The Wisdom Of Kalabari: Essays On Relationships Between Language And Body

The Wisdom of Kalabari explores Kalabari as a name and a source of wisdom. This book interrogates and orders ideas and empirical knowledge rooted in the Kalabari particular way of life. Wariboko urges Kalabari to recognize the role of their inherited wisdom in shaping their thoughts, perceptions, and deeds, and, eventually, to confront the inconsistencies and limitations within it. The Wisdom of Kalabari demonstrates how the gems of African indigenous knowledge can ignite the flowing force of creativity and intelligence within Africans as fire for personal and socia transformations. This book provides scholars with the language to write about the Kalabari in ways they have never written about it before. It also invites them to reflect on how to think about the Kalabari as a matrix of philosophical reasoning. In twenty-seven scintillating essays, Nimi Wariboko adroitly draws us into the freshness of the Kalabari-jos philosophical understanding of reality, language and embodiment, and how these devolved into an indigenous wisdom for managing existence and human flourishing. We are introduced, in a digestible format, to melodic and rhythmic indigenous words and concepts that are more than mere lexical items because they aggregate years of reflective engagement with the unique place and space of the Kalabari-Ijo people.... What Wariboko has done, and most commendably, is to pioneer a pathway into the mind of the Kalabari-Ijo people. -Adeshina Afolayan, Professor of African Philosophy, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.