By Niyi Akinnaso
Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai had an unobtrusive personality. He was affable, warm, forthcoming, kind, and liberal. He was a true omoluabi. You needed to be close and engage him in discussion or read his work to discover that he was also a polyglot, a polymath, and a transnationalist. These attributes came through in his professional undertakings as an academic and a diplomat.
Born in 1939 to Yoruba parents in Sabe, Benin Republic, Yai was raised as a lone child. However, he became a child of the world and his global family grew with his academic training; his professional development; and his diplomatic engagements. The location of Sabe, the old capital of the Yoruba kingdom, in Benin Republic, rather than Nigeria, made Yai realize early how the Europeans manipulated the African continent. Little did he realize that he would later participate in assessing the impact of the manipulation.
Yoruba language, culture, and philosophy formed the basis of Yai’s scholarship and outlook on life, because his learning began at the feet of Yoruba village elders and from watching local festivals and rituals. True, he studied French language and literature at the Sorbonne in France, where he was persuaded by to continue with French studies after his first degree, he decided to steep himself in Yoruba studies, which led him to the University of Ibadan to study Yoruba linguistics. He taught briefly at Ibadan but later joined the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University).
It was at Ife I met Yai as a colleague-he in African Studies and I in Linguistics. We would later reconnect in the United States-he at the University of Florida at Gainesville and I at Temple University in Philadelphia. He and Goran Hyden invited me to Florida in 1992 to participate in the Carter lecture series. Our bond was re-kindle and we occasionally exchanged visits until he joined UNESCO in Paris.
It was during this second encounter that it became apparent that we shared a common exposure to Ifa’s unparalleled textuality and the associated rites and rituals. Although we made little of Ifa as youths, its centrality to Yoruba culture, philosophy, epistemology, and worldview gradually dawned on us and came to shape our encounter with scholarship as business. We were engaged in the business of exegesis like the Ifa priests we encountered.
But there was much more to Yai beyond our encounters. He was a true polyglot. He spoke and read Yoruba, English, French and Portuguese, among others. This linguistic template gave him access to a wide range of literature on Yoruba in particular and Africa in general.
Multilingualism also suited the wide nest of his intellectual engagements as a polymath. Yai was at once a linguist, philosopher, cultural historian, literary critic, and, I would add, a pseudo-anthropologist. This multi-disciplinary background allowed him to engage any topic from various perspectives.
We often disagreed whenever the topic was of anthropological interest, because he saw in anthropology no more than cultural translation. True, Maxwell Owusu, a Ghanaian anthropologist, critiqued the first generation of anthropologists of Africa along similar lines, but he did not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I tried to convince Yai that he should not paint all anthropologists with the same brush. At one end are expatriate anthropologists, seeking to understand other cultures. At the other extreme are indigenous anthropologists, such as Owusu and myself, who study our own culture and explain it to outsiders. However, these extremes are not absolute as various anthropologists fall into slots in between, depending on how much of the local language they acquire, how long they stay in the community, how frequently they revisit the same group, and how rigourously they engage the appropriate methodologies and theoretical perspectives. Besides, anthropology is not a monolithic discipline as it encompasses cultural, linguistic, archaeological, biological, and visual specialties and engages material across the humanities, the social sciences, and even the hard sciences.
Yai revisited my argument with a nod only after reading my article, Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies, published in the Cambridge Journal, Comparative Studies in Society and History. I teased him that only anthropology could provide the perspective of knowing that informed the article and we both laughed, but not without his teasing back: “Well, Niyi, Ifa lo foo’re fun e, by which he meant it was not anthropology; it was the blessing of Ifa, the very focus of the article.
Yai was as much a polymath as he was a transnationalist. He held academic positions in Africa (Nigeria and Benin), North America (USA), Latin America (Brazil), the Caribbean (Haiti and Cuba), Europe (Birmingham and France), and Asia (Japan). He also held consultancy positions in culture and language policy across West Africa.
However, it was his appointment as Benin Republic’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO that capped his transnationalism. He travelled widely and participated at the highest levels of the development of UNESCO’s programmes. He served on various UNESCO committees, including the World Heritage Committee; the Committee of the International Fund for the Promotion of Culture; the International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route Project; the Jury for the designation of Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage; the Board of Trustees of the Africa World Heritage Fund (AWHFD); and President of the Culture Commission of UNESCO G77. Above all, he became the Chairman of the Executive Board of UNESCO.
These appointments put Yai at the centre of decision making, especially on issues relating to Africa. Accordingly, he was on the team that revisited the horrific past of Africa through the experiences of slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, cultural bastardisation, and the theft of African art, including the majestic artwork of the Benin palace that came to be known as the Benin bronze collection. How I wish Yai were alive to witness the imminent repatriation of these magnificent pieces!
Yai’s life and scholarship were marked by three cyclical themes. First, he was born Yoruba and he returned to Yoruba language and culture after studying French at the Sorbonne in Paris. Second, he would return to the Sorbonne briefly to teach and finally to Paris to work for UNESCO. Third, Yai’s study of Yoruba culture involved trans-continental studies, connecting the Yoruba homeland in Nigeria and Benin Republic with the Yoruba in the Diaspora. These studies affirmed the centrality of Ifa to the survival of Yoruba culture in the Diaspora and led to Yai’s idea of Global Africa.
