Toyin Falola
dele jegede
Son of colors,
Keeper of lines that speak,
You became an artist:
not just to paint
But to question
to laugh
to remember
and to awaken.
The pen sketched before the brush
Stories that cut into the conscience of our nation.
With cartoons honed by a keen intellect
You skewered leaders and corruption,
hypocrisy and power.
Where silence became the weapon of others
You crafted satire into a sword of light.
Student of memory,
Historian with vision,
You traversed the museums of Africa
gathering bits and pieces of our stories,
pulling voices from under a layer of dust,
turning hopes
into visualizations
that colonialism had once tried to forget.
Today,
I stand before a painting.
Not just any painting,
but a gift.
A gift that is not boxed
or weighed by gold.
But a gift wrought from creativity,
friendship,
and that sacred trust between artist and historian.
You gave me one of your creations
And in that moment, colors spoke to me.
The painting became dialogue,
brushstrokes turned into sentences,
images into memory.
What historian does not dream
of wrapping memory in vibrant colors?
What writer does not pause
when sentences take on new life in the paintings?
You gave me more than a painting.
You gave me a tool for meditation,
a partner for reflection,
a quiet teacher hanging on my wall
that speaks every day.
Each time I look at it,
I discover new meanings.
Each time I see it,
Another story is revealed.
The painting will never be static.
It takes me on a journey
through time
as our work as historians often does.
Staring at your painting,
I now see how our professions meet:
you with brushes,
me with words;
you with canvas,
me with pages.
You and I,
story seekers,
preservers of memory.
Your gift has taught me
that friendship is also a gift.
Sketches become lines,
slowly filling a page.
Patience adds the shades.
Time colors our laughs
and deep respect shines through.
So, my friend,
I thank you for this.
Thank you for more than just a painting.
Thank you for the love behind it.
Thank you for the kindness that created it.
Thank you for the thought that put mind into matter.
Thank you for this token of your friendship.
May your brushes continue to paint masterpieces.
May your eyes stay keen and bright.
May your art keep turning walls into history
and moments into memories.
And when they speak of dele jegede tomorrow
They will say not only does his artwork adorns homes
Or that his cartoons defined an era
or that he was Africa’s great art historian,
But they will also say
He was a friend
who gave extraordinary gifts
bountiful with beauty,
knowledge, and love.
With appreciation,
admiration, and the fondest of friendships,
For dele jegede,
The artist who painted history
and the friend who made art
a blessing to unwrap.
Emeritus Professor dele. jegede is a citadel of superior intellectual knowledge! Since encountering him, first at Indiana State University over 30 years ago, he has always been original as well as a scholar of integrity and a first class family man!
In conversations, Professor jegede is authoritatively philosophical and, in scholarship, he is a modern-day Shakespearean incarnate!!
Often, my equal half VP Yvette and I long for a rich and very purposeful conversation with the artful genius called Emeritus Professor dele jegede, a profound sage and earthly saint!!!
Sir, whenever your time comes to go to our ancestors, please sleep well with a snore in order to forget about our currently-confused as well as decimated and corrupt world, of which both America and Africa are integral part.
I am sure that we will one day meet at Heaven’s gates, with artistic Yoruba-cum-Ashanti dance, coupled with a brilliant Soyinka dirge and a comical play.
The meeting point you describe between Jegede’s brushwork and your pages made me think about every boundary memory must cross to survive; the canvas, the pen, the paintbrush, and for the translator, language itself. Some Nigerian political concepts resist translation not because the words don’t exist elsewhere, but because the institutional experience behind them doesn’t. Indigeneship. Federal character. The experience of the £20. A translator faces the same problem the painter and the historian face: how do you carry what the original holds without flattening it into something merely recognizable.