Our Goals
Fagunwa Society is an association of persons who have pledged themselves to the study and propagation of Afrikan history, arts, science and literature for the chief purposes of moral and cultural renewal and spiritual regeneration. We are a non-profit organization working towards the cultural literacy of people everywhere, providing opportunities for Cultural and Spiritual Expression and Education. Our programs are designed for the spiritually open, scholarly, spirituality and culture enthusiasts and all those who seek a deeper understanding of Cultural Principles.
Specific Goals:
- To elevate the standard of the spoken and written Yoruba Language, increasing the number of fluent speakers and writers throughout the world.
- To revive the power of Yoruba Literature and Theater, using both as learning tools for speakers of the language, and as powerful cultural education and entertainment.
- To initiate the regeneration of Yoruba Spiritual and Medicinal lore.
- To re-enliven Yoruba Music by encouraging a return to nobility and art in the spoken word, the lyric and the instrumental.
- To unify the Yoruba Community, building a continuum of understanding across cultural, spiritual and generational factions.
- To bring the Afrikan Diaspora into the fold of the Motherland cultures, building a continuum of understanding across cultural, spiritual and generational factions.
- To provide esoteric cultural and spiritual information to elevate our thinking on the same.
Our Philosophy
![Senegal_Rice_Farmer [northstarfund.org]](images/image-sample.jpg)
The peasant has always been the most independent of all people. This assertion, of course, will sound ridiculous to people who’ve grown accustomed to equating peasantry with poverty. The peasant is not poor; he just has no cash whatsoever. As long as he can farm his land, he can eat and feed his family. This is why when a man conquers or invades a land such as Africa in which the vast majority of the people are peasant farmers, his victory will mean nothing unless he can take people’s land away from them.
This is indeed what the invading europeans accomplished in Africa. They engineered land redistribution that forced the peasant off his land and consequently into the weakest possible position in which he can only feed his family if he goes to the invader for employment. This is the method behind the enslavement of the African masses by the europeans. Our cultural and spiritual subjugation was accomplished in the same fashion.
More than any other member of the homo sapiens family of creatures, the African man’s spirituality controls everything else in his life. Other peoples might be able to separate their religion from everyday life, the African can not. He who controls the African’s religion controls the African himself. If it becomes necessary to pinpoint the exact moment in time at which the African man was enslaved for all modern time, it must be the moment at which we allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked into believing that the spirituality of our ancestors was evil and must be discarded.
This is not to say, necessarily, that Africans should not be Christian or Muslim. The religions themselves are not the problem. The problem is that when we discarded our spiritual traditions, we foolishly discarded along with those traditions certain cultural psycho-spiritual philosophical concepts that form the foundation of our thought and define us as a people. For instance no people can afford to have others define for them what is sacred and what is profane; what is good and what is evil. We often mistakenly consider these concepts to be religious because we hear them only when religion is discussed. These are cultural-spiritual concepts upon which religion is engineered, but they do not only have meaning for religion. They should affect the way we live and the way we approach the world. In fact, once we define these concepts for ourselves as a people, if we do adopt someone else’s religion, it should determine how we practice that religion.
It is our understanding at Fagunwa Society that African people are in dire need of a cultural renewal that will enable us to re-engage our cultural-spiritual traditions and unleash forces within them. Unless we first accomplish this, any social economic or political device, principle or institution that we organize will yield poor fruits. If you share this understanding, then we need thinkers like of your caliber.