Prof. Dr. Shola Adenekan
I am a research professor at Ghent University and a recipient of a Starting Grant from the European Research Council, in which I am leading a team of researchers – as a Principal Investigator – to study the networks of Yoruba Print Culture. My latest book, “African Literature in the Digital Age”, was published in 2021 by James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer.
In the introduction to his dictionary, A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (1852), Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, makes an important statement about Yoruba people, of which he was one:
As the Natives have much to do with reckoning they very early begin to teach their children to count. This is effected simply by frequent exercise in counting cowries or stones: and it is astonishing how very soon little boys and girls can reckon a large number of cowries. They first begin by counting one by one: when they can do that with readiness, they begin by twos, and then by fives. A person cannot be more insulted for his stupidity in arithmetic, than by telling him, “O daju danu, o o mo essan messan,” “With all your cleverness and sagacity, you do not know nine times nine” (39).
Crowther’s statement shows the many contradictions of print culture in many African societies; the development of Yoruba orthography was mainly aimed at fostering Europe’s colonial agenda, of which Christianity was an essential part. Crowther as a formerly enslaved African who later became the first African bishop of the Church of England was therefore the ultimate insider-outsider used as a champion of modernity.
My study of the networks that came about through Crowther’s work will highlight the power dynamic within the world of print technology and the relationship between big hubs and sub groups in this context. For example, Yoruba cities such as Ibadan, Lagos and Abeokuta are places where book publishing, literary and other cultural engagements have been taking place since the mid-19th Century. These cities and the mostly middle class people who control these networks, represent the locale of publishing power – local and global – as well as the cross-connections that one associates with networks. Questions such as what and who sets the aesthetic agenda need to be addressed. How does Yoruba print network re-enact the dynamic of global political and economic structure? These and more questions that this project will answer can signpost us to how cultural power replicates global economic power.