It seems almost inevitable that one intrepid scholar would dare to engage with Toyin Falola and his extensive scholarship, which includes nearly 200 books and essays. It is most commendable that this unenviable task of writing about Falola’s contributions to African Studies would be taken up by Sanya Osha, whose own scholarship crosses the boundaries of African Studies at the intersection of African philosophy, African feminism, cultural studies and African politics. It is a real service to the global academic world for him to take on such a responsibility of evaluating someone who has become an intellectual phenomenon on the continent.
Sanya Osha sets for himself the tough methodological task of weaving the many intellectual and conceptual elements inherent in Falola’s corpus into an integrative conceptual and policy-oriented practical framework that expands our understanding of his oeuvre. And yet, it is right within this framework that Osha began to encounter the most immediate and, for me, the most fundamental challenge. His objective is to ‘engage with various parts of Falola’s vast corpus that highlight and invite critiques that address the conceptual issues bearing on his thought and practice’ (p. 4). To achieve this objective, Osha looks naturally to his disciplinary space of philosophy as opposed to Falola’s discipline of history. While this philosophical concern yields a useful interrogatory pathway, Osha quite strangely shies away from pushing it to its logical conclusion. Transdisciplinarity is relevant because it speaks to a coherent framework of ideas, concepts and paradigms that the transdisciplinary scholar has fused into a system for mediating theoretical and practical concerns. And anyone investigating such a system, not least a philosopher, would be well motivated to critically prospect for those conceptual and ideational frames suitable for praxis. Unfortunately, Osha keeps pivoting despite his doubts: ‘Falola isn’t that kind of scholar. True, he is an extraordinarily diverse and prolific scholar but how much of his work is of use philosophically?’ (p. 5). Osha obviously struggles to pinpoint a distinct theoretical framework that could hold together what he calls the ‘freewheeling transdisciplinarity’ of Toyin Falola. For Osha:
Perhaps it should be stressed, once again, that an often baffling characteristic of Falola’s prolixity is the apparent loss or sometimes even absence of theoretical coherence or potency. In his work, there is an evident belief in the attraction of volume, verbosity and gratuitous detail. (p. 25, emphasis added)
Rather, Osha celebrates a so-called ‘Rabelaisian/Joycean expansiveness’ in Falola’s oeuvre. This crucial hesitation questions the very title of the book itself. So, the transdisciplinary thread crumbles in Falola’s body of work because the embedded theories and concepts are not developed ‘in a systematic or philosophically useful way’. And to address this, Osha switches tack and chooses to focus on Falola’s ‘other strength as a scholar’ (p. 5) – versatility and profusion, attended by ‘perhaps certain (quasi)theoretical parameters’ that could make up for the absence of theory (p. 25).
One quasi-theoretical parameter Osha identifies is what he calls ‘an essential epistemology of holism’ – an attempt at imposing a structural form on ‘what appears to be a discursive formlessness’ (p. 27). Transdisciplinarity is therefore deployed as an arbitrary ascription without any conceptual foundation in the body of work under celebratory review. One becomes even more perplexed when the author further draws back from his conceptual responsibility as a philosopher, and acknowledges that the long introduction to the book – before the conversation with Toyin Falola (the bulky second part of the book) – actually ‘does not attempt to grapple with the entire range of Falola’s scholarship. Instead, it seeks to depict the cultural, political and ideological backgrounds that molded his intellectual practices and outlook’ (p. 26). Why insist on transdisciplinarity then?
An Ethos of Transdisciplinarity reveals an author struggling to demonstrate what that ethos consists of, while consciously pulling away from a mere hagiographic ululation. The structure of the book leaves much to be desired. There is a profusion of references dotting the pages of the book that could have found a place in an endnote. The five segments of the long introductions all read like some form of editorial imposition intended to make Falola larger than life (such as the comparison with Thoth and Sango). One even struggles to see the coherence that brings the segmented introduction together. And with the interview that forms the second part of the book, there is a distinct impression that Osha cedes to Falola a voluble garrulity that is very difficult to track.
The book promises more but delivers less, unfortunately. From the author’s admission, we can deduce that Toyin Falola’s body of work can be held to a different subsuming framework, but definitely not that of transdisciplinarity.
