of Africa (1990), traces the development of Pluridisciplinary Methodology to the works of Diop and Vercoutter. Diop was born in Senegal on December 29, 1923 and died on February 7, 1986. He was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who investigated the origins of the human races and pre-colonial African culture. His education included African history, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and sociology. He is considered one of the greatest African intellectuals of the 20th Century. Jean Vercoutter was born in France on January 6, 1911 and died on July 6, 2000. He was a French Egyptologist.
According to Mokhtar, Diop and Vercoutter were in total agreement on the point that it is necessary to study as much detail as possible all the genes bordering on the Nile Valley which were likely to provide fresh information. Mokhtar notes that Vercoutter considered it necessary to give due weight to the palaeoecology of the Delta and to the vast region which had been termed by other researchers the Fertile African Crescent. Mokhtar points out that Diop advocated tracing the paths taken by peoples who migrated westwards from Dārfur, reaching the Atlantic seaboard by separate routes, to the south along the Zaïre Valley and to the north towards Senegal, on either side of the Yoruba. He adds that Diop also pointed out how worthwhile it might be to study Egypt’s relations with the rest of Africa in greater detail than had been done, and Diop further mentioned the discovery, in the province of Shaba, of a statuette of Osiris dating from the 7th Century before the Christian era. Similarly, argues Mokhtar, a general study might be made of the working hypothesis that the major events which affected the Nile, such as the sacking of Thebes by the Syrians, or the Persian invasion of -522, had far reaching repercussions on the African continent as a whole (Mokhtar, 1990:55).
Furthermore, according to Winters, two major scholars who have advanced the pluridisciplinary approach by combining anthropological, historical and linguistic methods to explain the heritage of African people, constituting a third school of Africancentric researchers (the first and second schools being the African American and the French-speaking African and African Caribbean, respectively), are Anselin and himself (Winters, 1998). Anselin teaches ancient Egyptian linguistics at the University of Guyana Antilles. He is an anthropologist and also the founder of the Journal of Caribbean Egyptology. Winters is a lecturer at Governors State University at University Park in Illinois where he teaches curriculum design and research methods courses. He also is a 28-year teaching veteran of the Chicago Public Schools system.
Anselin is the author of three important pluridisciplinaryAfricancentric books—(1) Samba, (2) La Question Puele, and (3) Le Mythed’Europe—and numerous articles. In Samba, Anselin demonstrates how the corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphics explains both the Egyptian civilization and the entire world of the Paleo-Africans. He also makes it clear that Kemetic civilization originated in the Fertile African Crescent and that Black African and Kemetic civilization at its origination was unified from its foundations in the Sahara up to its contemporary manifestations in the languages and culture of Black Africans. In La Question Puele, Anselin examines the unity for Egyptian, West African and Dravidian languages, political traditions and culture. He also provides a detailed discussion of the “Black Ageans.” The findings comprise a thorough representation of the affinities between the Agean and Dravidian civilizations (Winters, 1998).
Winters is the only African American that attempts to confirm Diop’s theories in relation to the genetic unity of the Egyptian, Black African, Elamite, Sumerian and Dravidian languages. Winters is mainly concerned with the unity of the ancient and new worlds’ Black civilizations and the decipherment of ancient Black writing systems used by these Africans. This interest had led him to learn many languages, including French, Tamil, Malinke/Bambara, Chinese, Arabic, Otomi, and more (Winters, 1998).
Winters had used Diop’s genetic model in his research by combining anthropological, linguistic and historical methods to confirm that the center for the rise of the originators of the Egyptian and Manding civilizations, the Magyar or Hungarian civilization, the Dravidian civilization, and the Sumerian and Elamite civilizations was the Fertile Crescent of the highland regions of Middle/Saharan Africa. He also explains how Blacks founded civilizations in the Americas and East and Southeast Asia. A major finding from Winters’ work is that the ancestors of the Dravidian and Manding-speaking people seem to have left Africa at the same time around 2600 BC, and that these people founded civilizations in Europe, Elam, India and ancient China (Winters, 1998).
Like Diop before him, Winters also discusses the African sub-stream in European languages, the conflict between African people and Indo-European-speaking people, and the loss of early African settlements in Europe to the contemporary European people due to natural catastrophes and wars around 1000 BC. Winters provides valuable source material for the elaboration of the African influence on European languages and those of East and Central Asia (Winters, 1998).
Winters had discovered that the Proto-Saharan people used a common writing system. He also was able to read the ancient inscriptions left by these people in the Sahara dating to 3000 BC. He was able to confirm this development by comparing the Manding and the Elamite languages, and the Sumerian and Dravidian languages. The evidence of a genetic relationship between the Manding languages, which Winters used to decipher the earliest Proto-Saharan writings and other languages spoken by the founders of civilization in India and Mesopotamia, led him to hypothesize that the writing systems used by these ancient founders of civilization could be deciphered. The utilization of Diop’s linguistic constancy theory allowed Winters to confirm his own hypothesis and read the common signs used to write the Harapant, Minoan and Olmec scripts (Winters, 1998).