IN PRAISE OF THE ONISEGUN

In his very interesting book, The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful: Discourse About Values in Yoruba Culture,1 Professor Barry Hallen presents the ‘philosophical’ ideas of the onísègùn,2 a group of Yoruba traditional practitioners of medicine. What comes out of the endeavor is partly epistemological, partly ethical and partly aesthetic. This article is a critique of these ideas and is bibliocentric, based entirely on Hallen’s book.

Barry Hallen’s book has six chapters. Chapter 1, with the title, “Ordinary Language and African Philosophy,” is actually an account of how he embarked on the research project that produced GBB and its antecedent volume, Knowledge, Belief & Witchcraft,3 and his justification for adopting this particular method. It is impossible to disagree with Hallen’s claim that “the systematic analysis of ordinary, everyday language usage in non-Western, particularly African, cultures can prove to be of fundamental philosophical value.”4 This claim is unexceptionable, no matter where the methodological inspiration for this kind of analysis derives from. In Hallen’s case, he claims that it derives from ordinary language philosophy practiced by Anglophone philosophers during the middle of the past century.

Hallen, though, sees that objections may arise to his own procedure as an example of ordinary language philosophy. First, the ordinary language philosopher is expected to be competent enough in the language to be able to appreciate subtle distinctions and discriminations and nuances; by his own admission, Hallen does not have that degree of competence in the Yoruba language. Second, we may concede that “philosophy could be, and should be, a cooperative pursuit . . . for many independent but coordinated brains . . . ”5 Therefore, a philosophical approach to ordinary language may allow that a plurality of contributors may be engaged in a joint discussion of a philosophical idea, concept or problem. However, in an ideal situation of collaborative discussion, all the contributors must be competent philosophers in their own right. Hallen’s interlocutors, the onísègùn, are admittedly ‘unlettered’ and quite clearly unacquainted with philosophy, at least in the professional sense.

There are other problems with Hallen’s choice of the onísègùn to help him “to understand how one should speak the language correctly.”6 His response to all this is disabling: “the local population did regard them as more knowledgeable about the culture generally; and ordinary language is ordinary language—the accounts of it rendered here can always be confirmed, amended, or challenged by other researchers working with different sources. That is how scholarship should proceed.”7 The worst one can say about this response is that it is not an ideal situation of ordinary language philosophy for a non-native speaker of the language to seek this kind of assistance from people who have no formal philosophical training, and therefore do not appreciate the full philosophical import, significance, or consequences of their claims.

However, there are two positive remarks one can make concerning Hallen’s procedure and findings. First, he makes a conscious attempt to move away from old prejudices about the African intellect, especially the conception of it as being somehow qualitatively different from, nay, inferior to, the Western. Second, he strives to ground his claims on behalf of the African intellect on concrete linguistic data, even if he has sometimes, perhaps out of over-enthusiasm, overlooked countervailing (linguistic or other cultural) evidence.

Chapter 2 of Hallen’s book is entitled “Moral Epistemology.” Concern with epistemology or theory of knowledge takes him back to KBW. The kind of analysis to which Hallen subjects the terms ìmò, ìgbàgbó, iwádìí (not nwadi, which is not a noun), òótó or òtító, iró (lie), óseése (or kòseése), eri okan, etc. and the kind of epistemology Hallen presents as resulting from such analysis will, I am sure, appear alien to the onísègùn. In a way, they will feel flattered by being credited with such acuteness of observation and “talent for articulating precise distinctions between different degrees of epistemic reliability”8 that can lead to the construction of such an elaborate theory of knowledge.

Hallen attempts in this chapter to ‘link’ the epistemological and the moral as a step to value theory. He discusses the notions of òótó (or òtító) and iró, noting that, in the Yoruba language, as in the Akan language, as claimed by Kwasi Wiredu,9 the ‘moral’ and the ‘cognitive’ are intertwined. Though this point is well taken, it is not clear that there cannot or must not be a separation of the two.

I do not share Hallen’s worry about the dominance of the orthodox Western paradigm of what a cognitive system should be in order to be considered ‘rational.’ This is because not enough work has been done on the analysis of these concepts or notions and their inter-relationships in African culture. This is why it is difficult to disagree with Hallen when he says: “To that end, analytic philosophers concerned with Africa must engage in systematic presentations of African cognitive systems, moral systems, aesthetic systems.”10 It is my hope that when this is done it will be found that there are close affinities between so-called Western and non-Western systems to warrant universalizing statements about them, rather than the relativism that Hallen predicts.11

Hallen opens Chapter 3 entitled “Me, My Self, and My Destiny,” by agreeing that the method of analysis, which he employs in this work, does compartmentalize. Hallen discusses the constituents of the person or self, for which he uses the term inú or èmí. The mental capacities that constitute inú are okàn (literally, heart, but rendered ‘mind’ by Hallen), ogbón (literally wisdom), opolo (literally, brain, but rendered “intellect”), èrí okàn (literally, the evidence of the heart, rendered “judgment”), ojú inú (literally, the inner eye, Hallen’s ‘the “eye” of the inu, in part akin to “insight”), iyè inú (Hallen’s “self-consciousness,” but literally, ‘inner’ memory or alertness), ìwà (literally, character) and sùúrù (literally, patience).

Hallen then embarks on a more or less standard account of destiny (orí inú, úkunlèyàn, ìpín). As is evident from such discussions, we are led thence to the question of moral responsibility. Hallen puts the question in various ways: “Can the self be held morally responsible independently of its destiny (orí)? Or is it more fundamentally morally responsible because it chose the orí? Or is it less morally responsible when it finds itself the unwilling victim of a lifetime it finds morally repugnant?”12 There is also an epistemological perspective to this: how do we know what a man’s destiny is? Hallen identifies two: first, from the successes and failures he experiences in life,13 and two, from consulting a diviner (babaláwo or onísègùn).14

The use of divination may be to redirect the subject who has lost touch (sìnà) with its original destiny or to seek to modify the destiny. Any of these ‘uses’ raises questions as to the possibility of changing a fixed destiny. First, how do we, in the words of Hallen, “reconcile the idea of having a fixed destiny with the notion of losing touch with that destiny for a portion of one’s life”?15 Second, is it possible for an individual to “exercise some independent control over, effect upon, his or her life once in the world”?16

There are two points that can be made here. The first is that in traditional culture, it was customary for the parents of a newborn baby to approach a diviner who would tell them what the baby had come to the world to do; in other words, tell them the baby’s destiny. The second is that there is a saying in Yoruba that Orí tí yóó gbeni ní gbé aláwo ‘re ko ni [It is an orí that will favor one that will bring one to (or in contact with) a good aláwo (or babaláwo). It is reasonable to assume that this meeting with a good babaláwo may be at any point in one’s life. The babaláwo must be called good only because he is able to effect some desirable change in one’s life situation, whether the situation is the result of one’s destiny or the handiwork of ‘others.’

Chapter 4 entitled “The Good and the Bad” begins by reaffirming our author’s distinction between knowledge (ìmò) and belief (ìgbàgbó), that is, between firsthand experience and secondhand information. He believes that this distinction holds the key “with which to approach the analysis of Yoruba moral meanings in a systematic manner.”17 “For any experience to be firsthand,” according to Hallen, “I must witness it directly, and I must think that I understand or comprehend what is going on.”18 However, “information about anything that comes to me in a comparatively indirect manner, that I do not personally witness when it happens, is therefore secondhand and cannot be certain (òótó).”19

This distinction (that is, between firsthand experience and secondhand information) and the supposed caution and care with which the latter is evaluated when it comes to human character (ìwà), lead Hallen to credit the Yoruba with a certain prudence about human fallibility. Hallen then cites some passages20 which reflect this prudence, and concludes: “What I find remarkable about these passages, despite their semantic convolutions, is the absolute rigor and consistency with which the distinction between “knowledge” (ìmò) and “belief” (ìgbàgbó) is sustained.”21 Hallen’s conclusion is clearly unwarranted or, at least, exaggerated. For one thing, these and other passages22 can be translated in slightly different forms of words; this will expose glaring inconsistencies in the use of ìgbàgbó and ìmò.23

These possible inconsistencies make Hallen’s sliding scale of epistemic certainty about the moral character of other persons appear, as a result, to be rather contrived thus:

Similarly contrived is Hallen’s fairly comprehensive moral paradigm of the “good person” (ènìyàn rere), consisting in a catalogue of virtues and traits of an epistemic or moral nature, thus:

In this chapter (Chapter 4), Hallen also discusses two so-called ‘special personality types,’ the àjé and the àlùjànún (more correctly spelt àlùjànnú).26 Hallen is genuinely concerned to “liberate” these words from the “semantic domains of Western magic and superstition.”27 He thus suggests that these personality types be approached as types of natural human beings. He admits that “this narrative is deliberately cast so as to highlight the empirical and objective elements of certain forms and fields of Yoruba discourse.”28

He anticipates that all this will be received with grave reservations.29 His defense is that he is seeking to redress an unfair imbalance in Yoruba scholarship. One imbalance appears to totally ignore the physical, the natural and the objective, while the other imbalance totally ignores the spiritual or extra-physical.30 What is required is therefore to strike a fair balance between the supernatural and the natural, the physical and the extra-physical, the objective and the subjective. My worry is that Hallen’s “narrative” does not do this. He has only attempted to give a naturalistic, rationalistic, physicalistic and empiricist narrative. The resulting picture does not, in my view, truly reflect the views of the onísègùn as shown in their responses in Yoruba, some of which are, I believe, affected in the first place.

In my review of KBW, I had suggested that the authors ignored the difference between the literal and the metaphorical in the use of àjé.31 In GBB, Hallen has only made some concession to that criticism. It is easy to concede that the àjé (female witch) and osó (male witch or wizard) are definite personality types. Some people are ‘born’ witches or wizards, that is, they inherit the powers from an ancestor; some, however, acquire it, some consciously and others unconsciously because are ‘invited’ or initiated into it surreptitiously by school, college, university mates, colleagues in the office or in the market or a family member or friend. The age of a witch or wizard may be as low as three years, having inherited the powers from a late ancestor or one that is about to die. Such a young witch or wizard may assume, in the hierarchy, the position of the ancestor from whom the powers are inherited.

The àjé or osó is not merely an ‘intellectual’ category, contrary to what Hallen says.32 The aje or oso form a group in which there is a hierarchy. Each group, which may be characterized as ‘white,’ ‘black’ or ‘red,’ must have a ‘hatchet man’ who executes the ‘butcher’s’ assignments for the group. Witches and wizards know a lot about individuals—an individual’s destiny, past, present and future. They are able to affect an individual for good or for ill, physically or spiritually or psychologically. They can inflict on individuals poverty, disease, dullness or just any evil imaginable. The most or more powerful among them can save individuals from any affliction and bless them with wealth, children, success, or just any good imaginable. So witchcraft powers are not always used for evil.

There are individuals outside the witchcraft cult—babaláwo, onísègùn, ‘clerics’ of indigenous or non-indigenous religions—who claim to be able to undo the evil done by witches, with or without their connivance or cooperation. Some of these individuals are known to be overtly or covertly anti-witches. Similarly, there are individuals who are not witches or wizards themselves, but do good or evil with the active assistance or cooperation of members of the witchcraft cult.

As for the àlùjànnú, there is a distinction between its literal and metaphorical meaning, which Hallen fails to make. The Yoruba will refer to someone who is capable of doing extraordinary things as àlùjànnú. I have been able to lay my hands on Abdullahi Yusuf Ali’s translation and commentary of the Holy Quran used by Hallen in his etymological account. But I suspect that he has not done justice to the author of the translation and commentary. I therefore quote in full the author’s note 929 to chapter vi, verse 100:

I have quoted the note in full to illustrate Hallen’s penchant for arbitrary selectiveness. My own inclination is not to meet one imbalance in the material with another imbalance, no matter how well intentioned, but to attempt a truly balanced interpretation of the available material. I am ready to concede that some of the material is difficult to interpret because it is strange or, at least, different from what we are used to—different, that is to say, from our generally accepted conceptual framework.

Discussions about àjé, osó, àlùjànnú (and similar categories like emèrè and ewèlè) fall squarely in the area of ontology or metaphysics, rather than epistemology. These and other categories of persons or beings possess psi or extraordinary abilities to some degree—genius, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis hypnotism, true dreams, telepathy, psychomancy, telekinesis, etc. The philosophical task here is not to explain away these powers metaphorically, but to attempt to see how it is possible for human beings, who appear to be ordinary, to come to possess such extraordinary abilities. As Sanderson says, talking about these powers: “The only real mystery, lies in that we have not yet pinned them down, and for the most part we do not yet know how they work, or even on what principles . . . 34 As for àlùjànnú, it is safer to regard them as spirits, not human beings, except when the word is used metaphorically. My worry, though, is that it is well nigh impossible to discuss these types of beings, human or otherwise, without some initiation into the witchcraft cults or the onísègùn practice, or the realm of the ‘spiritual.’

Chapter 5, entitled “The Beautiful,” explores “the aesthetic of the person,” “the aesthetic of the natural” and “the aesthetic of the (hu)man-made.” The onísègùn apparently have less to say here than in the two previous chapters which deal with the epistemological and the moral respectively. The chapter is supplemented with a discussion of other authors on Yoruba art. Our author draws attention to points of agreement and disagreement with those authors.

The concluding chapter, chapter 6, entitled, “Rationality, Individuality, Secularity and the Proverbial,” according to Hallen, “is devoted to discussing one fairly standard approach to the exegesis of indigenous African philosophy, and two widely discussed contemporary themes from moral philosophy.”35 The approach has to do with the use of proverbs as a source of African philosophy. The two themes are (i) “the importance of the community to the moral life of the individual,” (ii) “the importance of the religious or spiritual to African systems of morality.” Hallen does not pretend to be exhaustive in his discussions of these topics; he only feels constrained to “offer the viewpoints” he might have upon such topics.36

It is now time to look more closely at Hallen’s central argument in GBB which is that there is a link between the epistemological and the moral and that this can be made the stepping stone to value theory.37 He contends that the distinction between firsthand experience and secondhand information, that is, between ìmò (knowledge) and ìgbàgbó (belief) holds the key with which to approach the analysis of moral meanings in a systematic manner.38 For me, for any experience to be firsthand: (1) I must witness it directly, and; (2) I must think that I understand or comprehend what is going on. On the other hand, any information is secondhand for me: (1’) if it comes to me in a comparatively indirect manner; (2’) if I do not personally witness when it happens. Such information cannot be certain (òótó).39

Series of questions can be asked about this theory (if a theory it is). The first series of questions is this: What does it mean to witness directly? Do I witness directly when I see an object? Hear a sound? Smell an odor? Touch a surface? Introspect or ‘look inside me”? Read a book? Watch television? Listen to the radio? Hear a lecture? And so on.

The second series of questions is: What am I aware of when I witness directly? An object? A sound? An odor? The smoothness or roughness of a surface? An internal state, like happiness or sadness? A story? A theory? A philosophical position? An argument? An exercise in reasoning? A soap opera? A news item? The president’s visit to Zambia? And so on.

The third series of questions is: How much do I witness directly? Only those events at which I am present? Or those events in which I participate? Or those events which I observe? Or those feelings which I myself have? Or those objects which I myself perceive? And so on.

I guess Hallen was too impressed by the onísègùn’s “absolute rigor and consistency” to ask them these or other critical questions. It is not clear how the onísègùn would have answered these questions. They spoke freely about okan, opolo, inu, ori inu, emi, ogbon, eri okan, oju inu, ipin, akunleyan, Olorun, kadara, iwa, orun, Esu, and so on. Are all these witnessed directly? What will constitute witnessing them directly, or having firsthand knowledge of them?

Our onísègùn also discussed iwa, iwa rere, iwa buruku, and so on. Hallen concedes that a “person’s moral character (iwa) is not as readily or easily observable as everyday material objects, such as a tree or a table.”40 What, then, is the epistemic status of the onísègùn’s claims concerning iwa? Are they part of knowledge (ìmò) or belief (ìgbàgbó)? How, for example, do we determine if the person whose iwa is under scrutiny is pretending or acting sincerely? If we witness a smile directly, is it an expression of happiness, sarcasm or contempt? Similarly, if we witness weeping directly is it an expression of rage, grief or joy? In speech, if we directly witness a person uttering a falsehood, how do we know that it is a lie or just a falsehood? We do know that all falsehoods are not lies, since a lie, in addition to being a falsehood, has to be accompanied by the intention to deceive.

The point of the above questions is to suggest that in spite of Hallen’s celebration of the onísègùn’s distinction between ìmò (knowledge, resulting from firsthand experience) and ìgbàgbó (belief, resulting from secondhand information), it is not adequate as a ‘theory’ of knowledge. It is not even adequate to support the onísègùn’s own disquisitions about persons (ènìyàn) and their constituents (both physical and non-physical) and their ìwà (character), whether good or bad. Their practice belies their claims. The onísègùn cannot claim to have firsthand experience of all the items of their knowledge. Much of what the onísègùn say and practice derive from tradition. Many of them inherited what they believe, say and do from their ancestors, teachers, or ‘masters’ often without question.

As I suggested in my review article on KBW, the onísègùn do not come out as very proficient users of the Yoruba language. This is shown partly by the almost complete absence of proverbs in their utterances. Proverbs, as Hallen observes, I believe correctly, cannot be the sole source of an African philosophy.41 However, the Yoruba regard proverbs as an essential ingredient in the use of language. As the Yoruba saying goes:

Thus, in a discussion, a proverb can be used in clinching a point. For example, in the discussion of the aphorism, “Ìwà l’ewà” (or, more fully, “Ìwà l’ewà ènìyàn”), one would have expected the onísègùn to supplement it with another aphorism, “Ìwà rere l’èsó ènìyàn” (Good character is a person’s ornament). Though this, in my view, does not describe beauty but character, the discussion would have been enriched by the introduction of this and other aphorisms, for example:

Some final general comments about GBB are now appropriate. The book is a vast improvement on KBW. There are many parts of the book one can identify with. Many of the claims made on behalf of African philosophy and African culture are plausible. The book’s central argument about the inter-relationships of selected epistemological, moral and aesthetic concepts is rigorous and well crafted. The translations are in general felicitous, though some infelicities remain. The attempt to rehabilitate the àjé, osó and àlùjànnú as intellectual categories, though in my view largely unsuccessful, represents a fresh perspective to the problem.

The problems that remain are due largely to the onísègùn’s lack of philosophical training, our author’s inadequate attention to the complexities of the Yoruba language and culture, and perhaps his pre-conceived ideas about intellectual, ontological, moral, and aesthetic categories which prevented him from following the inquiry wherever it led. The onísègùn’s claims are nothing but their claims; they cannot be generalized into Yoruba epistemology, morality or aesthetics, since there are other possible alternatives, as Hallen himself acknowledges.42

Notes and References

1 Barry Hallen, The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful: Discourse About Values in Yoruba Culture, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000) (hereinafter GBB).

3 Barry Hallen & J.O. Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief & Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy, (London, Ethnographica, 1986), (hereinafter KBW).

9 Kwasi Wiredu, “The Concept of Truth in the Akan Language,” in Philosophy in Africa: Trends and Perspectives, ed. P.O. Bodunrin (Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, 1985), p. 43

23 For example, compare Hallen’s translation of (85) with the following translation by me:

(85) If we have been observing (nwò) a person’s behaviour (ìwà), we may say that we believe (gbà) that he/she can do it. If you have not observed him/her doing that thing, he/she will say that he/she believes (gbàgbó), but if he/she has observed him/her doing that thing, he/she will say that she knows (mò), which means that he/she is certain of it (dáalójú). If he/she says that he/she believes (gbàgbó) and they ask what makes him/her believe, he/she may say that his/her conduct (ìsesí) makes him/her know (mò). My emphasis.

Note the shifts in pronouns; note also the reported speech and the interpolations in Hallen’s translation. None of these is justified by the original. My emphasis illustrates the inconsistency in the use of gbàgbó and mò by the onísègùn.

31 A. G. A. Bello, “Knowledge, Belief & Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy,” Journal of African Philosophy and Studies, Vol. 1, nos. 1 & 2, (1988), p. 97.

34 Ivan T. Sanderson, “An Introduction,” in Sheila Ostrader and Lynn Shroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, A Bantam Book/Published by arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979 (13th printing; first published, 1970), p. xii.