Summative Biographies of Ijeoma Ej Clement-Akomolafe and Adebayo Clement Akomolafe (Initiating Cofounders of the Koru Network)

Mrs Ijeoma Ej Clement-Akomolafe ejpdike@gmail.com

If anyone ever disturbed the convenient boundaries of racial and national identity, it would be Ej. A prolific author, speaker, lecturer, Doctor of Applied Biology and Biotechnology at Covenant University, Nigeria, and a member of the newly constituted Global Cooperative Forum, Ej is of Indian, Iranian, English and African descent. Ej was born in Chennai in 1984, and obtained most of her education in the city. After graduating summa cum laude from the Womens Christian College, Chennai, Ej proceeded to seek a doctorate degree in one of Nigerias most prestigious universities, Covenant University, where she now lectures. For her PhD work, Ej focused ambitiously on discovering new antimalarial compounds in previously untested indigenous plants and their associated therapies. It was during this time that she experienced a seismic shift in her perceptual framework a profound challenge to her previously hegemonic assumptions about the way the world works. She started to grow increasingly suspicious of the biomedical industry and drug production praxis; she questioned whether health and wellbeing were truly the end results of her labours in the laboratory. Her new paradigm-altering questions inspired further investigations into some of the hidden assumptions that have shaped her experiences, hopes and expectations as an educator, a scientist and a social innovator. At the

moment, Ej is no longer comfortable with being called a biotechnologist; her desire to explore disenfranchised learning contexts external to institutionalized public schooling, and protect indigenous ways of knowing and healing from the exploitative dynamics of the academic-consumerist-industrial complex moved her to co-imagine a trans-local platform for social emancipatory practices called Koru. Now married to a Nigerian, Ej is most proud of her small moments, her dreamy garden wedding a year ago, her burgeoning backyard garden, the opportunities to relate with her students in subversively empowering ways, and the shared vision to transit from her lifestyle of independence to sacred interdependence and local community. She co-designed the Dreamscape game and the Dreamweavers Network with her husband, Bayo, is currently co-writing a number of books, and is conceptualizing a new social network devoted to radical food sharing and organic farming at local platforms. She calls this movement Singing Seeds. She loves traveling, and speaks French, Tamil, and three other Indian languages.

Adebayo Clement Akomolafe bakomolafe@yahoo.com

One word goes a long way to capture the restlessness of Bayo subversion. Born in 1983 to Nigerian parents, Bayos lifelong quest for absolute truth was his most cherished preoccupation as a pioneer undergraduate in the then new Covenant University, Nigeria. His Christian upbringing deeply influenced his imagination, and inspired his

decision to study human behaviour and, later, to specialize in Clinical Psychology. He graduated summa cum laude in 2006 (and has remained the only male graduate to do so since then), and returned to his alma mater to teach and pursue a postgraduate degree in Clinical Psychology. It was during his clinical training (at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Enugu, eastern Nigeria) that he chanced upon new strains of thought that completely unravelled his quest for absolute truth. Shaken to his intellectual core, Bayo now holds a largely participatory view about the world one in which the notion of truth is stripped of its pretensions to universal validity. His alter-modern suspicions of knowledge, development, progress and truth as Eurocentric metanarratives led him (and his wife, Ej) to develop the first International Workshop on Alternative Research Paradigms and Indigenous Knowledge Promotion (WARP, 2011). His writings and publications have taken him to multiple conferences and counter-cultural events around the world. He initiated a book project called We will tell our stories: Reimagining the Social Sciences in Africa in 2011, and is currently publishing the book with Professors Molefi Asante (USA), Augustine Nwoye (South Africa) and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), among other African intellectuals. Bayo is co-founder of Koru, co-designer of Dreamscape, Kalengo (a reality television concept based on community activity), and the Dreamweavers Network. He was appointed Visiting Scientist to Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (UK) in February 2012, and is also a member of the Global Cooperative Forum in Switzerland. His most abiding interests involve the idea of civilizational transitions, localization, the multidimensionality and paradox of reality, consciousness and being, entheogens (psychedelics), the idea of play as a performative consciousness-altering technology, indigenous learning and community, extra-terrestrial civilizations, failure as an alternative way of being outside the normative characterizations of success, and the possibility of other worlds caught in the Arundhatian rhetoric another world is possible. He is currently writing two novels with his life-force (Ej) called The Boy who stayed Outside and And we shall dance on the Mountains, the latter explores his experiences investigating indigenous alternatives to mainstream mental healthcare delivery in a Yoruba community in Nigeria. He holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology. While he remains in the university system (a framework he believes is becoming obsolete), he is most excited to direct a well-funded initiative

called The iFund (from the David Oyedepo Foundation), which is designed to re-engineer student identity as active co-creators of change, and not merely passive recipients of instruction. His most fervent passions are Ej, drawing, singing, writing, designing, speaking, and travelling.

About Koru Koru is a trans-local network of cultural creatives, subversive visionaries and persons generally disenchanted with their world who believe another world is possible. Koru is an invitation to shift consciousness, to share conversations, to play games, and co-create opportunities for new ways of being and knowing. Koru is a response to the multidimensional crises gripping our civilization. The social network platform is currently in development.