Awaiting Prof Sola Olorunyomi’s Wombiture

This can only be a crude reporting of the impending sensation called Wombiture. Those curious about it would have to either travel to the University of Ibadan on September 25^th, 2019 to listen to the expert on stage or arrange for video recording of the event.

It is partly nestled in futurology but it is neither futurology nor technological determinism. No! It is more appropriately a variant of colonizing the future with a view to disciplining it.  But it is a completely Nigerian cognitive radius on the world except that, without journals through which its originators can be heard, the originators might soon be reading themselves from different binary codes.

Wombiture might be taken as the return of Sola Olorunyomi, an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Ibadan to scholarship. He wrote Afrobeat: Fela and the Imagined Continent and nobody heard from him again, so to put it. The unconquerable literary spirit might be leaping again from an academic in whom so much is locked up. Just 10 minutes with him takes you higher in knowledge and practices that speak to what Nigerian universities were before and to the highest values of humanism.

Wombiture asks us to imagine what sort of human beings children of today would be who have the advantage of every other phase of their life from conception to adulthood, technologically narrated. At conception, their mothers are able to use the sensor which women insert nowadays and which sends signals recorded audio-visually. That makes available for future viewing all such details as the weight, fatness or thinness, troublesomeness or is it resistance of the child in the womb, etc within the first nine months of the child’s life. This is the same for the first nine years of their life. The implication is that members of this ‘Generation Hence’ are participants at every stage of their becoming because they can watch the recorded progression through the stages later in life, including voice which science is said to be suggesting can be recorded from the womb.

So, such children have a better knowledge of what Sola Olorunyomi, the literary philosopher of Wombiture calls “presence, arrival and new presences of qualitatively different human child in the mould that was expected of the Darwinian archetype”. Wombiture, he continues, announces a series of ruptures, one of which is the very first human type that can lay claim to a fairly confident knowledge of his or her pre-birth. From this comes the tentative conclusion that ‘Wombicians’ will have the context of a different psycho-dynamics of their experience like never before. Wombiture as a subject matter takes us to how technology is changing narrativity.

Well, this report can only be a snippet. September 25^th, 2019 is the D-Day. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, (CODESRIA) will be standing intellectual guard as Wombiture is delivered, with Prof Femi Osofisan on the chair. Remember the author of Once Upon Four Robbers and other works.