Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu: A unique Yorùbá intellectual, cultural icon and elder statesman, By Tunji Olaopa

Baba Ladigbolu is phenomenal. He occupies the same circle of cultural preservationists that include Tunde Kelani the filmmaker and the Afenifere, the pan-Yorùbá cultural and political forum. However, Baba’s historical trajectory is one with a significant difference. And this is because he is a minister of God who is deeply ingrained in both his cultural environment as well as in Christianity. His career therefore enables a deep insight into the understanding of the conflicted relationship between culture and modernity, and how one could begin to unravel the significance of modernity within a culture’s own development.

The Yorùbá culture has always been blessed with the attention of intellectuals, scholars and academics who considered it a worthwhile subject of discourse. Without any doubt, the Yorùbá culture is one of the most studied cultural forms of life in the world. This is apart from the many scholars, cultural enthusiasts and intellectuals that the culture itself has produced, from Samuel Ajayi Crowther to Samuel Johnson, from Akinwunmi Isola to JA Atanda to Saburi Biobaku, and from Wole Soyinka to Wande Abimbola, Oyekan Owomoyela to Toyin Falola. But we must also not forget the cultural and indigenous intellectuals, like DO Fagunwa, Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu and Adebayo Faleti, to name just a few, who’s very being and profession are invested in the culture itself. All these intellectuals are those who have laid the foundation for entrenching the influence and the national and global reach of the culture, as well as its hold on our collective imagination.

In this piece, I am glad to dedicate this critical analysis to Baba Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu who has been a cultural icon for me since way back. I have written so much about my wondering and wandering sensibility as a young boy growing up and reflecting about my context and surrounding. Yoruba culture and history have always held a deep source of curiosity for me, and Pa Ladigbolu is a phenomenal figure who constitutes a triadic embodiment of the theological, the cultural and the political, and one at that who influenced my scholarship indescribably. That places Baba within the crosshair of my search for cultural and theological enlightenment, especially about the Yorùbá culture’s engagement with non-Yorùbá influences. Indeed, in many of my intense political conversations with His Excellency Chief Olusegun Obasanjo around Nigerian politics and the place of the southwest within it, he had always been insistent that I must not miss the opportunity to sit at the feet of the Master, Archbishop Ladigbolu, since I have chosen to follow in the footstep of my grandfather and the celebrated historian of culture, Reverend David Aibinu Olaopa of blessed memory. This was an added impetus since I had already taken him as a father and a mentor.

Baba Ladigbolu is phenomenal. He occupies the same circle of cultural preservationists that include Tunde Kelani the filmmaker and the Afenifere, the pan-Yorùbá cultural and political forum. However, Baba’s historical trajectory is one with a significant difference. And this is because he is a minister of God who is deeply ingrained in both his cultural environment as well as in Christianity. His career therefore enables a deep insight into the understanding of the conflicted relationship between culture and modernity, and how one could begin to unravel the significance of modernity within a culture’s own development. Indeed, the cultural and professional trajectories of Baba Ladigbolu provides us with a fundamental framework for how an ecumenical framework could be generated between an indigenous culture and a foreign religion. Pa Ladigbolu achieved that almost seamless coherence that allowed him to become a priest of the Methodist Church of Nigeria (and to rise up to the zenith of its hierarchy as an archbishop) while retaining a very deep cultural mooring in the Yorùbá heritage.

We immediately see the significance of this fusion in an age when Pentecostal Christianity built its own incursion into a different culture on the basis of the demonization of those cultures as heathenism. Archbishop Ladigbolu deployed his contact with western education as the fulcrum for developing an open-minded cultural sensibility that allows for the mutual reinforcement between Christianity and the Yorùbá culture in terms of the emergence of a modern sensibility that enables a conversation between the two. When I think of Pa Ladigbolu, I see an older and more perfect reflection of how Ali Mazrui’s Africa’s triple heritage thesis could become an embodied lifestyle and philosophy. I have written so much about how my upbringing enabled me to see how the three dynamics — Christianity, traditional Yoruba religion and Islam — could relate in a non-violent manner. Baba Ladigbolu was raised as a Muslim within a deeply culturally conscious Yoruba context and he converted to Christianity while still advocating the preservation of the Yorùbá culture.

Being born within a household that traces its lineage to Alaafin Siyanbola Ladigbolu I, and growing up within an authentic palace comes with its own unique educational value in the paraphernalia of the Yoruba culture. One of the deepest implications was that even before encountering western education through his many travels and the experience they yielded, he had already assimilated an enlarged mind that accepted the theological ramifications of Islam, Yoruba theology and Christianity. His worldview was already wide enough and empathetic to accommodate his myriad experiences traveling from one place to another. We can speculate that his enlarged sensibility owes a lot to the openminded accommodationist framework that the Yorùbá culture itself makes possible. The Yorùbá culture was able to accommodate the incursion of Islam and Christianity because it lacks the exclusionary ontology of both.

I prefer to see Archbishop Ladigbolu as an exemplar of Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of who an intellectual is. Gramsci bifurcated between the “traditional” and the “organic” intellectuals. The traditional intellectuals — teachers, scientists, priests, artists — contrary to their claims to be the bearers of universal values, are actually those that emerged from within a privileged or even a dominant social class, and who are compelled by the dynamics of that class to reinforce its values and philosophies. The organic intellectuals, on the other hand, are more organically connected to the masses because they grew and emerged from within non-privileged strata, transformed their status through education especially, and imposed on themselves the obligation to raise the fortune of that strata. Intellectuals, Gramsci argues, are recognised by their need for the critical elaboration of a new understanding of the world. This is what determines the functions of the intellectuals in any society.

Indeed, I want to make a radical assertion that Pa Ladigbolu possesses the status of both a traditional and an organic intellectual. When he became a Christian and the entire household became convulsed with fear and tears, they had no way of understanding the contradiction in their worries. They were Yorùbá who embraced Islam. And so there should not have been any worries about one of them embracing Christianity. And if their worry had been about his possible loss of cultural knowledge, little did they know that he would become a cultural champion that he is today.

A much more fundamental challenge embedded in Pa Ladigbolu’s stature is the tension between absolutist theological ontology of Christianity and the accommodationist and liberal worldview of the Yorùbá. How was the archbishop of the Methodist Church in Nigeria able to balance the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life with Christianity’s paganisation of non-Christian cultures? How is Christianity’s proselytising dynamics squared with the non-proselytising nature of Yorùbá traditional religion? One way to respond to this is to argue that Pa Ladigbolu’s cultural enthusiasm had to take a back seat while he was the Archbishop of the Methodist Church. And this cultural advocacy had picked up immediately he retired as the archbishop. Even if this explanation is far-fetched given his fearless determination to be Yorùbá at all cost, no one — not even the Church — could deny that Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu was a staunch Yorùbá who deeply loves God.

Combining two near incompatible theological views, in my assessment, becomes a courageous plus for Pa Ladigbolu, an insight into the capacity of the Yorùbá culture to keep inventing itself in the face of challenges. The Yorùbá understanding of àṣà demonstrates a flexible adaptability that has allowed the Yorùbá to not only domesticate non-Yorùbá influences, but to also fit into any cultural and theological contexts wherever they found themselves. This is what had made possible, for instance, the Candomblé and Santeria religious experiences from Brazil to Cuba and beyond. These religious forms emerged from the syncretic fusion of the Yorùbá òrìṣà tradition with Roman Catholicism. What is even more significant is that Candomblé, for example, lacks the same institutionalised framework determined by an orthodoxy and a sacred text. Its heterogeneous form allows for significant incorporation in the same way that Ifá incorporates non-Yorùbá events.

This is the same way that Baba Ladigbolu could be understood as a moderniser of the Yorùbá culture and tradition. Being the leader of the Yorùbá Unity Forum (YUF) as well as the chairman of the Oyo Metropolitan Development provide the opportunity to do two major things. First, it allows him to pursue a programme of creative urbanism, what the Yorùbá themselves are historically famous for — transforming Yorùbá cities in line with modern exigencies. And second, Baba’s advocacy also brings to the fore the roles of traditional structures and institutions in the development of modern existence.

For Baba, even as the best of modern scholars have realised, culture matters. It must be the platform around which our being-in-the-world is measured and extended to others. The full extent of his multicultural experiences has allowed him to both serve the Almighty, while pushing the bounds of theological and cultural similarities and differences. And so, in straddling Gramsci’s distinction between the traditional and the organic intellectual, Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu becomes an exemplar for other intellectuals — a sum of cultural knowledge that broadens our cultural worldviews.

Tunji Olaopa, a professor of Public Administration, is chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.