The Philosopher and his Mother : For Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack : Mother and Guide of Scholar and Economist Nimi Wariboko

Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack at Mid-Point of Life's Journey

 

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.

“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.

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 philosopher and economist Nimi 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 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.

Grace Wanyiaru Wariboko Jack at  Tender Stage of Life's Journey

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, more Christlike parent (mother and father rolled into one) than my dear mother."

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 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.

Nimi Wariboko

“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.

“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 …”