Colloquies: The African Poet, the African Philosopher, and the African Physicist: a Discourse

By Oluwole Komolafe

At a clubhouse in Lagos, Nigeria, intellectuals meet for fellowship and to ponder the simple and complicated questions that have puzzled people everywhere.

Among them are Olurombi, a renowned poet; Emeka, a professor of philosophy at one of Nigerias premier universities; and Ahmed, a physicist researcher at the Planetary and Space Research Institute of Nigeria.

While arguing with each other and enjoying each others company at their gathering spot, the Egghead Place, the men and their fellow intellectuals provide meaningful insights into African traditions. They also explore local heritage, wise sayings, and insights that break down cultural barriers all in a fl owing narrative that includes poetry, deep thoughts, and scientific reasoning.

The men and their cohorts closely study abstract thoughts, metaphors, and empirical data as they pursue a quest to understand humanity and life itself. While often seemingly at odds, they find out that they also have a lot in common. Join them as they look at life from an African perspective and discover what ties all of us together in Colloquies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450257978

Oluwole Komolafe

Oluwole Komolafe studied Industrial Engineering at the Technische Universitaet, Berlin. He is an ardent student of philosophy and classics and has published many other books on African wisdom and philosophical reflections on the life of man. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, with his family.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

The Egghead Place

Chapter Two

The Poet, the Philosopher, and the Physicist

Chapter Three

The Crown Prince of Loneliness:

His Manuscripts

Chapter Four

The Crown Prince of Loneliness: His Background

Chapter Five

The Crown Prince of Loneliness: A Quarter Life and Less

Chapter Six

The Crown Prince of Loneliness:

A Modern-Day Hermit

Chapter Seven

The Emperor of Sorrow: His Manuscripts

Chapter Eight

The Poet-Physicist

Chapter Nine

Final Words by the Officious Bystander

The Psalmist said, "What is Man that thou are mindful of

him?" (Psalms 8:4)

Protagoras said, Man is the measure of all things.

Preface

Colloquies is not a conventional nonfiction book, as the stories are not taken directly from reality, but derived from a mixture of life lessons learned and personal encounters experienced by the author. A few of the characters in the book are real people that the author observed or interacted with at one time or the other in the course of writing this book, while the stories told in the book represent the surreal thoughts and philosophical musings of the author. The author, coming from a multidimensional background including the disciplines of engineering, philosophy, and poetry, applied musings and life experiences to characterize the parts played by the actors in the book. In all cases, the author is the poet, the philosopher, and the physicist; hence it was easy for the author to present three distinct perspectives on the various universal themes that formed the bedrock of Colloquies.

The clubhouse for intellectuals in the book, called the Egghead Place, is a fictitious meeting place created in the fertile mind of the author. The author wishes that the clubhouses that men visit for relaxation in the evenings in Lagos, where they spend precious time hanging out, could be turned into such a productive venue as the Egghead Place.

About five years ago, a destitute man was living in a wretched shed along a major road in Ikeja, on the outskirts of Lagos. I observed him for a period of about two years; each time I drove past his shed, he was writing and scribbling something in his notebooks. I had a mind to stop over to see what he was writing, but I was not able to achieve this before his shed was eventually destroyed by government officials. It was at that point that I decided to write a book about him based on what I imagined he could have been writing about. Consequently, I made the destitute man the main actor of Colloquies, dubbing him a notorious poet and philosopher called the Crown Prince of Loneliness. In order to make the story interesting and to emphasize the need to have a place for intellectual discussions in Lagos, I pivoted the discussions in Colloquies around the personalities of three intellectuals: a poet, a philosopher, and a physicist, who later also became the poet-physicist as the third leg of the tripartite philosophical musings and discussions that took place regularly at the Egghead Place.

Because all of this book’s characters were created by one author, it was easy, toward the end of the book, to merge all the actors into one personality using poetry as the universal language of communication to relate the events of everyday life. One could then say, as it was in the case of the events in Animal Farm by George Orwell,[1] that the poet spoke to the philosopher and the philosopher spoke to the poet-physicist, and the poet-physicist to the poet, and it was difficult to tell the voice of the poet from that of the philosopher and from that of the poet-physicist, showing that poetry was more universal than one could have possibly imagined.

This work would not be complete if I did not recount the difficult path that authors like me trod before this book—which is my fourth in the area of African philosophical and poetical writings—could be completed. The path of the published author is never easy and straight. An author’s book is his or her baby; in the world of book publishing, the author spends sleepless nights in putting the works together, and the time of giving birth is fraught with agony. The path is strewn with failures and discouragements, such as when the criticism offered does not make any sense, but such feelings give way to triumph and smiles at last when the editor gives the book a passing mark and eventually success, if ever the book gains readership and acceptance among the reading public. Success at the end of it all is like the joy on the mother’s face at the end of the birth of the new child.

For the benefit of my readers, and as a legacy for the budding writers who, like me, refuse to give up even when all odds are against them, I wish to leave a memorial of what I went through to put this work together, hoping that this preface and the effort put into the book will encourage aspiring authors to stay with it and see their works to the end, just as I did.

And so, I write this confession for the benefit of those readers who might be thinking of me as a good writer—or, worse still, a thinker—and wondering how, despite my clumsy schedule, I have managed to publish a few books. The way I see things is this: oftentimes, I wonder if I am a good writer after all, much less a thinker of broad mind who could ever qualify for a place among the greats.

If only my readers knew the secret behind my writings! If only my readers knew how many corrections I made to my writings before the final passage emerged. If only they knew how long it takes me to write a few lines of prose or poetry, or how long it takes me to write a few pages of my works.

If only my readers knew how often I would go back and forth, twisting the same sentence round and round, how often I would delete that which I have written before and thought was final, and how many times I would read and reread a single sentence of my works, how often I purred and pondered at night on the construction of a line of prose, how often I lay awake and could not go back to sleep thinking of a sentence, how often I have gotten stuck by not knowing how to begin a sentence, and how often I lay blank in the dark, not able to think at all.

If only my readers knew how many jottings I made in the dark in my notebooks, how often I dreamed I was living in a sonnet house built with walls of sentences, and how I borrowed from discussions with others I had recently experienced.

If only my readers knew that I learned to carry on and adamantly stay with it, leaning on the experience of observing the persistence of ants carrying an insect ten times their own body weights: the prey would fall off their backs many times, and yet for the umpteenth time, the ants would pick up their game and continue, and I went to sleep and woke up hours later only to find the ants still at work, having moved the insect only a few strides of a man’s stroll. At last they carried their prey uphill, over the mound of a stick lying in their path and farther uphill only the length of an arm on the wall of my study, going far away to a destination in a house with undulating flooring of seeming hills and valleys as in the fiction book[2] of Gulliver’s Lilliputians, where the hair was like a forest and the arm was like a tree trunk to be lifted with cranes! With time, the prey got lighter and lighter as the ants fed on their prey to gain energy and strength during their upward eternal journey.

If only my readers knew how many times I failed to meet a target of, say, writing five pages a week, with weeks passing by and only a few lines written to meet my target; if only my readers knew how I leaned on my experience seeing ants at work in carrying on with my work.

If only my readers could know the many acts behind the scene, not just judge by watching the final play presented on the stage without knowing of the many failed trials that had gone into the play, my readers would know that any man who devotes so much energy, ritual, and so much ado to so worthless a cause as writing a mere sentence and formulating merely a sentence a week, should do much better than whatever I am deemed to have accomplished—considering that ants, if confronted with such a task, would do much better.

So there you are, dear reader: you can do better than whatever I have accomplished.

Oluwole Komolafe

Lagos, Nigeria

Acknowledgments

This book will be thrown into the virtual bookstores of the World Wide Web and stocked on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookshops to compete with millions of other books all over the world. What are the chances it will be discovered among all the books? Will it merit an honor among all the books written by millions of authors all over the world? Will the book be discovered in my time, or will it be discovered by chance a long time after I am gone? In writing the book, I concluded that even if the chances of the book becoming widely read were one in a million, I will continue to write. My first round of appreciation goes to the readers that add to the number of people who will read this book and thus increase the chances of the book being discovered in my time.

The inspiration to write this book came from the destitute man I used to see sitting and writing at his desk in a makeshift tent at Maryland junction, in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria. He so inspired me by the way he worked hard at whatever he was writing that seeing him so diligent at his work provided a large portion of the impetus to see this work to the end. I therefore wish to extend my gratitude to this passive contributor to my work.

My wife, Motunde, read the first draft of the manuscript of this book. She was the first person to make sense out of the works, even before I saw the merit of what I was writing, and she encouraged me to go ahead with the book. If I am able to make sense out of the book, this is due to the encouragement from close partners, while I hold responsibility for the quality of the work.

My children, Yewande and Aramide, guarded the manuscript jealously, making sure several saved copies were available in different locations as backup. I also thank them both for encouraging and assisting me in the obstacles I had to overcome in respect to publishing the book. I thank them for encouraging me to go on even when my earlier books had not yet made it to the bestsellers list.

My friends Warren Michael Hayes and Jean-Evre Tonico read through the manuscript and made very insightful comments and contributions to the works. I thank them both for being my fans and for always reminding me—and letting others know—that I am an author!

The aspiring sages of Sages Consult Limited have always supported me in all my publications. They deserve special mention by name: my special thanks and appreciation go to Iyabo Arinola Awokoya, my committed partner at Sages, who always listened with the patience of Job to my many stories about the book, encouraging me to go on even when I repeated myself on several occasions. I owe my thanks also to inspired and inspiring, aspiring sages like Leke Ekundayo, who is a delight to work with; Ben Odiase, for his continued support over the years; Joke Adeleye, who assisted in making sense out of the writings; Tayo Elujoba, for her extraordinary talent and enthusiasm; and Sunday Soyewo and Sunday Emmanuel, for their ability to go beyond the call of duty in offering services to our company, Sages Consult Limited.

As soon as you have slept off your drink, your troubles come, racing back on four white horses in triumph.

—Plautus, Asinaria

Chapter One

The Egghead Place

I watched pensively as the condensed water on my glass mug flowed down, forming a pool of water on the plastic place mat. The pool of water drained slowly off to the Formica tabletop at a point on the place mat that, with long use, had become twisted into a funnel-like shape. The condensed water flowed slowly, forming transparent oval beads that trickled feebly from the edge of the table, smashing into tiny fragments as the drops of water landed noiselessly on the terrazzo floor.

For a brief moment, I was lost in thought, oblivious to my surroundings, as I mused on how natural occurrences arising suddenly from a state of calmness and lasting but for a few seconds may lead to an irreversible situation that could cause permanent damage to life and property. I thought about the quietness preceding an earthquake and the vast destruction that follows. I mused on the tsunami and the permanent disruption it can cause in the life of a child who lost both parents and all siblings in the ensuing disaster. I considered the futility of life, remembering a ghastly motor accident I had witnessed on my way to the Egghead Place.

My mind wandered back to the little drops of water falling from the table to the terrazzo floor, and I remembered the saying that little drops of water form the mighty and great ocean. I thought of how uneventful drops of water falling on the floor could seem when compared to raindrops falling on an aluminum roof in the tropics.

Raindrops falling on an aluminum roof would first sound like fine sand spewed incessantly from a spraying gun, and then like pebbles thrown from the catapult of a mob of angry gods, dropping like fragments of rocks regurgitated from the flaming throat of a raging volcano—the pebbles first sporadically tapping the roof, gently, one at a time, and then simultaneously, with one drop denting, and another drop hammering on the roof in quick succession. And, as if competing to chart unfamiliar territories on the aluminum roof, the wind would blow and bend the trees, as if paying obeisance to welcome the rain, with the thunder booming short solo songs and the lightening flashing choruses.

Nature would become a whirlwind of brute force, whining louder and louder, sobbing like a cat trapped in a smoking chamber as the wind waged war upon the stunned and defenseless mortals: fugitive men and women seeking cover from the fury of the southern winds. The raindrops would hit the roof until they all crescendo in a regular melodious pattern, creating a cymbal-like music reminiscent of a steel band, clattering louder and louder, yet soothing to the ear.

Tap, traap, traplalala, traap, traplalala, taptaptap … so go the