The Philosopher and His Mother
For Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack
The Philosopher
Mother and Guide of Scholar1and
andhisEconomist
Mother Nimi Wariboko
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
The Philosopher and His Mother
For Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack
Mother and Guide of Scholar and Economist
Nimi Wariboko
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
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Abstract
Correlating the work and life of scholar and economist Nimi
Wariboko with his relationship with his mother Grace Wanyiaru
Wariboko Jack in the context of intersections between various zones
of existence
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“Sweet mother
I no go forget you
for de suffer wen you suffer for me…”
goes Nigerian musician Prince Nico Mbarga’s immortally poignant
“Sweet Mother” ( YouTube link), extolling the painfully sweet
memories of his mother’s love, from the carrying of another human
being inside oneself for nine months to bringing that person into the
world in pain and the struggles to keep that child alive and thriving.
The mellifluous Nigerian Pidgin English of that song has to be
listened to in order to catch its emotive depth.
Philosopher and economist Nimi Wariboko’s celebration of his
relationship with his mother in “Between Community and My
Mother: A Theory of Agonistic Communitarianism” demonstrates
similar emotive undertones:
As a son to my 87-years old mother, I feel myself placed
under infinite responsibility for her.
When I was a helpless baby, she had the same infinite
responsibility toward me.
To say all this is not to argue that my mother and I were
autonomous moral subjects that rationally entered into a
mutually beneficial contract. Given her maternal instincts
and the ethos of her Kalabari community, she loved me as a
baby without concerning herself with profits from the
mother-child relationship. She loved me without concerns
that I would love her.
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Today, I care for her, without equivocation, not with a sense
of an abstract universal duty I must perform, not because
communitarianism runs in my blood, but because of my
…inclinations.
“To my mother, Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack,” goes the dedication
of his 2014 Nigerian Pentecostalism by Wariboko.
Fittingly so, because the book gives an expansive account of the
environment where his vocation is rooted, the “orientation of [ a
person’s] life and work in terms of [ their] ultimate sense of
mission,” as Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the
English Language defines “vocation.”
A vocation is a fire that welds the disparate powers of a human
being into a unity. It provides a focus and drive through which they
shape reality, making their mark in the world, a light shining within
the cacophony of the multiplicity of existence, a flame calling the
wayfarer to a landing at a consummation of possibility, but, perhaps,
a fulfillment that remains beyond reach the closer one approaches it,
“All that a truth procedure…can do is to put us on a path between
potential infinities and actual infinities as we approach the
rationally unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity…”states the
son of Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack in his Charismatic City.
The book dedicated to his mother is grounded, even more than his
other texts, in the transformative encounter with Pentecostalism in
Nigeria that eventually made him a scholar whose work is centred in
spirituality, his work rooted in a former career as a pastor. This
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unified spiritual and scholarly culture are in turn suffused by his life
as an economist, an explorer of how people make ends meet. These
intersections of spiritual and scholarly vocations constitute a
trajectory unifying matter and spirit.
Where is Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack?
Within the “unconceivable Absolute Infinity”?
Are those drums on the other side tuning skin to skin with
ours at Osugbo? Do the sounds of gbedu, the regal drum,
welcome you like the stamping of royal elephants? Do you
see a light at the end of the tunnel, a light I dare not look
upon? Do you see those whose touches are often felt, whose
wisdoms come suddenly to the mind when the wisest have
shaken their heads and uttered ‘it cannot be done’? … if the
world were not greater than the wishes of [ my yearning
self ], I would not let you go…”
sings Wole Soyinka in his masterly evocation of intimacy and
distance between love and a receding reality as a life escapes
beyond the constraints of the three dimensional universe.
Does Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack continue along the lines
described of her by her son towards the conclusion of the
acknowledgements pages in Nigerian Pentecostalism”? :
This book is dedicated to my mother, who celebrated her
eightieth birthday in 2012. There is no kinder, more caring,
more enthusiastic cheerleader, more virtuous, more
prayerful, and more Christlike parent (mother and father
rolled into one) than my dear mother.
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Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack
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Various spiritualities celebrate the unity of life within and beyond
flesh, of the departed, the terrestrial and the unborn, as Soyinka
sums up the expression of this idea in Yoruba thought in a way
resonating with cosmologies across the world.
Authors write acknowledgments to publicly record their
indebtedness to the living and the dead who helped them in
the process of researching and writing their books. I have
done a lot of this in my previous sixteen monographs and
four edited volumes
as stated in the acknowledgments pages of The Split God by Nimi,
whose name in his native Kalabari, as described in his The Depth and
Destiny of Work, means “knowledge,” in all its forms, including the
particularly intimate knowledge gained through the amorous union
of body/mind with body/mind.
The acknowledgements from Split God continue:
Now that I am on my seventeenth monograph, it occurred
to me that my acknowledgment should properly focus on
the not-yet born. I expect their coming onto the academic
scene, to carry forward the ideas in this book. I
acknowledge their accomplishments of this task and the
claim past scholarship has on them.
This approach to acknowledgment is very important for
those of us who are Africans and/or Pentecostals. We write
not only with an eye on the current intellectual questions
and debates, but also with an ear on the distant sound of the
footsteps of coming generations. We are building a body of
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work for the next generations, whose coming is expected
and whose joy in inheriting and encountering works and
ideas left for them by their own deeply excites me.
I acknowledge here the inspiration I received from the
generations of Africans and Pentecostals who are coming
after me. I acknowledge the intellectual powers of those
who come after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not
worthy to untie.
I have no greater joy than to expect that my brothers and
sisters, my children, will be committed to the quest for truth
rooted in the public intercourse of rigorous ideas.
A new entrant into a Buddhist community commits themselves to
the Buddha, the founder of the religion, the dharma, the message he
preached and the Sangha, the community of believers.
“Graciously yield your waves of guidance, O gurus,” pleads Tibetan
Buddhist hermit Jetsun Milarepa in Evans Wentz’ edited Tibet’s
Great Yogi Milarepa, calling on personages who are physically
absent but spiritually present, members of the Sangha both
embodied and disembodied, within space and time and beyond
these coordinates, moving forward in history as they tread the earth
and having transitioned beyond history, to become, as Soyinka puts
it in “O Roots,” “cleansed/they await the seeker [ “at pools of silence”
] …promising from far to slake immortal thirst.”
Milarepa calls on these personages to send his way uplifting
vibrations of influence, invisible but potent, to inspire and uphold
him in his pilgrimage in search of awareness of what is known in
Buddhism as Nirvana, the “ultimate mystery and impenetrable core
of reality” as Wariboko sums up the correlative quest of
Pentecostals in The Split God.
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Nimi Wariboko
“My son, continue to be guided by the lessons your learnt from our life
in Abonnema, once glorious but now unknown by few outside its
shores in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, what you gained from assisting me in
the market, from your experience hawking as a youth on that fateful
day, understanding gained that has propelled you into trading at the
centre of the world’s financial universe, to dialoguing in ideas at a
global nexus of knowledge cultures, taking you from MBA to Wall
Street, from Lagos to Boston, as you carry with you the voice of the
voiceless, the cries of many choked in the coils of the octopus of the
world of money, empowering and suffocating, the groans of they
seeking to break through the walls of time and space, reshaping
reality through contact with infinity …”
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