A Case for Objectivity in the African Outlook
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Ikogosi warm spring lies buried deep, encircled by imposing forests and a scattering of motely settlements in Ekiti State of western Nigeria. It is widely acclaimed that warm and cold water flow out of this natural spring source without mixing, despite having no physical barrier separating them. According to the indigenes, you can stand in the stream coursing from this natural spring source, placing one leg in the cold stream, and the other in the hot stream flowing side by side.
For ages, Ekiti and non-Ekiti indigenes have visited this tourism site to experience the wonder of this oxymoron in nature. I’ve been there too, but I remember leaving the tourism site with a feeling of uncertainty about the claims of the tour guide. I had both feet in the ‘separate’ streams, and I wasn’t quite sure which was warm and which was cold. The other people I went with were convinced, but I wasn’t.
Ten years after my visit to the Ikogosi warm springs; ten years after my road-to-Damascus conversion into a professing cynic; ten years after losing my childhood innocence to the jarring reality of scientific questioning, and a search for Truth, I return to that experience.
Was Ikogosi warm springs what it claimed to be? Has anyone studied it, or measured the differing temperatures all year round? Have they explored its source and why the phenomenon occurs? Has it been proven that warm and cold water flow from the same source and don’t mix? Are there others like me that are not quite convinced having experienced Ikogosi’s acclaimed mystery?
What If?
These questions are valid.
From the standpoint of belief — a core part of being African, one is expected to embrace certain things as they are. But what if Ikogosi’s claims are not true? What if our perpetuation of its myth stems from what we’ve been told, and down the generations, we have simply believed this without testing it? Is my one-time experience enough to debunk its representations?
These what-ifs probe for age-old truisms grafted into my mind by culture, layered over centuries to form…
