“Agha sẹ Ẹdo, Ẹdo rree”

When One Arrives in Benin, Benin is Distant

Spatial, Temporal and Cognitive Dislocation and Conjunction

through the lens of

Bini Epistemology

and

Spatial Theory

Part I

Basic Framework

Toyin Adepoju

“A gha sẹ Ẹdo, Ẹdo rree”: “When One Arrives in Benin, Benin is Distant” , a saying brought
to my attention by the scholar of Bini culture, Joseph Nevadomsky, from the Ẹdo founders
of Benin, the famous Nigerian city, brings into focus relationships between space, time and
cognition.

In just one line, this expression sums up a fundmental preoocupation of the human quest
for knowledge across the centuries. It evokes the dislocation between appearance and
reality and the need to bridge this gap through understanding. To a significant degree, the
quest for knowledge is driven by the notion that there is more to existence than appears to
be so on the surface, than is obvious to immediate perception. This gap between the
apparent and the real is suggested by the saying that even when one has arrived in the city
of Benin, Benin remains distant.

What more challenging drive to exploration can be conceived than the bafflement of finding
that the location, the city one has travelled to reach, remains distant even after one has
arrived at it? Your physical self is present, your mind and senses are fully alert to your
sorroundings, but you realise that the place is still beyond your reach.

Of course, every location within which human social life takes place cannot be encompassed
purely by physical presence in that place or by corporeal perception of the place alone.
Every habitat, every organisation of social life, creates a network of meanings that are
distinctive to that place as well as sharing, to some degree, in a universal semiotic universe.
This shared body of possibilities of meaning constitutes the human race understood in
terms of the configuration of its ways of understanding the cosmos.
In relation to this body of understanding as it shapes the relationship between the spatial
and the social worlds, is the knowledge of the affiliation between space and the people who
use it, a knowledge developed across time by groups of people as well as by individuals, an
awareness demonstrated both explicitly and implicitly.

Truly, one may arrive in Benin or any other city, settlement or corporate structure,
particularly for the first time, and that place would remain distant. It would be as one
spends time understanding such a place that Benin, for example, as physical construct, and
Benin as cognitive possibility, move closer to merging. ''Agha bu' Edo, Edo (ghi) bu ovban'' :
"As one journeys into Benin, Benin journeys to meet you", my development of a contrastive
but complementary concept in relation to “A gha sẹ Ẹdo, Ẹdo rree”: “When One Arrives in
Benin, Benin is Distant,”translated into Bini by Alex Osifo, evokes this process of conjunction
between physical presence in a complex physical and social location as Benin, and increasing
cognitive penetration into the significance of the physical and social complexity of the city.